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The morning on which the 2025 budget came to Ottawa City Council for voting, we joined a rally of a number of organizations fighting for a budget that serves all Ottawans. You can listen to a portion of our remarks here, or read them in their entirety below.
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First of all, let’s talk about what a budget is. Beyond all the glossy documents, the spreadsheets, the tables and pie graphs—beyond all this, a budget is a statement of priorities. It’s a statement of what we think is worth investing in.
So how should Council invest our money? Probably the most important things. Fortunately, the City has rightly declared several emergencies and signed several pledges. To take a few of these:
- In 2019, Council declared a climate emergency
- In 2020, Council declared a housing and homelessness emergency
- In 2022, Council signed the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty
- In 2023, Council signed the Montreal Pledge on Biodiversity
So how are these commitments reflected in the 2025 budget?
- There’s $6 million for implementing the Climate Change Master Plan. This is something, but it’s a far cry from the $687 million annually called for in our emissions reduction plan
- The City also applies a climate lens to the budget, measuring the emissions reductions of capital investments—but it ignores investments that increase emissions
- This budget has $2 million to plant trees. That’s fine, but it’ll only plant a third of what the mayor promised in his election campaign. And right-of-way trees? The City isn’t even keeping up with the losses
Does this budget address what the United Nations has called “the largest, most pervasive threat to the natural environment and societies the world has ever experienced”?
Unfortunately, the budget that Council votes on today is a political one. The mayor’s most important budget direction that he brought to Council was a property tax cap. Rather than building a budget around Ottawa’s actual needs, he built it around what was politically tenable. He decided the largest increase that homeowners would accept was 2.9%, and built a budget within this. This might not be a problem if he hadn’t capped the 2023 and 2024 budgets at 2.5%. As a result, many City services are fighting over scraps.
Transit riders know this more than most. Last year, the City announced cuts of 74,000 hours per year and several 200-series routes. In September of this year, Council doubled off-peak LRT wait times to save $1.6 million. The City also cut wait times between bus runs—apparently to save a couple dollars
We know what this means for transit service, because we’ve seen the effects already. In October, over 900 bus trips were missed in three days. Currently, one-quarter of all buses are awaiting maintenance. People are waiting in the cold for buses that don’t come.
This budget has a $120 million deficit for transit. The mayor has placed the largest burden on transit users. He’s suggested raising regular fares 75%, increasing seniors’ passes by 120%, and cutting the youth pass. He’s leaving school boards with a $5-million annual bill. Yet conveniently, the earliest proposal to increase the car-parking levy has since disappeared.
Why does transit matter? Getting people onto transit is key to achieving our emissions goals. 42% of our GHG emissions are from transportation. But more importantly, it’s an issue of accessibility, and of basic decency. People need transit to get around—to work, groceries, medical appointments, daycare. And it’s equity: over half of Ottawa’s low-income residents don’t own a car.
And it’s not like the money isn’t there. Somehow, the City found $500 million to invest in Lansdowne 2.0. Somehow, we had money to approve $600 million for Tewin’s water infrastructure alone. We have a 6-year, $900-million plan to widen roads across the City.
We can ask for money from other levels of government, but the last times we got money from the Province, we ended up with a police helicopter, a highway interchange, and transit enforcement officers. Meanwhile, Toronto’s mayor Olivia Chow got a huge package for transit. So what are we doing?
So again I ask: Does this budget live up to the climate emergency, the housing emergency, the biodiversity crisis?
We need a budget that works for all Ottawans and responds to the crises we're confronting.