Affordability is an issue impacting most households. From the price of groceries, to housing, to food—life is becoming less and less affordable. The city has the ability to alleviate some pressure on households.
In early 2026, Toronto created a pilot project instituting four municipally-owned grocery stores tasked with offering staple foods at reduced prices. This, if successful, will result in reducing grocery prices by about 3-5% for an average family, and more for families that rely on staple foods.
If elected, I would take the data that comes out of the Toronto pilot project, analyze it, and if it appears feasible, move a motion that the city create a municipally-owned grocery store in Ottawa. I would also try to focus on stocking locally sourced and/or ugly produce, to minimize the environmental impact and potential supply chain disruptions, and to support local producers.
Homelessness is a problem with no easy solution, and certainly no cheap solutions. It is a multifaceted problem with complex intersecting needs, including mental health, affordable housing, and access to other services.
People experience homelessness for many reasons: job loss; breakup; disasters such as fire; family troubles; etc. Not everyone entering the shelter system has the same needs. They range from someone stably employed who needs to land on her feet after a breakup, to someone who has been chronically homeless for a decade leaving rehab. The current triage system, prioritizing people who have been homeless the longest, is resulting in people who often need supports beyond what is available in most city-owned long term housing accommodations being pushed through to OCH. They then, predictably, are unable to function long term in those units, resulting in eviction and often damage to the unit.
In the short term, one of the things to begin tackling the problem would be to reenvision the triage system, with a focus on getting the people most able to support themselves out of the shelter system, leaving the shelter resources for those who need them most. Ottawa has been over shelter capacity for years, and part of the problem is that people who have had a bit of bad luck, not a significant systemic need, are waiting for space to open up.
In the medium and long term, the focus should be on building the infrastructure necessary for a housing first approach. The city has, to date, not appropriately funded housing first models of addressing homelessness, which is resulting in more traditional, or “warehouse style” shelters being built, but not solving the underlying problem.
See also: Development.
The primary problem with OC Transpo is reliability. If a person cannot rely on OC Transpo to get them to work because a bus is missing or late, they will seek permanent alternatives.
The problem with Ottawa’s public transit is the death spiral it is undergoing at the moment. Quality diminishes, leading to fewer people taking transit leading to lowered revenues, leading to lower quality as more routes are cut, and the cycle begins anew. One facet of the solution to this is to ensure reliability.
In my time at the OCDSB, we ran a program called DOTS (Dedicated Occasional Teachers), where we would hire people to full time teaching positions, but assign them daily to cover classrooms where people had called in sick, ensuring every class had coverage. We couldn’t ever predict which schools would have someone out on any given day, but across a large enough system we knew that a given number of people would be out on any given day.
A solution to address cancelled routes would be to set aside a set number of drivers and buses at various locations across the city, and when a bus breaks down or a driver calls out sick, there is someone on hand who is able to pick up the slack and ensure that the route is not cancelled.
A DOTS-like program is only one facet of the solution. Another would be changing the expected funding ratio of fares to city funding from 50-50 to something more realistic, closing the ongoing budget deficits OC Transpo is undergoing, which results in cutting routes. A third would be reducing coverage in extremely low use areas, such as the milk runs through some suburban areas that have non-existent ridership, to increase the frequency of buses in high use areas.
The public deserves better access to information, about how money gets spent, as well as a genuine opportunity to provide feedback on the city budget. The public should have their feedback heard when they clearly reject ludicrous wastes such as Lansdowne 2.0.
A participatory budget process increases citizen engagement and public transparency by allowing more direct feedback on the needs of the community. Other municipalities, such as Paris have successfully undertaken changing from a more traditional budgeting process to a participatory budget process.
Some benefits include the possibility of reversing the existing order of decisions. Currently, the total budget is passed by the city, and then each department has to figure out how to action their mandate within the budget allocated to them, often resulting in subpar services if the department is stretched too thin, such as OC Transpo. A participatory budget lets the process get reversed, determining what the public wants to see out of the city, i.e. longer library hours, more frequent buses, etc, then building the final budget from the summation of those city-wide needs.
Overhauling the budgetary process allows the people to realize how holding property tax increases artificially low has hurt the city. When inflation is over 6% for a number of years in the last decade, but the city only increases taxes by 2%, we see a gap between what was offered, and what used to be offered, and that gap is increasing.
Ottawa is growing. As a growing municipality, we should be building upwards, not outwards. Ottawa should be building new non-profit housing, and protecting the non-profit and co-op housing that already exists.
According to the City of Ottawa Official Plan, the city is projected to hit 1.41 million people by 2046. This will necessitate increasing the number of households by more than 160 000. Given the rental vacancy rate is already below 3%, this will need to be nearly entirely new units.
To meet this demand, it is important that the city build upwards, not outwards. Endless urban sprawl causes traffic congestion, environmental damage, eats up local farmland, and significantly increases the long term tax burden on the city to cover services such as sewer repair, road paving, and snowplowing, to less dense areas. To increase densification, the city should make regulatory changes to make densification easier, including allowing fourplexes in all zoning as a right, and reducing property setbacks for units committed to densification.
The city also needs to directly contribute to creating affordable housing. The 2025 update on the 2021-2030 housing and homelessness plan indicated that the city built just 31 new low income housing units. This is tantamount to nothing compared to the demand for affordable housing in the city, with waitlists for affordable housing being greater than five years.
The city should begin by immediately passing a bylaw allowing the city a right of first refusal for existing units going to market, as well as committing to ramp up new, city-owned, building production in the city to 1500 per year by 2031. This should include units of various sizes, particularly for families, as the waitlists for affordable housing for larger families is much longer than for that of individuals.
Finally, the production of new affordable units will create a downward pressure on the housing market as a whole. Given the low rates of vacancy in the city, the existing landlords have the ability to set prices somewhat wherever they would like, and because of the lack of alternatives, we see rapidly rising rental prices, well above the rates of inflation. If there were empty city-owned housing units, the existence of the city-owned alternative would create a floor with which private or for profit landlords would have to compete, bringing down rent prices.
The city should make ANCHOR funding permanent, and expand on pilot projects to pair police with social workers, so that those in crisis get the help they need.
Currently ANCHOR is a pilot project, based on the Transforming Mental Health and Substance Use Crisis Response in Ottawa report. It is intended as an alternative to police intervention for people in crisis. Operating 24/7/365, it provides a mobile response team for people in crisis that allows individuals to get support.
Currently, it is a program with very strict geographical boundaries, and operates without stable core funding, resulting in a lack of ability to plan longer term, and requiring renewal in the 2027-2031 strategic plan.
This program has value to the community, and as such, we should be evolving it from a pilot project to a long term stable project, as well as increasing the geographic scope to include more neighbourhoods across the city.
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