We followed Mark Sutcliffe’s campaign for a week. He gets mad sometimes.

Spend any time with Mark Sutcliffe in the throes of campaigning and you will see that he is an eye-contact man.

He will nod, smile and frown meaningfully, his deep-set peepers glued upon you.

Not long ago, at a campaign stop at the Irish Hills Golf and Country Club, Sutcliffe came face to face with Devin Michael Fitzgerald O’Brien, a candidate for city council in Stittsville who until recently ran a store specializing in Magic: The Gathering and Pokémon trading cards.

O’Brien was prevailing upon Sutcliffe to spend more dollars on infrastructure in Stittsville.

The room was crowded. Although Sutcliffe has the politician’s knack for holding intimate conversations even in the loudest spaces, O’Brien appeared to be keeping him longer than he wanted.

Sutcliffe often only speaks when called upon to do so. It was O’Brien who was doing the talking.

The incumbent mayor’s face assumed a Zen equanimity. His focus never wavered. When Sutcliffe locks eyes, he is disciplined about maintaining their grip.

For him, communication is an endurance sport.

The adjective “incumbent” is rooted in the Latin incumbere, meaning, according to the Merriam-Webster, “to lie down on.” But Sutcliffe is not at rest. If anything, he is running for his life.

At first blush, it’s not clear why.

Although new polling suggests that the race has narrowed, Sutcliffe has long enjoyed a significant lead and he remains ahead.

His record as mayor contains no major boobs. Ottawa’s problems — unreliable transit, homelessness, increasingly open drug use — are now widely seen as chronic and not of Sutcliffe’s own making. What’s more, they are the main downtown issues.

Another concern for Ottawa voters — affordability — is meanwhile shared by people across Canada.

And Sutcliffe says he has a fix: he is pledging to keep his tax increases low — indeed, below the rate of inflation — for the first two years of his next term should he win re-election.

If his opponents — Jeff Leiper, Neil Saravanamuttoo and Alex Lawson — have a lock on Ottawa’s ever grittier downtown, the polling suggests that the incumbent can count on the city’s suburbs and outer reaches.

What’s more, the non-Sutcliffe vote continues to be split between his foes: “It doesn’t seem like there’s been a coalescing of the change vote behind any single challenger,” says Ottawa-based elections watcher Dan Arnold of the polling firm Pollara.

If only Sutcliffe would allow himself to take comfort in what the numbers say.

“I don’t look at opinion polls,” Sutcliffe told the Ottawa Citizen. “Last time around, there wasn’t a single published poll that showed me ahead before Election Day. So I don’t pay attention. I run like I’m in second place. I do my job. I talk to the people of Ottawa.”

The Citizen spent this mayoral election’s penultimate week watching Sutcliffe do just that.

From golf courses to banquet halls to The Ottawa Mission to a centenary celebration for Rockcliffe Park at which the birthday cake was decorated with an icing map of that wealthy village — “I’m looking at all the streets, I think mine is here!” exclaimed an organizer — Sutcliffe has worked relentlessly squeezing hands, sparring with his challengers and locking eyes with everybody.

At the Irish Hills golf course, across Carp Road from the Carp Airport and partly owned by the real estate broker Jagdeep Perhar, the event’s organizer, Sutcliffe took the mic and made his pitch:

Ottawa, he told the crowd, is projected to grow by 500,000 people and reach a population of 1.6 million in the next 25 years.

To lay the groundwork for that surge, the city will need to spend mightily on infrastructure, to the tune of $10 billion, according to Sutcliffe’s proposal.

“We’re going to invest like we’ve never invested before,” he said.

Sutcliffe has also promised, among other things, to lower the cost of an adult monthly transit pass from $138.50 to $95, secure funding to increase the affordable housing supply and plans to hire 200 more police officers, 100 more paramedics and 50 more firefighters if re-elected.

And yet, he told the crowd, Ottawa has under his leadership raised taxes by some of the lowest rates of any city in Canada. On that score he is committed to delivering more of the same — a lot for way less.

Sutcliffe said his main opponent, Leiper, a councillor over the last dozen years for the downtown ward of Kitchissippi, “isn’t even saying how much he’s going to increase taxes.”

He asked the crowd to think of the tax hikes of Toronto’s Olivia Chow and Hamilton’s Andrea Horwath. He said Leiper would do the same here.

Acting as MC, Perhar, the organizer, wearing a maroon turban and a dark suit, said that he liked the idea of keeping taxes low. But what if the Ottawa police, when called, stopped coming?

