Ottawa has a new 10-year plan to end homelessness. If that sounds familiar, it should — the city has launched three of these decade-long strategies since 2014, and not one of them has meaningfully reduced the number of people sleeping rough on Ottawa streets.
That's the blunt observation at the heart of a recent Ottawa Citizen opinion piece by Brigitte Pellerin, and it raises an uncomfortable question: at what point does a plan stop being a plan and start being a habit?
Three Plans, One Problem
The math here is pretty damning. If Ottawa has been running consecutive 10-year homelessness plans since 2014, that means the city has been perpetually mid-strategy for over a decade — and the crisis has only deepened in that time. Each new framework arrives with fresh language, new committees, and renewed political energy. What it hasn't arrived with, apparently, is results.
The visible signs are hard to ignore for anyone living in the city. Encampments have grown in size and number. Emergency shelters regularly operate beyond capacity. The wait list for supportive housing stretches years long. And yet the response, cycle after cycle, is another plan.
Why Plans Keep Failing
Pellerin's critique cuts to a familiar tension in municipal policy: the gap between strategy documents and actual housing units. A plan is not a shelter bed. A framework is not a supportive housing worker. And a 10-year timeline conveniently spans multiple election cycles, meaning accountability is always someone else's problem — a future council, a future mayor, a future staff report.
There's also the funding question. Ottawa's homelessness response depends heavily on a patchwork of federal, provincial, and municipal money, often tied to short-term program cycles that don't align with long-term housing goals. You can write a 10-year vision all you want, but if the funding expires in 18 months, the math doesn't work.
So What Would Actually Work?
Housing-first models — where people are placed directly into stable housing with wraparound supports, rather than cycling through shelters — have shown real results in cities that have committed to them with actual resources, not just policy language. Medicine Hat, Alberta declared an end to chronic homelessness in 2015 using this approach. Ottawa has dabbled in housing-first principles, but scaling it requires political will and sustained investment that has proven elusive.
The new plan will likely contain all the right words: dignity, wraparound supports, systems change. The question Ottawa residents should be asking isn't whether the plan sounds good — it's what's different this time that would make it work when the last two didn't.
The Real Accountability Gap
Perhaps the most striking part of the critique is what it implies about civic memory. Ottawa keeps approving these plans, and nobody is held accountable when they quietly expire unmet. The goalposts shift, the branding refreshes, and the cycle restarts.
For a city that prides itself on being a livable, progressive capital, that pattern deserves far more scrutiny than it typically gets at council.
Source: Ottawa Citizen Opinion, Brigitte Pellerin. Read the original at ottawacitizen.com.
