The Day After The Lansdowne Vote: POTTER

09/23/2025

By Evan Harold Potter

Let’s be honest, Lansdowne 2.0 was never about evidence-based policymaking.

Residents wrote “strongly worded” emails to the mayor and councilors, filed careful point-by-point rebuttals, and produced data-driven critiques. They exposed the shaky assumptions in the Ottawa Sports and Entertainment Group’s (OSEG) proposal. They argued the deal wasn’t in the public interest. And what did it change? Almost nothing. Well OK, one of the three towers from the original OSEG proposal was dropped.

That’s because facts never really mattered. For the city, estimated costs and revenues were abracadabra — see them now and now they’re gone to be replaced by new and improved numbers. This was never going to be a real public debate about OSEG’s business model — it was a political script for ratification. The mayor’s favorite line — “it’s Lansdowne 2.0 or doing nothing” — isn’t a fact-based choice. It is strategic communications designed to frame a false choice and suppress public dissent because “doing nothing” sounds kind of bad. (Note to file: Ottawa taxpayers had already spent a King’s ransom on Lansdowne 1.0.)

Here’s one fact you can’t make magically go away: OSEG was losing money. Every year. On Lansdowne 1.0. Re-opening the partnership agreement with the city became a lifeboat deal to stop the bleeding. This wasn’t charity. It was business. And business hates losses. That, more than anything, is why Lansdowne 2.0, a single design with no public debate, marched onto council’s agenda like a foregone conclusion.

Is It Really Over?

As we wait for the final vote to take place in the next eight weeks, the left hemisphere of my brain, the logical side, says “it’s all over but for the counting.” Mayor Mark Sutcliffe won’t bring this vote forward without the minimum 12 Yes votes he needs to win and he undoubtedly already has a cushion of two to three more. He has learned that no drama is good politics for him.

But my right brain keeps insisting the real drama might not have even started — that Lansdowne 2.0 is less a final act than the first act of a much longer play about changing the composition of council to make it more accountable to this city’s citizens.

It reminds me that politics is not physics, though Newton’s Third Law is tempting to cite: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. That might not apply to a post-vote public protest directed at council. Still, there’s no denying that, even though the vote’s outcome is a foregone conclusion, it has given Ottawa’s civil society renewed energy. For example, the anti-Lansdowne 2.0 flyer from Neil Saranavamuttoo’s BetterOttawa.ca, a citizen advocacy organization, has already landed in mailboxes across the city. He lists 15 councilors expected to secure the mayor’s victory, among them Osgoode ward’s newly elected Isabelle Skalski who, notably, had pledged a No on Lansdowne 2.0 during her campaign

My point is that Lansdowne 2.0 will not be settled by a final tally on the council floor, but by another tally on Oct. 24, 2026. The story isn’t over. In fact, the curtain is just about to rise on the second act.

The Lansdowne Effect

The day after the vote, Ottawa will wake up to a new campaign – one that extends far beyond a stadium or a food court. It’s a campaign about councillors’ accountability. This is the Lansdowne Effect.

For Kitchissippi Councillor Jeff Leiper — who is council’s de facto Leader of the Opposition and who will almost certainly vote No — this moment might become a defining early scene of his mayoral audition. How he frames Lansdowne after losing the battle matters as much as his No itself.

He has choices. He can play it safe: issue a standard lament, pivot to other issues, and hope voters remember his opposition. Or he can act like the mayor-in-waiting, hold a press conference and give lots of interviews. This frames his reaction to Lansdowne as the symbol of his alternative vision. He can also up the ante, sharpen the wedge, Hammer Sutcliffe as reckless with public money, tie the $500-million-plus cost of Lansdowne 2.0 to the city’s $10.8-billion infrastructure shortfall and make it a metaphor for a mayor who doesn’t have his priorities straight. Whichever script Leiper chooses will shape not only his own campaign, but also those of the challengers taking aim at incumbent councillors who backed Lansdowne 2.0

Suburban Councillor Immunity or Not

For suburban councilors such as Kanata North’s Cathy Curry, Lansdowne is a political mosquito bite — barely noticed by her residents. She can wave away critics, secure in the knowledge that few of her voters will ever see Lansdowne as top-of-mind. But in politics, even the safest incumbents live in fear of a perfect storm: a serious challenger who already knows the political ropes with an excellent ground game and then add some unforeseen problem in their ward.

Which brings us to Matthew Luloff, councillor for Orléans East-Cumberland. On paper, Luloff is hard to unseat. Incumbency is powerful, and suburban voters skew older and home-owning. Most aren’t losing sleep over stadium deals in the Glebe.

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Yet some conditions for his vulnerability are quietly assembling: A challenger has emerged. Barbara Daniela Gandolfo is already in pre-official campaign mode with Liberal Party experience at both the federal and provincial levels. She’s doing a Bruce Fanjoy — knocking on doors, making herself known. Such classic retail politics chips away at incumbency. She won’t put Lansdowne in her pitch at the door, but if voters question Luloff’s stewardship of tax dollars, Lansdowne becomes Exhibit A. That’s the Lansdowne Effect: it transforms from a “downtown project” that is unconnected to suburban concerns into a litmus test for fiscal credibility — which matters a lot to suburban voters.

Why Sutcliffe Can’t Lose And Why That Matters

Of course, Sutcliffe won’t lose the council vote. He can’t. A defeat here would not only embarrass him but cast doubt on his ability to steer the city’s agenda. For a mayor who leans heavily on his business backers, that’s unthinkable. But in politics, the optics of victory can be as dangerous as defeat. Winning Lansdowne might strengthen Sutcliffe’s short-term grip on council. It might also galvanize his critics for the long haul. Civil society stakeholder groups such as Horizon Ottawa, ReImagine Ottawa, and BetterOttawa aren’t fading away. With the municipal election just a year away, they’ve been given a fresh cause and fresh oxygen.

Yes, Lansdowne 2.0 has been framed as a downtown-centric fight. Residents in the Glebe, Old Ottawa South and Old Ottawa East will obviously feel it most acutely with its 10-year construction horizon. But elections are not won in three neighborhoods.

The political test in this multi-act drama is whether Lansdowne like transit will become a symbol across the city — a symbol of mismanagement and misplaced priorities. That’s what the mayor and his allies fear. That’s why their talking points have leaned on inevitability. They don’t just want to win the vote. They want to kill the narrative because if Lansdowne 2.0 becomes shorthand for council’s indifference to taxpayers, it won’t matter that only a fraction of residents ever attend a football game there. It will matter that voters feel ignored, overruled, or played by their representatives who figured that there were no political-pain points for voting Yes.

The Fat Lady Isn’t Singing Yet

So let’s return to the idioms.

My left brain insists Lansdowne is done. My right brain counters that politics is full of sequels and surprises. The “fat lady” hasn’t even walked out on stage to sing. What we’re watching now is less the end of a pre-planning and approval phase for a major municipal project than the beginning of an argument — an argument that is already starting to play out in this pre-election period in wards across the city as well as the mayoral contest. And unlike stadium contracts, this one won’t be settled by lawyers. It will be settled by voters.

Ottawa’s civil society has been bruised by this fight, but also toughened. The OSEG project that residents couldn’t stop at council may yet become the project that helps them reshape council itself.

Evan Harold Potter is associate professor of communication at the University of Ottawa.