With Ottawa’s municipal election set for Oct. 24, the Charlatan consulted the city’s 14 mayoral candidates about their plans to address crime, policing and emergency services. In order of nomination, with those the Charlatan didn’t interview listed last, here’s what each candidate wants voters to know.
Brandon Bay
Brandon Bay wants to make Ottawa safer by having more emergency response plans for various scenarios and re-investing in emergency services.
He said police services are understaffed and carry responsibilities that could be allocated to other services. Bay said reporting and administrative work, for example, could be performed by civilian employees, while mental health support should be assigned elsewhere.
He added it’s important to address the fact that numerous police officers are retiring and there aren’t enough prospective recruits to replace them due to people not wanting to deal with low pay and burnout.
For a new police chief, Bay said he wants someone who can work with others, take criticism and find the patience to build relationships not only with other officers, but with the public.
Catherine McKenney
In the wake of the “Freedom Convoy” occupation, Catherine McKenney said they want to repair trust in municipal institutions. “A failure of our police force” and “a failure of leadership” allowed this occupation to take root in a residential neighbourhood, they said.
With Ottawa due to select a new police chief, McKenney said they asked the police board to delay the process until after the election, but the board refused. To reduce crime, they said Ottawans need housing and better mental health support.
“If we don’t invest in mental health services or housing, the increase in crime will continue,” McKenney said. “We need to invest in community safety and well-being.”
With Ottawa experiencing a paramedic shortage, they said the service “has to keep up with a growing population.” McKenney wants to explore new models for ambulance services, including one that would see paramedics caring for people directly and not simply taking them to hospitals.
Ade Olumide
Ade Olumide proposed a “transparency” bill of rights that would let Ottawans file misconduct, policy and service complaints and would hold the police to greater accountability and public scrutiny.
He said not issuing a threshold for police investigations nor publicizing the investigations online can incite criminal misconduct. Olumide added “a misconduct investigation is not a criminal investigation,” but rather like an HR investigation.
“In order for us to assess whether we want a police chief [applicant] from any city, we should be able to see how many investigations they let exceed 120 days,” he said.
If the public aren’t aware of these numbers, they’re denied the right to hold police accountable, Olumide said. He prioritized digitally publicizing what the complainant, investigator and board of the police chief say.
“And then we, the public, can judge,” Olumide said.
Param Singh
As a former Ottawa Police Service (OPS) officer, Param Singh said he’d increase police funding with a “reasonable budget” and improve mental health and public services to reduce crime in Ottawa.
“Police officers [are] already running on low staffing almost every day,” he said. “For a growing city to have a police service underfunded is not a good idea. My steps would be to keep funding police as they [themselves] see fit.”
Singh said he’d take issues such as February’s occupation seriously.
“Every person in Canada has a right to protest, but they do not have that right at the expense of someone else’s right,” he said. “Any recommendation will be taken seriously and we will look into everything and anything to make sure that this doesn’t happen again, and if it does, we are going to be ready for it.”
Mark Sutcliffe
Mark Sutcliffe said he won’t politicize policing but promised a better police service going forward, adding “the public lost a lot of confidence in the police service and in the leadership of the police service” during February’s occupation.
“We needed a police service that treats everyone fairly and equitably and treats everyone the same in our community,” he said. “We need people to have confidence in that and know that that’s the case.”
Sutcliffe wants to invest in addressing hate crime and would hire specialized personnel for this. He also wants greater diversity and accountability in the police force and said he’d reflect this in the OPS hiring process.
“I want to represent all of Ottawa, not just one part of Ottawa,” Sutcliffe said.
To address Ottawa’s net-zero ambulance levels, he’d hire more paramedics and work with the province to stop them from getting stuck in waiting rooms with patients for hours at a time.
Mike Maguire
Mike Maguire said addressing homelessness is an important first step to managing Ottawa’s rising crime rates. Many crimes of opportunity take place within the homeless population, he said.
Maguire plans to increase mental health services and promote aggressive enforcement of street-level drug laws to make Ottawa and surrounding areas safer.
“We’re not going to have a city if we’re not going to make it livable, and nobody wants to stay in a city where it’s not safe,” he said.
Maguire said he wants to be a “law and order mayor” and, when hiring a new OPS chief, will look for someone who shares similar values of strict law enforcement.
“I want someone with successful experience who has been in a large municipality and who has addressed things like cleaning up homelessness,” he said. “At the same time, [I want] someone who’s demonstrated commitment to what I consider to be our Canadian values of fairness and tolerance.”
Celine Debassige
“The justice system has to be reformed in order to better serve the citizens they claim to be protecting,” Celine Debassige said, adding that police taking minimal action for the first three weeks of February’s occupation demonstrated complacency.
