MILTON, ON - Zainab Azim, former Milton Citizen of the Year and Harvard Teaching Fellow, officially announced her candidacy for Mayor of Milton at a campaign kickoff held Sunday, May 3rd, 2026, at Saint Francis Xavier Secondary School. The announcement drew community members from across the town and culminated in more than 100 volunteers knocking on neighbourhood doors - six months before the October 26, 2026 municipal election.
A Campaign About Time
At the heart of Azim’s campaign is a single belief: People matter. Our time, our talent, our families matter. Over half of Milton’s residents work outside the town, many enduring commutes of three hours or more each day.
“Over the past ten years, like many of my neighbours, I have had to commute away from home for opportunity - spending three hours a day on the GO or the 401,” said Azim. “Time that could have been spent with the grandmother who raised me and now has dementia. Politicians love to measure things in dollars alone. But time is our most precious resource - and right now we’re wasting it instead of saving or spending it on the things that matter most.”
Azim’s platform, developed through listening sessions with hundreds of Miltonians across generations and backgrounds, is built around three pillars designed to give Miltonians their time back for the things that matter:
- Work here - Careers Close to Home: Zone for commercial development instead of more warehouses, invest in small businesses by cutting red tape and offering conditioned property tax incentives, and accelerate the Milton Education Village to create an innovation hub that seeds startups and strengthens the local economy like other university towns.
- Get around here - Transit Every Twenty: Deliver bus service residents can trust every twenty minutes, rationalize traffic signals, and fight for All-Day GO, a service promised to Milton for twenty-five years but never delivered, even as Barrie, with half Milton’s ridership, moves ahead.
- Live here - Alive After Five: Create Milton Central, a public community gathering space for food, art, and culture; make activities affordable so families don’t have to choose between putting food on the table and these opportunities; and invest in parks and community centres. As Azim puts it: “People should not be priced out of joy.”
A People-Powered Campaign
Sunday’s kickoff was designed as an organizing event, not a political rally. Before Azim spoke, three volunteers shared their own stories - highlighting what brought them to the campaign and how it changed them. The event ended not just with applause but with action, as volunteers went out across Milton neighbourhoods to knock on doors and have real conversations with their neighbours.
“Winning does not mean one election alone,” Azim told the crowd. “It means showing people, not just telling them what hope looks like by focusing on doing and delivering, not dividing.”
“It is on days like this, six months out from an election with 100 people knocking on doors, that we win. Because people are doing something about the problems they see. That is winning.”
The campaign’s metric of success? The number of new community leaders it develops. People who continue the work even after election day. Azim describes her approach as building lasting community power, rather than mobilizing people once every four years.
About Zainab Azim
Zainab Azim grew up in Milton, attending Milton Montessori, playing for Milton United, and volunteering with local nonprofits. She is a Teaching Fellow at Harvard University with substantive policy experience working with Canada’s Minister of Finance and Deputy Prime Minister, as well as organizing experience on the Mamdani mayoral campaign in New York City. She was named Milton Citizen of the Year in 2022 and has served with Milton Transitional Housing (Coldest Night of the Year), the Milton District Hospital Foundation, Meet Milton, and the Learn to Lead Program. Milton is where she learned the values of care, community and commitment to a cause greater than oneself.
Why Now
Milton is at a critical juncture. Unlike Toronto, Burlington, and Mississauga, the town still has the opportunity to decide what kind of community it wants to become. Azim argues that we can’t wait another four or ten years - the concrete will have been poured and the choices locked in, just like the CN intermodal.
“We can either choose to continue down the path of being a bedroom community with more warehouses and truck stops, or become a complete community that invests in the beauty of this town to benefit the people of this town,” Azim said. “The choice is ours.”
In her closing remarks to volunteers before they headed to the doors, Azim returned to the central theme of her campaign:
Back to the campaign“Hope will not arrive on October 26 on election day. Hope is right here in this room. Hope starts right now. Hope starts with us. It’s about time we turned Milton from a place of possibility to one of reality. It’s about time we stopped waiting for hope and started building it with our hands, heads, and hearts, together.”