For reliable police service, Perhar suggested, “I’d pay $10.”

Others, asking further impromptu questions, wanted to know how he’d pay for that promised $10-billion infrastructure plan.

Sutcliffe outlined a scheme that involved water bills and development fees but then touted investments he’d secure from the provincial and federal governments, which he suggested had shortchanged Ottawa while showering cash on the GTA.

There was a distinct tension in the room between the promise of services and the problem of how to pay for them.

Joining Sutcliffe at Irish Hills was his wife of nearly 20 years, Ginny, his campaign co-manager, DG Stringer, and his young driver and amanuensis Sam Wittmann, an extravagantly sharp dresser.

The entourage also included a second Sam — Sam Laprade — a comms and fundraising pro who back in her 20s had worked as executive assistant to Mary Pitt, the last mayor of Nepean.

(Sutcliffe, Laprade said, has 36 hours in a day while the rest of us have just 24.)

And there was a third Sam in the room, too — Sam Kaddoura — in a checked sport coat and helping himself to the buffet. He had come all the way from Orléans to see Sutcliffe. The westbound traffic was brutal that night and it had taken an hour and a half. He was new to city politics.

“This is the first time I’m doing this and I’m doing it because I’m feeling it,” said Kaddoura, 53, explaining that his family’s business, a shawarma spot in Place d’Orléans, had seen a drop in sales of 20 per cent last month. His customers, he said, just have less money in their pockets:

“There’s tough times coming,” he said. “It’s already here — and it’s going to get worse.

“I haven’t made up my mind,” he added of the mayoral race.

But he had approached Sutcliffe and shaken his hand. “The vibe that I got from him is… not a bad one,” he said.

*

The following Saturday, Sutcliffe, 58, started his day as normal with a run at 6:30 a.m.

His running routine is important to him — he’s written books on the subject — and he appeared committed to sticking with it even amid the election. (He tries to get to bed at 10:30 p.m.).

A trim man whose devotion to exercise gives him a jaunty athletic look even when he’s in one of his grey suits, Sutcliffe has an alternative sweater-and-slacks uniform for weekend events in the autumn, and that is what he wore when he appeared with Sam Wittmann at The Ottawa Mission.

It was Thanksgiving weekend.

Peter Tilley, the Mission’s CEO, would later confirm that over the week ending on Thanksgiving Monday the Mission and its food trucks served 19,684 meals. Tilley led Sutcliffe through the food hall and back behind a cafeteria-style serving counter into the kitchen. Wittmann, wearing a Barbour jacket, took photographs of Sutcliffe’s encounters.

Tilley said that since the province closed the city’s last remaining supervised drug consumption sites, in Sandy Hill and Lowertown, in June, frontline Mission staffers had responded to 10 times the number of overdoses.

Up until the week before, the drug supply had been tainted with horse tranquilizer, knocking users out so profoundly they required multiple doses of Naloxone.

“We’re at the mercy of the drug supply,” Tilley told him. “We’ve gotta do something about this mess.”

Sutcliffe said it was unlikely the province would revisit its decision on safe consumption sites, which he has repeatedly said he lobbied Queen’s Park to keep open. They needed to convene stakeholders to hammer out a strategy. And they needed to prevent an “ideological debate.”

It was not that Sutcliffe was being cavalier. Last year, he pledged to end youth homelessness in Ottawa by 2030. The city’s 2026 budget put $400,000 towards that goal.

Tilley pointed to a new awning above the sidewalk outside 53 Daly Ave., explaining it had only just been installed after a client of the Mission’s Diane Morrison Hospice who died in July, Brian Leeman, willed a substantial portion of his residential school settlement to the organization in order to install it. Leeman wanted to keep the smokers gathered below it dry.

“That’s a great story,” Sutcliffe said.

Later that day, Sutcliffe and Ginny arrived at the Rockcliffe Park Library for the “Century of Community” event. A musician signalled the commencement of speeches with a trumpet fanfare, and Sutcliffe was called to the podium as keynote speaker. He had changed into a suit.

*

Rockcliffe is a long way from The Ottawa Mission. Or is it?

Sutcliffe pushed back at the suggestion. Over the course of the previous days, he said, he’d been out to Navan and to Richmond, each about a half hour from City Hall when there is no traffic. Relatively speaking, he said, Rockcliffe and the Mission, near the Rideau Street corridor, are actually neighbours.

