Connecting with the City of Ottawa

One way of keeping up with the many things happening in Ottawa is to subscribe to the City’s newsletters. Here is the link to the registration page, with checkboxes for a couple of dozen topics you can sign up for.
https://ottawa.ca/esubscriptions/signup-form-en.html

There’s also https://ottawa.ca/en/news for press releases and other pieces of news (there’s an RSS feed if you want to subscribe to those). As you can guess, there’s also a French version at https://ottawa.ca/fr/sujets-de-lheure

https://ottawa.ca/en/city-hall/your-city-government/contact-city-ottawa/protocols/social-media-protocol has a list of the social media feeds from various groups (City jobs, Election, OC Transpo, Library,…) that you can subscribe to (they almost all have a Twitter account plus ones like Facebook).

You can also sign up for newsletters from your city councillor and mayor on their personal web sites, for news and discussion on issues that are even more local. Though you’d best do that after the municipal election; which is on October 22 2018. The councillors are listed on https://ottawa.ca/en/city-hall/mayor-and-city-councillors and you may have to do a Google search on their name to find their personal web site.

As you can guess, https://ottawa.ca/ is the main city web site, where you can find everything.

There are 3 key telephone numbers in Ottawa to call for help and information:

• 911 for life-threatening emergencies: fire, medical, or crime in progress.
• 311 for any questions on services provided by the City of Ottawa: garbage and recycling, recreation programs, emergency and social services, property tax bill, transit, etc. This is the best one to call to make a complaint about something that needs to be done, since they count the calls to figure out what is important to residents.
• 211 for information on government and community based health and social services: housing, elder abuse, meals for seniors and people with disabilities, etc.