An ounce of prevention
Stronger communities / youth
An ounce of prevention.
Recovery First Ottawa is how this city helps people get off drugs. This plan is about keeping kids from starting.
Talk to the people on our streets and in our shelters and you hear the same story again and again. Long before they lost a home, they lost their way, and they lost their connection to a community. Nobody was coaching their team. Nobody noticed when they stopped showing up. The time to change the ending is when that person is twelve.
Ottawa’s numbers are not a crisis. Ontario students drink, smoke and use cannabis less than they did twenty years ago. But the warning lights are on. A quarter of Ontario students now spend five hours or more a day on social media, and 30 percent rate their own mental health as fair or poor. Violent offences involving young people in Ottawa rose 7 percent in 2024, even as overall youth offences fell. We want to get ahead of this while it is still a prevention problem.
Iceland asked its kids what they needed.
In the late 1990s, Iceland’s teenagers had some of the highest drinking rates in Europe. The country did not rely on scare campaigns. It surveyed nearly every teenager, every year, and acted on what they said. Kids who spent time with their parents, played organized sports and took part in music, art and clubs were far less likely to drink, smoke or use drugs. So Iceland built more of all of it: a recreation card for every child, and youth centres attached to the schools, open into the evening.
Twenty years on, the share of 15 and 16 year olds who had been drunk in the past month fell from 42 percent to 5 percent. Daily smoking fell from 23 percent to 3 percent. Organized sports participation rose from 24 to 42 percent.
Lanark County is doing it. Ottawa isn’t.
The Icelandic model now runs in Canada under the name Planet Youth. Lanark County, forty minutes from Ottawa, was the first Canadian community to sign on, in 2020. Since 2024, the federal government has funded 13 community projects to run the model, including Calgary, Mississauga, Sudbury, Peterborough, North Bay and Lanark County, with up to $750,000 over three years. Municipal governments were eligible to apply. The national capital is not on the list. That changes in the first year.
Mission per square foot.
The City of Ottawa owns 15 recreation complexes, 49 community centres and 68 community buildings, plus 70 fieldhouses, 21 indoor pools, 44 ice pads and 30 gymnasiums. Ask how many of those rooms sit empty on a Tuesday night and nobody can tell you. That is the problem.
We are going to measure every one of them by a new standard: mission per square foot. Not how much rental revenue a room brings in, but how much community happens in it. Ask BGC, the YMCA, Kiwanis or any community association what holds them back and the answer is almost always the same: space. The City has the rooms. These groups have the people and the ideas. The City’s job is to get out of the way and hand them the keys.
Somewhere to go that isn’t a bedroom and a phone.
Home is the first space. School is the second. A Third Space is where you go to be with people, with no appointment and no fee. For a lot of kids today, the only third space is a screen.
We will pilot Third Spaces inside City community centres, and in libraries or other City buildings where an area has no community centre: a room open later into the evening, shaped by the kids and partners at each site. Free. Supervised. A place to gather. Staffed by an adult lead from a partner organization and high school students earning their 40 community involvement hours as peer leaders. Older kids running a space for younger kids.
Quebec funds more than 250 community-run youth houses. Toronto’s library runs 32 Youth Hubs open weekdays until 7 p.m. Edmonton’s $2-a-day youth pass drew 848,079 visits in 2023. Manitoba funds 71 Lighthouse youth sites through its Justice department as crime prevention. Ottawa has pieces of this, from Play Free to BGC clubhouses to community houses, but most run in the afternoon, one night a week, or in a handful of neighbourhoods. What Ottawa does not have is a network.
The plan: ten commitments
An anonymous in-class survey of grades 7 to 12 through all four school boards, following Iceland’s model. Parents can opt out. No names, no student numbers. Results published by school area, with small groups combined so no child can be identified, and every result tied to a decision about what Third Spaces offer and where they open.
Build the local coalition with Ottawa Public Health and the school boards now, so Ottawa qualifies when the next federal round opens, and press Ottawa for its fair share. Borrow what already works in Lanark County.
Within the first year, report on every City recreation building: hours open, hours booked, rooms sitting empty. Publish it.
Vacant rooms and idle hours go first to community associations and non-profits like BGC, the YMCA and Kiwanis for youth programming, at little or no cost. One simple agreement, standing bookings, no annual re-application. The City looks at covering approved youth partners under its own insurance.
A first group of sites across urban, suburban and rural Ottawa, using libraries or other City buildings where there is no community centre nearby. Later evening hours on the nights kids actually need them. Free to use.
An adult lead from a partner organization at every site, supported by high school students earning their 40 community involvement hours. Every adult passes a Vulnerable Sector Check. Students who complete 100 hours leave with a City reference letter.
Before designing a single program, the City sits down with community associations and non-profits and asks one question: how can we help? They already have the ideas. The City brings the space, the keys and the backing.
Track visits, repeat attendance and partner programs at every pilot, alongside the survey results. Expand where kids are showing up. Report it all publicly.
Pursue federal prevention funding, including the renewed Building Safer Communities Fund. Lobby Queen’s Park for an evening Third Spaces stream for teenagers, modelled on Manitoba’s Lighthouses and Quebec’s maisons des jeunes, and for a Youth Wellness Hub in Ottawa. Ontario has 32 hub networks. None is here.
Invite Ottawa businesses and foundations to sponsor Third Spaces in their own communities, with every sponsor disclosed publicly.
Stronger kids, a stronger economy.
Kids who stay connected stay in school. A Université de Montréal study found boys who played organized sports at age 12 were almost 15 percent more likely to have a high school diploma by 20, and girls about 7 percent more likely. Working-age Canadians with a bachelor’s degree earned an average of $69,900 in 2020, against $42,960 for a high school diploma. Among Canadians aged 25 to 29, 14.6 percent are not working, not in school and not in training. Affordability starts long before the first rent cheque.
I know what a drop-in program is worth.
I grew up in a low-income neighbourhood. The only place I could play soccer was a drop-in program run by the Boys and Girls Club. Not a league. Not a travel team. A field, and an adult who showed up.
Then it closed. Funding. The field was still there. The kids were still there. The adult who showed up was gone.
It never took much. It took somebody deciding it mattered enough to keep paying for. That is why this plan is built on the groups already doing this work and the space the City already owns, and why it measures whether kids actually show up. We just have to stop letting the lights go out on the programs that work.
An Ounce of Prevention is the other half of Recovery First Ottawa and works alongside Jobs and growth.
Read the full plan, with every source (PDF)
We’ve got a lot of work to do.
Ottawa deserves better.