When the 2025 Budget came to city council on Dec. 11, it resulted in a nine-hour meeting as councillors debated the many elements of this year’s budget, including a $36-million placeholder for funding from upper levels of government and 3.9 per cent tax hike.
During the meeting, College Ward Coun. Laine Johnson spoke out against the budgets for the Ottawa Police Board and Transit Commission, voting against both. She ended up being one of only three councillors who voted against the budget in its entirety.
In this exclusive interview with Ottawa Compass, she explains why she voted against the 2025 budget, and why she thinks her constituents deserve better.
Let’s get right into it. You were one of the few councillors who voted against the entire 2025 Budget. Why is that?
I’m not married to any one particular solution for our financial challenges. I know that the numbers are so big that we absolutely need and deserve support from other levels of government, and I believe in the mayor’s Fairness for Ottawa campaign.
But we have inherited a city that has made decisions over the last over a decade to keep taxes low. In some years, they chose to not even charge them, and our expenses continue to go up. So we end up making decisions to defer capital projects that then end up being inflated. You know, over time, that capital costs increase. Over time. we end up using debt, which I understand is an appropriate tool. But it also means that when people say, ‘where are my tax dollars going,’ you can’t always point to an increase in service. Sometimes those tax dollars will have to go to serve service debt.
These are decisions that we continue to make that I think ultimately make the city more expensive. To me, there is a different way of talking about affordability for the citizens of Ottawa that should include other ways of generating revenue right now, and one of them might be an increase on property tax. One of them might be to advocate to other levels of government.
I’m one of the directors for a new municipal growth framework where we ask for redistribution of the collected tax by upper levels of government. Right now, we get eight cents on the dollar for every dollar of tax revenue. That’s very little.
But I do think that the residents of Ottawa notice, after these decades… That there are consequences to this on their sidewalks. They see it on the roads. They see it in their bus service. They see it in their recreational facilities. We don’t ever budget for new, good ideas. We don’t ever have the ability to respond to a new good idea.
We are constantly patching our existing reality and not casting forward into the future. When you don’t move forward in a world where the rest of the world is moving forward, when you stand still, you’re actually moving backwards. And I’m concerned that the City of Ottawa is a healthy city, an intelligent city, and a city full of good ideas, and I think our residents deserve to talk about this.
When I was first elected, I moved my first motion ever as a city councilor for a four-year budget like the City of London, because then you can map out over the four years of a council term where you’re going.
So if you do end up increasing taxes in one particular year, you can have that conversation with your residents. But we haven’t done that. We continue in this annual cycle. And the annual, cyclical nature of it means that it can get away with being short-sighted. And it can get away with standing still.
So (on Dec. 11), I just felt like I had to advocate for a different way of looking at affordability for residents. I sound a bit sad because it was hard to do because it’s hard to stand up for what’s right when everyone else does something else. But I think it was the right decision.
Process aside, what aspects of it were of particular concern to you? You also dissented on the police board budget, for example.
I dissented on the police board budget for two reasons, and I’ve been pretty transparent with the police about my expectations on that.
One is that they’ve had this race-based data and their disproportionate use of force data for a number of years now, and I still don’t see the strategy to address that the disproportionate use of force is not going down.
I think that demonstrates that you have a serious problem in your organization, and I want to see them apply their attention to addressing that systemic issue that you know. And I was reassured by the chair of the board saying that they’re also going to be monitoring for that. So that’s great.
But I won’t vote for the police budget until I see resources put on that action item.
The other one was the automated speed enforcement revenue. This was something that I thought was kind of exemplary of what I was describing, where the police come to the City of Ottawa with a need, and they’re able to articulate, ‘I’m going to need this much on the levy to do what we need to do this fiscal year.’
They have that opportunity because they’re a separate board. You can look in their budget and see the numbers, but they come there and then the city seems to have something that is greatly outside the budget directions set by the mayor.
So, how do we help you to reduce your expenses so that you can fall within this? One of the revenue streams that they’ve opened up to balance the police budget is the automated speed enforcement revenue, which is a program that was sold to the public as being very bound to road safety improvement expenses exclusively.
The police weren’t attributing those dollars to traffic enforcement in their budget, nor was the city documenting the million dollars out of their budget against the Road Safety Action Plan to police. There was no record of the money with respect to the purposes of that program.
