Anna Hopkins — first elected in 2014 and, by one account, London's longest-serving sitting councillor — faces three challengers, none of whom have previously held elected office, though one has run against her before. Matt Millar placed second to Hopkins in the 2018 Ward 9 race (28.7% to her 54.4% in the final round under the ranked-ballot system then in use) and is back for a second attempt eight years later, having spent the intervening years as the New Blue Party of Ontario's prospective candidate for the provincial riding of Elgin–Middlesex–London.
The ward's central fault line is growth and its pace. All four candidates name it, but they land in different places. Hopkins argues for a case-by-case "thoughtful" brake on intensity rather than a blanket position, drawing on her committee-adjacent record: in July 2025 she publicly pushed back on the scale of the roughly 4,000-dwelling 6309 Pack Road rezoning proposal, warning that schools, parks, and amenity spaces would fall behind and calling for further traffic and sewer-capacity study.
Luke Thomas takes the most categorical stance of the field, opposing "ultra-high density" projects in Byron and Lambeth specifically and calling for growth to be redirected downtown — a position that, taken at face value, would be more restrictive than Hopkins's own record. Tammy Abi-Khalil's "responsible growth" plank is closer to Hopkins's framing but, as a first-time candidate, is not yet backed by a comparable record.
Matt Millar has since taken a direct density position of his own. In June 2026 he filed a written objection to a six-storey, 100-unit-per-hectare application at 3924–4050 Colonel Talbot Road, arguing it exceeds the Southwest Area Secondary Plan's four-storey standard for Lambeth — alongside his traffic-flow framing and his signature taxpayer-accountability proposal.
Public safety and homelessness-adjacent concerns appear in some form on every candidate's platform, consistent with those issues polling as top-of-mind citywide. Millar's platform is the most explicitly government-restraint-focused of the field (the PACT bylaw, a four-part regulatory-restraint test), framed more around national and provincial themes than the other three candidates' more locally-scoped priority lists. Thomas is the clearest opponent of the city's Bus Rapid Transit program; Hopkins is on record supporting BRT expansion conditional on senior-government funding — the sharpest single policy contrast identified between the incumbent and any challenger.