Debassige, who identifies as Ojibwa and Dene, said Ottawa must steer itself away from white supremacy, colonialism and capitalist beliefs if it wants to reform its justice system and measure crimes—including police-perpetrated crimes—for what they are. She added there needs to be accountability and transparency in a new police chief and their intentions.
Gregory Guevara*
Gregory Guevara wants to build a wall around Ottawa, which he said would prevent an incident such as February’s occupation from happening again.
“I want you to imagine a truck trying to get into Ottawa after there’s a wall around it,” he said.
Guevara said there’s no need for a police force, as Ottawans don’t commit crime. He attributed any crime to “Nottawans”—those who aren’t from Ottawa. Guevara would keep other emergency services, such as paramedics and fire crews, because they’d fit into his promise to give every Ottawan a government job.
Listing which government jobs he’d prioritize, he said, “No. 1 would be policy analyst. No. 2: guy who copies Excel spreadsheets back and forth for six hours. But maybe No. 5 could be paramedic.”
Guevara emphasized that his promises are serious.
“If I get into power, I will indeed build a wall,” he said. “I’ve already imagined it. I’ll walk into Jim Watson’s old office. I’ll sit down, have an anxiety attack and say, ‘OK, time to get started.’”
Nour Kadri
Nour Kadri said Ottawa, as a G7 capital, can’t run its emergency services and respond to incidents such as demonstrations the same way Toronto and Montreal do because it houses the federal government and countless embassies.
“[Citizens of] Ottawa should not be the ones to pay the price for these demonstrations,” he said. “Protests are normal and we know these things happen, but we [also] need to be ready when something like [the “Freedom Convoy”] happens.”
Kadri said emergency plans would come from collaboration between Ottawa, the federal government and provincial governments. To improve local emergency services, he wants a standardized training program for members of the RCMP, Ontario Provincial Police and OPS.
“There were many cases of mismanagement and misco-ordination at all levels of police matters, and that isn’t effective,” Kadri said. “There must be change. We need to realize that, in Ottawa specifically, it’s something that must be done because all three levels of police are established here.”
Zed Chebib
Zed Chebib said he was once mishandled and hospitalized by police and denied his right to a doctor. He wants to make changes to OPS’s legal department and would put more “checks and balances” into the police force.
“They have to hire more officers who could be trained like social workers,” Chebib said, adding he has no issue with increasing police funding as needed.
He’d make an internal hiring process to elect a new OPS chief, adding there are enough talented officers within the current force.
Jacob Solomon
Jacob Solomon deemed the police “useless” during February’s occupation. He acknowledged it to have been a “tricky situation” but described officers as having been “blocking the road illegally.” Solomon said he’d be “totally looking for a new and better police chief who actually promises to do something” and who’d adequately serve the community.
Mandating police body cameras is a “no-brainer” for him, which he added would enable better responses to information requests. Solomon would also work to make drivers better at yielding to emergency vehicles.
“I think we’ve got to have some sort of big public campaign awareness thing for, ‘get the hell out of the way for emergency vehicles,’ because sometimes people clearly don’t care,” he said.
Bob Chiarelli
According to his website, Bob Chiarelli thinks police weren’t able to “successfully control the situation” during the occupation.
He said Ottawa needs to review budget-making issues of the city and police and “assess its resources” in seeking a new OPS chief and reviewing Police Services Board operations.
To address Ontario’s health-care crisis, Chiarelli would form a “nimble, focused and local” task force that advises the city in its response to provincial plans and makes health-care recommendations for the Ottawa region.
Chiarelli did not respond to the Charlatan’s request for comment.
Bernard Couchman
According to his website, Bernard Couchman wants to legalize possessing “small amounts of narcotics,” calling the offence “a health concern at best and an issue that can lead to mental illness.” He said he’d put more money into finding and dealing with the root causes of addiction, rather than incarcerating offenders.
Couchman would switch police officers’ focus from making arrests to ensuring substances are free of contaminants, providing specialized training and high-tech equipment for this.
He said this would save more lives, bring crime to an all-time low and create more high-paying jobs. Couchman also wants to put $25 million toward suicide prevention.
Couchman did not respond to the Charlatan’s request for comment.
Graham MacDonald
According to his website, Graham MacDonald would urge city council to appoint a mental health officer who’d serve all age groups and work to unite police and mental health professionals. He’d also advocate for “more effective services” to assist those who struggle with addiction or have lost someone to an overdose.
MacDonald called the current OPS force understaffed and more receptive to service calls than street crime, leading to “reactive strategies with limited effectiveness.” He said bringing in the right number of recruits could make Ottawa Canada’s safest city, adding he’d work on the ground with police to gather first-hand knowledge.
MacDonald did not respond to the Charlatan’s request for comment.
*Gregory Guevara was the Charlatan’s Arts editor for the 2018-19 publication year.
Featured image provided by Emmanuella Onyeme.
