Even a slate of high-profile candidates wasn’t enough to get the vast majority of Brampton voters to care enough to show up on voting day.

Brampton failed to surpass 40 per cent voter turnout for a fourth straight municipal election, with only 108,070, or 34.5 per cent of the city’s 313,273 eligible voters casting their ballots in the Oct. 22 election that saw Patrick Brown elected the city’s new mayor.

Only 30.8 per cent of eligible voters showed up in 2006. That increased to 33.1 per cent in 2010 and hit a peak of 36.2 per cent in 2014, before falling back again this year.

According to statistics from the Association of Municipalities Ontario (AMO), Brampton has consistently scored well below the provincial average when it comes to local civic participation for the past three elections.

The average municipal election turnout across Ontario was 43.12 per cent in 2014, 44.35 per cent in 2010 and 41.33 per cent in 2006.

Ahead of the election, experts like Michael McGregor, principal investigator with the Canadian Municipal Election Study, were optimistic Brampton might buck its dreary particpation trend in this election, with a competitive slate of candidates including incumbent Linda Jeffrey, former PC Party leader Patrick Brown, former Harper Conservative MP Baljit Gosal, and longtime councillor, John Sprovieri.

“If it’s not competitive, turnout will decrease,” said McGregor in an October 19 interview with The Brampton Guardian.

“I’m by no means an expert on Brampton, but I would expect — all other things equal — you might see a slight uptick in voter turnout there," he predicted.

Instead, more Brampton voters stayed home, despite an increase in voter registration from 289,906 eligible voters in 2014 to 313,273 registered for this election.

“In general, there are reasons why voter turnout is lower locally than other levels. The biggest one is that people just don’t have the sense that (municipal government) matters much for their lives, they don’t think it has as much of an effect. And as result they’re less interested and pay less attention,” said McGregor.