Voting With Your Wallet: Ottawa is Spending Differently, Will it Vote Differently?
Households across the city have been cutting spending on the things they can control. In October, they get one shot at the thing they can't.
Look around a food court, a chain drive-thru, or the seats at TD Place this year and you'll see the same pattern: people are pulling back. Not because they've stopped wanting a burger, a beer with friends, or a Saturday at a Redblacks game — but because the household budget has stopped stretching that far. That pullback is itself a form of voting. It's households deciding, purchase by purchase, that a given business or product isn't giving them enough value for the money, and walking their spending somewhere else — or nowhere at all.
The numbers back up what everyone's noticing anecdotally.
- Roughly three in four Canadians say they're eating out less often because of the cost of living, and among 18–34-year-olds it's closer to four in five.
- Real per-person spending at full-service restaurants has fallen to about $1,035, down from $1,165 in 2019 — a genuine retreat, not just belt-tightening at the margins.
- More than a third of restaurant operators are now running at a loss or barely breaking even — triple the rate in 2019 — and industry analysts are projecting a net loss of thousands of restaurants across the country this year.
- Quick-service chains, the ones built around being the affordable option, are getting hit hardest of all: over 80% of operators report declining profitability.
Closer to home, the Redblacks tell the same story from a different angle. Average attendance fell 4.2% in 2025, and through the first four home games of the 2026 season, crowds were down almost 20% year-over-year — a franchise the club itself has partly attributed to fans "staying away." Some of that is a losing team. But a losing team plus a squeezed household budget is a fast way to lose a season-ticket holder for good, and that combination isn't unique to football. It's the same math playing out at the drive-thru, the patio, and the corner pub.
OC Transpo: the line item that doesn't have to compete
Transit tells a different — and in some ways more revealing — version of the same story. OC Transpo isn't a discretionary purchase the way a burger or a game ticket is; for a lot of residents it's how they get to work. So when ridership actually dipped to start 2026 — 11.5 million rides in January and February, down from 12.4 million over the same two months in 2025 — even that captive demand was bending under the affordability squeeze. Ridership has since recovered somewhat, with the past 12 months landing close to flat and still sitting around 81% of pre-pandemic levels.
But here's where transit breaks from the restaurant-and-Redblacks pattern rather than confirming it: a private business that loses riders has to win them back with better value or shrink. OC Transpo raised fares 2.5% and its transit levy on the property tax bill by 8% for 2026 anyway — pushing the average adult monthly pass to $138.50 and adding roughly $74 a year to the average household's tax bill — regardless of what ridership did. It can do that because only about 31% of transit revenue comes from fares; the other 69% comes straight from property taxes, whether or not anyone rides the bus that month.
- Ridership dropped roughly 7% year-over-year in the first two months of 2026, even as the 2026 operating budget rose 11% over 2025 and 22% over 2024.
- The transit levy rose 8% and fares rose 2.5% for 2026 — increases that took effect regardless of the ridership dip that preceded them.
- Only 31% of OC Transpo's revenue comes from fares; 69% comes from property taxes, so a rider walking away barely moves the needle on the budget the way a diner walking away moves a restaurant's.
- The 2026 budget is built around ridership reaching just 82% of pre-pandemic levels — a target, not a recovery, baked into the plan from the start.
That's the accountability gap in a sentence: a restaurant losing customers has no choice but to answer to them. A transit system losing riders can still raise its own price. The check on that kind of insulated spending isn't a wallet vote at the fare gate — it's the ballot.
The vote you can't cast at the register
Here's the thing about voting with your wallet on a burger or a football ticket: it works because you have a choice. You can cook at home. You can skip the game. The business either delivers enough value to keep your spending, or it doesn't, and you walk.
You don't get that choice with City Hall. Property tax isn't optional. Water and wastewater rates aren't optional. The debt Ottawa takes on this term gets serviced by ratepayers whether or not they think it was money well spent. There's no drive-thru menu where residents can quietly downgrade from the large order to the small one when the city decides to spend more.
Except once every four years, there is exactly one moment where residents get to do to their city government what they've been doing to McDonald's, to restaurants, to the Redblacks all year: withdraw support from something that hasn't delivered proportional value for the money, and put that support somewhere else. That moment is the ballot box, and under Ontario's municipal election cycle, this October is it — the next chance isn't until 2030.
What the household squeeze should mean for how we spend at City Hall
If families are cutting back on a $12 combo meal because the math doesn't work anymore, it's worth asking whether the city's own math is getting the same scrutiny. Ottawa is carrying $16–17 million a year in debt servicing on Lansdowne 2.0 alone — a project whose "no risk to taxpayers" promise depends on OSEG revenue covering losses, at the same moment OSEG's flagship tenant, the Redblacks, is drawing its smallest crowds in decades and the Ottawa Charge left the site altogether. That's not a coincidence worth ignoring. It's the same consumer pullback showing up as a revenue risk on a project residents are on the hook for either way.
Meanwhile the city's own infrastructure gap sits at roughly $10.8 billion over ten years, water and wastewater debt grew by $1.7 billion in a single year, and basics like road repair and public washrooms keep getting deferred. Residents are tightening their own budgets in real time. It's fair to ask whether council has been doing the same with theirs — or whether it's been spending like the affordability crisis is happening to everyone except City Hall.
| What households are doing | What the city has been doing |
|---|---|
| Cutting discretionary dining as costs rise | Approving new debt-financed capital projects |
| Skipping games when ticket value doesn't hold up | Deepening reliance on OSEG revenue projections at Lansdowne |
| Reallocating spending toward essentials | Deferring basic infrastructure (roads, washrooms, water mains) |
| Voting with their wallet, purchase by purchase | Asking residents to keep paying regardless of outcome |
The one wallet-vote that actually counts
Every skipped combo meal, every empty seat at TD Place, is a household making a rational call about value for money. Multiply that by a city's worth of households and you get a pretty clear signal about where people think their money is and isn't being well spent. City Hall should be reading that signal the same way a restaurant chain or a football franchise has to — because eventually, the wallet vote catches up with everyone.
Residents don't get to skip a City Hall "order" the way they skip a burger. But they do get one wallet vote over the next four years of city spending, and it happens this October.
References
- Retail Insider — Q1 2026 Food Service Retail Report: Pricing Pressure and Margin Compression (May 2026)
- Restaurants Canada — High operating costs and uneven consumer spending put Canada's restaurant sector under pressure (May 2026)
- CBC News — As Canadians feel crunched by the cost of living, quick-service restaurants are taking a bigger hit (May 2026)
- AiF News Bites — Canada Could Lose 11,000 Restaurants by 2026 as Industry Faces Deep Reset
- 3DownNation — Five burning questions for the Ottawa Redblacks in the 2026 CFL offseason (Nov 2025)
- 3DownNation — Ryan Dinwiddie: Ottawa Redblacks "fighting our ass off for our jobs" (Jul 2026)
- 3DownNation — No timeline for Ottawa Grey Cup hosting bid, but Redblacks will "get creative" amidst Lansdowne construction (May 2026)
- CTV News Ottawa — OC Transpo sees drop in ridership to start 2026 (March 2026)
- City of Ottawa — Transit Committee approves OC Transpo's 2026 Draft Budget
- OC Transpo — Recap: June 11, 2026 Transit Committee
- Councillor Glen Gower — NOTEBOOK: 26 points about Ottawa's 2026 transit budget (January 2026)
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