#427 For the "How" - I' m your man

Ward 13 — Rideau-Rockcliffe Candidate — Peter Karwacki Election — October 2026

Project Charter · Draft for Public Comment

Knowing the What Isn't the Job.

I can tell you what needs to change in this city. So can a lot of people. The job is getting a hundred different departments, contractors, and residents to actually move — and that's a different skill entirely.

Sponsor

Residents of Rideau-Rockcliffe

Method

ADKAR change management

Candidate background

PMP · Data Analyst · 13 yrs, IBM/Cognos

Status

In progress — see case log below

Opening argument

Every council in Ottawa's history has known what needed to happen. Fewer of them have known how to make it happen — through staff who don't report to them, contractors who don't answer to voters, and departments that operate on their own clocks. That gap has a name in project management. It's the whole reason a framework like ADKAR exists.

I'm a certified Project Management Professional. I trained as a data analyst. I spent thirteen years at IBM and Cognos learning, in practice, that a good plan and a delivered plan are two entirely different projects. Ottawa's council chamber is full of good plans. This city's actual record — on transit, on infrastructure, on oversight — is a record of the second project going sideways.

This post does three things: explains the framework I use to think about this, shows exactly where it's breaking down in Ward 13 right now, and lays out what running the "how" would actually look like.

Part One — The Framework

ADKAR isn't a slogan. It's a sequence, and every step is a place to fail.

ADKAR breaks organizational change into five stages a person — or a city — has to pass through, in order, before a change actually sticks. Skip a stage and the change doesn't happen; it just gets announced.

ADKAR's five stages, staged ascending — and where three live Ward 13 files actually stall.

Awareness and Desire are the easy stages, politically. They're a press release and a vote. Knowledge, Ability, and Reinforcement are the hard ones — they require someone to sit in the room with the people actually doing the work, build the capacity to do it, and check back later to make sure it didn't quietly slide backward. That's not a communications job. It's a delivery job. It's the job I've done for a living.

Part Two — The Case Log

Where Ward 13's own files stall — and who's supposed to be pushing them

These aren't hypotheticals. They're three open files in this ward, each one stuck at a different late-stage ADKAR gate, each one sitting on a desk that reports, one way or another, to your councillor.

03Stalls at Knowledge

Transit oversight without a seat at the table

Councillor King has made repeated public calls for stronger LRT oversight. But across his full tenure, he has never sat on the Transit Commission or the Light Rail Subcommittee — the two bodies where the operational knowledge that makes oversight real actually lives.

You can't build the "how" of fixing a rail system from outside the room where the rail system's problems get explained. Awareness and Desire, repeated in a newsletter. Knowledge, never acquired.

04Stalls at Ability

A tunnel with a five-year-old warning, still not fixed

The St-Laurent LRT station tunnel had "urgent" structural inspection findings flagged in 2020. The follow-up inspection in 2022 was skipped. As of this writing, repair is still years out, even as the risk has been described in the City's own tendering documents as ongoing and serious — and the pre-tender estimate is a floor, not a ceiling.

The station sits in Ward 13. Councillor King has made no public statement on it. Knowing a tunnel needs fixing is Awareness. Funding, staffing, and scheduling the fix is Ability — and that's the stage where this file has sat, unmoved, for years.

Pre-tender estimate: ~$9.5M · Warning age: 5+ years

05Stalls at Reinforcement

"Not robust," and nothing built to fix it

Ottawa's Auditor General has flagged the Ottawa Police Service's database-misuse auditing as inadequate — the Chief's own word for it was "not robust." That's a known problem with a known, off-the-shelf technical fix: anomaly detection on access logs is not exotic technology in 2026.

Councillor King sat on the Police Services Board and resigned from it in 2022, vouching for the board's competence on the way out. The safe workplace program's budget has since been cut from $8.2M to $5.4M. A known gap, publicly acknowledged, with no reinforcement mechanism built to close it and keep it closed.

Safe workplace budget: $8.2M (2022) → $5.4M (current)

Three files. Three different late-stage failures. One common thread: nobody stayed in the room long enough to do the unglamorous part.

Part Three — Running the How

What "getting things done through others" actually looks like on council

This isn't a promise to work harder. It's a specific method, applied to specific files, with the same discipline I'd apply to any delivery project — because that's what a council term is.

