Ottawa mayoral incumbent Mark Sutcliffe is promising a community-wide strategy to address mental health and the toxic drug crisis in the city if re-elected on Oct. 26. Sutcliffe’s plan would bring together health care, supportive and community housing, public safety, and other community organizations, including The Royal, to develop a broad plan to connect people in crisis with appropriate support. “We must find more solutions to support those who are struggling with mental health and addictions issues,” said Sutcliffe in a news release on Wednesday. “We must ensure that individuals in crisis are connected with care and appropriate housing, and that our streets and communities are safe places for all who call them home.” Many of the promises included in Wednesday’s release were part of Sutcliffe’s overall public safety plan that he announced in September. As part of that plan, Sutcliffe said he would double the investment in the city’s alternative response teams, such as ANCHOR, the Alterative Neighbourhood Crisis Response that provides mental health and/or substance use crisis support and dispatches crisis response workers. He also said he would work to make changes to business licencing rules to revoke licences of “pill mills” that are “handing out drugs in communities like Chinatown, Centretown and Lowertown.” In Wednesday’s release, Sutcliffe also said, if re-elected, he would expand daytime programs in the city to “shift social challenges off the street” and explore the use of mandatory care “in specific cases.” In late 2025, the City of Ottawa received nearly $1.2 million from the federal government toward measures to tackle the toxic drug crisis, funding organizations such as Operation Come Home, Ottawa Inner City Health, the Shepherds of Good Hope, the Centretown Community Health Centre, the Ottawa Paramedic Service, and Community and Social Services. “Together with our supportive housing partners and other community leaders, the professionals and experts at the Royal have the knowledge, expertise, and relationships to examine every possible solution and report back with the best ideas,” said Sutcliffe. “They will undertake the work of developing meaningful long-term solutions while I direct the City to address the crisis in our streets head on.” Other mayoral candidates, including Neil Saravanamuttoo and Coun. Jeff Leiper, have promised to expand ANCHOR citywide. Saravanamuttoo says he would provide same-day access to detox and recovery beds, investing in Neighbourhood Watch programs, reviewing fire and paramedic coverage in rural areas and creating a Community Emergency Response Report Card to provide information on emergency response times, ambulance availability and hospital offload delays, if elected mayor. Leiper would tie future growth in the ANCHOR program to increases in the police budget to “ensure the right response is available for every call.” Leiper is also promising to focus police resources and strengthen Bylaw enforcement to improve response times. Candidate Alex Lawson has publicly said he agrees with expanding the ANCHOR program and has vowed to “take the drugs away.” The promises come as community organizations say they’re at their limits dealing with the fallout from toxic drugs and homelessness. The Ottawa Mission said in September it is facing “unprecedented need” for its services, in particular since Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s government pulled funding from supervised drug consumption sites in favour of its HART Hub model. Residents in areas like Centretown say open drug use has become a major problem in their neighbourhoods. Thousands of discarded needles have been found at former encampments, and unsafe needle use has led to closures of public washrooms at O-Train stations this year. Election day is Oct. 26. An advance voting day will be held on Oct. 16. Fourteen candidates are running to be mayor of Ottawa. In alphabetical order, they are: Queen Divine Priya Amber Bakshi, Zed Chebib, Bernard Couchman, Suraj Harish, Alex Lawson, Jeff Leiper, Geoff Nicholas, Josh Rachlis, Neil Saravanamuttoo, Ali Shayvard, Jacob Solomon, Mark Sutcliffe (incumbent), Amjad Ali Syed, and Peter Westaway.
