The Myths About Lansdowne: POTTER

 

By Evan H. Potter

I promised in my recent The Day After Council’s Final Vote post to look past a vote whose outcome is a foregone conclusion and focus instead on what it means for the 2026 municipal election.

I’m breaking that promise, briefly, because one last Lansdowne 2.0 shoe just dropped on the eve of the vote. Recently, CTV News Ottawa asked Ontario’s sports minister whether Queen’s Park might fund Lansdowne 2.0. “We’ve talked about it,” Neil Lumsden is quoted as saying. “It’s a fantastic idea.” Mayor Mark Sutcliffe doesn’t need provincial money to win the vote. He has had a minimum of 12 councillors onside probably for months if not years but he still needs some political cover on what will be another split Ottawa City Council decision. A cheque from Queen’s Park doubles as a communications shield when the blowback starts.

Which brings me to the Mayor’s two-track election message.

Track 1 is taxes must stay low because families are stretched and the cupboard is bare. This is Sutcliffe’s low-tax-equals-affordability election pitch to keep his suburban voter base on side for the next 12 months.

Track 2: We must prioritize core services – roads that don’t resemble topographical maps, a transit system that actually gets you where you need to be before the sun sets, a central library that opens before your grandkids graduate. And then, the mayor and his 12 or more yes-on-Lansdowne 2.0 councillors appear to be set to approve a project that will almost certainly blow past $500 million.

The anticipated provincial contribution? Around $8 million or $10 million or $20 million? This will not make a large dent in Lansdowne’s overall cost to almost two generations of Ottawa taxpayers. Opportunity cost isn’t an accounting abstraction. It’s what we won’t fix and won’t do because we chose to spend our tax money on this project in this way. If that sounds harsh, let’s test it – by walking through the cost, the timeline, and the contradictory stories we keep telling ourselves about Lansdowne.

Story 1: We’re engaged in “astute budgeting” with a hole in the middle

City reports and communication materials still cite a $419.1-million cost for Lansdowne 2.0. Nathalie Gougeon, the city auditor general, says the estimate is optimistic – by roughly $70–75 million – pushing the project toward $500 million before shovels really move and before anyone utters the word cost “overruns.”

If we’re already in an era of constrained budgets, why is our scarce debt capacity being assigned to a best-case scenario? And if costs drift – as large projects tend to – what gets cut or deferred to make room? Roads? Water mains? Transit service hours? The answers matter more than a glitzy city-branding campaign that says that Ottawa’s Lansdowne Park is a great place to host national and international sports tournaments.

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Major Construction At Greenbank, Baseline

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This isn’t an either-or proposition. You can still fill the city’s hotel rooms and keep the restaurants buzzing without raiding our city’s property-tax vault for a second revitalization of this iconic location. What rings false in the mayor’s Lansdowne 2.0 sales job is the insinuation that his critics don’t love Ottawa. It’s the oldest rhetorical trick in the political campaign book: conflate dissent with disloyalty and pray Lansdowne’s wonky math goes untested until after the final vote

And here, we can only hope that councillors Wilson Lo, Sean Devine, Riley Brockington, Shawn Menard, Laine Johnson, Theresa Kavanagh, Rawlson King, Ariel Troster, Jessica Bradley, and Jeff Leiper will stand their ground and not let the mayor off the hook – even when he produces his Province of Ontario cheque for Lansdowne to try to make all the red flags go away.

Story 2: When “critical” means “smaller”

Supporters call Lansdowne 2.0 a “critical asset,” as if that settles the debate.

But the plan on the table doesn’t just rebuild – it reduces. Fewer seats, no north-side stand roof, a smaller arena footprint, and demolition of relatively recent private construction on the site. If we’re paying more for less, what exactly is the public-value proposition beyond keeping the Ottawa Sports and Entertainment Group private partnership whole? “Critical” is not a synonym for “whatever the City’s commercial partner prefers.” Show the evidence that replacement beats repair or phased rehab—and publish the alternatives you costed out.

