Newly re-elected Ottawa Mayor Mark Sutcliffe says he is gearing up for an “aggressive economic development and job creation agenda” as he enters his second term.
Sutcliffe told OBJ Tuesday that his immediate goal for the business community is to strengthen the local economy and create more jobs.
“There’s a lot of economic uncertainty with tariffs, federal government job reductions and just overall economic pressures, global conditions, supply chain issues (and) the rising costs that small businesses are facing.”
His next steps will include extending the small business tax reduction, permanently eliminating patio fees for restaurant owners, keeping tax increases as low as possible and working with the City of Gatineau to create free trade between the two cities, he said.
“We will be working with Ottawa Tourism to attract more events and tourists to the city, to strengthen our visitor economy and working with Invest Ottawa to have an investment summit in Ottawa in the first part of the new year, similar to the investment summit that Prime Minister Carney did in Toronto recently,” he added.
Sutcliffe said he was happy to serve his community for another four years.
“I love this city and all I’ve ever wanted to do was to serve the people of Ottawa and make things better. I’m honoured to have the chance to have a second mandate and to have the opportunity to implement the very detailed plan that I put forward during the election campaign.”
From the election trail
When OBJ spoke with Sutcliffe last month, he said he would continue working on plans for the ByWard Market and downtown revitalization if re-elected.
“I’ve talked about how we need to treat the toxic drug crisis and the mental health crisis as an emergency. So I would mobilize the emergency coordination centre to get started on that right away. I would create an emergency task force chaired by a downtown safety czar to lead an emergency response to the situation, bringing people together from all over the community because everybody has a stake in the ByWard Market: residents, business owners, employees, property owners, folks from the social services sector, the hotels.”
Continuing to attract foot traffic to the downtown core would be needed to advance plans for downtown revitalization, he said at the time.
“I think there’s a huge amount of opportunity and there’s more we can do to attract investment downtown through more office conversions, more development. I think there’s a lot of potential,” he said.
Sutcliffe said work would continue to build more homes in the capital.
“We’ve had a particular focus on building affordable housing and supportive housing and I want to speed up the rate at which we’re doing that. I want to build 10,000 affordable units this decade, so 10,000 more than we had in 2020 by 2030. I want to build 650 supportive housing units in the next five years.
“We’re still negotiating the final details, but we have a plan working with the provincial and federal governments to reduce development charges in Ottawa by perhaps 50 per cent or more in order to stimulate more building of homes as well. We’ve been very, very aggressive about making it easier and cheaper to build homes in Ottawa and I’m going to continue doing that if I’m re-elected,” he told OBJ in September.
Sutcliffe said making the case for Ottawa’s quality of life is important for talent attraction and retention, especially in the tech sector.
“I think something that’s really important to mention is if we’re going to drive growth in the technology sector in Ottawa, one of our greatest advantages is our quality of life. It’s not just about economic development and attracting investment and those kinds of things. It’s also about protecting and enhancing our quality of life in Ottawa.”
