In case you haven’t read it cover to cover, a new provincial omnibus bill has a buried provision that serves as a direct veto on our community’s future. The legislation is Bill 60, the Fighting Delays, Building Faster Act, 2025. Tucked inside is Part XII.1, Section 195.3, which, in short, explicitly forbids the City of Ottawa (or anywhere in Ontario) from removing a lane of car traffic to add “A bicycle lane” or for “any other prescribed purpose”.
The bill also makes it easy for the government to add additional bans on any other way a city may choose to use car lanes for any other purpose. That could at some point in the future include bus lanes, street festivals, wider sidewalks, pedestrianized spaces, or anything else the provincial government decides it doesn’t want.
Prohibition re reduction of lanes
195.3 (1) Except as permitted by the regulations, a municipality shall not, by by-law or otherwise, reduce or permit a reduction in the number of marked lanes available for travel by motor vehicles on a highway or a portion of a highway under the municipality’s jurisdiction and control for any of the following purposes:
1. A bicycle lane.
2. Any other prescribed purpose.
A Top-Down Assault on Local Democracy
This isn’t some minor tweak to transportation planning policy. It’s a top-down assault on two critical fronts: street safety and local democracy.
First, it directly outlaws the primary tool—the road diet and complete street retrofit—that cities use to make city streets safer and more accessible for people outside of cars. Second, it’s a profound overreach of municipal autonomy. The City of Ottawa, through our democratically approved Official Plan and Transportation Master Plan (among many other documents over decades), decided we want safer, more efficient streets. We pay our city planners and engineers to use data to find the best, most cost-effective designs.
Bill 60 invalidates that entire local, evidence-based process. It substitutes the will of our local council and the expertise of our staff with a political veto from a transportation ministry that doesn’t know or care about our streets.
Orléans’ Stalled Progress
This is not an abstract problem. This provision has an immediate, devastating impact on plans that are being worked on right here in Orléans.
Consider Orléans and Jeanne d’Arc Boulevards. For anyone living here trying to use or cross these streets outside a car, they’re not streets; they are dangerous barriers to getting around. They are high-speed boulevards that carve our community in to distinct sections, and Orleans Blvd serves as one of the few linkages across highway 174. They separate neighbouring communities from parks, schools, and stores on the other side. They are wide and unsafe to cross, loud and hostile to walk beside, and terrifying for anyone who isn’t an expert to bike on.
These roads should be complete streets that connect us, safe and accessible pieces of transportation infrastructure for everyone. City engineers have been working hard for years on a clear, data-driven plan to do exactly that. But because this plan involves replacing redundant car lanes with safe protected bike lanes (because traffic volumes don’t require a second lane, and it is cheaper to use the existing roadways), Bill 60 stops this renewal project in its tracks.
A Fiscally Reckless Mandate
This top-down decision is also fiscally reckless. In its current form, these boulevards are a financial liability. They are overbuilt, expensive to maintain (and in disrepair), and the space could do so much more to create value for the community. Retrofitting these routes isn’t just about safety; it’s about smart asset management.
Bill 60 aims to force Orléans (and all of Ottawa) to maintain any costly, inefficient, and dangerous car-exclusive infrastructure forever, and it forces us to pay the full price.
Ultimately, the plan to upgrade Orléans and Jeanne d’Arc Boulevards aren’t just about bike lanes. The projects aims to create a set of critical links, safe routes connecting our neighbourhoods. It is about giving our kids the independence to get around and enabling our seniors to age in place while safely accessing community services and amenities. It is about taking a step towards building the kind of connected, 15-minute community we’ve been fighting for.
This Isn’t Just About Orléans
And this isn’t just about local arterial roads in Orléans. This single provision is sending a chill across all of Ottawa’s transportation planning. Projects and studies aimed at making our main streets safer, more efficient, and more welcoming for everyone are now being put on indefinite pause.
Decades of local planning, community consultation, and data-driven work are being sidelined by this top-down clobbering of local democracy. These local examples in Orléans are one of the most immediate and damaging to my community (it was literally in the very final stages of planning), but this problem is now city-wide, forcing us to halt progress on building a more livable and fiscally responsible city.
Bill 60 doesn’t just veto bike lanes; it vetoes our community’s vision for a more walkable, connected, and financially resilient future. It locks in car dependency as permanent, official provincial policy, whether we like it or not.
This provision is flying under the radar. We need to act now.
PLEASE contact your MPP, Minister Sarkaria and the Premier to tell them to remove Part XII.1, Section 195.3 from Bill 60. You can also call the Premier’s office directly here.
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