Candidates elected to Ottawa City Council on Oct. 24 will face a myriad of issues for Canada’s capital that span affordable housing, public transit and welcoming the newly elected police chief.
Experts at Carleton University discuss how these matters concern Ottawa’s incoming city council and what its members can do to increase housing options, transit reliability and public confidence in the Ottawa Police Service (OPS) and its new leader.
Affordable housing
With Ottawa projected to reach a population of 1.4 million people by 2046, Prof. Ian Lee, who directs Carleton’s Sprott School of Business MBA program, said city councillors have key roles in giving post-secondary students more places to live.
“The mayor and the councillors can lobby the Government of Ontario to provide more assistance to the universities to provide more student housing,” Lee suggested.
He explained giving property developers more autonomy, not relying on artificial housing solutions like rent controls, and removing barriers against urban sprawl will lead to more living options for students.
“The idea that we can dump another half million [people] into the downtown or the Glebe or Westboro or Old Ottawa South by Carleton is just delusional,” he said.
Lee noted each student only faces housing challenges for a few years, before they graduate and unlock higher paying jobs. However, he said this challenge renews itself annually as more students come and go every year.
“Specifically for students, we need targeted housing because it’s a unique temporary market,” Lee concluded.
Public transit
Cameron Roberts, a researcher at Carleton’s School of Public Policy and Administration who specializes in electric and on-demand mobility, said city council plays a decisive role in transit despite needing provincial and federal funding to operate and develop it.
“It’s the level that co-ordinates. It’s the level that sets the vision. It’s the level that makes plans,” Roberts said. “Successful public transit is about more than just building a train or buying some buses. You really need to build it into a system which also includes the aspects of urban planning and pedestrian space.”
He called for integration with other sustainable transit forms such as bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure, noting better integration with Gatineau, Que. transit could also help.
“Someone needs to find a way to get OC Transpo and the [Société de transport de l’Outaouais] to play nicer with each other,” he said. “It would be a small and relatively cheap way of vastly improving the effectiveness of this system as a whole.”
Roberts said students have good reason to demand transit that lets them navigate “any part of the city that they would probably need to get to” in a pleasant, easy and car-free way.
“I think that requires the municipal government to take those things much more seriously, and I hope to see that from the mayoral race.”
Policing
The Ottawa Police Services Board announced Friday it had selected RCMP assistant commissioner Eric Stubbs as the new OPS chief. Previously, Steve Bell had served as interim chief since former chief Peter Sloly resigned in February amid criticism of how police handled the “Freedom Convoy” occupation.
Prof. George Rigakos, who specializes at Carleton in the political economy of policing, said the hiring of Stubbs will have “absolutely no impact” on the society and security of Ottawa, but “major impacts” for logistics of everyday policing.
Board chair and Ward 5 (West Carleton-March) Councillor Eli El-Chantiry told the Charlatan in an email that recruiting the OPS chief is a main responsibility of the board but not a responsibility of city council.
“The whole idea [of the board] is to create an arms-length association between local city council, the politics of local city council and the administration of policing,” Rigakos said.
According to El-Chantiry, the board consulted the public during the summer about what they wanted out of the next chief. Board members discussed the findings from the consultation and voted unanimously to continue the recruitment process and post the job opening. They intended to choose an applicant for the position before the current council term ends Nov. 14.
Rigakos had said, partly due to belief that police lacked effectiveness during February’s “Freedom Convoy” occupation, Ottawans would “likely be watching more carefully this time” than during previous hirings. He added public opinion on Stubbs will largely come down to how well he responds to protests “to secure the safety and security of the Ottawa general population.”
“When there’s a lack of co-ordination between police services, it exacerbates the already existing problem of jurisdictional responsibility.”
Another issue Rigakos said needs consideration is arrangements the board can make with other police services, including with the Ontario Provincial Police and RCMP.
“There needs to be jurisdictional discussion because, when there’s a lack of co-ordination between police services, it exacerbates the already existing problem of jurisdictional responsibility,” he said. “Until the jurisdictional issues are clarified and maybe even amended, you can potentially have situations again like the Ottawa siege.”
Rigakos described complexities from the occupation where, for example, protesters camped on municipal properties during an event that also had largely federal implications. An absence of integrated police approaches for responding to such situations, he explained, poses a serious problem.
Police chief aside, El-Chantiry said the election means a change in the three city council members and one council-appointed citizen member seated on the board. These currently include El-Chantiry (Ward 5 West Carleton-March), Coun. Jeff Leiper (Ward 15 Kitchissippi), Coun. Cathy Curry (Ward 4 Kanata North) and vice-chair Suzanne Valiquet. Council will determine its next arrangement of board members postelection, after Oct. 24.
Featured image by Phil Renaud/City of Ottawa.