Still, it is hard to think of them as anything but worlds apart.

Sutcliffe grew up in the downtown west end — he mentioned to one audience in the area that he recalls going to the Dairy Queen that once stood at the corner of Woodroffe Avenue and Richmond Road near his old McKellar Park neighbourhood — but he often sees the city through a rural lens.

“It started with my career on CFRA and a lot of the callers to my radio show were residents of rural Ottawa,” Sutcliffe told the Ottawa Citizen. “We used to broadcast live from the Carp Fair and the Metcalfe Fair and the Richmond Fair and the Navan Fair. And I would spend time with those rural residents. And I understood through that that their needs are different.”

That attentiveness is one thread of continuity between Sutcliffe’s term as mayor and the Jim Watson era, the tail end of which became increasingly acrimonious.

Back then, downtown interests were pitted against those beyond the core. Sutcliffe likes to suggest that as mayor he has played peacemaker, getting everybody working together.

This election has interrupted that harmony.

During the mayoral debate at Knox Presbyterian Church at Lisgar and Elgin streets, in response to a question put to the candidates by moderator Hallie Cotnam, a CBC broadcaster, about Ottawa’s urban-rural divide, Leiper called the division “overblown.” In general, he argued, Ottawans across the city all want the same thing:

“People just want a city that works,” he said.

Sutcliffe’s wife Ginny, sitting in a pew near where the candidates were debating, caught Sutcliffe’s eye, and the couple began to shake their heads at each other in unison in reaction to Leiper’s comments.

Asked later about that exchange of looks, Sutcliffe recalled Leiper’s comments exactly:

“He said something that is a very familiar thing for someone who has not spent a lot of time in rural Ottawa to say. Something to the effect of, rural residents want the same things as other residents of Ottawa. And the truth of the matter is, if you spend a lot of time in rural Ottawa — as I’ve done over the course of my life, my career and as mayor — you actually learn that they want different things, right? They don’t want to be lumped together with everybody else.”

Treating rural Ottawa as a monolith, he said, is exactly what his chief rival Catherine McKenney did in the 2022 mayoral election.

Former premier Mike Harris’s move to amalgamate a number of large Ontario cities with their suburbs nearly three decades ago — Ottawa and its surroundings morphed into a behemoth that, in Sutcliffe’s words, “can fit Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Edmonton and Calgary” in 2001 — was aimed at cutting costs.

But a happy consequence for Harris, a Progressive Conservative, was to pull the political centre of gravity further away from Ontario’s downtowns and into the peripheries.

In debates, Sutcliffe takes pains to emphasize the interests of voters in those suburbs and the countryside. While he has a reputation for mild manners, he can on occasion flirt with nastiness — a trait he especially exhibits when the discussion touches on this rural-urban split.

During the CTV News Ottawa and Newstalk 580 CFRA debate, Sutcliffe raised McKenney’s 2022 plan to invest $250 million in bike lanes and suggested that Saravanamuttoo, who acted as an economic advisor to McKenney’s campaign, was the plan’s architect.

That plan was widely seen as key to McKenney’s electoral loss.

“You’ve been a huge advocate of the war on cars,” Sutcliffe told Saravanamuttoo.

Later that same day, after the debate, the Sutcliffe campaign team published posts on social media treating the bike lane proposal as Saravanamuttoo’s current policy rather than part of another candidate’s platform from 2022:

“In today’s CTV debate, Neil Saravanamuttoo defended his plan to spend $250 million on bike lanes, claiming it would cost ‘absolutely nothing,’ ” one post read.

At the Knox Presbyterian debate, Saravanamuttoo took issue with these statements, calling them “disinformation” and adding: “Shame on you, Mark!”

Sutcliffe defended the broadsides, saying, “Neil confirmed that he was the architect!”

When that debate turned to public safety and street disorder in the downtown, Sutcliffe touted initiatives he’s already taken, including $1 million for private security in the ByWard Market. He also pledged to shutter so-called “pill mills” that indirectly fuel the illegal drug market.

Leiper pounced, highlighting not just the closure by Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservative government of the supervised consumption sites but Sutcliffe’s own public silence on that issue.

“The problems are getting worse,” Leiper told the crowd. “I was so disappointed when Doug Ford closed the safer consumption sites — which were a key to mitigating some of the social disorder, key to mitigating the public drug use — that Mark Sutcliffe said nothing.”

Sutcliffe said he’d opposed the decision and “lobbied” Ford and Health Minister Sylvia Jones—

“In private!” Leiper interjected.

