Adrian Foster

Adrian Foster has served as Mayor of Clarington — one of the eastern municipalities of Durham Region — for over a decade. Clarington includes Bowmanville, Newcastle, Courtice, and surrounding rural areas, and it has experienced significant growth pressure as families priced out of the inner GTA and even Oshawa and Whitby have moved further east seeking housing they can afford. The housing crisis did not arrive suddenly in Clarington. The demographic and economic trends that would produce it were visible to municipal planners for years before they materialized in the sharp price increases of the early 2020s. The question for any mayor with a decade in office is whether they used that time to position their municipality to grow in a way that benefited residents — or whether they managed growth reactively, approving development when pressure was already acute rather than getting ahead of it. Clarington's development approvals process has been slower than the pace of demand. The municipality has had legitimate debates about the balance between growth and agricultural land protection, between development fees and infrastructure capacity. These are real tensions and they do not have easy answers. But a decade is a long time. If Foster's tenure ends and Clarington's young families are still paying the same proportion of income for housing in the Durham region's eastern corridor as they were when growth began accelerating, then the fundamental test of long-term municipal leadership — did you make your community more livable for the people who will live here next — will not have been passed.