What to Expect from Ottawa City Hall in 2024

4 predictions based on the first year of this City Council.

This City Council has now had a year to settle in. It’s becoming clear what we can expect for 2024 and beyond. I’m seeing four patterns that I believe will shape the remainder of this term of Council.

1. Lower your expectations

While some Councillors are fighting hard to build a better city, I expect to see little more than business-as-usual come out of this Council. City staff will put forward their business items, which Council will process on a transaction-by-transaction basis.

The Mayor will continue to push for Lansdowne and, perhaps, a new downtown arena for the Senators. But those would be the only real signature “accomplishments” of this Council.

What can we expect on the real issues facing this city?

• Affordable housing. We’ll throw a few dozen million dollars here and there, but little that will move the needle. It seems inevitable that we’ll have to increase shelter capacity, but that would just be a bandaid solution rather than an attempt to actually house those most in need.

• Climate action. Again, a few million dollars extra in the budget, but little that will move Ottawa towards our 2050 net zero goal.

• Transit. Eventually, we’ll see a resolution to our LRT woes — hopefully during this term of Council. For the bus network, however, expect “less with more”. Bus operations will be cut by 74,000 hours this year, while the transit budget increases by $31m.

2. Back to the Watson playbook

Most of 2023 was not a great look for the new Mayor. On important issues, such as how we extend the life of the Trail Road Landfill, he seemed unable to control Council, failing to get them to agree to his proposal for the smallest of reforms to garbage collection.

But that all changed with Lansdowne. Leading up to the Council decision in November, I was tracking the expected votes of different councillors, and it was pretty close to a 50-50 split, with Councillors Brown, Lo and Plante all a hard no.

Then something happened. Someone in the Mayor’s office started to whip those votes in favour of Lansdowne. Someone picked up the Watson playbook, and likely started dangling carrots and sticks in front of Councillors to support the Lansdowne project.

Was it a coincidence that the 2024 City budget unexpectedly decided to accelerate the Greenback Road Realignment in Barrhaven, to start immediately?

The Ottawa Council honeymoon is over. Lansdowne erased the Mayor’s efforts at building a more collegial council, by reverting back to the urban vs. suburban-rural fault lines. Welcome back to the Watson Club.

3. Spin city

Just like the Lego Movie’s “everything is awesome”, there is going to be a lot of spin coming out of City Hall.

We’ve already heard the Mayor talk about the transit bus cuts as “efficiencies” that will improve service, glossing over the fact that its pretty hard to provide a better service with noticeably fewer buses on the road.

Spin was also on full display when the Mayor presented the 2024 budget.

He took great offence at my December article, where I pointed out that his budgets were draining city reserves. In his budget speech on 6 December, he said:

“We are not dipping into strategic reserves to deliver this budget. Any suggestion otherwise is either deliberately misleading or simply a lack of understanding of how the budget works.”

I have bad news for you, Mr Mayor. The new 2024 Draft Budget Tool on the city website tells a different story. The data doesn’t lie.

I could go on with other examples. But expect more spin that tries to “control the narrative” over the next three years.

4. Sweetheart deals

We have a housing crisis and we need private developers to build the vast majority of new homes in Ottawa. But this City has been working too hard to protect the interests of those developers.

Consider Lansdowne, a half billion exercise to tear down a stadium that has 40 years of life left in it (which the City’s consultant says we can maintain for $1m a year), because the property developers and other partners in Lansdowne can’t make the site profitable.

Or Tewin — the proposed new development in the far south of Ottawa. City staff recommended not including this land in the urban boundary, but the Watson Club put it in the Official Plan anyways (and which Sutcliffe agreed with). There is so much wrong with that proposal — I’ll put out that analysis in the weeks ahead.

A third recent example is the Caivan development in the Jock River flood plain, for which the Auditor General blasted city staff for being too cozy with the developer and not following due process.

Expect more sweetheart deal over the next three years, where the interests of developers are put ahead of the interests of the public.

Moving sideways means falling behind others

For the next three years, I think it’s fair to expect the City to move sideways.

Hopefully, conditions will not get worse. But it also means that we fall behind those cities moving forward.

Montreal has taken bold steps forward since Valérie Plante became Mayor in 2017. Toronto has made impressive progress on key files in the six months that Olivia Chow has been Mayor.

Meanwhile, Ottawa is stuck in neutral. We’re getting left behind.

I don’t like to be critical. I care deeply about this city.

While I don’t agree with many of the choices Sutcliffe has made, I do want Ottawa to prosper regardless of who's in charge. I just don’t have high hopes for the next three years.