“Writing letters, being an activist, doesn’t solve anything,” said Sutcliffe.

“I will be a loud voice for the residents of Ottawa on this issue,” said Leiper.

“You’ll be an activist — not a leader,” Sutcliffe answered with his signature gesture: thumbs pointed up, fingers poised for a knitting that never quite happens.

“I’ll be a vocal, public voice, representing and fighting for the residents of Ottawa in a public forum,” Leiper insisted.

“You’ll be an activist — not a leader!” Sutcliffe repeated.

The crowd jeered meaningfully.

“I’m tempted to let this continue,” Cotnam, the moderator, said.

It was at about this time that the Knox Presbyterian debate briefly spiralled into crosstalk, prompting Sutcliffe, who has a habit of raising procedural quibbles, to ask if “these are the new rules?”

“No, no, no, we’re not going to do this,” came Cotnam’s steely response.

As the debate progressed, Sutcliffe could be seen whispering at Cotnam, beside whom he was seated, asking for more speaking time after he felt that he’d been shortchanged.

Cotnam shook her head vigorously.

When, during a response on another occasion, the debate’s timekeeper, a distinguished-looking man with a white beard, held up a card indicating his remaining time, Sutcliffe exclaimed:

“I only have 15 seconds left? That can’t be right.”

Cotnam gave the floor to another candidate.

Sutcliffe locked eyes on the timekeeper and inspected him with evident concern.

*

Ginny appears alongside Sutcliffe as he campaigns as often as she can.

She points out that she and her husband are also still raising adolescent children: Kate is 15 and Jack 17. Erica, Ginny’s daughter from a previous relationship and Sutcliffe’s now-stepdaughter, is 27.

Sutcliffe says Ginny, who does communications for the federal government, played a key role in getting him into politics in the first place.

“I wasn’t planning to run for mayor five years ago,” he said in an interview.

He recalled that, after former mayor Jim Watson announced he would not seek re-election, “there was sort of a void in the race — you know, where there was a spot available for somebody who would bring an outside perspective, a middle-of-the-road perspective, a balanced approach.”

This was likely in early 2022, he says. “And at first I said, ‘No.’ ”

At the time, McKenney was favoured to win. The prospect of a left-leaning downtown mayor caused a stir among some in Ottawa and Sutcliffe continued receiving those calls.

“And Ginny, one day, she said, maybe this is the thing, right? Maybe this is the thing that we ought to be doing for our community — is put our lives on hold for a few years and have you step up and do this,” he recalls.

Sutcliffe does appear genuinely motivated by duty. During a press conference at the top of The Westin Ottawa on Colonel By Drive, in a room boasting a breathtaking near-360-degree view of the city, Sutcliffe briefly choked up. It was a blip in an otherwise polished act.

He had just described his father John’s arrival in a speech built around that panoramic view:

“You can see the old train station across the street that is now being used as the Senate,” Sutcliffe said. “Seventy years ago, in 1956, my dad arrived in Ottawa on a train that pulled into that station. He was 19 years old. A few days earlier, he had travelled across the Atlantic Ocean on a ship with about $80 in his pocket, no job, and no place to live.”

John was an immigrant from Yorkshire. Sutcliffe’s mother, Florence Ng-Yelim, was raised in Shanghai by a father from Mauritius and a Parisian mother. John and Florence met here while both worked at the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company.

“Throughout my life, I have always felt incredibly lucky that my parents” — Sutcliffe paused to compose himself — “found each other here in Ottawa and chose to raise their family here.”

Sutcliffe has a disarming, face-rearranging grin and, while he occasionally betrays a weakness for tetchiness, he also laughs and jokes with his rivals mere moments after sharp exchanges.

“I think people would say he’s a nice person,” says Ottawa pollster Nik Nanos. “There’s probably a consensus that he hasn’t been a star and he hasn’t messed up. He’s not failing as mayor and he’s not getting an A+.”

Sutcliffe says doesn’t mind being held accountable for the various problems across the city. “That’s my job, right? But at the same time, I think, ‘We inherited a mess.'”

“I’m not a career politician,” Sutcliffe told the Citizen. “I don’t intend to seek any other position in elected office other than this one. I’m going to hand it off to somebody else. And I’ll go back to the life I had before.”

Sutcliffe was sitting in his campaign office, a half-finished commercial space in Hintonburg with wooden placard stakes piled in the middle of the floor.

He was still making eye contact.