Story 3: Lansdowne’s faith-based budgeting versus the math everywhere else

The City of Ottawa – OSEG partnership continues to post recurring net losses after depreciation and financing costs — $9.2 million in the latest 2024 Lansdowne annual report. The auditor general in her June 2024 agile audit of the project also warns that the city’s repayment plan leans heavily on long-tail “waterfall” distributions decades out, which is civil-service speak for you won’t see much cash for a long time, and it might be a lot less than you think. In a city facing a $10.8 billion infrastructure gap over 10 years, loading up 40-year debt on another Lansdowne redevelopment project while praying for distant-future returns isn’t prudence; it’s faith-based budgeting.

Story 4: Meanwhile, downtown is getting a different “arena district”

Michael Andlauer’s Capital Sports Development Inc. has finalized a land-sale agreement with the National Capital Commission for a new downtown Ottawa Senators arena at LeBreton Flats, explicitly framed as an “arena district” with mixed-use development.

It’s good for the city, potentially great for the team — and a direct competitor for the discretionary-spending dollars Lansdowne hopes to capture over the next 40 years. If the business case for Lansdowne depends on overly optimistic revenue projections, perhaps don’t build a bigger arena magnet a few transit stops away. The only rebuttal to this by Lansdowne 2.0 proponents is that the entertainment will be different at Lansdowne. If so, they should at least re-run and publish the Lansdowne financials with the LeBreton district in the picture, at today’s interest rates.

Story 5: The opportunity cost you can feel on your commute

The new Ottawa Public Library – Library and Archives Canada joint facility will open later than planned and at a far higher total budget than first advertised; transit reliability remains fragile; basic road maintenance feels like a lottery. Every dollar we bond for a new major capital initiative is a dollar we don’t use to fix electric buses and trains, resurface arterials, or protect pipes and culverts we only notice when they fail. The mayor and his council allies can say “we’re doing both,” but the spreadsheets — and the cracks in your suspension — suggest otherwise. That’s the opportunity cost: not theoretical, but daily.

The Lansdowne bet — and who carries it

Defenders of the Lansdowne plan will say you can’t be a world-class capital if you never build anything nice. True. Cities need amenities. But good capital projects survive tough questions. Here are three:

Why now?

If we’re short roughly $11 billion on our infrastructure bill, why is a discretionary mega-project at the front of the queue? Show the ranking that put Lansdowne ahead of the fixes we keep telling residents we can’t afford.

Why this scope?

If the delivered facility is smaller or less functional in key ways, where’s the quantified public benefit that justifies the premium over repair?

Why this financing story?

If the business case leans on back-loaded distributions and a partner that has posted recurring losses, why should taxpayers carry construction-overrun risk and the long-term demand risk? Put the full sensitivity analyses on the table, including scenarios with a thriving LeBreton district pulling discretionary spending away from Lansdowne.

Ottawa can walk and chew gum but it can’t promise everyone everything with the same dollar. If council insists it can keep taxes low, fund basic services, repair infrastructure, rescue a struggling P3 project, and insulate residents from risk while betting against a new Ottawa Senators downtown arena district taking revenue away from Lansdowne, then councillors should show the math — not the brochure.

Lansdowne 2.0 continues to read less like a plan and more like a hope. And hope is a lovely thing. It just doesn’t fix our deteriorating infrastructure, keep buses and trains on time, or balance our budget. These are our opportunity costs.

Coming soon

If there’s even a whiff that the council votes aren’t there for Lansdowne 2.0 — though, as I’ve noted previously, the smart money is on the mayor having his 12 yes votes — watch for the fail-safe message. So far, Sutcliffe’s singular message in the homestretch has been “Lansdowne 2.0 or nothing,” a handy way to close the curtains on debate.

But in the highly unlikely event that his yes count stalls at 11 councillors and provincial money can’t push the project over the line, expect a quick communication pivot to “too big to fail.”

Cue the city’s slideshow: sunk costs, staff hours, and the urgent need to avoid bad optics complete with Globe and Mail headlines and questions from Premier Doug Ford’s office, capped by the spectre of OSEG walking away and partner Roger Greenberg dropping the Lansdowne keys on the mayor’s desk.

Also worth asking, since nobody at city hall seems eager to: Why was there never a Plan B? Because Plan Bs create choices. And Lansdowne 2.0 was always about giving the residents of Ottawa no choice.

Evan H. Potter is a professor at the University of Ottawa. To read his blog, click here.

 

For You:

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