What’s in the 2026 municipal budget?

This is a reprint of an article published November 28, 2025 by Ecology Ottawa, an Ottawa-based organization that works to create a mobilized constituency of Ottawans who demand action and leadership on the environment (see original post here). It is reprinted in the PEN with the permission of the organization. You can learn more about Ecology Ottawa—and sign up for their newsletter—at their website, here.

The municipal budget is one of our best levers to take meaningful local environmental action. But is the City of Ottawa using it to its full potential? It’s mixed.

The 2026 draft budget is making its way through various committees over the next few weeks before the final City Council vote on December 10th. With only a small window of opportunity to influence the outcome, here are three items we’re paying attention to.

[editor’s note: the PEN considers this post to still be informative and worth including in this edition, even though the budget has now already been passed by City Council, as of December 10.]

OC Transpo

With an over $900M operating budget, our transit system continues to be both expensive and unreliable. It’s hard to square the budget’s stated theme of affordability with yet another fare increase, and the so-called “historic investments” with the fact that nearly half the budget is for running the LRT lines and debt service payments on them. Trains are expensive, but they do not in themselves constitute a good transit network. Without investments in bus service frequency (we are electrifying the fleet but not growing it) or transit priority infrastructure (bus lanes, traffic light upgrades, etc), we’ll continue to lack the convenient, reliable service necessary to get cars off the road, reduce emissions, and serve people across the city. 

The affordable, low carbon city we all deserve requires viable alternatives to driving. Our transit system has great potential to deliver this, but only with proper funding and priorities.

A motion with several interesting measures was tabled at the November 24th Transit Committee and is being forwarded to City Council for consideration. It includes:

• Free rides for riders 18 and under on weekends, holidays, and after 5 p.m. 

• A direction to develop a process to provide up to four free rides per month on Para Transpo for seniors 65 and older. 

• Extending the transfer window from 90 minutes to 105 minutes between 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. daily until the Stage 2 LRT west extension is launched in 2027.

These measures are certainly welcome, if quite watered down. There's great potential in going fully fare-free for youth: Kingston and Oakville, for example, have both seen youth ridership skyrocket since removing the cost barrier for youth and families. As for the transfer window, the framing has been a bit odd: lamentations that a 120-munite transfer window (already in place on STO and the TTC) would "cost" OC Transpo $900 million feel disingenuous if they only have that revenue because their buses aren't arriving on time. There's also a real missed opportunity for equity here, given the fact caregivers are often trip-chaining errands in the middle of the day, which can't typically be completed in 90 mins, before kids get home from school.

For more about the transit budget, check out our delegation at the November 24th Transit Committee. 

The Climate Change Master Plan 

As our Council Watch team covered this Fall, the Climate Change Master Plan is a very ambitious set of plans – everything from fossil fuel reduction, greater use of renewables, climate resiliency strategies, carbon sequestration, public education, and more. These are critical objectives, but progress on achieving them has been varied and sometimes difficult to gauge. That’s why we welcome a funding increase in this year’s budget, bringing the total from $6M to $9M. 

The Climate Change Master Plan relates to the Transportation Master Plan, the Solid Waste Master Plan, the Infrastructure Master Plan, and the Energy Management Program Strategic Plan – to name a few. It can be challenging to keep track of progress for these plans, and how they relate back to the main priorities of the CCMP. We will be asking that all of the funding for the CCMP be clearly delineated and equitably allocated to these plans (and that their progress is measurable and accessible). 

The budget allocates $2.3M to trees, roughly in line with last year’s spending. Unfortunately this is inadequate: the recently released Tree Canopy Mapping revealed that we're only halfway to our 40 percent urban tree canopy target - and these numbers are declining. Investments on trees yield among the highest returns, given their role in cooling neighbourhoods, absorbing stormwater, sequestering carbon, and supporting biodiversity, among many more. We should be increasing our investments into strengthening the urban tree canopy, not maintaining the status quo. 

The budget will be discussed at the December 8th Environment and Climate Change Committee meeting. 

Roads and sidewalks

We are pleased to see the infrastructure budget includes $13.5 million for sidewalk rehabilitation and $32.1 million for pedestrian and cycling facilities to address missing links, improve connectivity and enhance safety. (Blunting this progress, however, is Premier Ford’s Bill 60, which may force the city to cut three planned bike lane projects.)

Dwarfing these figures, however, is the $70 million earmarked for road resurfacing, totalling over $450 million in this term of council, well above the last term of council. This is one of the perennially high costs of roads, given the immense wear and tear they are subject to primarily by car traffic. Failing to invest in sustainable transportation – like public transit, and infrastructure to support cycling and walkability – means more tonnes of metal on our roads and of course induced demand for more lanes.

One of the costliest types of projects under the transportation file is road widening. A slate of road widening and expansion projects were included in this year’s Transportation Master Plan and several receive funding in this budget. Half of the capital funding for growth projects in 2026 goes to two widening efforts. Fortunately, it’s not all for car lanes:

• Carp Road ($20.4M) – widening 2km of Carp Road from two to four traffic lanes between Highway 417 and Hazeldean, plus new sidewalks and cycling tracks, and the installation of new sanitary and storm sewers plus watermain.

• Greenbank Road ($56M) – between Chapman Mills and Cambrian Road; part of a larger project that will include the design of a new 4-lane arterial roadway with 2-lane segregated median Bus Rapid Transit lanes and facilities for pedestrians and cyclists along the corridor.

It would be great if the City opted to purely induce demand for transit, cycling and walkability without tacking on some old fashioned car lane widening as well. One electric bus costs a million dollars; it’s worth imagining how many more could be put on the road for what it costs to widen a stretch of road for private vechiles. After all, the real remedy for congestion is moving more people using less space. As our population grows over the next two decades, more spatially efficient and low carbon modes of transportation will be essential to avoid worsening congestion and endless costs spent on road widening and upkeep.

The budget was passed at the November 27th Public Works and Infrastructure meeting. But you can email your city councillor about any of these issues before the final council vote.

Nick Grover is the Climate Change Organizer at Ecology Ottawa, a local not-for-profit, grassroots and volunteer-driven organization working to make Ottawa the green capital of Canada.