Article content
It’s among a few must-have phrases for travelling in a foreign country. It’s a reality of daily life. A feeling of familiar panic.
Where is the bathroom?
Gotta Go Ottawa is a volunteer-driven campaign that advocates for a wide network of free, accessible and secure public toilets in the nation’s capital.
Bessa Whitmore, a member of the Gotta Go team, sums up the current status of Ottawa’s toilet network: “not very good.”
Article content
“Ottawa hasn’t done terribly well, we think,” she said in a recent interview.
There are many “hidden toilets” around town with insufficient signage, she says, and they’re mostly concentrated in the downtown core, where tourists spend most of their time.
“Suburbia is built around the automobile. People use Timmy’s, coffee shops or public buildings, or they go home,” Whitmore said. “It seems incredible that so many cities in the world have done so much better than we have.”
The ByWard Market building, in the middle of the neighbourhood, has public washrooms during work hours. After that, “the whole area becomes a public toilet,” she said.
“Everybody in the world needs to go, sooner or later. And it isn’t only homeless people, only old people, only children, only people with Crohn’s and colitis. Everybody does.”
Here’s a map of where you can find some of Ottawa’s public washrooms:
The Gotta Go campaign advocated for public toilets to be included in Phase 1 of the city’s LRT Confederation Line, Whitmore said. As it stands, only public washrooms are included in “node” stations: Bayview and Hurdman.
Article content
Cities in Tokyo and Japan are considered world leaders in public bathroom accessibility, she said, as well as New Zealand. Closer to home, Edmonton, Montreal and Vancouver have made great strides.
“If Ottawa is to be seen as a world-class city, it needs the network of beautiful, accessible, clean and secure public toilets,” she said.
Whitmore noted the city’s downtown revitalization task force penned a lengthy report in January 2024 calling for “visionary, transformative action.” That report only mentions public bathrooms once, in relation to an event, she said.
“If they want people to live downtown and go there, they need to go somewhere,” Whitmore said. “And not in the back alley, please.”
Our website is your destination for up-to-the-minute news, so make sure to bookmark our homepage and sign up for our newsletters so we can keep you informed.
Recommended from Editorial
Share this article in your social network