In the last Ottawa municipal budget, Mayor Mark Sutcliffe made the most significant transit service cut since 2011 when tens of thousands of hours of service were cut from the system. Similarly in 2023, he also included up to $50 million in cuts yet the budget was still left with a $39 million hole that other levels of government were supposed to fill. Residents, experts and other community groups had called on the mayor to invest in transit rather than cut it as they knew funding would not come, and they were right.
Now OC Transpo and the Mayor are engaged in a "service review" and we want to ensure that there are no cuts to our vital public transit system that has already been weakened by years of cuts and "optimization"
We need our Mayor and council to commit to finding other ways to make up for the transit shortfall.
