Jobs and Growth
Jobs and growth
The cuts are the weather. A mayor’s job is to build the roof.
Between February 2025 and February 2026, Ottawa lost 30,500 jobs. That is the largest employment loss of any city in Ontario. The federal government cut roughly 8,000 positions here over the same stretch. The rest were the dry cleaner, the lunch counter, the daycare provider, or the framing crew.
That is what happens to a city with one big employer. When it exhales, everybody feels it. And it is not over: the federal government has committed to being about 40,000 people smaller by 2029, and more than 26,000 public servants have already been told their jobs are at risk.
Alex Lawson’s plan does not blame the federal government for those decisions. Ottawa does not get a say in the federal budget, and a mayor who pretends otherwise is wasting your time. The cuts are the weather. The question on the ballot is whether this city built a roof.
It did not. The City employs 506 people to administer assistance to residents who are out of work, and 13 in Economic Development. Ottawa’s workforce planning board was folded into an organization run from Cornwall. There is no published Ottawa youth unemployment number. This city is far better staffed to manage the consequences of unemployment than to prevent it.
The plan has two halves, in deliberate order. First, get people into work: that helps people who need help this year. Second, get more work into Ottawa: that pays off over years. Twenty-one commitments across seven areas, and every one of them is something a City of Ottawa mayor and council can do on the City’s own budget.
A city cannot fix a problem it has decided not to measure. A small team inside the City whose one job is knowing Ottawa’s labour market. An Ottawa youth unemployment number published every quarter, good or bad. The EmployerOne employer survey run at city scale, and an annual Jobs and Skills Report in plain language: vacancies, training seats, the gap between them.
The province will cover up to $35,000 to retrain a laid-off worker, and almost nobody is using it, because someone who just lost their job has no idea it exists. Career Pathways Ottawa: the jobs available for the skills you already have, what they pay, the industries hiring, the training that closes the gap, where it is offered, and the programs that help cover the cost. Plus a single front door for displaced workers, and the City’s 506 caseworkers finally wired to the employer side.
You cannot build houses without the people who build houses, and Ontario construction is short a projected 27,300 workers by 2035. Workforce development weighted in contract scoring, a fair wage policy so a contractor who pays properly doesn’t lose City work to one who doesn’t, and City buildings, yards and land opened to trades training with the high schools, colleges, unions and employers.
A 22-year-old in Ottawa is now competing against a 45-year-old with fifteen years of service and a security clearance. The City’s job is to be the conduit, not the destination: broker youth hiring commitments from real employers and publish who delivered, put sector information in every high school, and lead by example with a published City target for students and apprentices.
The people this city is losing are experienced, bilingual, security-cleared administrators. Insurance, banking, compliance and head-office operations pay for exactly that, and Quebec City has already proven a government town can build a private cluster on local talent. The pitch: the people are already here, and this city will work with you to get your doors open. One named person to call, published decision timelines, and a quarterly employer attraction scoreboard so residents see results, not announcements.
Ottawa’s industrial availability sits at 4.4 percent. The City says it holds fifteen years of employment land, but a drawing is not a site. A live public inventory of serviced employment land with sizes, zoning and prices. A published servicing schedule. And approval timelines reported in public, quarterly, with the misses shown beside the hits.
Grow the city, or grow the bill. Ontario Works caseloads are at a record 20,170 households. 711 families are in emergency accommodation, and the City spent $29.3 million on hotel and motel placements last year, more than double its entire Economic Development budget. The cost of the pathway gets reported annually, beside the employment numbers, whoever is mayor.
Alex hires out of high school co-op programs. He has taken on kids who had never picked up a tool and watched them turn into tradespeople. It works, it is not expensive, and most employers never do it, because nobody ever made the introduction. That is what he wants the City to do.
We’ve got a lot of work to do.
Ottawa deserves better.