I'm tired of Mark Sutcliffe whining that he's broke, and begging for more money.
Pay your own bills, Mark. I'm not giving you money.
Catherine McKenney warned all of you, and you didn’t listen to them. In the 2022 Ottawa Mayoral Election debates, Catherine McKenney pointed out there was a massive hole in Mark Sutcliffe’s budget, and you didn’t listen to them. Bob Chiarelli pointed out that Mark Sutcliffe had, of all three major candidates, by far the least fiscal experience managing budgets. Ottawa didn’t listen to his warnings either, and on election day, Mark Sutcliffe is elected mayor with 51.37% of the vote.
Fast forward to September 2024. Turns out everyone who warned Ottawa was completely right, and that Mark Sutcliffe has a massive hole in his budget, and he needs to fill it right now! If only entire slews of people had warned Ottawa that this obviously foreseeable thing would happen! Nobody could have ever predicted this outcome!
Sarcasm aside, Ottawa was indeed warned on repeat occasion that Mark Sutcliffe has no idea how to manage finances or economics. But Sutcliffe promised that not only would he keep everything exactly the same, he would magically also do this with lower property tax rates.
Catherine McKenney rightly pointed out that Mark Sutcliffe was not going to find anywhere near $80 million in “efficiencies”, and that his promises that there would be no service cuts would become patently false. But people in Ottawa didn’t care; they were promised they could have their cake and eat it too, so they picked the huckster over the hard worker.
For comparison, Sutcliffe promised 2.5% annual increases to Ottawa’s property tax, versus McKenney who proposed 3.0% increases instead. Mark Sutcliffe delivered on 2.5% for the first two years of his budget, but he is now claiming to journalists that for 2025 he aims for a “2.9%” increase. This is hilariously and pathetically transparent, a bare naked attempt to keep the number below Catherine McKenney’s suggested 3.0%. I would not be surprised if Sutcliffe does something even sillier, and makes the top-line number 2.995%.
Note, however, that 2.9% increase applies to all city services except OC Transpo public transit. For assuredly stupid reasons, Ottawa has separated the transit levy into a separate rate from the rest of Ottawa’s property taxes. Mayor Sutcliffe is now claiming that to fund a $120 million shortfall in OC Transpo, he will be “forced” to hike OC Transpo’s fare as much as 75% higher, the transit levy as much as 37% higher, or a combination of the two.
Addressing the OC Transpo shortfall solely with the transit levy, and including the 2.9% increase for the rest of Ottawa’s budget, Ottawa would see an effective 9.9% property tax increase. Meanwhile, OC Transpo has a current adult fare of $3.80 with a 90 minute transfer window; if the shortfall was covered by a fare increase, riders would instead be paying a per-ride fare of $6.65, so absurdly large it would dwarf the fares that other agencies charge across all of North America.
Note that Ottawa’s yearly increases of 2.5% under Sutcliffe are remarkably low compared to other major Ontario cities; in 2024, Toronto’s taxes jump 9.5%, London’s jumped 7.5%, and Waterloo a tad lower at 6.1%. If anything, these artificially low property tax rates in Ottawa are the direct result of Ottawa’s current fiscal collapse; residents of Ottawa are not willing to pay for the things their city needs to keep operating, while other Ontario municipalities are willing to do the hard thing and raise property taxes to keep the city running.
Is Mayor Sutcliffe willing to take responsibility for this? Of course not. Instead, he’s decided to spend the past month casting blame upon the federal government, supposedly because they haven’t given him enough money. As one level of government cannot legally tax another, the federal government and it’s crown corporations instead pay municipal governments something called a Payment In Lieu of Taxes, known as PILTs.
The federal government, as well as the National Capital Commission and various other crown corporations, own a significant portion of land in Ottawa, and as a result these PILTs became a low nine-figure revenue stream for funding Ottawa’s budget. Because PILTs have now reduced to Ottawa, Sutcliffe is spending the majority of his days recording social media videos castigating the federal government for not paying their “fair share” of taxes to Ottawa.
