The inaugural #NOPE | No Ottawa Prison Expansion campaign stop’s $1 billion jail from being built in the city
Just over a year after then Minister of Community Safety and Correctional Services and Ottawa-Centre MPP Yasir Naqvi stated that prison expansion would be “failing our taxpayers“, on 4 May 2017 a new minister and Ottawa-Orléans MPP Marie-France Lalonde and then Liberal Premier Kathleen Wynne announced a plan to build a new and bigger 725-bed jail to replace the Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre. The project, then dubbed the “Ottawa Correctional Complex” (OCC), was pegged to cost up to $1 billion to design, build, finance and maintain through the life of a 30-year public-private partnership.
The same day the OCC was announced, the Criminalization and Punishment Education Project launched the inaugural #NOPE | No Ottawa Prison Expansion campaign to demand that the province not build the human caging site and instead allocate the funds towards community infrastructure, services, and supports.
In the months that followed, the #NOPE campaign was endorsed by various community groups in the city who participated in a “If I had $1 billion” workshop to brainstorm alternatives to imprisonment and the planned jail. Numerous op-eds and a protest that resulted in the cancellation of a public engagement session the Wynne government had planned for the project followed, along with social media interventions before and after a new Progressive Conservative government led by Premier Doug Ford took power.
By late 2019, the OCC was under review and was later abandoned by the Ford government. The plan to build a $1 billion jail in Ottawa, which was supposed to open in 2024, was dead in the water.
When the new provincial government announced its “Eastern Region Strategy” in August 2020 featuring several new jail infrastructure projects, including a new 235-bed prison that was originally supposed to open in 2027 on the grounds of the former Kemptville Agricultural College farm, several No Ottawa Prison Expansion campaign veterans were recruited by local residents to join the newly formed Coalition Against the Proposed Prison (CAPP). CAPP, now known as the Coalition Against Proposed Prisons, continues to be comprised of organizers based in Kemptville and Ottawa, as well as other members from elsewhere across the province. Together, they have successfully delayed the Ford government’s plan to build a prison in Kemptville, which now has a November 2032 completion date, by more than five years so far.
While CAPP is still working to save farmland and stop the Kemptville prison through its recently launched Kemptville Prison Watch initiative, they are also working with others to halt the construction of jail infrastructure projects across Ontario through the new #NOPE | No Ontario Prison Expansion campaign that got off the ground in August 2025.