I’m hearing from a lot of residents who want answers about why flooding happened, and how we can prevent it from happening again. I certainly want those answers as well.
There won’t be a simple fix. 25 neighbourhoods have been dramatically affected and each had their own particular contexts. The City needs to examine the different local factors that may have contributed to flooding.
I brought a motion to last week’s City Council meeting listing many of our local concerns. It includes questions about the maintenance of aging infrastructure, large-scale construction projects, and more paving and infill, but you can read the full motion (and some other work I did at Council) below. I want to know when the City releases its neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood analysis, these factors are also considered and recommendations made that reflect those local circumstances.
Without a doubt, regardless of the circumstance, the amount of rainfall in a very short period will be a significant cause of the damage. This was the single worst rainfall in the history of our region. We’re seeing more extreme weather, as climate scientists told us we would. Climate change is real and we’re feeling its effects.
Our systems for dealing with regular rainstorms fell short of being able to deal with the overwhelming amount of water that fell. Those systems are largely planned for “worst case” scenarios, but no one imagined a worst case that could be as bad as what hit us on July 1.
The General Manager assured us at Council that they are recalibrating their baseline of what is typical and will make recommendations based on that new interpretation.
It will take some months to evaluate what happened in each neighbourhood, but I promise you that the investigation is already underway.
There are many short-term solutions like cleaning out culverts, better maintaining creek flow, and rehabilitating our existing ditch systems. There will likely be localized infrastructure improvements recommended as well, that will take a longer time, and more money, to get done. Improving our systems will be an engineering challenge, but also a political one, as we seek provincial and federal funding to help pay for better protections for our homes, businesses, and facilities.
I will continue to monitor staff’s investigations and to report their findings to you over the coming months. And I will fight for the resources we need to protect our homes from another disaster of this proportion.
Motion: Detailed review of storm impact and mitigation efforts
Motion: Compassionate Grant and protective plumbing programs
The General Manager of Infrastructure and Water Services has issued a detailed memo today about the floods. She details some of the causes, the impacts ward by ward, and how the City has responded.
She also talks about the investigation and analysis that are being done over the next months, and a commitment to action. It's worth reading!
Today, the Public Works and Infrastructure Committee unanimously approved my motion to improve road safety across Ottawa. Here's my motion:WHEREAS speeding continues to be one of the most significant road‑safety concerns raised by residents across the City of Ottawa, particularly in residential neighbourhoods and school zones where vulnerable road users, including children, are at heightened risk; and
WHEREAS recent City data has shown a substantial increase in speeding in school zones, with compliance dropping from 87 percent to 41 percent within a 12‑week period following the removal of Automated Speed Enforcement (ASE) cameras, and high‑end speeding increasing from 0.3 percent to over 4 percent during the same period; and
Whereas speed data is an important input in understanding risk related to more serious collisions; and
WHEREAS the city’s current approach to collecting speed data is limited and does not provide a full picture of speeds across the roadway network, and
WHEREAS other jurisdictions across Canada and internationally are increasingly incorporating innovative, technology‑enabled, and data‑driven approaches—including, predictive analytics, and AI‑supported monitoring systems—to inform their road safety programs; and
WHEREAS the City of Ottawa is currently undertaking work to update the Road Safety Action Plan, which will guide the road safety priorities for the next term of Council; and
WHEREAS this work presents an opportunity to modernize and strengthen the inputs used to make informed data-driven decisions about road safety;
THERFORE BE IT RESOLVED THAT staff, through the update to the City’s Road Safety Action Plan, leverage advanced data analytics, predictive modelling, and AI‑supported technologies, where appropriate, to enhance the City’s ability to identify, monitor, and respond to speeding trends and inform road safety priorities
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED THAT staff consider speed management as a focus area when developing the Road Safety Action Plan that will be presented to Council in 2027.
Read the Year Three Progress ReportDear Neighbours,
I am pleased to provide you with the College Ward Annual
Progress Report, showing the work that we did in 2025. I work hard every day to represent you on the
issues that are important to our neighbourhoods.
I hope this Progress Report is informative of the projects we
took on last year, and that it demonstrates my continuing
transparency and accountability to you. There is still more
always to do, and I list some future areas of interest.
Warm regards,
Laine
