Boroughs of Ottawa

The Ottawa Capital District Municipality (French: Municipalité du district capital d'Ottawa), informally the Ottawa CDM (MDC d'Ottawa) or just Ottawa is the federal capital city of the Canadian Republic. It consists of 16 boroughs (arrondissements), each of which is a distinct community of Ottawa receiving its standard municipal and civic services from the Capital District Metropolitan Municipal Corporation, and which as a whole are legally and administratively separate from the 13 provinces and five territories which constitute the rest of the Canadian Republic.

While the directly elected Mayor of Ottawa and the Ottawa Metropolitan Council (the mayor's cabinet) govern the city as a whole and oversee much of its development and many of its public services, each borough also has its own local council, consisting of nine members directly elected by their borough's constituents, which after being elected proceed to elect from amongst themselves a chairperson, also known as a borough manager (secrétaire/gérant(e) de l'arrondissement), who is responsible for presiding over and moderating the deliberations and procedure of meetings of the borough council, which meets regularly to deliberate and debate upon issues affecting the borough and its residents as well as citywide matters the council wishes to bring to the attention of the city government.

Each local council comes together annually for a plenary session officially called the Metropolitan Summit, during which the chairperson of each borough's local council acts as representative of his/her council to the other councils of the summit as well as to the Summit Parliamentarian, a summit member who is internally elected at the start of the Metropolitan Summit to preside over all subsequent summit deliberations, including opening and closing presentations and discussions, moderating debates, calling votes, overseeing the votes' counting and announcing results, etc., and ultimately officially bringing the summit to a close; all members of a Metropolitan Summit are eligible to be elected to the office of Summit Parliamentarian, with the exception of members already currently serving as chairperson of their borough council, with no limit on the number of times an individual may serve (consecutively or otherwise) as Summit Parliamentarian.

While the 16 council chairpersons moderate and ultimately control the matters brought before the summit by their council, and similarly the Summit Parliamentarian directs the overall flow of summit procedure and makes the ultimate decisions in many respects, all members of a Metropolitan Summit are at least once afforded an opportunity to present and/or address concerns and issues before the summit, which are then deliberated, debated and possibly voted upon, sometimes even leading to the introduction of new municipal legislation, which is also then voted upon. A single annual Metropolitan Summit can last between two and five days, with each day beginning proceedings at 10:00 am sharp and concluding at 4:30 pm, with a 90-minute lunch break between 12:30 and 2:00 pm; each day of a Metropolitan Summit thus consists of a total of five hours of proceedings. The variation in length (in days) of different annual summits is caused primarily by the significant variation in the amount of matters before a summit each year; at the direction of the Summit Parliamentarian, each matter is dealt with in the proper manner, with the summit proceeding to the next matter only when the Summit Parliamentarian is satisfied with the way the previous matter was addressed and officially brings it to a close.

While several aspects of local services are funded and coordinated by the borough councils, especially social and charity services, the majority of standard urban services are provided to all sixteen boroughs of Ottawa by the Capital District Metropolitan Municipal Corporation, which is owned by the city and managed by the Metropolitan Department of Urban Services, an executive department subordinate to the Ottawa Metropolitan Council. While the Mayor and Metropolitan Council officially constitute the executive government of Ottawa at the municipal/non-federal level, the Metropolitan Summit is only the city's de facto legislative branch of municipal government; according to the Ottawa Municipal Charter, the city's basic law, the 16 individual borough councils in fact collectively constitute the official legislative branch of the city's government, with the Metropolitan Summit thus deriving its authority and legislative legitimacy from its nature as a plenary session of all members of the 16 borough councils.