City can't wait on infrastructure upgrades | Letters to the Editor

Advertisement 1 This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Breadcrumb Trail Links HomeOpinion City can't wait on infrastructure upgrades | Letters to the Editor Letters to the editor of the Ottawa Citizen for Saturday, Sept. 12, 2026 Author of the article: By Citizen letters Published Sep 12, 2026 Last updated 1 hour ago 5 minute read Join the conversation Ottawa City Hall PHOTO BY ERROL MCGIHON /POSTMEDIA Article content City can’t wait on infrastructure upgrades Article content In a recent Ottawa Citizen article, some candidates for council indicated they were wary of hiking taxes to support infrastructure upgrades. Come on, folks, we are all adults and we need to have a grown-up conversation about the realities. Article content Article content We want all the services we want, plus we know we can’t continue under funding infrastructure because sooner or later there will be a major infrastructure failure that will be a real emergency when it happens. When it does happen, we will blame the politicians who didn’t fund the necessary fixes before it happened. Great 20/20 hindsight. Article content Article content We have chronically underfunded the behind-the-scenes and under-the-ground “stuff,” really critical stuff, because successive mayors and councils were too afraid of raising taxes. Article content Hey, I’m not rich and really don’t want to pay more, but I know I have to. You all know that, too. Consequently, I will happily vote for a candidate who has the courage to say that they will support raising taxes to create a fund that must be directed to infrastructure remediation. Such funds cannot be diverted to someone’s pet project. Article content Ross Couchman, Ottawa Article content Financial numbers don’t tell whole story about life in Canada Article content Re: Living standards sink further behind U.S. Article content This article is another example of the distorted picture that you get if you look only at financial indicators. Article content The U.S. is the richest country in the world, but, if all countries lived like that (or like us), we would require three or four planets. The U.S. takes a disproportionate share of global resources and wants more. Article content While its per capita GDP may be higher, it is poorly distributed. Since about 1970, most of the economic growth has gone to the top 20 per cent and increasingly to the top one per cent. The middle 50 per cent have been stagnant and…