End the vacant unit tax
Fix the basics / housing
End the vacant unit tax.
Every winter since 2023, the owner of every house, semi, townhouse, duplex and small walk-up in Ottawa has been required to go online and tell the City whether they lived in their own home last year. Miss the deadline and the City charges $250. Miss it altogether and your occupied home is deemed vacant and billed one percent of its assessed value, unless you find out in time to appeal. Last cycle, 327,967 properties had to declare. The number found vacant, after the City’s own audits, was 4,140. That is 1.3 percent.
The tax was sold to Ottawa as a housing supply measure: tax empty homes, owners rent them out, more supply, lower rents. Here is what happened to rents. In October 2022, before the first declaration was ever filed, the average two-bedroom apartment in Ottawa rented for $1,625 a month. In October 2025, after three full years of the tax, it rented for $1,916. Up $291 a month. Up every year the tax was in force. So here is the next plank in Alex Lawson’s platform: repeal the vacant unit tax at the first meeting of the new council, and keep every dollar of the affordable housing money it raised.
The tax applies to houses. The rent is set in apartment buildings.
The tax did not lower rents, and it did not slow them down. The honest explanation is structural. The tax applies only to properties with six units or fewer. The apartment buildings where most of Ottawa’s renters actually live, and where the vacancy rate is set, are not covered by it at all. A tax that structurally cannot touch most of the rental market was never going to move most of the rental market.
When Ottawa’s rental market finally eased in 2025, the reason was not the tax. It was construction. CMHC’s own explanation is “historically high rental supply completions combined with weaker demand.” The vacancy rate in newly built units hit 6.7 percent. In the lower-rent units a working family can actually afford, it stayed below one percent. Supply moved the market. Paperwork did not. Vancouver’s longer-running empty homes tax tells the same story: a C.D. Howe Institute study in 2024 found no measurable impact on rents or on new construction.
It catches people who missed a form.
The City’s own program reports tell the story. In the 2023 occupancy year, 327,967 declarations were required and 99.7 percent came in, which means the program’s main achievement each year is that a third of a million households did what they were told. Of the 4,140 units found vacant, 2,067 had been vacant two years running. In other words, the owners the tax was aimed at mostly paid it and left the home empty. The rest of what it catches is transitional: a renovation that ran long, an estate in probate, a senior who moved into care, a home between tenants.
The appeals tell you who the net lands on. The City received 1,764 notices of complaint for the 2023 year and approved 1,233 of them. That is a program which, by its own count, bills people wrongly and then corrects itself when they push back. The residents who do not know to push back pay. The exemptions do not fix this. The renovation exemption applies only to work “for which the City has issued permits,” so a family waiting on the City’s own permit queue can be pushed past the 184-day threshold by that queue. The estate exemption runs the year of death plus the following year; Ontario probate routinely takes longer. Every exemption has to be claimed by someone who knows it exists.
The plan
A motion at the first regular meeting of the new council to repeal By-law 2022-135. The goal is that no household in Ottawa files a vacant unit declaration in 2027. If the declaration portal has already opened for the 2026 occupancy year before council can act, no tax is levied on that year and the portal closes. The audit program, the late fee and the deemed-vacancy rule end with the by-law.
The tax clears about $12.5 million a year after the City pays itself to run it, and that money goes to affordable housing. On September 16, Mark Sutcliffe admitted there is another $250 million of fluff in his budgets at City Hall. The revenue cut from the VUT is fully covered by these savings.
Every notice of complaint and request for review still open from the 2024 and 2025 occupancy years gets decided, and any late fee charged to a household whose home was in fact occupied is waived. The program does not get to bill people wrongly on its way out.
In the 2024 Ontario-Ottawa deal, the City promised the province three things: open up City land for housing, strengthen the vacant unit tax, and keep the property tax burden down. Council did the second one in November 2024 by raising the top rate to five percent. As mayor, Lawson would tell the province in the first 100 days, with the City’s own numbers, that the tax did not do what it was meant to do, that the affordable housing money is protected, and that Ottawa will keep the other two promises by doing more of both. Nobody at Queen’s Park wants a tax kept for its own sake. They want housing built and taxes held down. That is this plan.
The staff time and the $1.85 million a year spent running declarations, audits and appeals goes to the work that actually moves rents: cutting permit and approval times in half, and cutting development charges in half for one year across the board, both already in the Lawson housing plan. The City’s own 2025 numbers show where rent relief comes from. It comes from units that get built.
You should get what you pay for.
Ottawa asked 328,000 households to prove every year that they live in their own homes. In exchange it promised that rents would come down. Rents went up $291 a month. The households that missed the form paid $250 for the privilege, or got a bill for one percent of their home and had to appeal it. The owners the tax was actually designed for, the ones leaving homes empty on purpose, mostly paid it and kept the home empty. Two thousand of them, two years running. That is not a housing policy. It is a compliance program with a housing label on it.
Politicians keep writing policy without taking the human element into account. A charge or a tax like this one has to be measured two ways: is it having the effect it was meant to have, and what is that effect worth against all the well-meaning people it hurt along the way? On the first count, three years of the City’s own data say no. On the second, the people it hurt were the senior who missed a deadline, the family settling an estate, and the owner whose renovation ran long. That trade was never worth making, and it is not worth continuing.
Alex Lawson has spent 20 years framing houses in Ottawa. He knows what adds a home to this city: a permit, a crew, and a finished building. He knows what a form adds. A form adds a form. In 2023, Sutcliffe seconded the motion to keep this tax. In 2024, the City made it harsher, raising the top rate to five percent. He measured the revenue. Alex measures the result. The full plank shows every source.
Ottawa deserves better.