Montreal Road: Why the Salvation Army's Shelter Plan Had to Go
What are the lessons for Rideau Rockcliffe?
The Salvation Army has announced that its controversial shelter project on Montreal Road will not move ahead as originally proposed.
Rising costs have forced what community advocates have been arguing for years: that this wasn't the right solution in the first place.
I want to be clear, this isn't about being against helping people who are experiencing homelessness. It's about insisting we do better than warehousing them. The Problem Was Never Shelter When the Salvation Army first proposed this project back in 2017, it was massive: a 350-bed shelter in Vanier. When the scope was later reduced to 211 beds, the fundamental issue remained the same. We were looking at concentrating large numbers of people experiencing homelessness in one location, creating what amounts to a social services ghetto rather than a genuine solution.
The community got this right from the start. Drew Dobson and the folks at SOS Vanier, the Vanier Business Improvement Area, and many others said the same thing: shelters aren't a solution. They're a Band-Aid. They warehouse people rather than housing them. Housing Works Better We've known this for a while now. Last week, the Shepherds of Good Hope announced they're moving in the right direction—replacing their emergency shelter with supportive housing.
Their leadership understands what evidence shows: people in stable housing have better outcomes.
They can address addiction, mental health, and employment in an environment that actually supports recovery and reintegration.
That's what we need more of. Not bigger shelters. Not more concentrated services in a single neighborhood. Housing with supports. Real solutions that treat people with dignity and give them a foundation to rebuild their lives. The Real Path Forward Now that the Salvation Army's original plan is off the table, we have an opportunity.
VANIER'S local councillor has made it clear: any future project on this site should focus on housing, not shelter beds. I absolutely agree.
This is what good advocacy looks like, Community members speaking up, year after year, even when they're being told they're in the minority. And eventually, the facts and the arguments catch up. You can't build a healthy neighborhood by concentrating poverty and homelessness in one location and calling it a service hub. If we're serious about addressing homelessness in Ottawa, we need to commit to housing-first approaches. We need distributed supportive housing throughout the city. We need wraparound services that follow people into their homes, not institutions designed to manage them in one place.
The Salvation Army will likely return with a revised proposal. When they do, the community needs to stay engaged and insist on housing.
Not warehousing. Not ghettos. Housing. That's not just good policy it's the right thing to do.
───
What do you think the next steps should be for the Montreal Road site? Have your say in the comments below.
815 St. Laurent is in danger. School Boards need money to run the complex and the space is under utilized. Do not be complacent or they might "Lansdowne" the place.
The existing community resource center at 815 St Laurent already serves as a anchor for social services in Ward 13. Expanding it into a full recreation hub would:
Create jobs and programming opportunities
Reduce barriers to wellness for lower-income residents
Provide safe, supervised spaces for youth
Serve as a true community "third space" beyond home and work
imagine a new community arena, indoor soccer and amenities at 815 st Laurent Blvd
Rideau Community Hub.
What would a modern community arena complex look like?
Imagine what a modern Rideau-Rockcliffe Community Arena could look like at that location.
Here's what this integrated facility might include:
Core Facilities
Indoor Soccer Complex
A full-size regulation field with professional-grade lighting and climate control, available for competitive leagues, recreational play, and youth development programs. Perfect for a community that wants year-round soccer access regardless of weather.
Multi-Purpose Fitness Center — Flexible space for group fitness classes, strength training, and community wellness programs.
Could include equipment for diverse fitness levels and free/subsidized memberships for residents.
Aquatic Center — Swimming pool(s) for competitive training, swim lessons for children, and water-based fitness classes—addressing a gap in the Vanier/Rideau-Rockcliffe area.
Community Amenities
Youth Programs Hub —
After-school activities, skill development, and mentorship programs serving the neighborhood's young people (the Resource Centre already focuses heavily on youth).
Community Café — Social gathering space for families to connect, reducing isolation and building neighborhood bonds alongside food access programs.
Accessible Design — Ground-level entry, accessible parking, barrier-free facilities (important given the existing food bank and vulnerable population served).
Why This Location Works
There may be less time than you think to do something!
The existing community resource center at 815 St Laurent already serves as a anchor for social services the Ward. The old Rideau High School site at 815 St. Laurent Blvd is within Rideau-Rockcliffe, and councillor King's office refers to it as the "St-Laurent Complex" in newsletters.
The school closed in 2017 after OCDSB shut it (and five others) due to declining enrolment, with students redirected to Gloucester High.
