Ottawa Council Year-in-Review: Looking Back and Looking Forward

City of Ottawa Politics with Evan H. Potter

Ottawa Council Year-in-Review: Looking Back and Looking Forward

One prediction for 2026: Don't look for any major change on Ottawa Council until 2030.

Evan Harold Potter

Dec 28, 2025

Group photo of the 2022 Council. Osgoode Councilor Isabelle Skalski is not in this photo because she succeeded George Darouze in the June 2025 byelection. Photo credit: Tony Caldwell/Postmedia.

Bob Dylan warned us that “The times, they are a-changin’.” Ottawa Council is preparing to prove him wrong. When voters wander back to the municipal polls this coming year, don’t expect a political earthquake — expect a family reunion. The next Council will look uncannily like the last one, save for a couple of arrivals and departures.

But before we turn the page to 2026, it’s worth lingering over 2025 — a year of one very big political win and loss depending on where you sit, a rising star or two on Council, and a series of avoidable fumbles. I’ll hand out bouquets and brickbats, name the best and worst political plays, and — cue the municipal drum roll — identify the member of Council who appears to have had the best year. Then I’ll peer into the municipal crystal ball to identify the stories that may dominate 2026, and offer some predictions — pointedly not endorsements — about who’s likely to be smiling in a group photo about 304 days from now. All of it is based on a highly unscientific but deeply Ottawa-esque blend of insider talk and end-of-year local media interviews with Mayor Mark Sutcliffe.

The biggest political win and loss: Lansdowne 2.0

This may have been my most revealing exchange with Ottawa’s municipal cognoscenti, most of whom agreed with this paradox: Lansdowne 2.0 was simultaneously the biggest win and the biggest loss of the year at Council. For the Mayor, it is the signature victory of his term so far. For the ten No councilors it is undoubtedly another stinging loss. But as I’ve argued elsewhere in this newsletter, Sutcliffe’s triumph comes with secondary effects, chief among them, a re-energized civil society that regards City Hall as increasingly unaccountable to Ottawans.

This democratic deficit was on full display in the City’s public-engagement process on Lansdowne 2.0, where “informing” the public — through the Engage Ottawa platform — was passed off as “meaningful engagement” with them. The predictable result was further decline in public trust: residents gradually tuning out once they realized their views were decorative rather than determinative. Cynics might suggest that this was not a design flaw.

For those hoping that this erosion of trust will be repaired anytime soon, patience will be required. Meaningful change at Council is at least one election cycle away. The real payoff from today’s citizen mobilization in the lead up to the 2026 election, I suspect, won’t materialize until 2030 — assuming Ottawa’s newly roused civil society continues to build on its strengths.

Overperformers and underperformers?

Everyone loves a public report card as long as it isn’t their own. There is a certain schadenfreude when a councilor you don’t like gets a low rating in a survey or from a blue-ribbon panel. But to do this properly would require a lot of performance indicators and a statistically relevant sample of residents in every ward. Absent that, the exercise collapses into something closer to vibe-checking, heavily shaped by who gets the most media attention.

Take Councilor Tim Tierney. Should Beacon Hill–Cyrville’s resident showman be filed under underperformer because some people think his traffic-cone theatrics and juvenile behaviour make him Council’s enfant terrible? He would not-so-gently remind you that four terms and his 80 per cent “landslide” win in 2022 suggest a different interpretation. Or consider Capital Councilor Shawn Menard. Many of his supporters think he overperformed heroically in trying — and failing — to kill Lansdowne 2.0. Residents of Cathy Curry’s Kanata North ward may be less moved by his performance. And what about Councilors like River ward’s Riley Brockington? They know their briefs. They get things done. Are they performing at an A level or overperforming at A+?

Is Orléans East–Cumberland Councilor Matt Luloff’s — dubbed by some as Council’s “invisible man” — contribution to Ottawa’s broader public good greater or lesser than that of Barrhaven West Councilor David Hill? They all look good in their newsletters and have loyal supporters in their wards. Judging relative performance is impossible without hard data.

