A move to make federal public transit funding permanent would bring “predictability” to big cities like Ottawa that have major transit projects on their to-do lists in the coming decades, Mayor Jim Watson says.
Watson’s comments came as the mayors of Canada’s biggest cities convened in the national capital on Thursday and announced they want the Liberal government to “permanently fund public transit expansions” beyond 2027, one of the group’s major proposals for the upcoming federal budget.
For its part, the City of Ottawa is turning its head now to Stage 3 of its light-rail expansion and will eventually ask the provincial and federal governments to foot a huge chunk of the bill for the train’s extension to the suburbs of Kanata and Barrhaven.
While it’s not certain at the moment that Queen’s Park and Parliament Hill will acquiesce, Ottawa’s mayor said federal transit dollars would still “bring reliability back to the equation.”
“In the past, governments have announced money and then threw it into the economy and then we’re out of money and then we put all these applications forward on a one-by-one basis,” Watson told reporters following a press conference held by the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM).
“I think it would bring predictability to our planning process, because a lot of these major projects take years and years to get a shovel in the ground, whether it’s zoning issues or land contaminants and so on.”
An environmental assessment of an 11-kilometre extension of the Confederation Line to the Kanata and Stittsville area said the project would cost $1.85 billion and begin after 2031. The City of Ottawa is in the middle of conducting an environmental assessment of an extension to Barrhaven, in the city’s southwest end.
The city hasn’t yet formally asked either the provincial or federal governments for Stage 3 LRT money, but the municipality has “alerted” government officials that the Barrhaven environmental assessment is underway.
“When that is completed, we will go and formally approach the federal and provincial governments for their support — as they gave us with Phase 2 — to go farther west, farther south,” Watson said.
“The response has been very positive to date…They understand that those are the two fastest-growing parts of the city.”
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Watson said he also raised the cost of investing in more environmentally friendly buses when the group of mayors sat down with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Thursday morning to talk municipal priorities.
“There’s a real desire for a lot of municipalities to go electric with their buses, because you see the diesel buses spewing a lot of smoke through the streets of Ottawa, and there’s a cost differential,” he said.
The current federal funding plan for transit infrastructure investments has a 2027 sunset date, according to the FCM.
Based on conversations so far with government officials, Edmonton Mayor Don Iveson, chair of the FCM’s big-city mayors’ caucus, said he thinks the federal government will deliver on permanent funding for public transit expansions. Iveson noted the commitment was in the Liberals’ election platform and appeared again in the federal infrastructure minister’s mandate letter.
“We really want to nail that down in the budget again because it helps us turn back to a conversation with the provinces,” Iveson said.
“I think there’s a lot of openness and interest in what we can do around zero-emission vehicles to help the government meet the challenging emission reduction targets that we’ve asked for.”
The mandate letter for Minister of Infrastructure and Communities Catherine McKenna also demands that public transit investments be “used to support zero-emission buses and rail systems starting in 2023.”
Big city mayors also press for housing, climate adaptation investments
Finance Minister Bill Morneau, who met with the mayors Thursday afternoon, has billed the budget as one with an environmental focus.
Iveson says that’s why the mayors are prioritizing budget requests that fit that environmental lens.
Larger investments in housing and climate disaster mitigation were also among those top budget requests.
On housing, the caucus is asking for a new program “to preserve lower-cost market rental housing, while making it more energy-efficient” and for the federal government to “grow the National Housing Strategy to build more affordable housing for Indigenous Canadians and people living with mental illness and substance use.”
Housing continues to be a pressing issue for the City of Ottawa, whose councillors voted on Jan. 29 to declare a housing and homelessness crisis and emergency in the national capital.
Just days later, Watson and other municipal councillors met with the federal minister for families, children and social development, Ahmed Hussen, to call for larger investments in affordable housing construction and retrofitting existing low-income housing units to make them more environmentally friendly.
Watson, however, said he didn’t come to the table on Thursday asking for a specific amount of housing money from the federal government.
The big-city mayors’ caucus met with Hussen earlier Thursday morning and will meet later with McKenna, who represents the local riding of Ottawa Centre.
-With files from The Canadian Press
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