Rather than sit empty, it was converted into the Rideau Community Hub and the Rideau-Rockcliffe Community Resource Centre became anchor tenant.
immigration support,taxes, public use kitchen, computers
Inuit arts programming (Isaruit), elder services, and
rentable community space.
The gym is locked up The auditorium is un air-conditioned, the cafeteria is locked up. The building is by and large unfulfilled in potential. There is a volunteer board.
Ottawa Carlton District School Board OCDSB still owns the building; it never went to private sale.
On the soccer-field question specifically: there is a "Sports Field" on the grounds, listed as a venue by community groups (the Council on Aging has used it for a fundraising walk, for instance).
It's actively used as a soccer pitch . but more as a generic green space used for community events than a maintained, bookable soccer field in the way New Edinburgh Park or Rockcliffe Park PS's field are.
Because the grounds space isn't being put to organized sports use, that's arguably a missed opportunity given the capacity gap and a school board property that's already publicly owned and centrally located in the ward.
One thing worth flagging
As of February 2026, OCDSB's provincially-appointed supervisor (Bob Plamondon) has been directing staff to move quickly on selling off "unused" board properties, and that's already drawn criticism from a city councillor and an MPP for happening without trustee or municipal consultation.
There is no confirmation that 815 St. Laurent is specifically on that disposition list. The named properties so far are elsewhere (e.g., the former Grant Alternative School) — but given the board's posture toward "legacy structures," it's the kind of citywide pattern that could eventually touch the Rideau Hub site too, especially since it still costs the board $200,000–$300,000/year to operate per the original 2017 figures.
The backyard is used as a day care and community garden.
Inside is an unused gym, an unairconditioned auditorium, a large cafeteria area.
This space seems to be in good condition.
And as usual
Demand open data.
Demand accountability.
Vote for people who actually have experience running things.
This time around, inform yourselves, vote differently, vote wisely. Vote for Peter Karwacki for Rideau Rockcliffe
1. I support the new east end crossing
2. I advocate for sensible public washroom strategy
3. I am advocating for animation of the JetForm Park
4. I am advocating for true open data
5. I am advocating for increased use of Artificial Intelligence
6. I am advocating for physical seperation in bike routes
7. We are different candidates, I offer different skills and abilities. I am a professional project manager and administrator. King is a pandering communicator.
8. If elected I will not run again. I want to get in and get stuff done, then get out.
9. Get those 18 wheelers out of the downtown.
10. Noise control
11. Road repair.
12. North South cohesion
Now it's up to you to act on this.
Let me know what you think. Invite me to your hood!
peterkarwacki.overbrook@gmail.com
This time around, vote differently, vote wisely, vote for Peter Karwacki for Rideau Rockcliffe .
OC Transpo: A National Capital That Can't Operate Its Own Transit System
Ottawa has a million people. We have one of the biggest geographic footprints for city services in Canada. And we cannot, for some reason, manage a reliable transit system.
This is not a failure of transit. It's a failure of governance.
The Structure of Failure
Here's what happened. We had buses. They worked—imperfectly, but they got people where they needed to go. Then someone/group decided: light rail is the answer.
They were wrong, but not in the way you might think.
The problem wasn't the LRT itself. The problem was that bus service was cut before the LRT was proven to work. They made a strategic decision based on a theory. When the theory fell apart, and it did, people had nowhere else to go.
This is what happens when non-transit people make transit decisions. You remove your safety net before testing the new one. It's not good risk management. It is negligent.
An ex-driver said it plainly: "I have no idea why the same management team has been in place for all these repeated failures." That's the real question. Why? And the answer is: because voters re elect incumbents rather than hold them accountable.
The Transparency Problem
Go ahead. Try to find OC Transpo's daily activity log. Try to pull their action items, timelines, pass-fail marks. Try to understand why vehicles are degrading until they're no longer serviceable, which is what happens when maintenance gets deferred.
You can't. It's not public. Operations are not transparent. There's a black box between the taxpayer and the service rather than clarity.
This is the opening for real change: demand open data.
Not just budget numbers but
daily performance logs,
maintenance schedules,
repair costs,
on-time performance by route,
customer complaint data,
internal recommendations from drivers that were ignored.
All of it.
Why ignored? Because you get a system where:
Management doesn't listen to drivers
Union protects members without fixing actual problems
Failures happen in the dark
New operators inherit the same broken culture with fresh paint on the org chart
The Midnight Service Gap (And What It Says About Priorities)
The O-Train runs until 2 a.m. Buses stop by 11 p.m.