A —
Awareness

Make the liabilities visible, on one page, every quarter

A consolidated liability statement — on- and off-balance-sheet, OMERS, the infrastructure gap, Hydro Ottawa's own debt — published on a fixed cycle instead of assembled by residents from scattered financial statements.

D —
Desire

Tie a funding source to every debt motion, no exceptions

Council votes for things constantly. A standing rule that no debt motion passes without a named funding source attached forces the "want to do this" stage to actually confront the "how we pay for it" stage, on the record, before the vote.

K —
Knowledge

Sit on the committees where the operational knowledge lives

Transit Commission. Light Rail Subcommittee. The bodies where you actually learn how the system works before you claim to oversee it. Not optional, not a newsletter substitute.

A —
Ability

Fix the 311 pipeline so tickets connect to projects

Modify 311 itself — GPS-aware project lookup, ticket-to-project linking at creation — instead of building a parallel app. Reuse the budget and the users the City already has. That's how 123,000 orphaned tickets stop becoming a bulk-closure story.

R —
Reinforcement

A standing accountability motion, every budget cycle, plus a sunset clause

A quarterly infrastructure-gap tracker. A recurring liability accountability motion. A four-year sunset review on major liability decisions. Reinforcement is what stops a fix from quietly reverting once the press release cycle moves on.

Closing argument

A council seat is, functionally, an executive delivery role: you don't do the work yourself, you get a hundred people who don't report to you to do it, on schedule, and you keep checking that it stuck. That's the job I've done for thirteen years, under a name — change management — that most councils have never once applied to themselves.

Knowing the what has never been Ottawa's problem. This ward has a five-year-old tunnel warning, a transit file nobody with a vote has ever really studied, and a police audit gap everyone agrees is "not robust" and nobody has funded a fix for, to prove it.

The nomination deadline is August 21.

If this is the kind of oversight you want in Ward 13, the fastest way to help is to make sure you're registered to vote in October — and to keep asking your councillor which ADKAR stage any given promise is actually at.

Read more at the campaign blog

Peter Karwacki · Candidate, Ward 13 (Rideau-Rockcliffe) · Ottawa Municipal Election, October 2026

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#426 2001: A Placement Oddity

Look, there's  shitter in the middle of the road!

Am I the only candidate asking for a city wide policy on public washrooms? 

Now, 2026: An outplacement oddity

Praised, Then Gone: What the BMDA's Leadership Churn Says About Its Governance

The ByWard Market District Authority has now gone through two executive directors in under a year. One stepped down. One was fired without explanation, seven months after the board publicly praised her fit for the job. Neither departure came with real accountability to the people the Market actually serves.

The pattern

Zachary Dayler, the BMDA's founding executive director, stepped down in September 2025 after roughly five years leading the organization (first as ByWard Market BIA, then through the 2023 merger into the BMDA). The board launched a national search through Odgers Canada. Victoria Williston — the BMDA's own communications and marketing manager at the time — put her name forward and got the job in January 2026.

The board's announcement left no ambiguity about how it felt:

"Victoria brings a strong understanding of the ByWard Market and the broader civic environment in which it operates. She has demonstrated an ability to balance strategic thinking with sound governance and a clear commitment to public service. The Board is confident that her leadership aligns well with the organization's priorities."
— Sandy Smallwood, BMDA board chair, January 2026

Seven months later, Williston was terminated. Board spokesperson Suzanne Valiquet called it "an internal and private matter" and said the board would not comment further. No cause was given, publicly or otherwise.

Williston did not treat it as a firing in her own account. Her LinkedIn post the following Saturday read like a departure announcement, not a termination notice — crediting her team, listing the Carré ByWard Square opening and the Night Ambassador Program relaunch as wins, and closing with plans to take the rest of the summer off before sharing "what comes next" in the fall.

Two different exits, one shared problem

It's worth being precise here: Dayler's departure and Williston's are not the same kind of event. Dayler stepped down. Williston was let go by board decision. Collapsing the two into "back-to-back firings" would overstate what's actually on the record.

