To every neighbour in Copeland Park and Bel Air Park who signed the petition, documented what was happening, called 3-1-1, wrote to the City, reported another short-term rental or raised concerns about a suspected rooming-house operation: thank you.

You did what residents are always told to do. You paid attention. You gathered facts. You used the City's processes. You gave municipal officials the information they claim to need before they can act.

And then, far too often, nothing happened.

Ottawa has a short-term rental by-law. It has licensing rules, zoning rules, enforcement officers and an elaborate system for receiving complaints. What it appears not to have is the institutional will to enforce those rules when a residential neighbourhood asks it to.

By-law's response has become a familiar choreography: acknowledge the complaint, assign a number, redirect the resident, close the loop and leave the underlying problem exactly where it was. That is not enforcement. It is administrative theatre.

The office of College Ward Councillor Laine Johnson cannot simply function as a forwarding address between frustrated residents and a department that has already failed to act. Representation is not the mechanical transmission of emails. It requires advocacy, follow-up and, when the bureaucracy is plainly inert, pressure.

The Mayor's Office cannot speak endlessly about housing, public confidence and neighbourhood safety while treating the quiet conversion of family homes into commercial accommodations as an administrative footnote. A home is not merely an asset with a booking calendar. A street is not a hotel corridor. And the people living beside these operations are not obstacles to somebody else's revenue model.

None of this is anti-visitor, anti-owner or anti-business. It is a demand for the most elementary bargain in municipal government: if Council adopts a by-law, the City must enforce it. Otherwise the by-law is decoration and compliance becomes something expected only from those conscientious enough to volunteer it.

So thank you to the neighbours who refused to shrug. Every signature matters. Every report creates a record. Every photograph, date, licence search and follow-up removes another excuse for inaction.

City Hall may prefer that this issue disappear into its intake system. We will not let it.