Roundup: What you may have missed in the municipal election campaign last week

Ottawa residents had a chance to cast their ballot on advance voting day on Oct. 16 from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Elections Ottawa did not immediately release voter turnout.

There were 27,553 electors who cast their ballot at voting places across Ottawa during the first advance voting period.

The capital is exactly one week out from voting day on Oct. 26. As part of the Ottawa Citizen‘s weekly series, here is a roundup of the promises made in the past week by the four leading mayoral candidates: Neil Saravanamuttoo, Mark Sutcliffe, Jeff Leiper and Alex Lawson.

If elected, Sutcliffe says he will double the Ottawa Police Service’s Hate Crime Unit to strengthen the city’s available resources to respond to hate-motivated incidents.

Within his first 60 days, Sutcliffe says he will reconvene the Faith Leaders Council and bring together community leaders involved in Ottawa’s City of Kindness Summit (a symposium hosted at city hall in February 2026 by incumbent Sutcliffe) to combat hate and support affected residents.

Sutcliffe says he will also launch a city-wide campaign to denounce hate and stop extremist recruitment by working with local MPs, the Ottawa Police Service, the city’s Ottawa Stops Hate campaign and other community partners. The goal, according to the release, is to help residents recognize, understand and report white nationalist and other extremist tactics.

If elected, Leiper promised Tuesday to create a new recreation centre and community health hub in Kanata. The centre would have dedicated space for medical practitioners to bring community health services and recreation services “under one roof.”

“Last October, hundreds of residents lined up at a local Kanata clinic, with some arriving before dawn in the hope of finding a doctor,” Leiper’s campaign read, adding that this underscores the urgency the city needs to have addressing health-care scarcity.

Leiper said Ottawa can learn from other municipalities that are working with provincial partners to support medical spaces “and attract doctors, including Carleton Place, as well as Wellesley Township, which incorporated a community health centre into its recreation complex.”

Kanata’s recreation infrastructure has not kept pace with growth, he said, adding that Kanata North is home to more than 45,000 residents, and is growing. “Yet the City’s current recreation plan does not include an additional complex for Ottawa’s west end.”

“People should not have to watch their neighbourhoods grow while the services and infrastructure they depend on fall further behind,” Leiper said. “We need to plan ahead and invest in the facilities that make our communities healthy, active and connected.”

Sutcliffe unveiled his full 70-page platform, which outlines a vision for the city’s next 25 years. Some of the key commitments from the comprehensive platform include keeping property tax increases between two to 2.5 per cent for the first two years of what would be his second term as the mayor of Ottawa.

His platform includes his previously revealed plans to reduce the price of monthly transit passes to $95 (down from the current $138.50), hiring 350 more police officers, paramedics and firefighters, cutting the small-business tax by almost $4,000 annually, finding savings at city hall through program reviews and “freezing municipality imposed new-housing costs to help keep the cost of building homes under control.”

If elected, Lawson says he will raise the floor for Ottawa’s police patrol cars to a minimum of 64 cars from the current 42 in the city. Lawson says this is an increase from Ottawa’s 1995 minimum which sat at 42 patrol cars, which he claims hasn’t been reassessed since then.

“In 1995 Ottawa had 721,000 people and 42 cars. Today we have 1.1 million people and 42 cars,” Lawson wrote in his platform. “The officers aren’t the problem. The math is.”

This means approximately 110 more officers on Ottawa streets, which would cost roughly $20 million a year or $42 per household. His platform promises “guaranteed coverage for every zone” as well as a set number of minimum patrol cars for every zone of the city “so no suburb or village goes without a car when downtown is busy,” he wrote.

To expense this additional cost, he says the city’s bill will go to governments that “should pay for it,” arguing that the Ottawa Police Service handled 415 demonstrations last year, meanwhile the federal program for the capital’s extraordinary policing costs is capped at $3 million “and a refused claim for Middle East demonstrations left $6.5 million on local taxpayers.”

“He will ask Ontario, which already funds the mounted unit, special constables and the ByWard Market strategy through 2027, to renew that money and fund front-line officers as it did from 1998 to 2019,” he wrote.

Sutcliffe unveiled Sunday he would launch a pilot program providing free annual recreation passes to Ottawa residents undergoing cancer treatment so patients can stay active “and access City recreation facilities without worrying about the cost.”

He says the passes to city’s to city recreation facilities and programs will be free. “An annual pass can be worth nearly $550, helping remove a significant expense for patients and families already facing additional costs,” his platform reads.

Sutcliffe says he will also work with provincial health officials to share the city’s “pilot’s results” and explore whether the approach could benefit cancer patients across Ontario.

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