On December 10, City Council approved the city’s 2026 budget with an important change that my team and I have advocated for relentlessly.
Budget process
As you can imagine, the budget for a city of over one million people living in urban, suburban and rural areas is an incredibly complex document. In every budget, there will be parts of it you like, parts of it you oppose, and areas where compromise and collaboration are prudent.
Once the draft budget gets released, it becomes difficult to make major improvements to it. According to provincial legislation, cities are not allowed to run budget deficits, so if someone wants to add any spending or cut any revenue, they will have to find an offset within the budget to account for it.
Change is on the way
One budgetary issue I have been working on in my time in office is supporting our youth to get the best start in life they can by offering more affordable services. One way to do this is to lower the costs of one of the most expensive things in all of our lives: transportation. Many times at council, I need to fight just to save or keep good plans and policies from being cancelled. Last year, the draft budget proposed eliminating one weekly free day for seniors, as well as increasing the senior’s pass by 40%. Working with other concerned councillors, we were able to reverse both decisions, keeping senior’s passes affordable, and maintaining both Wednesday and Sunday as free transit days. During that budget process, youth fares were also increased (which many councillors voted against, including me) but I was able to secure a motion that had staff study how to bring in a Youth Pass for our city. The result of that motion bore fruit one year later.
New Youth Pass coming July 1
This year, I’m happy to say, my team worked with the city staff charged with carrying out my motion, the chair of Transit Committee, Mayor and Council to achieve free transit for anyone aged 18 years or under on all weekday evenings after 5:00 pm, and all-day every day on weekends, holidays and summer (July and August). These measures passed council and will go into effect July 1, 2026. I proposed to pay for them with the savings in the budget from diesel fuel costs as my offset—with no further increase to taxes. The cost was $0.75 million in a $938 million transit budget. It's amazing how low-cost items can mean such big changes in people's lives.
This is an important development for Ottawa. Transit has grown more and more expensive, especially for families. A return trip for a family of four could cost $32. Now, that would be cut in half.
Further, this gives more freedom to young people as they travel around our city—to work, to go to extracurricular activities, to visit family and friends, or just to enjoy Ottawa. It provides extra safety at night, as youth will be able to hop on the LRT or bus without the barrier of a fare, rather than walk home alone.
By making transit more affordable and accessible, it will become more attractive to youth and families with an estimated additional 600,000 annual trips taken because of this measure alone. This can help shift our transportation modal share and can also help to create a culture of transit use as young people grow up, encouraging more and more transit use in years and decades to come.
Youth Pass complements the U-Pass
This move also complements the existing U-Pass in Ottawa for post-secondary students. I led the campaign to bring that to Ottawa 15 years ago. It means all full-time students at Carleton, uOttawa, St. Paul and Algonquin automatically receive a transit pass at about half the cost of an adult pass as part of tuition fees. Imagine the benefit being in Ottawa from birth through a college/university degree and having such easy access to a transit pass. Game changing.
Provincial collaboration needed
Admittedly, this is an imperfect solution. Because the free youth transit only begins at 5:00 pm on weekdays during the school year, people who need to get somewhere prior to 5:00 pm will have to pay a fare. This stems from the way school transportation is provided and paid for in this province.
Neither the city nor OC Transpo is in charge of school transportation. That duty falls to the Ottawa Student Transportation Authority (OSTA) and Le Consortium de transport scolaire d'Ottawa (CTSO) which provide transportation for the four school boards in Ottawa. The provincial government funds student transportation and these organizations make decisions regarding how to provide it—either by yellow school buses or by purchasing bus passes from OC Transpo to distribute to eligible students (depending on the distance from school a student lives).
If OC Transpo were to expand free transit to all youth all-day throughout the school year, it would result in the city subsidizing the province and taking a significant hit to the Ottawa transit budget, as OSTA and CTSO would no longer have to purchase bus passes (using provincial funds).
Future Work Ahead
That doesn’t mean we can’t keep working at it, though. We provided direction to staff to keep working with the province and the student transportation authorities to collaborate on times prior to 5:00 pm on weekdays.
There is more work to be done on affordable transit and, of course, reliable transit in Ottawa. New e-buses and 60-foot buses that are on order, and the new LRT extension east and west should help with reliability. The city could bring down the cost of the EquiPass and Community Pass to help riders of low-income.
We will keep working on these issues of transit affordability, reliability, and accountability. I want to personally thank Jonathan McLeod in my office for the years-long campaign we've undertaken. It can take a lot of effort to change city policy and budgets, to improve quality of life for people, but as we can see from this year’s budget and the introduction of a Youth Pass, change for the better is possible.