So after a little reflection, I’m shelving the whole over-and-under game for this year-end tour d’horizon. It would only make sense if there were someone on Council whom everyone — colleagues, media, stakeholder groups, the general public — agreed had achieved a remarkable (how do we define it?) success that significantly improved the lives of the city’s residents. On this basis, no common name surfaced.

The rising stars

My soundings tell me that opinion is divided on Barrhaven East Councilor Wilson Lo. But as I wrote in an earlier column, my spider senses say that this young, independent-minded Councilor is biding his time for a future run for a seat at another level of government. But first, we’ll see if he tries to hold his Council seat. On the other side of the city, I find Gloucester-Southgate Councilor Jessica Bradley intriguing as a possible future political heavyweight. If I had three words to describe her, they would be “calm,” “measured” and “thoughtful.” She’s no showboat, that’s for sure. Although she’s not exactly in witness-protection mode, a little more visibility in the media wouldn’t hurt in the development of what I will call Bradley’s “pragmatic progressive” political brand (see my column).

Best and worst political plays

I’ll stick to what’s top-of-mind here, because everyone reading likely has their own favourite hits and flops from the year. On the “win” side of the ledger, there was something on which virtually every councilor could nod in agreement: free OC Transpo for youth on summer evenings and weekends. It looks good on paper, feels good on Ottawa Main Street, and is a voter-visible move that improves the perception of public transit before an election.

On the other hand, there were a couple of fumbles that could have been avoided with a bit more political foresight. I’m not prepared to name the Mayor’s handling of the women’s hockey controversy the uncontested “worst play of the year,” but it certainly fits in the head-scratcher category. Of all the constituencies a politician might alienate, the very people he has publicly congratulated — athletes and sport-supportive families — are near the top of the list you’d prefer not to antagonize. What surprised a lot of observers was his rather casual framing of the Ottawa Charge’s concerns as a “negotiation tactic” before the Lansdowne 2.0 final vote and then to see him double down in year-end interviews on his belief that the new Civic Centre’s seat count is appropriate.

And then there’s the City’s new online donation page — a curious municipal innovation that lets anyone drop between $5 and $25,000 into civic coffers without clear guidelines on how the money will be used or governed. Calling it peculiar might be the charitable. It didn’t take long for critics to wonder whether such contributions might effectively become a way to grease the wheels of someone’s pet project. That’s not exactly the sort of public confidence booster a city needs when many residents already have questions about the potential for insider dealing.

Council Member of the Year

Mayor Sutcliffe has developed a curious verbal tic. He begins by promising not to politicize an issue — and then, with the reflexes of a political pro, proceeds to politicize it anyway. The Lansdowne 2.0 saga supplied a particularly vivid case study: after an oddly choreographed and unmistakably political performance at his Lansdowne 2.0 “update” news conference (see my column), he went on to decry any politicization of Lansdowne at Council’s final debate on the file. It was a bit like lighting the match and then scolding the room for smelling smoke.

The pattern resurfaced in his year-end interview with Robyn Bresnahan on CBC’s This is Ottawa podcast. The Mayor opened with a meditation on his political temperament, that can be neatly distilled into one of his favourite words: balance.

So, my goal has always been not to be ideologically left or right or ideological at all. But to try to find consensus, bring everybody together and find solutions that work for everyone, which is, as I’ve discovered over the last three years, not always easy in a city as large and diverse as Ottawa.

Bresnahan then asked the obvious question: why should Ottawans give him a second term? Sutcliffe replied:

Let me start by saying [that] I’m not spending a lot of time thinking about the election next October. I was elected three years ago and I still have almost a year left in this term and I still have a lot work to do before the next election, so my focus is not on that.

Really? Hello, say that again, Mr. Mayor.

This disingenuous insistence about not being in campaign mode — in the face of daily evidence to the contrary — has left some former Sutcliffe admirers wondering aloud: what happened to Mark? In fact, it can be observed that the Mayor, as part of what appears to be a personal re-branding, now has a tendency to spike the political football. Credit goes to Bresnahan for not letting him skate around her questions during the rest of the interview.

