Ottawans seeking climate change policy in municipal election in midst of increasing weather events

For Ottawa residents, this year's municipal election has been an opportunity to speak with candidates about what they would like to see from city hall in the coming years. 

Key issues such as public transportation, traffic, affordability, housing, and public safety have echoed throughout the city's 24 wards. Many candidates' platforms highlight how they would improve OC Transpo services while keeping tax increases low, even increasing spending on failing infrastructure.

But there is another issue that is increasingly causing concern among Ottawa residents. As the planet continues to warm, making weather patterns less predictable and extreme weather events more frequent, climate change has become another issue that politicians are expected to plan for.

The summer months of 2026 brought with them a reckoning for many citizens of the impacts of climate change, as well as a literal deluge of rain for Ottawa. Between June 1 and Aug. 12, 510.1 millimetres of rain were recorded at the Ottawa airport, breaking the previous record of 464 millimetres in 1972.

During the Canada Day flooding event, records now show parts of the city received up to 167 millimetres in five hours. The city has labelled the event a one-in-200-year occurrence.

For CAFES Ottawa (Community Action for Environmental Sustainability), an Ottawa-based non-profit organization that supports and advocates for effective environmental action, that designation does not align with the latest environmental science or the City of Ottawa's own published projections regarding climate change.

Despite the City of Ottawa's 2020 Climate Change Master Plan, which states, "the latest data from the Climate Atlas Report indicates that over the coming decades, Ottawa will experience considerably wetter springs and winters" and that "extreme weather events such as heat waves, floods, high winds and ice storms will become more unpredictable," city leaders have been caught off guard by climate-change-related events in recent years.

In a July 1 memo, CAFES pointed to documented reactions from Hydro Ottawa's CEO Bryce Conrad and mayor Mark Sutcliffe, both of whom expressed surprise at the event rather than recognizing it as part of an increasing pattern of erratic and intense weather shifts.

Residents want planned, thoughtful flood management

Since the Canada Day event, Ottawa residents and community advocates have increased their calls for the city to expand and expedite both its planning efforts and its responses to extreme weather events.

Rhonda Birenbaum, a resident of Ottawa's Carlingwood neighbourhood in Ward 7, experienced flooding in her basement and yard on Canada Day. She described a scene that became increasingly familiar throughout the summer: sump pumps that couldn't keep up, front yards submerged under three to four feet of water, and a new sense of fearful apprehension every time it rained.

"It's an anticipation. I sit, and I listen for my sump pump, and if I don't hear it, I go down and look," said Birenbaum. "The [storm] after July 1st…I happened to be in the car when it hit, and when I got home, I checked the basement. It's automatic now."

Birenbaum would like to see more emphasis on essential infrastructure and less on what she calls "vanity projects."

"We cannot ignore what's underground. My bottom line on all this is we've seen a lot of money spent, especially under Sutcliffe, on Lansdowne, the LRT nightmare, all these very above-ground, fancy, flashy what I call vanity projects at the expense of what's underground," said Birenbaum. "Out-of-sight, out-of-mind, the sewer. You don't see them, so you can kind of ignore them."

With her front yard flooding, Birenbaum is also concerned about where the water will go during another flood, despite her efforts to prepare her property through landscaping and other measures.

"There's nothing that I can do beyond what I've done to my house to make it more floodproof. I have a sump pump, I have a French drain under the front yard that takes the water 50 feet away from my foundation, and I've got a dry river bed that is built to slow the flow of groundwater," she said. "I keep track of climate change, so I figured I ought to do [these things]."

Carlingwood, along with many other Ottawa neighbourhoods, was built throughout the 1950s when city planners weren't thinking about managing rainwater, let alone the extreme amounts driven by climate change. When rain falls on manufactured surfaces such as streets, parking lots and buildings, it isn't absorbed into the ground. Instead, it flows into storm sewers that, during periods of increased precipitation, simply can't keep up.

Birenbaum would like to see elected officials do more to increase permeable surfaces in the city, leaning into an urban planning model often referred to as "sponge cities."

"One of the things that worries me about what politicians are doing with their decision-making is we need more permeable surfaces. If they continue to develop without any thought about climate change, or any thought about volume of precipitation, and we continue to have impermeable surfaces then we're going to run into this over and over," she said.