But the precision cuts the other way too. What the two departures do share is this: an organization now on its second unplanned leadership transition in under a year, governed by a board that answers to no one on council and explains itself to no one when it moves. Whether an executive director leaves voluntarily or is pushed out, the residents and businesses who live with the BMDA's decisions get the same thing either time — a closed door and a press release.

The board that praised her is the board that won't explain itself

The dissonance is the story. In January, the board chair went out of his way to vouch for Williston's judgment, her grasp of "the broader civic environment," her "commitment to public service." In August, the same board terminated her and declined to say why — not to the public, and, by Councillor Stéphanie Plante's account, not even to the ward's own elected representative before it happened.

"I actually didn't know until yesterday, so it's not a decision that I made. It wasn't one that would have been made in consultation with me because I'm not on the board."
— Coun. Stéphanie Plante (Rideau-Vanier), whose ward includes the Market

That's not a knock on Plante. It's a description of how the BMDA is built: a municipal services corporation whose board can hire, praise, and fire its top executive with no binding obligation to tell the one council member whose constituents actually live with the results.

Structural, not personal

Barry Padolsky, the architect and longtime ByWard Market preservation advocate, read the firing the same way — as a symptom, not an isolated personnel decision:

"It seems that the dismissal of the appointment of the executive director seems to be a way of admitting that there is a problem… the ByWard Market District Authority isn't structurally set up to be able to be more widely consultative about its mandate."

That tracks with what businesses and residents in the Market have been saying for months: a Business Advisory Committee that's shrunk from seven members to three, decisions made without meaningful notice, and a governance model that formally excludes merchants and property owners from voting seats. Williston spent part of the summer publicly defending that structure. She's no longer there to defend it, and the structure hasn't changed.

What this actually asks of Ward 13's next council seat

The BMDA isn't going away, and its 200th-anniversary year for the Market is coming up in 2027 whether its leadership is stable or not. Two EDs in a year, a board that won't explain a termination, and a ward councillor's seat with no vote is not a governance model that self-corrects. It's one that needs a council seat willing to ask, in public, the questions the board isn't volunteering answers to:

• What was the actual reason for Williston's termination — performance, direction, or a board-level disagreement she was caught in the middle of?
• Why does the ward councillor's BMDA seat carry no vote, and should that change before the next leadership transition?
• Is the Business Advisory Committee's shrinkage from seven members to three being addressed, or is it being treated as a footnote?
• What does the board's search process for a third executive director in under two years look like, and will it include real consultation with vendors and residents this time?

An organization that praises its own hire in January and fires her without explanation in August isn't demonstrating strategic thinking. It's demonstrating exactly the consultation gap its critics have been pointing at all year — just with a new name attached to it.

#425 Inform yourselves! Then Vote Differently and Wisely

 

The portion of the 2022 debate. Rogers removed it from its catalogue for some reason.

Inform yourselves. Vote differentl and wisely. Vote for Peter Karwacki for Rideau Rockcliffe.

#424 Out and about by bike

 

The good bike intersection

By comparison

Coventry and St. Laurent

What a mess.

#423 We Need Parking and we need Housing

 

Council is being asked to approve a fixed zoning envelope today based on a transit network that may exist tomorrow, with the actual parking and transportation management plan deferred to a later stage that isn't binding.

Ottawa Is Asking Council to Approve 1,505 Homes on a Station That Doesn't Exist Yet

A staff report going to Planning and Housing Committee this week shows how far a zoning approval can get on an assumption nobody has funded, designed, or committed to build.

On August 19, Planning and Housing Committee will consider a Zoning By-law Amendment (File ACS2026-PDB-PSX-0040) for 530 Brisebois Crescent and part of 265 Centrum Boulevard in Orléans Town Centre. The ask: four high-rise towers between 30 and 40 storeys, plus a nine-storey mid-rise, for a combined 1,505 residential units. Staff recommend approval. Council votes August 26.

This isn't a Ward 13 file. But it's worth reading closely, because it's a clean example of a pattern that shows up across this city's biggest approvals: a plan gets sold on the strength of infrastructure that is planned, hoped for, or simply assumed — not infrastructure that is funded, designed, or under construction. The gap between those two things is where residents end up absorbing the risk.

The Number That Does All the Work

The application proposes zero resident vehicle parking. Not reduced parking — none. Just 136 visitor spaces and 753 bicycle spaces for 1,505 units.

