The 2026 Municipal Campaign Print Checklist: Everything You Need, in Order

Ontario holds its municipal elections on the fourth Monday of October. In 2026 that is Monday, October 26, and the new council term begins Sunday, November 15, 2026. From the start of September that is roughly eight weeks — which sounds like plenty until you notice that every campaign in the city is buying from the same small pool of presses in the same eight weeks.

There is one scheduling fact that decides the whole calendar, and most first-time campaigns learn it a week too late. A sign has to physically exist before the date it is allowed to go up. In Ottawa, an election sign may not be placed on private property more than 45 days before voting day — for 2026 that is Friday, September 11— and not on public property or the city road allowance more than 30 days before, which is Saturday, September 26. Those are the first dates a sign may appear. They are not order dates. If you want the full window, the signs need to be printed, delivered, and stapled onto stakes before September 11.

Everything else on the list — hangers, shirts, cards, banners — is competing for the same production time behind those signs. So the useful way to build a campaign print plan is not "what do we need?" but "what has the earliest hard date, and what can wait?" This checklist is ordered that way.

We have produced campaign materials for mayoral and city-council campaigns — signs, door hangers and volunteer apparel — and we know how the season actually runs. The pattern almost never changes. Campaigns over-plan the signs, under-plan the door hangers, forget the shirts until the first big canvass, and remember the candidate's business cards the night before the first all-candidates meeting.

Here is the whole list, with what each piece is for and roughly when it has to be ordered:

1. Lawn signs— name recognition, and the only piece with a legal start date. Order first, in the largest quantity you can commit to.
2. Door hangers— what gets left when nobody answers, which is most doors. Order to match the walk list, in waves.
3. Volunteer apparel— shirts that make a canvass team readable from across the street and recognisable at the door. Order by mid-September.
4. Candidate business cards— handed out at every meeting, every coffee, every door that does open. Cheap, fast, and constantly underestimated.
5. A banner— for the campaign office window or fence, and a portable one for events and debates.
6. Name tags— so a volunteer at a door is a person with a name, not a stranger with a clipboard.
7. One large-format piece— a launch backdrop or oversized sign that photographs well and gets reused all season.
8. The take-down plan— not printed, but it belongs on this list, because it is a real obligation with a real date.

Lawn signs are printed on coroplast — corrugated plastic that does not absorb water, so it will not warp through an Ottawa autumn, and whose internal flutes slide onto a wire H-stake. Flute direction matters: for a staked sign they must run vertically. The standard size is 18×24 in, which is readable from a car at residential speeds and economical in quantity; 24×36 in is the step up for signs set well back from the road. Our lawn sign size guide and the comparison of coroplast versus PVC cover the material choices in detail.

Quantity is the question every campaign asks first. It scales with the size of the ward, the number of supporters willing to host a sign, and how many you are prepared to lose to weather and theft — and you will lose some. A ward-level campaign usually lands in the high hundreds; a mayoral campaign is an entirely different order of magnitude. We broke the arithmetic down separately in how many lawn signs a campaign needs. Two practical notes: order the first run large rather than trying to test demand, and assume a top-up run in early October.

Placement rules bite here too. In Ottawa, a sign on private property may not be within three metres of an intersection, and the two start dates — September 11 for private property, September 26 for the road allowance — mean your volunteers get two separate placement pushes off one print run. Plan the routes so the second push is a top-up, not a scramble. There is more on the timing rules in when you can put up election signs in Ontario and on the Ottawa specifics in our guide to election lawn signs in Ottawa.

Most doors do not open. A door hanger is what converts an empty porch into a contact — it hangs on the knob rather than sitting in a mailbox, it survives rain better than a folded flyer, and it is the one piece a voter is likely to still be holding when they get inside.

Quantity comes straight off your walk list rather than from a formula: count the doors you genuinely intend to knock, then add a margin for re-knocks, damaged pieces and the volunteer who takes a bundle home and never brings it back. Twenty to thirty percent over the door count is a sane starting margin.

Print them in waves, not all at once. A campaign that prints its entire hanger run in September ends up recycling half of it, because the message that works in week two is rarely the message that works in week seven. Keep the artwork file ready so the second and third waves are a reprint rather than a redesign. We went deeper on the format, the paper weight and the copy that actually works in election door hangers for canvassing.

A canvass team in matching shirts reads as organised from fifty metres away, and it solves a real problem at the door: the person knocking is visibly part of something rather than an individual with a clipboard. Shirts are also the cheapest morale spend a campaign makes, and volunteers keep them long after the election.

Order by size breakdown, not by headcount — "forty shirts" is not an order, "six small, twelve medium, fourteen large, six XL, two 2XL" is. Our guide to organising a group apparel order has a workable method for collecting sizes without chasing people for a week.