Political tonality aside, 2025 has been a very good year for Sutcliffe. The outcomes may never have been in serious doubt, but pairing a 15–10 victory at Council on Lansdowne 2.0 with a relatively frictionless Budget vote, of which he is quite proud, is the municipal equivalent of running the table. It has a way of making his supporters and opponents take notice. For many City Hall watchers, that alone is enough to make Mark Sutcliffe the Council Member of the Year.

This is not a case of comparing an apple (mayor) to oranges (councilors). By almost any measure, Sutcliffe heads into 2026 with the wind at his back. He’s much more confident, with less of the imposter syndrome that seemed to hang off him in his first year. He appears more in command at City Hall, and far more effective at translating his priorities into votes. And for the Ottawa Board of Trade and the city’s business community, he is, above all else, delivering.

The biggest political stories in 2026

The biggest political story of the coming year would be Jeff Leiper unseating Mark Sutcliffe. There will be plenty of time in the months ahead to dissect both campaigns, but for now I would observe that many residents still seem to be waiting for Leiper to arrive in the race he announced back in July. A charitable reading is that his team is executing a slow-burn launch. A less charitable one is that they are not trying hard enough to fill conspicuous news holes at CBC Ottawa and CTV Ottawa. If Leiper is counting on reporters to beat a path to his door — there simply aren’t enough of them in this town covering the municipal beat — or contenting himself with reacting to whatever Sutcliffe happens to say that day, he risks losing the narrative war before the campaign has officially begun. The most negative framing of Leiper that I have heard so far is that he, a three-term councilor, doesn’t have the fire in the belly for this run. And what of a Big Beautiful Idea to drive his campaign?

As for those still harbouring hopes that the Tewin development might resurface on Council’s agenda, there is no appetite for re-visiting this decision. Like Lansdowne 2.0, that train has been rolling for some time and will reach its destination, objections of some Council members notwithstanding.

What cannot be waved away in the year ahead are the political consequences of the City’s estimated $7.1-billion, tax-supported infrastructure deficit and its increasing inability to maintain the assets it already owns. That reckoning — along with the tax hikes it will inevitably demand — is coming whether Council wants it or not. And when the election campaigns begin in earnest, challengers will brandish it as a central exhibit in their cases against incumbents.

Predictions but not endorsements

Let’s call it the coming possible Battle of Osgoode — Bataille d’Osgoode. The spicy electoral ingredients are familiar enough: a rural ward that feels unheard at City Hall, layered with Tewin (a joint project of the Algonquins of Ontario and Taggart Group), a proposed ring road, and now the City’s intent to purchase a licensed landfill site in Carlsbad Springs owned by Taggart Miller Environmental Services. As I noted in my last column, attention is back on former Osgoode Councilor Doug Thompson (2001-2014), who lost to George Darouze — now the Progressive Conservative MPP for Carleton — by some 220 votes in the 2022 municipal election. If Thompson runs again alongside Colette Lacroix-Velthuis, Osgoode is headed for another three-way contest that likely works to incumbent Isabelle Skalski’s advantage. Thompson could, of course, decide to stay out and attempt to influence the result by endorsing Skalski or Lacroix-Velhuis. Either way, in a ward in which Darouze will not be seen by everyone as an entirely neutral actor (he is a long-time proponent of the ring road), the interpersonal dynamics are unusually complicated. My money is on Skalski, whose vote total will probably be anchored by Greely residents, getting re-elected. That being said, Osgoode could deliver one of the few surprises in the coming election.

One fresh face I expect to be beaming in the 2026 Council group photo is former journalist Joanne Chianello, who looks like the shoo-in to inherit Jeff Leiper’s Kitchissippi seat. She joins the honourable Ottawa tradition of reporters deciding that covering City Hall is no longer enough — they want to try to be part of running it. After more than a decade spent putting the place under a journalistic microscope, she would arrive not as a classic rookie but as a seasoned insider who knows the policy and personality terrains cold. And if she ever finds herself trading barbs with Beacon Hill-Cyrville Councilor Tim Tierney at committee or full Council, well, pass the popcorn. Chianello can and does go deep, deep into the policy weeds. If they have the time, the City’s senior leadership team should make a point of catching her on Better Ottawa’s weekly municipal panel and reading her Substack newsletter.

