How Somerset candidates would tackle safety, homelessness and the toxic drug crisis

In the heart of Ottawa, Somerset Ward is where many of the city’s biggest opportunities – and most difficult challenges – converge.

Home to Parliament Hill, Centretown, Chinatown and parts of downtown, Ward 14 is one of Ottawa’s most urban communities. It’s a place where residents can walk to work, run errands without getting into a car, grab a drink on a neighbourhood patio or bike along the Rideau Canal – all within minutes of home.

But it’s also a ward on the front lines of some of the most pressing issues facing Ottawa.

Homelessness and the toxic drug crisis have become increasingly visible on downtown streets. Residents and businesses have raised concerns about crime and public safety. Housing affordability remains a challenge in a ward where three-quarters of residents rent. At the same time, the future of public transit and efforts to bring more people and activity back downtown continue to shape conversations about what the neighbourhood will look like in the years ahead.

On Oct. 26, Somerset residents will decide who they want tackling those issues at City Hall for the next four years.

Five candidates are running to represent Ward 14, including incumbent Coun. Ariel Troster, who was first elected in 2022. Her four challengers – Nicholas Gollé, Dillon Anderson, Robert Dekker and Michael Tay – are each making the case for how they would approach a community that is both one of Ottawa’s most vibrant and one of its most complex.

Somerset’s demographics help distinguish it from much of the rest of Ottawa.

The ward is bounded by Parliament Hill and the Ottawa River to the north, the Queensway to the south, the Rideau Canal to the east and the Trillium Line to the west. With many daily necessities within walking or cycling distance, the ward offers the kind of 15-minute community lifestyle envisioned in Ottawa’s planning policies.

It is also the youngest ward in the city, with the 2021 census showing a median age of 35.2. However, seniors remain a significant part of the community, with 11,270 residents falling into that age group.

Somerset boasts an 80 per cent employment rate compared with the citywide average of 67 per cent. Average income is also slightly higher than the rest of the city, at $69,000 per year, while 70 per cent of residents have a post-secondary degree or diploma, compared with the citywide average of 55 per cent.

Perhaps one of the ward’s most striking differences is housing tenure. According to the 2021 census, 75 per cent of Somerset residents rent their homes, compared with 36 per cent citywide.

For all of its positive attributes, Somerset Ward is also facing significant challenges.

In May 2026, the Ottawa Police Service reported that the ward had the highest crime rate in the city for 2025, with a 1.5 per cent increase from the previous year.

Per 100,000 people, 15,824 crimes were reported in 2025 – a substantial difference from the rest of the city, which reported between 1,000 and 6,000 crimes per 100,000 people on average. Rideau-Vanier Ward was the exception to that range, with a crime rate similar to Somerset’s at 15,487.

Many say the pandemic was a significant turning point for the ward in terms of crime rates and public safety concerns. In the years since, safety issues have continued to plague the area, with advocates and community members saying the March 2025 closure of the Somerset West Community Health Centre safe consumption site led to a significant uptick in both crime and public drug use.

For the five candidates vying to represent Ward 14, questions surrounding public safety, homelessness, addiction and how the city provides services to its most vulnerable residents are among the defining issues of the campaign.

The Lookout sat down with each candidate to discuss those challenges, what they believe needs to change, and their plans for moving Somerset Ward forward.

Nicholas Gollé, who grew up in South Keys and Greely, has lived in Somerset Ward since 2018 – including through the pandemic years – and has seen a shift since then in both public sentiment and how politicians deal with complex problems.

“As the consequences of two years of stalled economic activity have resonated, and things have seemed only to get worse, clear signs of a general sense of anxiety have continued to grow,” said Gollé. “The economic anxiety comes, to some degree, from resource scarcity. We are all poorer now, and that leads us to zero-sum thinking.”

He believes that, due to ongoing issues such as the toxic drug crisis, economic instability and rapidly rising costs of living, citizens and politicians alike have been forced into a “scarcity mindset,” which has had negative repercussions in communities, causing people to feel isolated and limited in their options to solve the problems they’re facing.

Gollé is the first to say he is not a politician – he works in IT and the public service – but due to what he calls a lack of long-term thinking and planning, he decided to stop waiting for “someone else to meet the moment” and throw his hat in the ring.

In doing so, he says, he also had to “confront the possibility that waiting for somebody else was part of the problem.”

Gollé says one of the first things he would do if elected is ensure transparency and continuity with constituents when it comes to their concerns.

“My perspective is to improve the process of getting the concerns, the needs of the public to the government, and then the feedback loop to how those are solved,” said Gollé.

