One of the dominant issues in the election campaign was the status of the city's St. Joseph's Hospital. With the completion of the new
Sudbury Regional Hospital facility, the closure of the St. Joseph's site was imminent — however, despite the city's longtime interest in acquiring the property due to its adjacency to
Bell Park and
Lake Ramsey, the
Sisters of St. Joseph sold the site in 2010 to Panoramic Properties, a
condominium developer from
Niagara Falls. The campaign was subsequently marked by conflicting claims about how much notice the Sisters gave to city council, and how much time and money the city did or didn't have to prepare a counteroffer for the site; a community group, Save Bell Park, formed to lobby for the site's protection. Less dramatically, most voters identified road maintenance and property taxes as their other key priorities in the election. For the first time since the
2000 election, notably, the municipal amalgamation of the
Regional Municipality of Sudbury into the current city of Greater Sudbury, which took place in 2000, did not register as a prominent election issue. The issue of retail store hours in the city also became an election issue when Marianne Matichuk supported allowing businesses to set their own hours without regulation from the city. If passed, this would include allowing stores in the city to open on
Boxing Day for the first time; with
labour unions being a prominent political force in the city, the issue of balancing the rights of retailers to set business hours against the rights of workers to
holiday time at Christmas has been a persistent debate in Sudbury's municipal politics. The mayoral candidacy of David Popescu, a
perennial candidate in the Sudbury area who was convicted of
hate speech after advocating the execution of
homosexuals in the
2008 federal election campaign, also emerged as a minor issue when he was permitted to participate in a mayoral debate sponsored by the Greater Sudbury Chamber of Commerce. Marianne Matichuk publicly criticized the Chamber of Commerce for not excluding Popescu from the debate, while candidate Derek Young called Matichuk's move a
populist ploy that would both undermine the democratic process and distract from other issues in the debate, and the Chamber of Commerce reiterated that its standing policy when sponsoring political debates was to invite all registered candidates regardless of their personal views. however, the incident described in the article was one in which the city appeared to simply have followed its legal obligation to maintain
confidentiality around matters involving employee relations. The newspaper subsequently faced criticism for its portrayal of the story and for publishing the story only after it would be too late for Rodriguez or any other member of the city's staff to respond ahead of election day; in an interview on
CBC Northern Ontario's
Points North following the election,
Sudbury Star managing editor Brian MacLeod stated that the paper had received the information in an anonymous brown envelope several days before the story went to print. The
Ontario Provincial Police subsequently announced that they were conducting an investigation into the leak. ==Polling==