Ottawa mayoral candidate Alex Lawson says that if elected, his focus at city hall would be straightforward: ensuring the city provides the services residents expect and need.
“We have to make sure that we are doing what is expected and needed by the residents of the city,” Lawson said.
Under the slogan “get the basics right,” Lawson’s platform has focused on municipal services ranging from transit and roads to housing, public safety and how city hall spends taxpayers’ money.
Lawson is the director of operations at Capital Framers, an Ottawa home-building company, and a father of three. He says his experience as a small-business owner and parent has given him a firsthand understanding of the challenges facing families and businesses.
For Lawson, one of the city’s most important responsibilities is maintaining the infrastructure residents rely on every day.
“Maintaining the infrastructure, such as roads and sewers, so we don’t have the major flooding issues as we had around Canada Day,” he said.
He also believes city hall needs to be careful about how it spends taxpayers’ money.
“The city doesn’t need vanity projects, like Lansdowne 2.0,” Lawson said.
Lawson has proposed a triage system for aging municipal buildings and community centres to assess their condition, determine what work is needed and identify costs before facilities fall into disrepair.
His housing plan calls for a 90-day review of Ottawa’s shelter system involving police, paramedics and shelter operators.
A shelter plan released Sept. 24 would establish one set of standards for every shelter bed paid for by the city, including spaces in hotels and motels. Lawson proposes unannounced inspections at least four times a year, publicly available scorecards and an independent shelter ombudsman to receive complaints.
Shelters would be required to report every assault, theft and police call to the city. Public scorecards would track police calls, needles collected, 311 complaints and bylaw calls in surrounding areas, while operators that repeatedly failed inspections could ultimately lose their city contracts.
The plan would also require people entering shelters to receive a written plan for moving into permanent housing and a named caseworker within 30 days. For residents unable to live independently because of addiction or mental illness, his platform calls for supportive housing connected with treatment.
On housing more broadly, Lawson has proposed cutting municipal development charges by 50 per cent for one year to encourage construction, particularly of two- and three-bedroom rental units. His campaign has set targets of roughly $1,800 per month for a new two-bedroom rental and $2,200 for a three-bedroom.
If the private market did not produce enough family-sized rental housing after a year, his plan says the city would move toward developing housing using public land and financing partners.
He has also pledged to repeal Ottawa’s vacant unit tax at the first meeting of the next council. Lawson argues the program has created an administrative burden without doing enough to improve affordability. His proposal would maintain the affordable-housing funding generated by the tax by finding savings elsewhere in the municipal budget.
Public transit is another issue Lawson says needs attention. He believes OC Transpo needs to do a better job of helping people travel within their own communities rather than primarily focusing on routes that funnel passengers downtown.
“If you want to go to a dentist appointment in Kanata, it shouldn’t be a multiple-hour journey,” he said. “You should be able to get around your community in a reasonable time frame. I believe more focus should be put on that idea than it seems is being placed now.”
His transit platform proposes rebuilding schedules using operating data and driver input, reviewing dispatch and interlining practices and reconsidering routes where transfers have significantly increased travel times. He would expand OC Transpo-operated on-demand transit in rural Ottawa and put a senior manager directly in charge of Para Transpo performance.
Lawson has also proposed temporary peak-hour express buses between major transit stations and downtown until the Confederation Line demonstrates 20 consecutive days of reliability at the standard his campaign says should have been met before the line opened. His plan calls for an independent review of OC Transpo management within his first 90 days.
For drivers, Lawson has promised to remove paid on-street parking across Ottawa. He would switch off the city’s parking meters on his first day in office and eventually remove them, while establishing a minimum two-hour limit wherever time restrictions are needed.
Transparency at city hall is another priority. Lawson has proposed a disclosure system for public contracts similar to Ontario’s Sunshine List.
“That would allow everyone to know what is going on at city hall,” he said. “The more transparency, the better.”