That's legally allowed. Provincial changes to the Planning Act (Bill 185, 2024) bar municipalities from requiring vehicle parking inside a Protected Major Transit Station Area, and these lands qualify. Staff can't impose a minimum even if they wanted to.

But "the City can't require it" and "the plan works without it" are two different claims, and the report leans on the second one without earning it.

The applicant's own Transportation Impact Assessment reports observed driver mode share of 54% (AM peak) and 61% (PM peak) for existing Orléans high-rise residential buildings — that is, the real, measured behaviour of people already living in towers in this part of the city. The applicant then discounts that down to a projected 40% driver share for this development, and the entire reduction rides on one thing: a future Orléans Town Centre LRT station, positioned as the development's walking-distance rapid transit connection.

That station does not have a design. It does not have committed funding. It does not have a construction timeline. The TIA itself describes it only as part of the City's "Needs-Based Transit Network" — a planning category, not a project.

Strip the assumed station out, and the applicant's own study says the real number is 55% driver share, producing an estimated 180 to 200 additional peak-hour vehicle trips. Even with the future station baked in, the TIA still projects that roughly half of all resident trips will involve a private vehicle. Without it, that climbs to roughly 65%.

Read that again: the study supporting a zero-parking design still expects half its residents to be driving, under the best-case assumption. The zoning isn't betting that people won't own cars. It's betting that somewhere else will absorb where those cars go.

"Somewhere Else" Has a Name

Eliminating a parking requirement doesn't eliminate parking demand. It relocates it. In this case: the 136 visitor spaces, nearby commercial lots, surrounding public streets, and a roughly 30-space community centre lot that's supposed to serve the whole neighbourhood — all become the default overflow for a 1,505-unit development's residents.

A community centre parking lot that's been colonized by residential overflow parking doesn't function as a community centre lot anymore. Neither do a business's customer spaces. This isn't a hypothetical; it's the predictable mechanical result of putting the car somewhere when zoning says it can't be under the building.

The Unit Mix Cuts the Other Way

Of the 1,505 proposed units, 647 are two-bedroom and 159 are three-bedroom, plus ground-floor townhouses. That's a family-weighted mix, not a downtown-studio mix. Families are statistically more likely to need vehicle access — for childcare, groceries, medical appointments, caregiving, work that isn't reachable by a 15-minute LRT walkshed. A zero-parking design makes more sense for a building full of young singles near a subway platform than it does for a development explicitly designed, per the City's own large-household intensification targets, to house families.

Site Plan Control Is Being Asked to Fix What Zoning Should Decide

The staff report states plainly that "the final parking supply and Transportation Demand Management program will be addressed through future Site Plan Control applications." Meanwhile, Council is being asked to approve the entire building envelope — heights, massing, unit count, zero-parking framework — right now, at the zoning stage.

That's a sequencing problem. Zoning approval is largely irreversible. You cannot easily retrofit parking structure into a 40-storey tower once it's built. The mechanism that's supposed to manage the development's single biggest operational risk hasn't been designed yet, and Council is being asked to lock in the envelope before it exists.

The Design Panel's Objection Got a Non-Answer

The Urban Design Review Panel recommended cutting the nine-storey Centrum Boulevard building down to six storeys, to better match street scale and ease the transition to the 30-storey corner tower. The applicant declined, and the stated reason was that nine storeys "aligns with what is permitted in the Secondary Plan."

That's true, but it isn't a rebuttal. "It's allowed" answers a legal question. It doesn't answer the design question the panel actually raised, which was about street-level scale, not the ceiling set by policy.

What the Ward Councillor Actually Said

To be clear about what's not being disputed here: Councillor Luloff's own comment in the report supports the density, the height, and the Hub/transit-oriented-development policy direction for this site. His objection is narrower and, frankly, harder to argue with — that Council is being asked to approve a fixed zoning envelope today based on a transit network that may exist tomorrow, with the actual parking and transportation management plan deferred to a later stage that isn't binding.

His office reports receiving more than 1,000 comments on this file. Planning decisions shouldn't be a show of hands. But when the volume of concern and the substance of the concern point at the same specific number — the assumed 40% driver share resting on an unfunded station — that's worth Council's attention before a vote, not after.