If you work a late shift heading to Innes, Tenth Line, or Mer Blue, OC Transpo's official recommendation is: use Uber.
Let me be clear about what this is:
the city is already outsourcing public transit to private ride-sharing for people who can't afford it.
That's not efficient transit planning. That's a subsidy for people who do have alternatives, paid for by people who don't.
Buses should run every 45 minutes until the trains stop. Not at peak demand—just running. Because shift work doesn't stop at 11 p.m. and public transit shouldn't either.
This is the decision you make when you've stopped thinking about equity and started thinking about schedules.
Who This Hurts Most
Here's the math:
Youth: No car, can't get to jobs or university
Seniors: Can't drive, can't afford Uber, stuck
People with disabilities: Unreliable transit = unreliable independence
Newcomers: Unfamiliar with driving, dependent on public transport
Low-wage workers: Parking downtown costs $15–20/day. That's 20% of an $8/hour wage.
When the system fails, these people aren't just late. They miss job opportunities. They miss medical appointments. They don't go to school. They stop participating in the city.
And nobody tracks it. There's no public health data showing the cost of this in missed healthcare appointments. No economic data showing lost job prospects. Just anecdotes from people's lives that don't appear in council spreadsheets.
The $418.8 Million Question
While transit collapses, council approved $418.8 million for Lansdowne 2.0. A project phased to start in 2031. With 40-storey towers in a neighborhood already strangled by traffic and absent transit.
One resident after attending a downtown event gave up: "We drove and parked instead. We get home much earlier."
That's not a data point about parking preference. That's evidence that public transit has lost the city's downtown users. When reliable transit would create economy, we build towers instead.
This is the choice that happens when decision-makers aren't transit-dependent. They build what they want, not what the city needs.
Why Management Keeps Failing
The mayor has limited administrative experience running a city of a million people. It shows. Council members make decisions about transit without transit expertise. It shows harder.
And when failures stack up—wheels and tracks that don't work together, LRT sitting idle while tracks rust, express routes cut while the rail isn't ready—the response is: offer two free weekends of transit to people who commute weekdays.
That's not compensation.
What Actually Needs to Happen
MetroLinx or some other operator will take over OC Transpo soon. New coat of paint. Same broken system.
Before that happens, demand this:
Open data mandate — Daily activity logs, maintenance records, service performance, driver recommendations (the ones management rejected), cost per route, everything accessible online.
Synchronized service — Buses and trains working together, including after midnight for shift workers. Every 45 minutes minimum.
Driver expertise — Drivers have spent years experiencing this system. Stop ignoring them. Document their recommendations, publish the response.
No more false choices — Stop forcing people to choose between reliable transit and affordable housing. Stop subsidizing Uber for people who have no other option.
Leadership that knows what it's doing — We need people running this city who have actually managed complex systems. Not amateurs learning the job.
The Real Cost
It's not just that you're late to work. It's that transit has become infrastructure for sorting people: those who can afford alternatives, and those who can't.
A sustainable economy needs a functional public transit system. Not just for environmental benefits, we're building a city that's accessible to people who lack money.
Ottawa can do better. Is Leary the guy? Start with transparency, accountability, and someone finally admitting that the same management team has failed—repeatedly—and needs to change.
Demand open data. Demand accountability. Vote for people who actually have experience running things.
This time around, inform yourselves, vote differently, vote wisely. Vote for Peter Karwacki for Rideau Rockcliffe
When "Neutral" Isn't: Rideau-Rockcliffe's Community Associations and the Incumbent's Free Pass
There's a phrase that gets used a lot in civic life: "we're staying neutral." Community associations love it. It signals fairness, evenhandedness, a refusal to play favourites in an election.
These are volunteers. They mean well. "Lord, forgive them, they know not what they do."
Neutrality is a choice made through action, not just through words — and the choices being made by community associations across Rideau-Rockcliffe this campaign season are anything but neutral in effect even if they may think so.
Here's what's happening. The incumbent councillor, King, has had multiple opportunities to meet with these associations — repeat visits, ongoing conversations, relationships built over a full term in office and reinforced again during the campaign.
The challenger, so far only me, the people asking voters to consider something different are being offered exactly one shared opportunity: a single debate.
One meeting, for everyone running against the incumbent, to do what the incumbent has already done several times over.
That's not neutrality. That's a structural head start, dressed up as fairness because it technically offers "equal" access to the one event that exists. But equal access to a single, constrained event is not equal access. It's a fig leaf.
The five-minute rule
And it gets worse once you look at how that one debate tends to be run. "You have five minutes to answer" sounds organized.