“Every conversation that you have with people regarding an anxiety, they should get a trackable receipt to where they can see what you’re doing. You should be able to map the problem and what [I’m] working on regarding those problem spaces.”

Gollé believes most politicians do their best, but the status quo of “band-aid” solutions without a commitment to forward-moving results has created a system of representation based on election cycles rather than long-term solutions.

“Looking for a solution that will make people happy is not the same as solving the root problem. It is irresponsible and shows a lack of trust in people’s intelligence – or a lack of confidence in your understanding of a problem or your ability to articulate it,” he said.

Dillon Anderson, like Gollé, says that when he realized the representation he hoped for wasn’t available, the inevitable choice was to step up to the plate.

Originally from Callander, Ont., Anderson moved to the city in April 2026 to pursue his Chartered Professional Accountant designation after completing a degree in Business Administration at Nipissing University.

Anderson has titled his campaign “Your Voice,” because he believes the role of city councillor should be to communicate concerns on behalf of citizens and provide transparency throughout the process.

“Increasing communication and accountability – and service standards. It’s not fair to say [your complaint] will be responded to in four to seven days, and then sometimes it’s a month. It isn’t okay,” he said.

Anderson, who uses a wheelchair every day due to a physical disability, is also concerned with accessibility throughout the city and would push for the basics of mobility to be addressed.

“That means snow-clearing, that means your sidewalks are in better shape, and if you report something to 311, it’s going to be repaired. I’ve reported so many things, not only in Somerset Ward, but all over the city. And they fix some things, but then some things aren’t even looked at,” said Anderson. “We have to look at what operations are doing and how those complaints are being brought in and dealt with.”

Somerset Ward has been represented by Ariel Troster since 2022, and she says her track record demonstrates fierce advocacy and care for her community.

“I’ve achieved so much working in this community – the launch of the ANCHOR program in Centretown, the doubling of the city’s investment in affordable and supportive housing, the Gladstone bike lane that just got approved and a new renoviction by-law that will stop seniors from being evicted from their homes,” she said. “I’ve been taking on the big policy files, and fighting and winning even under difficult conditions.”

Troster says other city councillors have recognized the unique challenges Somerset Ward faces compared with their wards, in part due to the concentration of social services in the area.

She would like to see a more even distribution throughout the city of places where unhoused people and those experiencing addiction and mental health crises can go for support.

“There’s a tendency to over-concentrate a lot of these services in the downtown core. So something we’ve been advocating for is services in every single ward, across the city,” she said. “And of course, it makes sense that there will still likely be a concentration in the downtown, but we want other communities to help take care of our neighbours who are not doing well, because they’re really their neighbours too.”

Troster pointed to actions the City has already taken, saying properties throughout Ottawa – including 1245 Kilborn Place in Alta Vista and 1754 St. Joseph Boulevard in Orléans – have been purchased with plans to develop supportive and transitional housing. She says she will continue to advocate for further solutions to the toxic drug and housing crises.

One solution Troster would like to see is a move towards treating those issues like the crisis they are.

“I’m encouraged that most of the mayoral candidates are suggesting we should set up an emergency command centre and treat this like the actual disaster it is. I saw how we pulled together around the floods on Canada Day, and was like, what if we did that for chronic homelessness,” she said. “I’ve told the current mayor, I’ve told the other candidates, this is what we need to do. I’m hoping to see that jump into action.”

Troster says she’s asking voters to return her to City Hall in October in order to continue the work she’s started.

“I love this community, and I want to finish the job that I was elected to do, which is to solve some of [these] problems in our community,” said Troster.

Robert Dekker has lived in Somerset Ward for 20 years, calling the Golden Triangle area home.

A policy analyst and political strategist who works on Parliament Hill, Dekker also served as president of the Centretown Community Association for a year and a half before announcing his candidacy. He has since resigned from the position.

Dekker – like his fellow candidates – has grown concerned with the changes he’s seen in the ward in recent years.

“It was clear to me that in the last few years, the ward has declined in the way it looks, crime rates have increased, and people were just frustrated with the lack of movement and making things safer,” said Dekker. “So the crime and safe streets, safe communities is what really drove me to want to run to turn the downward trend back up to improve our ward.”

Having served as president of Daybreak Housing, a non-profit supportive housing organization, for two terms and volunteering for years prior, Dekker has seen the difference that supportive housing can make.

“There are resources that we could obtain from the province in order to have non-profit organizations expand their services. If we want to solve the homeless cycle, we need to have places for people that need support – and want the support – to be able to get in,” said Dekker. “Not everybody wants that support, so we focus on people who want the support, and we also look at other avenues on how to support people who truly want to be homeless.”

Dekker says the rest of the community also needs to be safe and would advocate for stricter measures to prevent crime.

