Recently, there’s been much discussion about financial pressures at the City of Ottawa, with an emphasis placed on getting increased funding from both the federal and provincial governments. The city’s budget should be a top concern of all residents, and I would implore higher levels of government to better fund transit in Ottawa and through the province and country, but there’s more that we, as a city should be concerned about…and there’s more that we could be doing.
As we seek to tackle this financial issue, we need to have an approach that’s rooted in honesty and collaboration. We can’t be playing the blame game or obscuring what’s actually been happening in the city.
We have a lot of challenges at the city, and in the past, we have made a lot of decisions that have helped create the tremendous budgetary pressures we’re feeling. Urban boundary expansion—especially the last-minute inclusion of the Tewin Lands—is exceptionally expensive. The re-re-development of Lansdowne Park is exceptionally expensive (and the price tag keeps growing). Continued road expansions are expensive and create an ongoing financial liability as we have to pay, year-after-year, to plow them, paint them and fix them. P3 projects like LRT come with higher prices and poorer outcomes, piling onto our debt and reducing the confidence residents have in City Hall.
On top of that, Ottawa has had back-to-back budgets of below-inflation rate increases. Our development charges (which are supposed to—but unable to—pay for sprawl) are 50th in the province.
We neither have the revenue tools we need, nor are we acting as prudently as we could be with those we do have.
So, yes, we must work together, both as a city and with other levels of government, to secure better funding for important, necessary services that our residents deserve. But we also must acknowledge the mistakes we’ve been repeating for the last decade or longer—choosing, instead, fiscal prudence and focusing on services that residents need—like improving and expanding transit.