In addition, Sutcliffe contests the fact that the federal government is able to determine the fair market value of it’s own properties, implying that the federal government is artificially lowering property values compared to MPAC’s assessments. While this is determined by the federal government, it is also appealable.
However, Sutcliffe magically ignores the main reason that PILTs are actually dropping in Ottawa: the federal government is selling land it no longer needs. Since it no longer requires that much land, it is selling some off to the public. Naturally the PILTs are lower, because many of those properties are no longer owned by the federal government!
Shouldn’t that thrill Mayor Sutcliffe? If the federal government keeps selling off land to the public, then he won’t need to worry about the PILTs being supposedly undervalued! He’ll be able to collect normal property taxes, which he claims are the true and fair value! In fact, if the federal government were to move everything out of Ottawa, then Mayor Sutcliffe would never need to worry about us bothering him again!
After all, Parliament was once in Kingston before it was in Ottawa. Perhaps such an important institution is more suited to a real city such as Montréal, where the municipal government is willing to be a strong partner and regularly build new public infrastructure.
Perhaps, like the Canadian Museum for Human Rights located in Winnipeg, we should relocate some other national museums out of Ottawa, to Saskatoon and Calgary and Victoria. If Sutcliffe truly resents the presence of the federal government in Ottawa, I’m sure there are many cities around the country willing to relieve him of the burden.
Truly, the acrimony brewing between Mayor Sutcliffe and the Ottawa Liberal Caucus genuinely amuses me. After all, every sitting Liberal MP and MPP in Ottawa unanimously endorsed Sutcliffe, over the objections of their own staff. They allied themselves with Tories to elect Sutcliffe, despite their own Ottawa staffers telling them it was a bad idea, and yet Ottawa’s Liberal caucus members did not listen.
Now, it appears Ottawa’s Liberal Caucus is reaping what they’ve sowed. Minister Jenna Sudds, formerly Deputy Mayor of Ottawa and now the senior-most Liberal MP in the Ottawa region, has the unfortunate responsibility of fighting Mayor Sutcliffe in public after helping get him elected. Perhaps, if only she had foreseen the plainly obvious consequences of her actions, she would not be facing those consequences right now!
Fair credit, however, to Catherine McKenna, Mark Carney, and Gerald Butts, for breaking with the Liberal mold and endorsing McKenney. A shame that Liberal caucus members in Ottawa ridings did not listen to any of the experienced Liberals in their circles, whom explicitly told them this was a bad idea.
So, while Ottawa spends $500 million on the Lansdowne 2.0 boondoggle to build a stadium for a sports team, OC Transpo disintegrates before our very eyes. Bus service has become painfully infrequent, with the scheduled buses frequently skipping right past waiting passengers, soaked at bus stops without rain shelters and now stuck waiting another 30 minutes for the next bus.
Line 2 still has no scheduled opening, with test trains running repeatedly past the Carleton University campus, taunting us by not allowing anyone to board. Line 1, frequently malfunctioning on a daily basis, will now have the added benefit of being made intentionally worse!
Whereas the Line 1 light metro currently operates every 5 minutes during weekdays, OC Transpo has now savagely cut Line 1’s weekday service; between 9am and 3pm, and 6:30pm and 9:30pm, Line 1 trains will now only arrive every 10 minutes. How much money is this move planned to save for the rest of the operating year? A measly $600,000, the same cost as the new concrete bollards installed outside Ottawa City Hall. Ottawa can afford to buy a $500 million sports stadium for a private company, but Ottawa can’t afford to spend $600,000 this year to keep their trains running normally.
Truly, OC Transpo’s executives, and Sutcliffe’s administration that gives them their marching orders, are the most miserly bunch I have ever suffered to witness in Ontario municipal politics. The sheer penny-pinching, self-sabotaging stupidity of this Ebenezer Scrooge-esque psychosis should be kept far away from any position of authority over the lives of others. Mark Sutcliffe shouldn’t be allowed to manage the budget of a children’s lemonade stand, because he’d forget how many quarters are in a loonie.