“We need stronger enforcement against the dealers and better coordination between the police, the prosecutors, and the courts in order to prevent someone from getting arrested and being back on the street the next day,” said Dekker.

Part of increasing that coordination, advocating for stronger measures, and bringing information back to the community would also see Dekker seek a seat on the Ottawa Police Services Board.

“If the representative from the ward with the highest rate of crime is not a part of the Ottawa Police Services Board, how can that councillor speak to what needs to be done in their community in order to reduce crime?” said Dekker.

A key component of Dekker’s platform is also a commitment to “provide opportunities for seniors to age with dignity” in the community.

Dekker highlights the increase in Naturally Occurring Retirement Communities, or NORCs.

“These are apartment buildings, condo buildings, where the age of the residents is going up. Within Somerset Ward itself, there are 13 of these buildings,” said Dekker. “Sometimes elderly people can’t get up to get their hair done – what kind of quality of life for an elderly woman or man who wants to get their hair done, but can’t leave their buildings?”

Dekker has plans to meet with the Council on Aging of Ottawa in the coming weeks, regardless of how the election plays out, to discuss how to better support individuals who wish to remain in their own homes as they age.

Not one to only focus on what needs improvement, Dekker believes Somerset Ward is still one of the best places to live in the city and would continue to advocate for recreational and green space growth.

“I think we have a wonderful cycling network of pathways and bike lanes that help everyone get around…and we could always use more green space, but we’ve got some great parks. I think sometimes we forget about the good things that we’ve got going,” he said. “I suggest we keep revitalizing our downtown and bringing people back in order to enjoy everything we’ve got.”

Michael Tay calls Somerset Ward home not only in residence but also where he works.

A social services worker for the past 17 years, as well as a professor with Algonquin College’s Social Service Worker program, Tay has assisted many people who have spent time in Somerset Ward seeking support and housing.

Tay says his professional experience has shaped his approach to many of the issues facing the ward.

“I’ve dedicated my career to supporting the community’s most vulnerable, and specifically right now, I work in housing and homelessness. Previously, I’ve worked in youth mental health and in community development – I’m very passionate about this type of work,” said Tay. “There are a lot of decisions made at City Hall that have large impacts on people, especially vulnerable people, in our community.”

“And I find that taking a frontline approach to City Hall can make a huge difference in people’s lives,” he continued.

Tay views the lack of a continuum of care for people experiencing addiction and mental health issues as one of the first issues he would tackle if elected.

“Treatment and harm reduction are not on two different sides. They are two steps and a focus on harm reduction for people who are using [is one side],” said Tay. “The other side is that treatment, which is the hope for the next step.”

Similarly, Tay says the overall situation in Somerset Ward needs to be viewed in a twofold way, advocating for both understanding and consequences.

“I want us to look at this situation and give it two important lenses – compassion and accountability. I don’t believe they’re opposites,” said Tay. “We need compassion for the vulnerable residents who are in the throes of this crisis, but we also need accountability for those who have committed crimes, harmed people, thefts, robberies, vandalism, all the things that very much impact our community.”

A fully functioning and punctual public transportation system is also a key part of Tay’s platform, not only for the obvious reasons of allowing riders a safe and timely commute, but as another piece in dealing with the ongoing homelessness and toxic drug crises.

Tay says many of his clients over the years have struggled to access support in their home neighbourhoods due to transportation constraints, which feeds a sense of lack of community and belonging, exacerbating situations that are already troubling.

“If you look at a picture of somebody who’s experiencing a crisis, and they live on the outskirts of the city, do you think it’s realistic for them to try to find the funds, to transport themselves across the city to [a community with services]? A lot of times they end up staying,” said Tay.

Through his community involvement, Tay has also heard from residents who are frustrated with the City’s lack of consultation and planning in terms of how to handle the influx of both workers and vehicles returning to the downtown as a result of return-to-office measures.

“Many residents feel like their opinions weren’t heard, and they weren’t able to give input that was meaningful,” said Tay. “You ask about transit, and the first question is going to be ‘Is the service reliable?’ Ask 100 people, and if you can find 50 people who say that transit is reliable, I would be quite impressed.”

Tay says that if elected, he would work to engage with the community before decisions are made, basing them on consultation and people’s lived experiences.

“If I’m city councillor, my role is not just to ask questions, but also to report back to people and say ‘this is your input,’” said Tay. “Sometimes it will work, and you’ll be happy to hear it. Sometimes it won’t, but I will be there to tell you why.”

“People want to know that their contribution is meaningful; they want to know they were part of a meaningful process. That is what we consider the basis of democracy, and that we all have a part.”