Ottawa Construction News staff writer
Mayor Mark Sutcliffe announced plans to eliminate nearly half of the city’s development reporting requirements and introduced a “culture of yes” for housing approvals during the Greater Ottawa Home Builders’ Association (GOHBA) annual breakfast on Jan. 8.
Addressing a sold-out crowd at the St. Elias Centre, Sutcliffe outlined the city’s progress on its Housing Action Plan, highlighting a 22 per cent increase in housing starts in 2025 compared to the previous year.
“We’ve made enormous progress,” Sutcliffe said. “I heard from you over and over again about the challenges of building homes in Ottawa: the bureaucracy, the long approval process, the red tape… So we got to work on fixing that.”
A key measure coming to city council later this month is a proposal to scrap 13 mandatory studies for development applications, including wind studies and shadow analyses, and to narrow the scope of 13 others. Sutcliffe said this move would effectively cut the city’s reporting requirements by 50 per cent, saving builders both time and money.
“You will no longer have to do them,” Sutcliffe told the audience. “I want everyone to look back on this time as a turning point for housing in Ottawa.”
The mayor also confirmed that a comprehensive new Zoning By-law will be presented to council this month. The by-law aims to increase density and height permissions, particularly near transit infrastructure, and make “yes the default answer to a much wider range of development proposals.”
The announcements follow a year of strong performance for Ottawa’s residential construction sector. According to Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) data, the city recorded 7,945 housing starts between January and October 2025, up from 6,520 during the same period in 2024. The growth was driven largely by a 28 per cent surge in multi-unit starts.
GOHBA Executive Director Jason Burggraaf welcomed the mayor’s commitments but emphasized the need to align policy with the city’s rapidly growing population.
“Right now, our official plan, all our zoning — everything revolves around the idea of Ottawa growing by 400,000 people,” Burggraaf said. “But the new, updated growth projections are 680,000 people… We need to basically scale-up all our plans to match those new growth projections.”
Sutcliffe opened his address by recounting an election-day promise made to Soula Burrell, GOHBA’s director of Membership and Business Development, in a Costco parking lot in 2022, pledging to attend the breakfast annually—a tradition he has kept for four consecutive years.
While acknowledging that the city does not control interest rates or supply chains, Sutcliffe reiterated his goal to make Ottawa the “most housing-friendly city in Canada.” He pointed to the city’s fiscal discipline as a supporting factor, noting that Ottawa has kept property tax increases to an average of three per cent over the last three years, in contrast to double-digit hikes in Toronto and Vancouver.