Whenever Ottawa’s austerity hawks complain about OC Transpo’s ridership dropping, they should consider it’s because they’ve mutated OC Transpo into an abomination unbefitting exposure to human contact. When it comes to public transit, frequency is freedom, and when your supposedly “rapid transit” is barely working and barely comes when it does work, you do not have frequency, and you do not have freedom.
Public transit users should be able to walk into a station instinctively, without needing to check a schedule in advance. The wait between trains should be, at worst, the length of an average song on Spotify as you wait for the next train to run through. Walking onto a metro platform as the train departs, to see the next one won’t come for another ten minutes, is a torturous experience I do not wish on my enemies. That’s absurdly slow for the massive investment in fully grade-separating a metro line.
If Ottawa wants to keep electing mayors who let their city crumble apart into dust, that’s their prerogative. But electing these fools as your leaders, and then demanding the province and the federal government pay the bills to clean up your mess, really boils my blood. In Toronto, when we needed to cover our fiscal shortfalls, Mayor Chow raised property taxes rather than slash services. That’s what it means for a city to take responsibility for itself.
I’m tired of Mark Sutcliffe whining to the rest of the country about how broke he is, and begging all of us for more money. It’s not the responsibility of hard-working Canadians, who pay their fair share of taxes to all three levels of government, to start paying for Ottawa’s tax bill too. Every city needs to use the fiscal tools at their disposal, and just because Sutcliffe doesn’t want to use those tools doesn’t mean the tools don’t exist and haven’t been given to him!
Why should Ottawa get a free ride from Edmonton and Halifax and Winnipeg and Regina? Why should Ottawa get to pass their responsibilities off on the rest of us? If Ottawa’s municipal government is truly unable to manage it’s own fiscal situation, do they require the province to take over administration? It would not be the first time that Ontario has had to step in when a municipality got in over their head.
Mark Sutcliffe clearly has no concept of the true value of a dollar, but he does know how to shift blame onto anyone and everyone but himself. Until Liberals in Ottawa stop backing Tories in municipal races, they’ll continue to be backstabbed and scapegoated by the political enemies they foolishly continue to empower.
Liberal MPs and MPPs representing Ottawa ridings are facing the consequences of their own actions right now, and I have very little pity for them as long as they keep acting like this. I have even less pity after they decided to skip Capital Pride the moment Mark Sutcliffe told them to do it. If they won’t have a backbone, I won’t feel bad for them.
All of these politicians, however, are ultimately elected by the people of Ottawa, and it is only the people of Ottawa that can choose a different path for themselves. Until Ottawa starts making smarter choices about the politicians they vote for, nothing will ever change. The services that everyone relies upon will continue to crumble and dissolve as long as Ottawa refuses to pay the money necessary to keep things in good condition.
Until Ottawa realizes there is no such thing as a free lunch, their small town will never become a real city. And really, as long as Ottawa governs itself like this, they do feel much more like a township than a proper city. For the sake of my friends and family who live in Ottawa, I really do wish things would get better for their home.
But my hopes are low. And they’re only getting lower.
Correction: A previous version of this column claimed that the Alstom Coradia LINT fleet intended for Line 4 was suffering mechanical issues. Both the Stadler FLIRT and Alstom Coradia LINT fleets are currently in active testing, and can be witnessed performing test runs on Line 2 as of the writing of this piece.
Remember pre-covid during those crazy long public transit commutes and detours around LRT construction sites back in the late 2010's ? I remember advocating for free transit at committee and councilor's balked at the idea of adding $150 to $450 to annual taxes so some or all of transit routes could be fare-free (at a time when adult passes cost $1700 per year and most people worked 5days per week).
Now we shall be paying that AND increased fares for those of us who still commute 5days/week! 🤯