The budget package approved by the emergency preparedness and protective services committee now goes to full city council for a final decision on Dec. 11.
Reviews and recommendations are unbiased and products are independently selected. Postmedia may earn an affiliate commission from purchases made through links on this page.
Ottawa’s emergency preparedness and protective services committee has approved a budget including 55 new hires to tackle emergencies and nuisances ranging from to ambulance delays to dogs running off-leash.
The budget package in front of the committee included 23 new paramedics, 22 firefighters and 10 bylaw officers.
It’s not a done deal yet, with the final decision to be made by city council on Dec. 11, but committee chair Riley Brockington called it good news.
“This is a good news budget for the emergency and protective services that we offer our citizens, and it responds to a number of matters that we have been clear about throughout the year,” he said.
The draft budget includes the 10 new bylaw officers to deal with increased call volumes, to improve response times and to support business licensing and property standards enforcement.
Municipal bylaw officers respond to complaints about parking, noise, property standards and animal control. Roger Chapman, the city’s director of the bylaw and regulatory services, said property standards and short-term rental enforcement would be priority areas.
Ottawa’s shot-term rentals bylaw kicked in on April 1, 2022. Under that bylaw, someone who wants to rent out their primary residence must apply for a two-year permit from the city at a cost of $110. A short-term rental is defined as a home rented out for less than 30 consecutive nights.
“I think it’s fair to say that we could never have anticipated the workload during the development of that bylaw,” Chapman told the committee on Nov. 21.
Evening Update
The city has issued about 1,000 short-term rental permits since the bylaw’s introduction and currently has about 500 pending permits, Chapman said.
“We have also removed 1,000 listings from the platforms, which is very important,” he said.
“These are hosts who have put a listing on the platform that was not their primary residence. Or there’s issues with insurance. Or there are fraudulent permits being used. We have issued 300 charges and we’ve had 2,250 service requests so far.”
There are six dedicated bylaw staff on the short-term rental team. Investigations are complex and can require hours of monitoring, Chapman said.
The short-term rental bylaw will likely be up for review in the next term of council.
Cheryl Parrot of the Hintonburg Community Association urged the committee to consider increasing the definition of short-term rental to 89 days.
“Short-term rentals take permanent housing away from those who need housing and keep the rental prices up,” Parrot said. “We are in a housing crisis and an affordability crisis and this could make a difference.”
Issues around short-term rentals in Hintonburg have included increased garbage, Parrot said. Short-term rentals are lucrative for owners, but complaints take a long time to investigate, she added.
Chapman agreed that investigations were time-consuming, but disagreed with Parrot’s argument that the city should increase the definition of short-term rental, as Vancouver has done. That could cause more problems for Ottawa if it drove long-term rentals into short-term rentals and could ramp up the need for even more enforcement, Chapman contended.
On the paramedic side, Ottawa has grappled with offload delays at hospitals resulting in fewer or even no ambulances being available to respond to calls.
Last April, the Ottawa Paramedic Service introduced a new dispatch system that has already helped to ease the logjam by dispatching ambulances according to the severity of each call. There has also been a concerted effort by Ottawa’s hospitals in the past five weeks to reduced offload delays, paramedic chief Pierre Poirier said.
“Our staff are not being held captive, and we’re able to actually get our staff out into the community and deploy them where they should be,” he told the committee.
There have also been fewer Level Zero incidents, when there are no ambulances available to respond to 911 calls.
In 2022, there were 73,000 minutes of Level Zero. In 2023, it was 55,000 minutes, Poirier said.
“I don’t have the exact number in front of me for this year, but it will be less, probably less than 15,000 minutes, of which most of that will occur early in the year.”
Added to that, when there have been Level Zero incidents, it has only been for a few seconds or minutes and not for hours at a time, Poirier said.
Meanwhile, Ottawa Fire Services is looking to add 22 new firefighters as Station 81 in Stittsville is converted from a volunteer-only station to a composite model with both volunteer and career firefighters.
“This investment will help address growth and improve response times in the communities of Stittsville and Richmond, said Paul Hutt, chief of Ottawa Fire Services.
The fire department is also hiring a dedicated full-time psychologist to address mental-health needs.
The budget calls for modest — or zero — increases to fees for services. For example, an open-air fire permit will still cost $15. Fire safety plans will still be free. Other fees, such as those for fire inspections, are creeping up slightly, usually by around two per cent. For example, the inspection of a building of less than three storeys increases to $481 from $472.
The city will start penalizing repeated false alarms in 2025 for second, third, fourth or subsequent alarms. A second false alarm within a calendar year will cost $500, a third false alarm will be billed $1,000 and a fourth or subsequent false alarm will get dinged $1,500. There will also be a 15 per cent administration fee.
About 37 per cent of total fire calls in Ottawa are false alarms. Of those, 13 per cent are nuisance alarms. False alarms are costing Ottawa Fire Services time and money and distract from potentially deadly emergencies, the committee heard last February.
