One standard for every bed
Fix the basics / shelters
One standard for every bed.
Emergency shelters aren’t the answer to homelessness, and this plan doesn’t pretend they are. A shelter is a bandage. But a bandage has to be clean. In 2025, Ottawa spent $29.3 million putting homeless families in hotel and motel rooms. For that kind of money, the city should be able to tell you that every bed it pays for is safe, clean and free of pests. Today it can’t.
Hotels and motels aren’t covered by the city’s shelter standards at all. The shelters that are covered get a full inspection once every 30 months. And nobody outside City Hall ever sees the results. So here is the next plank in Alex Lawson’s platform: one written standard for every bed the city pays for, checked four times a year without warning, with the results online for everyone to see.
Tents are going up because shelters are failing people.
City staff responded to 65 encampments in 2020. By 2023 it was 375, and the year wasn’t even over. In 2024 it was 458. City staff estimated 2025 would top 500.
Ask someone in a tent why they left the shelter. People have told Alex directly: violence, sexual assaults, theft, abuse, bed bugs and lice. They tell reporters the same thing. One man who moved from a downtown shelter to a tent told CBC, “There’s nobody here to sell you drugs.” The city’s own manager of homelessness programs said it comes down to “where they feel safe.”
The drug crisis didn’t stay on the street. It moved indoors, into the beds the city pays for. As soon as the weather allows, too many people decide they’re better off in a tent than in a shelter taxpayers are funding. That isn’t compassion, and it isn’t order. It’s a management failure. The people in the tents pay for it, and so do the neighbourhoods around the parks.
The least-watched beds hold the most vulnerable people.
When the family shelters are full, the city sends families to hotels, motels and college residences. That was supposed to be the overflow. It has become the system. In February 2024, about 300 families were living in those rooms. By December 2025 it was about 500. In June 2026, the city’s family shelter system held 711 families, 2,574 people, the most since the city started keeping monthly records in 2014. Three out of four are now placed in hotels and motels, and they stay an average of 11 months. More than 1,200 of the people in those rooms are children.
The city’s own 2021 report on its shelter standards is blunt about those rooms: “As private businesses, these facilities are not required to adhere to the Standards.” The shelters that are covered get a full check every 30 months, with a lighter review in between. We couldn’t find a single compliance review the city has published. Shelters only have to report deaths, fires, critical injuries and incidents that make the media. Assaults, thefts and police calls that don’t make the news aren’t on the list. And the last time the Auditor General looked at how the city manages its shelters was a 2017 review, which never examined the hotels at all. Kids shouldn’t be the ones paying for the gap.
The plan
In his first year, Alex will ask the Auditor General for a full audit of the shelter system, hotels and motels included. It runs alongside the 90-day shelter safety review this campaign has already committed to. The review fixes what’s dangerous now. The audit tells council where the money is going and what it’s buying.
Shelters, hotels, motels, college and university residences, and city-owned buildings will all meet the same written standard. If taxpayers are paying for the bed, it meets the bar. The standard goes into every hotel and motel agreement when it’s signed or renewed. No more exceptions for private operators and slum lords.
Every site the city places people in will be inspected at least four times a year, without notice, replacing the 30-month cycle. Inspectors will check for pests, cleanliness, safety, food, staffing and repairs, and talk to residents away from staff.
Every shelter and hotel the city uses will have a page online showing its inspection results, pest reports and the fixes it was ordered to make. Families deserve to know where they’re being sent, and taxpayers deserve to know what they’re paying for. These are city contracts, so they fall under Your money, in plain sight. Sites whose locations are kept confidential for residents’ safety will be reported without an address.
Shelters will report every assault, theft and police call to the city, not just deaths, fires and whatever makes the news. As mayor, Alex will also ask the Police Services Board to report calls for service to shelter and hotel addresses on their own, so problems are dealt with where they happen and the rest of the neighbourhood isn’t painted with the same brush.
A tenant doesn’t pay full rent for a unit that isn’t up to standard, and the city shouldn’t pay full price for a bed that isn’t either. A site that fails an inspection gets a written deadline. A site that fails again stops getting paid for the beds that don’t meet the standard until they do. A site that keeps failing loses the contract, and the people living there are moved somewhere that meets the standard.
A complaint that has to go up to the province has to wait to come back down, so Ottawa will have its own. An independent shelter ombudsman, separate from the department that manages the contracts, will take complaints from residents, families and staff, investigate them, and report publicly to council. Complaints can be made anonymously, so staff can speak up without putting their jobs at risk.
Every resident gets a written move-out plan and a named caseworker within 30 days of arriving. For people who can work, that plan runs through the Lawson jobs and growth plan: caseworkers connected to employers who are hiring, and Career Pathways Ottawa showing which jobs match the skills people already have and which programs will pay for retraining. For people who can’t live on their own yet because of addiction or mental illness, the plan is supportive housing with treatment, not another year in a motel. Every scorecard reports how many residents moved into housing, how long it took, and how many came back.
A shelter doesn’t only affect the people inside it. Every site’s scorecard will also report police calls, needles picked up, 311 complaints and bylaw calls within a set distance of the building, tracked over time. Neighbours will have a named contact at every site. When the numbers around a site get worse, the operator answers for it at the next inspection, the same as it would for a dirty room.
Paid for by getting families out of motels.
The city bought the former hotel at 377 O’Connor Street this year for $45 million, with 95 percent of the cost covered by the federal government, to house families in transitional housing instead of rented hotel rooms. City staff estimate it will save up to $2.5 million a year compared with renting the same number of rooms. That saving pays for the inspections, the scorecard and the ombudsman, not new taxes.
Fixing shelters is how you clear the tents.
A city can’t clear encampments when it has nowhere safe to send people, and Ontario courts have said so, in Waterloo Region and in Kingston. A shelter people are afraid of doesn’t count for much in court, and it doesn’t count for much in the park either. Better shelters give the city the footing to bring people indoors and give the parks back to the neighbourhood.
Call it the broken windows principle. When a city lets a dirty room, a bed bug report or an unanswered complaint slide, it tells everyone that nobody is checking. That message spreads, from the shelter to the park to the street around it. Fixing the small things, and being seen to fix them, is how a city shows it’s paying attention.
Alex Lawson is a carpenter. Nothing his crew frames gets covered up until it’s been inspected, because checking is how you know the work was done right. The city pays for thousands of beds a night and checks them once every two and a half years. Some of them it doesn’t check at all. This isn’t about spending more. It’s about knowing what we’re already paying for. The full plank shows every source.
Ottawa deserves better.