For the first time in more than a decade, Jeff Leiper won’t be asking Kitchissippi residents to send him back to the council seat he has held since 2014. Instead, he is asking them to help send him to the mayor’s office.
As Leiper campaigns across Ottawa, the issues he is hearing about in Kitchissippi remain familiar: unreliable buses, concerns over development and tree loss, rising housing costs and growing unease over public drug use and social disorder.
“We continue to hear a lot about transit,” Leiper said of canvassing in the ward. “We hear a lot about green space and trees in Kitchissippi, so intensification has had the result of significant tree loss and tree canopy.”
His platform calls for reversing recent OC Transpo service reductions and introducing a “Transit Service Guarantee” with publicly reported standards for reliability and frequency. He has also committed to advancing bus rapid transit projects, including the long-planned Baseline Road corridor.
Leiper said service remains a particular frustration in the western portions of Kitchissippi.
“We have in Hintonburg, where I live, the city’s best transit, but you just move forward to Westboro, we lost one of our best routes,” he said. “The frequency of the 11 has been diminished. The 14 continues to be cancelled morning after morning.”
Public safety and social disorder are also emerging as significant issues, Leiper said.
“I heard from a resident recently in Hintonburg who is afraid to walk her daughter to school at Devonshire because of the public drug use and the social disorder that she’s seen on the street,” he said. “Very few people are comfortable with it. It diminishes their feeling of security in their neighbourhood. It has to be addressed.”
Leiper said supportive housing and health care are ultimately needed to address homelessness and addiction, but acknowledged those solutions will take time. In the interim, he wants the city to increase its presence on the street.
“More people picking up needles, more ambassadors on the street, more outreach workers,” he said. “These are all, in the context of our $5.2 billion budget, eminently achievable.”
His platform calls for permanent funding and expansion of ANCHOR, which dispatches civilian teams to certain mental health and substance use calls. Leiper said policing would remain part of the response, but expanding alternatives could free officers to focus on issues such as aggressive driving, speeding and traffic enforcement.
Development has been a defining issue during Leiper’s time representing Kitchissippi. As mayor, Leiper said he would support development that conforms with Ottawa’s Official Plan.
“We have the right Official Plan, and the Official Plan says that near transit stations, particularly, we’re going to have big, tall towers,” he said. “And then our main streets are going to develop as mid-rises with mixed development, and then the interior of our neighbourhoods is going to remain as low-rise.”
One problem, Leiper said, is that Ottawa’s planning documents have not always kept pace with one another. Provincial policies can change, and the city can update its Official Plan while neighbourhood secondary plans remain based on older assumptions.
Leiper wants the next council to bring those documents into better alignment and give residents a clearer understanding of what can be built.
His housing platform also calls for 1,500 new non-profit homes annually, with funding from other levels of government, and an acquisition fund that would allow non-profit housing providers to purchase existing rental buildings and preserve their affordability.
Leaving Kitchissippi politics for a citywide race has required Leiper to campaign in communities much different from the ward he has represented since 2014. He said concerns over transit, affordability and municipal services have followed him across ward boundaries.
“It is surprising and gratifying to me when I go to the doors talking to people about transit and the need to invest in our services that I get roughly the same response, whether I am in Blackburn Hamlet or in Alta Vista,” he said.