It sounds fair — the same clock for everyone. But rigid timing rules like this don't create a level playing field; they create a format that rewards whoever already has the most practiced, most repeated, most pre-tested answers.
That's the incumbent, every time. They've answered these questions before — in committee, in council, in the associations' own previous meetings with them. A challenger encountering many of these issues for the first time in public needs room to think out loud, to push back, to actually engage — not a buzzer.
Real dialogue needs follow-up questions. It needs the ability to challenge a vague or evasive answer. It needs more than one room and more than one association's blessing.
What we get instead is a format that — intentionally or not — protects the status quo: minimize exposure, minimize spontaneity, minimize the risk that a challenger says something compelling enough to move votes.
How incumbency advantage actually gets built
This is how it happens , not through one dramatic, unfair act, but through a dozen small structural ones.
Name recognition.
Established relationships.
Inside access.
And now, the gatekeeping of the very venues meant to inform voters.
Community associations occupy a strange and powerful position in municipal politics.
They're not the media. They're not the city. But for a lot of residents, they're the most trusted source of information about who's running and what they stand for.
That trust comes with responsibility. When an association grants the incumbent unlimited access while rationing challengers to a single, tightly controlled forum, it isn't staying out of the election. It's shaping the outcome.
What would actually be fair
None of this requires an association to endorse anyone. It just requires a few honest changes:
Offer challengers the same number of meetings, and the same kind of access, that the incumbent gets not symbolically, but actually.
If one debate is truly all that's feasible, design it for substance instead of stage management: real time for follow-up questions, real time for rebuttal, real time to actually compare candidates instead of just clocking them.
Be transparent about why access has looked so lopsided and fix it before the next campaign, not after voters have already made up their minds with half the information.
It's no wonder incumbents win so disproportionately when the institutions meant to inform voters keep handing them the microphone and handing everyone else a stopwatch.
This is why King's resignation from OPS is so infuriating to me. He took credit for his work on OPS yet quit when the going got tough. He had an opportunity to make changes but went to the Buffet instead.
But who knew, who even bothered to watch? This is the only debate Rogers removed from its library.
https://youtu.be/5ruPIt2fzXw?feature=shared
This time around, inform yourselves, vote differently, vote wisely, vote for Peter Karwacki for Rideau Rockcliffe
It's that time of year again. Diplomas are being handed out, caps are being tossed in the air, and for many young people in Rideau-Rockcliffe, a dangerous thought is creeping in: I'm done. I've finished school. For some, that feeling of relief is well-earned and the next chapter of learning is already planned. But for others, June marks the moment they quietly decide to stop — and that decision can follow them for the rest of their lives.
The career you will work in probably does not currently exist!
Some may falsely believe they can use bad habits and unexamined thinking to get to some place better than where they are now.
They won't.
Wishful thinking is not a strategy — but education is!
The data makes this undeniably clear. Your wellness, your healthiness, is directly linked to your disposable income. Higher-income Canadians are 29 percentage points more likely to describe their health as excellent or very good compared to lower-income Canadians — and that gap is growing. In Canada, individuals in lower-income brackets have significantly shorter life expectancies compared to those in higher-income brackets. It's not just physical health either. Research demonstrates that Canadians living in the lowest income group were three to four times more likely than those in the highest income group to report their mental health as fair to poor.
The more money you have, the healthier you will be. That's not an opinion — it's a documented reality in this country.
And the statistics are just as clear on what drives income: education.
University graduates aged 25 to 34 in Canada earned an average of $18,868 more per year than similarly aged high school graduates — and that gap only grows with time, reaching $52,782 more per year for those aged 55 to 64. Over a working life, the median cumulative earnings difference over a 15-year period was $568,748 higher for male bachelor's degree holders than for high school graduates, and $472,270 higher for women. That's not a small edge — that's the difference between financial security and financial stress.
If you are a young member of Rideau-Rockcliffe, you need to understand this: staying in school and getting as much training and certification as you can is not optional — it is the single most proven investment you can make in yourself. Spending time in school rather than in the labour market, and acquiring debt to do so, is an investment that appears to pay off for most graduates, with cumulative earnings far greater than the cost of that education.
So before you let this June be the last one you spend as a student, think carefully. Education is your ticket to employment, to a career, and ultimately to good health. The numbers prove it.
Now it's up to you to act on them.
Let me know what you think. Invite me to your hood!
peterkarwacki.overbrook@gmail.com
This time around, vote differently, vote wisely, vote for Peter Karwacki for Rideau Rockcliffe.
