Ford government giving Ottawa $24M for community housing project

The Ontario government is giving Ottawa $24.1 million to support a community housing project on the former CFB Rockcliffe site.

Housing and Municipal Affairs Minister Steve Clark announced the funding Wednesday alongside Ottawa Mayor Mark Sutcliffe. The funding would support an Ottawa Community Housing building on Mikinak Road that would provide 271 homes for seniors, families, Indigenous people and people with disabilities. More than 20 per cent of the homes would be accessible.

The announcement comes weeks after Sutcliffe and city councillors raised issue with the amount of housing and homelessness funding the city was getting from the province.

The 2023 Ontario budget announced an additional $202 million per year in funding for supportive housing and homelessness projects in municipalities across the province. The city received an increase of $845,100 over 2022 funding, which Sutcliffe said was disproportionately small.

"Toronto will receive $48 million. That's almost 60 times as much, despite Toronto's population being approximately three times larger than Ottawa," Sutcliffe wrote in an open letter to Clark and Premier Doug Ford. "Based on Toronto's allocation, Ottawa's share should be in the range of at least $16 to $18 million."

Clark's office defended the amount of money Ottawa was receiving, saying the total funding was more than $48 million, the second highest in the province, and that a new funding model was correcting for previous overcompensations Ottawa had received.

In a news release Wednesday, Sutcliffe thanked Ford and Clark for the money.

"This announcement is an important step in our ongoing discussion about fair and appropriate funding for housing and homelessness prevention and it helps Ottawa build more affordable and supportive units in the next year," he said. "This comes after a lot of very healthy and productive dialogue and collaboration."

City council declared a housing and homelessness emergency in Ottawa in 2020. Three years later, Ottawa's shelter system is significantly over capacity, according to the Alliance to End Homelessness Ottawa (AEHO).

"We have almost a 400 per cent overcapacity rate for our family shelter," AEHO executive director Kaite Burkholder Harris told CTV News Ottawa in April. "We now have a waitlist for families to get into shelter, not even a housing waitlist, that’s how bad the housing crisis is in Ottawa and this kind of funding cut shows this is not a priority for the provincial government."

The announcement from the province comes just hours after city council voted to spend $48.5 million of provincial funding in 2023 and 2024 to provide long-term housing allowances, a landlord damage fund for Ottawa’s Housing First program, outreach to those living outdoors, in emergency shelters and in transitional housing, and other services and supports.