Ottawa’s next mayor will inherit a city dealing with some complicated and often interconnected challenges.
Public transit reliability affects where people can afford to live and work. Housing policy intersects with development, infrastructure and property taxes. Homelessness, addiction and public safety increasingly overlap in conversations about the downtown core. And major projects such as Alto high-speed rail raise questions that extend well beyond transportation. With Ottawa’s 2026 municipal election approaching, mayoral candidates are beginning to provide more detail about how they would approach these issues. But comparing those positions isn’t always easy.
Campaign announcements appear on candidate websites, social media, interviews, news stories and public meetings. A candidate may have a detailed policy on one subject and very little publicly available information on another. That’s one of the reasons Compare Ottawa was created. Rather than ranking proposals or recommending a candidate, the site gathers publicly available positions and links them back to their original sources so Ottawa voters can make their own comparisons. Here are several issues worth exploring.
Transit & LRT
Few municipal issues affect as many Ottawa residents as public transit. The mayoral campaign is already producing competing ideas about OC Transpo, including service levels, route reductions, dedicated bus infrastructure, LRT and how the transit system should be governed and funded. Some candidates have released detailed transit proposals, while others have focused on particular parts of the system. The useful question isn’t simply whether a candidate “supports transit.”
What would they actually change?
Compare Ottawa breaks those commitments down candidate by candidate and provides the sources behind them.
Housing & Development
Ottawa’s housing debate involves considerably more than the number of homes being built.
Density, zoning, development charges, affordable housing, neighbourhood planning and infrastructure all influence what gets built, where it gets built and what it costs.
Candidates can therefore agree that Ottawa needs more housing while proposing very different ways of getting there.
Looking at the individual commitments behind the headline is often more revealing than a simple support-or-oppose label.
Homelessness, Addiction & Supportive Housing
Homelessness and public drug use have become particularly visible issues in parts of Ottawa. Residents have raised concerns about discarded needles, public drug consumption and neighbourhood safety, while service providers and advocates continue to emphasize treatment, supportive housing, harm reduction and the underlying causes of homelessness. For voters, an important question is how each candidate proposes balancing those concerns. Compare Ottawa collects the publicly available positions so readers can see what candidates themselves have proposed rather than relying on assumptions about where they stand.
Taxes, Spending & City Services
Promises involving better transit, more housing programs, improved infrastructure or additional services eventually encounter the same question:
How will Ottawa pay for them?
Property taxes and municipal spending are therefore useful areas for comparison. Look beyond promises to “find efficiencies” or “protect taxpayers.” Where candidates provide specifics, Compare Ottawa tries to capture them. That can include proposed spending priorities, service changes, new revenue, efficiencies and commitments concerning future property-tax increases.
Alto High-Speed Rail
Some municipal election issues aren’t entirely controlled by City Hall.
Alto is the proposed high-speed passenger rail network connecting Toronto, Ottawa, Montréal and Québec City. The project is federally led, but decisions surrounding Ottawa’s station, routing, property impacts and integration with the city’s transportation network could have significant local consequences. The mayoral candidates have not all approached Alto in the same way. Some have discussed the location and economic potential of an Ottawa station. Others have focused on transparency, affected property owners and the City’s role in decisions largely controlled outside municipal government.
That makes Alto an interesting example of why candidate positions aren’t always neatly divided into support and oppose.
Sometimes, “not enough information” is useful information
One principle behind Compare Ottawa is that every empty space doesn’t need to be filled. If a candidate hasn’t published a detailed position on an issue or if we can’t find enough reliable evidence to characterize that position fairly, the site should say so. That’s preferable to guessing. It also means profiles can change during the campaign. As candidates release platforms, make announcements and answer questions, new information can be incorporated and linked to its source.
Compare the candidates for yourself
Compare Ottawa is an independent, non-partisan project built to make researching Ottawa’s 2026 mayoral election a little easier. It doesn’t score candidates, endorse platforms or decide which issues should matter most to you.