The police very openly said that they would be happy to go back and sort of do their books with a bit more transparency and attribute that money directly to their traffic enforcement. So next year, if the police are able to demonstrate that accountability for traffic enforcement and work on the disproportionate use of force, we may be in a different position.
You also voted against the Transit Commission budget. Why was that?
Well, the police levy had to be increased by a million dollars a year in order to offset what that ASE revenue would have been. It would have been pennies on the individual. We didn’t do that. We decided to open up a line of revenue from the City of Ottawa without proper discussion at committee in order to balance the budget for the existing levy.
It’s the same with the student fares. We put forward a budget at the Transit Commission where we were going to have a 5 per cent increase from January onwards, which was never possible under the agreement with the post-secondary institutions. That had to be there so that they could balance the books to find $120 million, but it wasn’t possible.
Those increases spread out over a transit levy, or the seniors’ fare spread out over the transit levy, would have been a number of dollars per person. But we don’t have those conversations with residents. We move these little, tiny bits of money around, instead of having the real conversation about what things cost and what the trade-offs are. And I think that’s why I was elected.
I just don’t feel like the accounting in either of those books was what it needed to be.
Were there other aspects of the budget that you don’t support?
The other part that I asked questions about was our asset management plans, like the Parks and Recreation asset management plan alone, projects that we need $900 million to get us where we need to go. These numbers are so big.
In 2025, we’re going to do what’s called a facility rationalization exercise, which is a super fancy government way of saying we’re going to consolidate some stuff, because we can’t afford all the facilities that we have at the condition that they’re in.
I asked about that. How does this 2025 budget sort of set us up for that asset management plan? And the answer was that we’re still working within the long range financial plan for asset management from 2017. So this budget reflects 2017 asset management plans, but we know that that’s a pre-COVID. The 2025 budget still works with the long-range financial plans, but we are not putting more pennies aside for expenses we know are coming.
I just don’t think that it’s an ethical way for us to talk about what things cost with our residents. It’s very difficult to sit in all of these committee meetings, and then come to budget and talk about pennies and fight over pennies.
It feels really out of touch. I just decided to say it out loud. I don’t think the accounting would meet the expectations of precedence. I think that everything that was done in the accounting, on the one hand, was legal, but it just doesn’t meet the transparency expectations for residents.
Were there parts of the budget that you were really excited about?
This is so boring, but I’m really excited about the fact that we got 10 new bylaw officers because property standards and parking complaints in College Ward are on the rise, and we don’t have enough ability to respond to that.
If I can point to one thing that the City of Ottawa has done extremely well and greatly surpassed my expectations since I’ve been elected, it is the affordable housing file. I really appreciate the way that the City of Ottawa has laid out all of the ways that they’re contributing to affordable housing, including what costs are not being expected to be borne by nonprofit providers, so that they’re not going to be collecting property taxes from nonprofit housing developments now, which is like a pretty significant ask that they’ve had for a long time from the city. It’s a big move.
We have lots of programs in the pipeline to accelerate the development of housing. The provincial government has been largely absent from that conversation. The City of Ottawa is doing way more, and I am very proud of that file.
It’s like a proof of concept. We decided that this was going to be a super important thing, and we decided to sort of look at our financial systems differently in order to achieve that goal. I think that residents should be proud about that, but I think we could do that in other places, to say ‘this is the goal we’re trying to achieve’, and help residents to envision that, and then talk about how much it costs.
Why did you feel it was important for you to stand up against this budget?
I think that’s what we’re elected to do. We’re elected to interrogate the City of Ottawa so that residents don’t have to do it all themselves. I think they have questions that they want answered, and for the residents that aren’t paying attention, I don’t think we’re doing them any favours either if we don’t leave every stone unturned.
Process is absolutely important, and we have found a tremendous amount of savings there. A publicly-funded organization that has a fiduciary responsibility to the public should be doing, you know, continuous improvement exercises constantly that includes cost savings. I don’t think that by finding savings, it absolves us of having a conversation about the expenses that are still to come.
The City of Ottawa is on the cusp of greatness, but we still get caught in this small city kind of mentality. We’re not a small city anymore, and our geography can’t allow us to be a small city anymore. We need to invest in what we aspire to be.
