On December 17th, 2025, the Joint Planning & Housing and Agriculture & Rural Affairs Committee approved the final draft of the New Comprehensive Zoning By-law, with amendments that are to be incorporated by staff in the new year. The Zoning By-law will come to City Council on January 28th, 2026 and is expected to be enacted next year. This is a big deal and several years of work have gone into this overhaul of our comprehensive zoning by-law.
Erica Shardlow, Trees and Greenspace Coordinator at CAFES, delegated to the Joint Committee to continue to push for our recommendations on how zoning can regulate spaces for trees in alignment with the Official Plan’s own goals for a 40% tree canopy.
With support also from Federation of Citizens Association (FCA), we emphasized the need for zoning to require sufficient soft landscaping metrics in front and rear yards of neighbourhood zones, for zoning to require soil volume metrics rather than merely surface area requirements (30 cubic m of soil at 1 m planting depth for a medium canopy tree), and front yard setbacks of at least 4.5 m, or combined setback + Right of Way space, that are large enough to host a tree in front of every building, specially on busy, dense streets in the urban core. We explained that big canopy trees are essential for a healthy and liveable city – we need them to clean our air, absorb rainwater, give us shade, cool temperatures, make streets more walkable and communities more enjoyable to live in.
Despite a hopeful motion presented by Councillor Leiper on reinstating soil volume into the final by-law, this motion was withdrawn due to not having staff support (staff claim is may be beyond their authority to regulate soil depth). Councillor Leiper did provide a direction to staff to conduct a study on soil volume requirements and how it may be enforced and implemented through zoning. So not quite case closed.
Other tree-related motions and amendments that passed included staff increasing the size of front yard setbacks in subzone B from 3m to 4.5m to make more room for trees, and a motion by Councillors Brockington and Johnson to remove the re-zoning designation of “Developmental Reserve” for the NCC Southern Corridor lands, including the McCarthy Woods area and the Woodroffe-Merivale corridor, and changing it back to what they were zoned in draft 1 (with some other changes).
Raymond Leury, delegated to the Joint Committee on behalf of CAFES, EVCO and the Federation of Citizens Association (FCA) on Electric Vehicle readiness; in particular, that zoning should require all new parking spaces to be constructed with electrical conduits to support long-term projections and the City’s 2050 net-zero goal. Currently, the new by-law only requires 25% of new spaces to be equipped with EV conduits. Councillor Dudas’ motion to decrease the EV parking readiness policy review timeline from every 5 years to only 3 years was considered a move in the right direction, but not quite the change we were hoping for. Retrofitting and rebuilding in the future is always far more expensive. Following prior conversations with CAFES, Councillor King questioned staff heavily on this and may bring forward a motion in January when this lands at City Council.
CAFES has been engaged on the new by-law since City planners began working on the first draft in 2023. To date, we have submitted a CAFES Trees and Zoning position paper, followed by three detailed submissions on drafts 1, 2 and 3 (the first two with the People’s Official Plan Coalition).
Check out the two delegations below and read CAFES’ full written submission. Visit the Engage Ottawa zoning page for updates and links. For comments please contact Erica at eshardlow@cafesottawa.ca