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Ottawa Council's Finance and Corporate Services Committee considered the Directions for the City's 2025 budget this morning. Ecology Ottawa was there, calling out the Directions' failure to respond to the crises—climate, biodiversity, housing affordability, addictions—facing Ottawans, as well as their failure to incorporate any of the City's Strategic Priorities. You can watch our delegation or read it below.
You can take action by letting your councillor or Mayor Sutcliffe know your thoughts. Council votes on the Budget Directions this Wednesday, September 18, but the Budget 2025 process will play out over the next few months. For a schedule of key dates—including councillor-led consultations—see the City's Engage Ottawa page. We'll be weighing in on the budget along the way, so please subscribe to our newsletter and follow us on social media (@ecologyottawa)!
Our Interim Executive Director William van Geest addressing Finance and Corporate Services on the 2025 Budget Directions.
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Thank you for the opportunity to address you. I’m doing so on behalf of Ecology Ottawa.
We’ve reviewed the Budget Directions for 2025 and are…perplexed.
Since we’re an ecology advocacy organization, my first search was for what the Directions held on climate. The answer: nothing. Climate receives no mention. This despite the fact that we’re in a climate emergency—which this Council declared in 2019—and its effects, which for Ottawans have included tornadoes, stifling wildfire smoke, flooding, a derecho, and more. In fact, there’s no mention of the environment at all. And this despite the City’s Strategic Priority no. 3, that Ottawa be “green and resilient.”
Of course, this isn’t to say that there’s nothing related to climate and the environment in the Budget Directions. It has quite a bit to say on transit—but it’s pretty grim. The Directions identify a $120 million deficit in the transit budget—which strangely is separated out—and they propose seven different options, ranging from deferring capital investments to further service cuts to a 75 percent fare increase. The picture painted here—and in last week’s Transit Commission meeting—is of a transit system on life support, and we’re preparing to start pulling plugs.
We’re sympathetic to arguments that other levels of government should chip in; it’s great to get their investments on capital costs, but we really need the help with operations. We’re also sympathetic to arguments that municipalities bear an unfair burden of services to deliver relative to the taxes we receive. But can we in good faith ask other levels of government for more funding, given our recent track record?
The Budget Directions contain much on “value for taxpayers’ money”; but what credibility do we have, when we made a $500 million deal with the Lansdowne owners? Or when we approved a plan for costly sprawl with $600 million for water infrastructure alone? Or when we’ve got over $1 billion in road widenings in the next 10 years—especially when we know that this will exacerbate an already bad traffic situation?
But above all, how can we ask for more funding when we won’t even raise property tax to meet inflation? And this when our peer municipalities—Toronto, Edmonton, Calgary, Vancouver—are raising their taxes from 7 to 10 percent. It seems fundamentally backward to approach our budget by asking how much we’re willing to raise property taxes, and then deciding what we’ll have to cut to make the numbers work. We should instead ask, What are the crises we’re facing, and what will it take to meet them? We must do our part to confront these crises, whether climate, biodiversity, housing affordability, or addictions. I’ll remind this committee that a 1 percent property tax increase for the average assessment in Ottawa is less than $30 per month.
To close, I want to return to the Strategic Priorities that Council set itself at the beginning of this term of Council. Let me review them:
- A city that has affordable housing and is more liveable for all
- A city that is more connected with reliable, safe and accessible mobility options
- A city that is green and resilient
- A city with a diversified and prosperous economy
Of these Priorities, we already established there’s nothing in the Budget Directions explicitly addressing environment. On mobility, it’s doom and gloom. But there’s not even anything on housing. So far, we’re 0 for 3. Will these Budget Directions improve the economy, the last Priority? Given that the main thrust of the Directions is capping property taxes, it’s hard to see they will.
So these Directions go backward on the climate emergency, they don’t address the biodiversity crisis, they don’t address housing. But more than this, they don’t address the very Strategic Priorities Council set for itself. I can’t see but that these Directions must be rejected.
I therefore urge you to reject them and to start again, to address the real crises that Ottawans face today and will continue to face until we get serious about building a City for all Ottawans and the ecosystem we inhabit.