On matters relating to corporate governance, I doubt that the City’s Integrity Commissioner Karen Shepherd has to worry about a heavy workload. In light of Council’s reprimand of Rideau-Vanier Councilor Stéphanie Plante following Shepherd’s report on her online conduct, we can expect councilors during campaign season to be circumspect about adhering to the City’s code-of-conduct rules.

On another front, one imagines that Cyril Rogers, the City’s Chief Financial Officer — who, during Council’s final debate on Lansdowne 2.0, struck some as auditioning for the City Manager’s chair — will be pleased by the appointment of the highly experienced and impeccably credentialed Marcia Wallace as General Manager of Planning, Development and Building Services.

A few of my interlocutors think the Ottawa Senators’ downtown arena might yet muscle its way onto the municipal agenda. I’m not so sure. This feels more like a 2027 story. It is hard to imagine team president and CEO Cyril Leeder championing a public-private partnership model dependent on provincial and federal dollars in the middle of a municipal election year. Mayor Sutcliffe, for his part, has already drawn a bright red line: whatever help the City may offer, it will not include taxpayer cash. If Leeder does do this, it will be a gift to Leiper’s campaign, allowing his team to remind voters at the door that another Lansdowne 2.0-like project may be on its way.

Finally, lobbyists who may be fretting about a particular councilor’s shelf life can relax. If the person they’re courting decides to run again, odds are very high they’ll still be calling the same office after election day.

Onwards

As this Council enters its final lap, expect an increasingly confident Mark Sutcliffe to be in perpetual campaign mode. He has shown — most vividly on Lansdowne 2.0 — that he prefers to leave opponents no political oxygen. This time, though, he will face a more coordinated resistance, with Horizon Ottawa and new civic groups like Neil Saravanamuttoo’s Better Ottawa having absorbed the bruising lessons of the 2022 election and now drawing on volunteers hardened in this year’s provincial and federal contests. They will, however, have to get suburbanites interested in municipal politics to move the political needle. Sutcliffe can also count on Ken Gray’s The Bulldog and Charlie Senack’s Ottawa Outlook to provide 2026 campaign commentary and reporting far earlier than Ottawa’s legacy media. Given her experience with the Bruce Fanjoy campaign, author and Ottawa Citizen columnist Brigitte Pellerin will undoubtedly be an important voice on campaign dynamics.

Still, incumbency remains the single most powerful variable in Ontario municipal politics, its advantage only amplified by the absence of political parties. Most councilors who want another term will probably get one. The modest changes on Council we’re likely to see won’t be decided by memes or Instagram reels (though Saravanamuttoo’s videos skewering the Mayor have their moments), but by the oldest metric in the business: who builds the stronger ground game — who, inspired by a little Zohran Mamdani-style energy (see my column), can mobilize hundreds if not thousands of volunteers and knock on more doors and reach into more demographic pockets of the city that have traditionally been ignored. On that score, Sutcliffe’s critics may have a fighting chance to achieve a few victories.

Thank you for reading this newsletter since its launch in August. Starting in January, you’ll see more columns grounded in public-opinion data on both the ward-level and mayoral races. Some will draw on public sources; some will come from original research I’ll be conducting through surveys and focus groups. The aim is to try to fill a yawning gap. Ottawa voters get remarkably little reliable data about what their neighbours actually think should be Council’s priorities and who is best able to execute them.

Happy New Year.

Evan H. Potter

Follow me on the road to the City of Ottawa election on October 24, 2026. Evan’s Substack is free today. But if you enjoyed this post, you can tell Evan’s Substack that their writing is valuable by pledging a future subscription. You won't be charged unless they enable payments.