Has Mark Sutcliffe kept the promises he made 4 years ago?

When Mark Sutcliffe first ran for election four years ago, he made a lot of promises.

All told, there were more than 170 commitments in his 2022 election platform. He said he would keep taxes low, put more paramedics on the road, plant a million trees, fix the LRT and much, much more.

Now, as he asks voters for another mandate this October, CBC has been looking at whether he got it done the first time around.

His team says he has, for the most part.

"We estimate the Mayor has delivered on over 90% of his commitments, and he is proud of that track record," said his director of communications, Tahera Mufti.

The mayor's office has it all written down on their policy tracker. But those "delivered" commitments aren't so simple. While they consider 86 promises fully complete, 75 are "done and ongoing."

It might sound like an oxymoron, but it means that Sutcliffe and city council have made changes, spent money or passed bylaws, but are still planning additional work or waiting for the promised results.

That leaves 11 promises that even they acknowledge haven't been fully kept. Some are in progress, but a few have seen no action.

But it's even more complicated than that. For 27 promises, the policy tracker says he "pivoted," including some they also consider delivered.

To make sense of it all — and to test their work — CBC took an independent look at some of Sutcliffe's biggest promises in six key areas.

WATCH | Has Mark Sutcliffe kept the promises he made 4 years ago?:

Taxes and spending

One of Sutcliffe's most prominent campaign pledges came on taxes. He committed to a maximum 2.5 per cent tax hike for his first two years. He said he would target the same level for the final two, but warned that budget conditions would be hard to predict.

He kept the 2.5 per cent pledge for 2023 and 2024. Then, taxes rose by 3.9 per cent in 2025, and 3.75 per cent this year. That came after a period of high inflation, and Sutcliffe has noted those tax increases compare favourably with other major Canadian cities.

Yet some charges rose by far more, including a flat fee for garbage collection that shot up by 10 per cent this year alone, and even more than that the year previous.

Sutcliffe has followed through on his commitment to launch a spending review and says it has resulted in about a quarter-billion dollars in efficiencies, though some of those savings were from windfalls like the elimination of the federal carbon tax.

But he didn't keep a promise to cut recreation fees by 10 per cent. On average, they have risen every year of his term. Last year's changes to the fee structure did bring substantial savings for about half of rec centre users, yet they also increased costs for others.

Public safety

Sutcliffe kept his promise to hire 42 new paramedics and add 100 police positions, actually exceeding both targets.

Ottawa had long been grappling with "level zero," when there are no available ambulances to respond to new calls. Sutcliffe promised to reduce or eliminate that problem. Level zeros did in fact fall sharply over the past four years — by almost 99 per cent. 

He also followed through on promises to use CCTV to fight crime, open a police operations centre in the ByWard Market and rely more on alternative approaches to respond to addictions and mental health crises.

But he promised those moves would do something else: make at-risk areas safer for residents and visitors. On that score, the stats aren't quite so encouraging.

The two downtown wards that had the highest crime rates in 2022 aren't any better today. Ward 12 had a higher crime rate in the most recent data, while Ward 14 was essentially unchanged.

Sutcliffe's campaign co-manager Brett Byers said that data should be taken with caution, since the heightened police presence makes it easier to detect and report crime.

"Actual criminal activity is likely to have declined despite reported criminal activity remaining flat," he said, adding that last year's uptick in visitor traffic in the ByWard Market suggests people are feeling safer.

Transit

The 2022 election was fought under the shadow of a botched LRT rollout. Sutcliffe promised to learn the lessons of the public inquiry and fix the system.

Almost four years later, the city has implemented the lion's share of the inquiry recommendations, yet OC Transpo still doesn't have a permanent fix to ongoing bearing issues that have plagued the LRT. In fact, it's been finding new ones.

Even so, the transit agency says it is making progress, including through sensors that can track problems in near real time.

Sutcliffe promised he would deliver Phase 2 of the O-Train project, with extensions to Riverside South, the airport, Orléans, Moodie and Algonquin. 

WATCH | OC Transpo reported a new bearing issue in January:

The north-south lines 2 and 4 opened last year, and Sutcliffe says they haven't repeated the mistakes of Line 1. While OC Transpo is preparing for a final round of testing on the eastern link, it's so far unclear whether it will open in time for the October election, and it's certain the long-delayed west extension won't.

As for Sutcliffe's pledge to secure funding for Phase 3, which would link up with Barrhaven and Kanata, there is no commitment from the province or the federal government on when that might come.

Sutcliffe was more successful on other transit promises. The city froze transit fares for a year, though they climbed every year thereafter, including by five per cent in 2025. E-buses have been rolling in as promised, though most arrived behind schedule due to supply chain snags.

