As Ottawa looks to make room for 500,000 more residents, city council will have to reopen a contentious debate about urban sprawl.
But that debate won’t come until next year at the earliest, after a slew of proposed provincial changes delayed a discussion on how far to go.
One term ago, in 2020, council voted to open up 1,281 hectares of greenfield land by expanding the urban boundary that limits suburban growth. Those lands still aren’t used up and could potentially accommodate tens of thousands of homes.
But it likely won’t be enough. That move was based on a population forecast the province is now calling outdated, potentially forcing council to find even more lands for even more homes.
As of 2024, provincial figures report 1.15 million people living in Ottawa. At the time of that 2020 vote, the city was predicting 1.4 million residents by 2046.
The province now wants Ottawa to use higher estimates. Earlier this month, Municipal Affairs Minister Rob Flack sent a letter urging the city to use provincial projections that foresee 1.68 million Ottawa residents by 2051, calling the gap “significant” and “the largest we have seen in the province.”
“That’s a big number,” Mayor Mark Sutcliffe said last week. “We’re going to need housing for all of those people. We’re going to need infrastructure. We’re going to need a strong sustainable growth plan for the City of Ottawa. We don’t know what that looks like yet.”
5 options, from no sprawl to wide expansion
Yet councillors were preparing to decide what it will look like. Even before the minister’s letter, they voted in February to update the growth projections to comply with the province’s numbers.
Staff were preparing to present councillors with options at a meeting this week about how to accommodate all those new people. The options included five scenarios that could result in radically different futures for Ottawa.
One would hold the line on sprawl, channeling those half million people into existing neighbourhoods.
Another extreme would rely much more heavily on single detached homes and row housing and require a potentially wide expansion of Ottawa’s suburbs into rural areas.
The other three proposals would land somewhere in between.
City staff called off this week’s meeting, however, saying the proposed new provincial laws and policies created too much “uncertainty” to go forward.
Kitchissippi Coun. Jeff Leiper, who chairs council’s planning and housing committee, blamed the province for causing “chaos” with Ottawa’s planning process.
“This government in Queen’s Park hasn’t hesitated to step into cities’ affairs with respect to urban planning issues,” he said. “This is not the first time. I suspect it won’t be the last time.”
Coun. Jeff Leiper chairs a meeting of Ottawa’s planning and housing committee. (Giacomo Panico/CBC)
The provincial government has recently introduced yet another housing bill, Bill 98, which could standardize and streamline official plans, the top municipal planning documents that guide urban growth and development.
It also plans to update guidelines on how population projections should be translated into demand for new development lands.
City staff say those changes make a final decision on how much land to add, and where, “premature.” Sutcliffe agrees.
“We might as well work together on a process that yields an outcome that the residents of Ottawa are comfortable with, city council is comfortable with, and the province of Ontario is comfortable with,” the mayor said.
Councillor says province sending mixed signals
Leiper said the debate is sure to divide council. He said some councillors are dead against any move to expand the boundary, owing to concerns about the cost of sprawl for future taxpayers.
“When you have to make your pipes longer, your transit networks longer, you have to build more libraries, more community centres, more facilities, that ultimately imposes a really high tax burden on our kids,” Leiper said.
But he said other councillors would find it “unpalatable” to lean too much on tall towers and infill development.
“Before we go down that really contentious path, let’s have a better understanding of what the province expects us to do,” he said.
So far, he said the province has been sending mixed signals.
“The minister has told the city very explicitly to do more infill, do more intensification, but at the same time, our senior staff are also getting [signals] from the minister’s office that they expect us to look at the urban boundary as well,” he said.
“So right now, it’s really difficult for city staff to try to discern what the province wants us to do.”
He expects city staff and council will try to find a “compromise” solution, not an extreme. Sutcliffe took a similar view.
“We don’t want to add parcels of land to the urban boundary unnecessarily,” the mayor said. “We want to stay focused on as much intensification as possible. So we need to strike the right balance here going forward.”