Neil Saravanamuttoo: The 'pragmatic progressive' who wants to be Ottawa's mayor

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At age 11, Saravanamuttoo was quoted in the article suggesting cartoons or popular Disney characters could help explain to kids the main roles and inner workings of City Hall.

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“You have to make it interesting or kids will get turned off,” he was quoted as saying. “It has to be fun.”

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A newspaper clipping of the Ottawa Journal from July 1980 when Neil Saravanamuttoo was a member of Ottawa city council’s children and youth advisory committee. Photo by Ottawa Journal /Archive

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All these years later, Saravanamuttoo credits his parents for sparking his passion for politics.

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His mother, Helen, was a social worker who was awarded the Marion Dewar Defender of the Public Good Award for her dedication to the community.

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“She was a real community activist, and that’s where, quite frankly, I got a lot of what’s in me,” he says.

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His father Herb was an aerospace engineer who became a much-loved professor at Carleton University, where he taught for 50 years.

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“It’s not uncommon that people will come up to us and say, ‘I had your father as a professor and just loved him.’ But then people will say, ‘I had your father as a professor, but so did my dad,'” he beams.

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As an aerospace engineer, Herb Saravanamuttoo worked on the Concorde supersonic jet and had a hand in the famed and ill-fated Avro Arrow — before plans for the legendary military interceptor aircraft were scrapped by the Diefenbaker administration.

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“He got fired over the PA system, along with 10,000 other people. They were told to destroy everything. But he managed to smuggle out a set of the plans for the engine,” Saravanamuttoo recalls with a proud grin.

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His parents have since passed away and he keeps their memory close to his heart. He has two daughters with his wife, Kimberley, a schoolteacher and a military reservist.

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“A year ago with all of Trump’s rumblings of the 51st state, that was a source of concern that Kimberley would get called up,” he says, half-jokingly. “But now that it’s a trade war I’m the one that might get that call.”

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His family lives in Ottawa’s Glebe neighbourhood. When asked whether he takes public transit, Saravanamuttoo says his bike is his preferred method of transportation.

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Mayoral candidate Neil Saravanamuttoo at a campaign event in September. Photo by Jean Levac /POSTMEDIA

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Saravanamuttoo cut his political teeth as an economic adviser to Catherine McKenney in the 2022 mayoral campaign, where the popular Somerset ward councillor led many of the opinion polls, but ultimately lost the race to Mark Sutcliffe.

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“That was my first foray into getting involved in political campaign, and so I saw some of what worked and what didn’t work, and I’ve been able to take some of those lessons into this campaign,” he says.

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“I thought the personal connection of that (McKenney) campaign worked well, and really trying to make it into more of a movement as opposed to just your everyday campaign. That was very effective.”

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He’s been building that movement for years as an outside critic of municipal affairs, holding regular town hall meetings with his CitySHAPES organization and hosting a roundtable podcast with former City Hall journalists Jon Willing and Joanne Chianello.

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Saravanamuttoo suspended the Better Ottawa podcast after he registered to run for mayor and with Chianello running for the Kitchissippi council seat vacated by Jeff Leiper for his own mayoral run.

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Keen observers of the city’s many committee meetings would recognize Saravanamuttoo from his numerous public delegations, where he’s used his allotted five-minute timeslot to speak out against everything from the controversial Tewin development in the city’s rural east to the fierce public debate over the Lansdowne 2.0 redevelopment, where he took a central role.

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“I’ve delegated on a whole range of other issues, transportation issues, environmental issues, and I became what many people at council would call one of the frequent flyers,” he says.