OC Transpo has faced serious budget deficits going back years, and Sutcliffe promised to negotiate a bailout from higher levels of governments. Though he repeatedly lobbied for that money and the city even baked it into its budgets, the funding hasn't yet come.

But Byers insists that a lot of these challenges will be solved when the province finally uploads the LRT to Metrolinx, something Premier Doug Ford has committed to do.

He said it will help fix reliability issues and called it "a game-changer that Premier Ford and Minister Sarkaria have confirmed will help advance Phase 3 of the LRT to Kanata, Stittsville, and Barrhaven with provincial support."

So far though, no deal has been signed.

Roads and transportation

Sutcliffe promised to add $100 million to fix crumbling roads and sidewalks, and pledged a separate $100 million boost for road maintenance and snow clearing. He kept both promises, as well as his commitment to double traffic calming budgets.

He promised to speed up the schedule of the Greenbank Road realignment in Barrhaven. There he succeeded, though his promise to address noisy big rig traffic in Manotick was only partly complete. Bridge Street remains a truck route, while Manotick Main Street was removed from the truck network for most of the year.

He kept promises to add pedestrian countdowns at intersections and add more community safety zones.

Sutcliffe had criticized his 2022 challenger, Catherine McKenney, for their wide-ranging cycling plan. He instead promised to fill missing links in the bike network.

Since his election, the city has added more than 55 kilometres of new or upgraded cycling paths, lanes and tracks, including missing links at Scott Street and Sawmill Creek.

Housing

As part of his pledge to make housing more affordable, Sutcliffe said he would get 100,000 new homes built in Ottawa within 10 years.

While he still has six years left to keep that promise, housing completions have so far been short of the pace needed to meet that goal.

Yet Byers says he has "every confidence" that the city is turning the corner. Housing starts ramped up in Ottawa last year, and the city has approved developments that could one day host tens of thousands more homes.

He said builders have never been in a better position to build. Council passed a housing acceleration plan this year, waiving some planning fees, deferring other charges and making approvals simpler, faster and more flexible.

Those changes didn't always overlap perfectly with Sutcliffe's campaign pledges. He didn't waive precisely the fees he said he would, but the mayor's office believes the plan captures the spirit of his promises and actually goes further. That's what they mean by "pivoting."

Sutcliffe also pledged to build more transitional housing, something the city has done with major new facilities downtown and in Orléans.

In some cases, Sutcliffe tried to keep a promise but couldn't get wider council support for his position, like on his pledge to axe an incentive program to redevelop contaminated brownfield lands.

Environment and climate change

While Sutcliffe did keep promises for the city to stop using single-use plastics, add generators to city facilities and set up a mayor's roundtable on the environment, several other pledges to go green fell through.

Sutcliffe said he would double the city's tree planting goal, saying it would mean a million new trees planted by the end of his term.

But the city confirmed that roughly 320,000 trees have been planted during this term of council through city-approved programs, though that doesn't account for trees planted during development or infrastructure projects, or through private or NCC efforts.

Byers called the tree promise another "pivot," made after consulting city staff and experts, to instead focus on planting fewer trees, but more mature and robust ones.

"It was decided that while planting 1,000,000 trees could be quickly achieved with mass tree planting efforts, many of the immature trees would not survive, they would necessarily be planted in locations that are less likely to provide climate, ecological, or social benefits, and the approach did not reflect a responsible use of municipal resources," he wrote.

Sutcliffe's platform also said he would spend $100 million to retrofit city buildings. There's some debate over whether that has been met. The city has only spent $21 million through dedicated climate change and resiliency programs, though Byers countered that the number doesn't capture spending through other departments that also improves energy efficiency.

He also promised to ensure all new city buildings are net zero, but city policy still requires only LEED certification. As for his pledge to see the city's gas-powered fleet go fully electric or hybrid by 2030, the current timeline for that stands at 2040.

As for garbage, Sutcliffe said he would opt for waste-to-energy rather than adding a new landfill or expanding the current dump at Trail Road. While the city is investigating an incinerator, Ottawa bought a new landfill site this year and is currently applying to the province to expand the Trail Road facility.

On the other hand, Hydro Ottawa has been busy adding more than 200 EV chargers and more renewable power, exactly as Sutcliffe promised.

He also pledged to ensure Ottawa used "the appropriate amount of salt" during winter snow-clearing operations. In 2023, city staff launched a pilot using technology to review and adjust salt application rates in real time.

Finally, Sutcliffe kept his promise to Ottawa canines, as the city opened four new dog parks during his term.