Rural Ottawa
Fix the basics / the Lawson plan for rural Ottawa
One standard, two operating environments.
More than 80 percent of Ottawa’s land mass is rural. There are 906 farms inside the city boundary working 234,774 acres and generating $223 million a year in farm cash receipts. The city is responsible for more than 6,000 kilometres of road and roughly 5,400 kilometres of roadside ditch.
And Ottawa applies a single set of citywide standards to two very different operating environments.
Traffic control warrants are calibrated to urban volumes and pedestrian counts. Road renewal priority is weighted by traffic volume. Zoning limits on farm business activity are set as a fixed area rather than a share of the property. Drainage maintenance is dispatched from a centralized model against a request-driven queue. Each of these works as intended inside the urban boundary. Each produces an outcome in the rural area that the standard did not intend.
The common mechanism is volume. Where a standard uses traffic counts, pedestrian counts, or population density as the qualifying test, the rural area doesn’t qualify, regardless of the physical condition of the asset or the consequence of leaving it.
Credit where it’s due
None of this is news to the Agriculture and Rural Affairs Committee, and this plan doesn’t pretend otherwise. The 2024 Rural Summit, the city’s first in seventeen years, brought more than 250 residents to the table and produced ten commitments. ARAC’s mandate was strengthened. The ditching budget doubled. Every city department now carries a named rural lead. The process for assessing rural intersections was reviewed and improved in June 2026. That’s the correct diagnosis and real progress against it, and this campaign says so plainly.
The limitation is structural rather than a question of effort. ARAC reviews rural matters after a citywide standard has already been written, and corrects for it case by case: one intersection, one budget line, one rezoning at a time. The commitments in this plan are largely about moving that work upstream, so the rural test happens before adoption rather than after the outcome, and the committee spends less of its time repairing standards and more of it governing.
Two positions already on the record are part of this plan and aren’t restated here: the southern ring road as a provincial 400-series highway, and OC Transpo-operated on-demand service for rural communities.
The review step: test the standard before it ships
The five problem areas above describe the same mechanism. A standard is calibrated to the urban and suburban area, adopted citywide, and applied in the rural area without a prior assessment of how it performs there. The gap is identified afterwards, through a collision record, a rezoning application, a flooded field, a failed road, or a signed agreement. There is currently no step in the city’s decision process at which that assessment is required.
Three things off the table
We will not commit to reversing decisions outside municipal jurisdiction. The Alto corridor is federal. The southern ring road requires Queen’s Park to build and maintain it as a 400-series highway, which is why this campaign has asked for it on that basis. Commitments in this plan are limited to what a municipal government can deliver.
We will not reduce farmland protection. Scaling the on-farm diversified use limit applies to secondary activity sited on low-capability ground. The Agricultural Resource Area designation, and the provincial policy underlying it, are unchanged by every commitment in this plan.
We will not contract out rural maintenance to avoid paying for it. The maintenance roster is additional delivery capacity alongside city crews, not a replacement for them. Ottawa’s public works workforce is not the reason ditches go unmaintained, and this plan does not treat it as such. The roster exists because 5,400 kilometres is more ground than any single centralized crew structure covers on a schedule.
Why Alex
I build things for a living. I run framing crews on job sites across this city, urban and rural, and I’ve spent my career delivering work inside a budget and on a schedule.
Every code and standard I work with exists for a reason. A specification that performs on one site can fail on the next, because the ground underneath it is different. That’s not a criticism of the specification. It’s the reason engineering requires site conditions to be assessed before the specification is applied.
Ottawa is two kinds of ground inside one boundary. The standards it applies should account for that before they’re adopted, not after a review is triggered by the outcome.
We’ve got a lot of work to do.
Ottawa deserves better.