The City's Books Have Two Kinds of Debt: The Kind You Can See, and the Kind You Can't
A plain-language look at Ottawa's finances — and three steps to make them harder to hide.
The visible kind is the loans the city has taken out — that number gets reported, and by itself it doesn't look alarming.
The kind you can't see easily is everything the city already owes but hasn't put on the main bill yet: things like closing old landfills safely, cleaning up contaminated land, and — the big one — keeping roads, pipes, and buildings in good repair. The city has a plan for all of this, but the plan isn't fully funded. That gap is a real cost. It's just not written on the page most people look at.
Here's what I think needs to happen, in order:
1. Show people the real number
Right now, the full picture exists — it's in the city's books — but it's buried in technical reports nobody reads. Step one is simple: put the true cost of what we owe, including the stuff we're deferring, in front of council and the public in plain terms. You can't fix a problem everyone's allowed to pretend doesn't exist.
2. Make it a running scoreboard, not a one-time report
A single number is easy to shrug off. What matters is whether the gap is growing or shrinking year over year. I want that comparison published every single budget, automatically — so if a council lets the gap widen, everyone can see it happening in real time, not find out five years later when a pipe bursts or a rec centre closes.
3. Attach real consequences
Once people can see the gap clearly and see it every year, the next step is a rule: if the funding for road repairs, pipes, or buildings falls below a safe level, the city has to publicly explain how and when it'll fix that — not just note it and move on. That part takes a full council to agree to, not one person. But you can't get there without the first two steps making the case first.
The short version: you can't manage what you can't see, you can't hold anyone accountable for a trend you're only shown once, and you can't force a fix without first proving, repeatedly, that the problem is real and getting worse. Transparency isn't the whole fix — but it's the thing that makes a real fix possible.
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