Ottawa's next nightlife strategy will turn its attention to the people who keep the city running after dark, not only the people out for a drink or a show. Mathieu Grondin, the City of Ottawa's nightlife commissioner, spoke at the Canada After Dark summit this week, and the Ottawa Business Journal reported on where the strategy is headed.
Who counts as a nighttime worker
The next iteration of the strategy will focus on people who work between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m., including those in health care, transportation, cleaning and logistics. That is a wider group than the bartenders, servers and venue staff many people picture when they hear the word nightlife.
The definition is built around the clock, not the type of business. If your shift falls between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m., you are part of the picture, whether you work in a hospital, on the road, in a building after hours or in a warehouse.
What the strategy will actually do for those workers has not yet been announced. The coverage does not describe specific services, programs or funding, so those details remain to be seen.
The numbers behind the work
The strategy builds on research. The report was done in collaboration with Deloitte and surveyed more than 400 people and businesses.
The spending figures give a sense of the scale of a night out in the city. In 2025, the average spend per night out in Ottawa was $75, with the average transaction costing about $31.
The city's broader study identifies more than 20,000 nighttime-related businesses in Ottawa. Most of them are small operations: 85 per cent of nighttime-related businesses in Ottawa have fewer than 10 employees.
That last figure matters for anyone thinking about how the night economy works. A sector made up largely of businesses with fewer than 10 employees is one where each shift, each hire and each late-night customer counts for a lot.
A national conversation
Ottawa is not working on this alone. Over 10 cities across Canada were represented at the Canada After Dark summit and are invested in developing their nighttime economy.
That gives Ottawa's work a wider context. Cities that were once mostly concerned with licensing, noise and last call are now looking at the night as an economy in its own right, one that includes the people who staff it.
What this means for Ottawa
For residents, the shift is a reminder that the night in Ottawa is not just entertainment districts and late-night restaurants. It is also the people in health care, transportation, cleaning and logistics who are on shift while most of the city sleeps.
No timeline for the next version of the strategy was included in the Ottawa Business Journal's report, and no specific measures have been announced. For now, the direction is clear: the city's nightlife commissioner says the next round will be about the people who work the night, not only the ones who go out in it.
Sources: Ottawa Business Journal