On method: screen printing is the better value once you pass roughly 50 pieces with a simple one- or two-colour design, which describes most campaign shirts exactly. Below that, DTF prints the same artwork with no setup fee and no minimum, so a run of fifteen core-team shirts costs what it should. You can put the logo on a real garment and see the price yourself in the free design studio, or read the full breakdown in campaign t-shirts and volunteer apparel. Either way, order these in mid-September — shirts that arrive in mid-October get worn twice.

These four are small, cheap, and almost always ordered in a panic. None of them takes long to produce; all of them take longer than the twenty-four hours you will have left when you remember them.

Candidate business cards — the single highest-use piece per dollar in a campaign. The candidate hands them out at every meeting, every coffee, every door that opens. Five hundred is a starting quantity, not a season's supply. Keep the card boring and legible: name, role sought, phone, email, website. Our standard business card size guide covers the dimensions and bleed.

A vinyl banner for the campaign office window or fence, sized to the space it is actually going on. If you are also doing all-candidates meetings and indoor events, a retractable banner is the more useful second purchase — it sets up in thirty seconds and travels in a bag. There is realistic pricing in our vinyl banner cost guide.

Name tags — peel-and-stick printed labels work for a one-day canvass and cost almost nothing per volunteer; reusable engraved badges make sense for the core team who will be at every event for eight weeks. Either way, a named volunteer gets more conversations than an anonymous one.

One large-format piece — an oversized sign or printed backdrop for a launch. Its real job is photographs: every picture taken in front of it carries the campaign identity into someone else's feed. Order it with the signs, because it is the same press and the same artwork.

The fastest campaigns we print for do one thing differently: they settle the artwork before they order the first item. A logo or wordmark in vector format, the exact colours written down, one typeface, and a contact line that will appear identically on every piece. Signs, hangers, shirts, cards and banners then all come off the same package, which is what makes a reprint a two-day job instead of a two-week one.

Vector matters more here than in most jobs because the same mark has to work at 18×24 inches on coroplast and at 3.5×2 inches on a card. A logo pulled off a website will look soft at sign scale. Our guides to preparing logo files and transparent PNG versus vector explain what to send. If all you have is a low-resolution image, we can rebuild it as clean vector artwork before anything prints.

A human designer reviews every order here before it goes to press — resolution, colour, sizing and placement — and either fixes the file or tells you plainly what is wrong with it. You can also build and see the apparel side yourself: design the volunteer shirt online in the browser and the price updates as you go. For signs and print, the quote form is the faster route, since the quantities and sizes are the whole conversation.

One content note that applies to some campaigns and not others: a registered third-party advertiser— which is not the same thing as a candidate — must register with the municipal clerk and must identify itself on its advertising, giving the registered advertiser's name, the contact information the Act requires, and the municipality where it is registered. A candidate's own campaign signs are a different category with different requirements. If you are unsure which one you are, ask the clerk before you send us artwork, because it changes what has to be on the piece.

Everything above — the 45 days for private property, the 30 days for the city road allowance, the 72-hour take-down, the three-metre setback from an intersection — is the City of Ottawa's regime, in force since January 1, 2022, under Ottawa's Temporary Signs on Private Property By-law and the Signs on City Roads By-law (No. 2003-520), sitting on top of the Municipal Elections Act, 1996.

Those numbers are not national, provincial, or even regional.Toronto, Mississauga, Gatineau and every other municipality set their own election sign rules, and they can differ in the dates, the setbacks, what is allowed on public property, and how they are enforced. A campaign that copies Ottawa's calendar into another city is making an assumption, not following a rule. Before you place a single sign, confirm the sign by-law that governs where you are running with your own municipal clerk's office. In Ottawa, sign complaints go to 3-1-1.

And to be direct about our own role: we print what a campaign approves, and nothing here is legal advice. The clerk's office is the authority on what may be posted, where, and when. We are the shop that makes sure the signs exist in time for you to comply with whatever it tells you. We print for any registered candidate or campaign, and we do not take sides.

In Ottawa, every election sign must come down within 72 hours after voting day — for 2026 that means by Thursday, October 29. It is an obligation, it applies whatever the result, and it lands in the exact week when a campaign team is at its least motivated to do anything.

So schedule it in September, when you schedule the placement. The same route sheets that tell volunteers where to put signs tell them where to collect signs; the same map, the same list, the same trucks. Book the people on the Tuesday and Wednesday after voting day while they are still saying yes to things, and stage somewhere to put several hundred signs when they come back.

One last note in favour of doing it properly: coroplast signs that come down clean and dry store well. Stakes are reusable. The signs themselves are dated to a specific race, but plenty of what you print this season — the banner, the retractable, the engraved name tags — is not, and it will still be usable in four years.