The Ask

Nobody needs to relitigate whether this site should hold density, or whether Orléans Town Centre should build up near transit. The Secondary Plan already answered that, and the answer is yes. The question on the table August 26 is narrower: should Council lock in a zero-parking envelope on the strength of a station that has no design, no funding, and no timeline — while leaving the actual parking and transportation management plan to a future stage that hasn't been written yet?

A more defensible path exists: approve the density and height as proposed, and require the Transportation Demand Management program and a binding parking-overflow mitigation plan to be settled before the zoning takes final effect — not after, at Site Plan Control, once the envelope is already locked in.

---

Source: City of Ottawa Planning and Housing Committee report, File ACS2026-PDB-PSX-0040, submitted August 13, 2026. Full report and supporting documents available via the City's Development Application Search Tool.

#422 Hold the Line on LRT testing!

Before the East Extension Opens: Ottawa Needs to Hold the Line on Testing

Peter Karwacki · Candidate for Ward 13 (Rideau–Rockcliffe)

OC Transpo confirmed this week that it's in “final preparations” for trial running on the O-Train East Extension — the 12.5-kilometre link from Blair to Trim Road that Orléans commuters have been waiting years for. There's still no opening date. Trial running itself has to run at least 21 consecutive days without major faults before the line can carry passengers.

That's a good moment to ask a question this city has answered badly before: what happens when the trains don't perform?

We already know the answer

In 2019, Ottawa's original Confederation Line was supposed to prove itself over 15 trains running a full schedule for 12 consecutive days. It didn't come close. Rather than let the line fail the test, the City quietly lowered the bar — dropping to 13 trains, and no longer requiring the days to be consecutive. Even that reduced standard wasn't cleanly met: one scorecard from the trial period showed the system failing at roughly 73 percent. The line opened anyway.

The Ottawa Light Rail Transit Public Inquiry later found this wasn't a technical judgment call — it was a decision made under political pressure, communicated privately, and kept from the rest of council while the trial was underway. Then-Transit Commission Chair Allan Hubley was part of a small group — alongside the City Manager, the Mayor, and OC Transpo's general manager — who discussed testing failures over WhatsApp without briefing the councillors and citizen transit commissioners who were supposed to be providing oversight. When the report came out in 2022, colleagues on council called on Hubley to resign. He didn't, and he remains on council today.

This is the precedent the East Extension is testing against. Not “will the trains work” — that's an engineering question. The accountability question is whether the City will tell the public honestly if they don't, or quietly move the goalposts again.

How council answered the accountability question — in public, on the record

When Coun. Catherine McKenney brought forward a motion for a full judicial inquiry into the LRT, it was defeated 13–10. That vote is worth revisiting now, because it's the clearest record of where every sitting councillor stood on public accountability for this file.

Nov. 10, 2021 · McKenney's motion for a judicial inquiry into the LRT was defeated 13–10.

How every councillor voted, Nov. 10, 2021. Rawlson King (Ward 13) and Allan Hubley are highlighted.

Two names on that list matter directly to Ward 13 voters.

Rawlson King voted Yes. He supported the judicial inquiry — the harder, more public, more accountable route to getting answers about the LRT's failures. That's on the record, and it deserves to be said plainly: on this vote, King was on the side of transparency, not against it.

Allan Hubley voted No — and turned out to be one of the people the inquiry found had personally withheld testing information from the rest of council. His seat on the transit file, and his refusal to resign after the inquiry report, is the clearest illustration of what happens when “no” votes on accountability motions turn out to matter later.

What this means for the East Extension, right now

Council doesn't get a do-over on Line 1. It does get a chance to apply the lesson to the East Extension, while trial running is still ahead of us instead of behind us. Three concrete asks, all grounded in what the inquiry documented:

1. Publish the trial-running pass/fail criteria before testing starts, not after. The 2019 fiasco happened partly because the target moved mid-test without public notice. There's no reason the 2026 criteria can't be public from day one.
2. Report any change to the criteria to council and the public in real time, not in a memo after the line has already opened. If reliability targets are adjusted mid-trial, residents should hear about it the week it happens.
3. Name who has the authority to approve a criteria change, and require that decision to go through council rather than being settled in a private channel between senior staff.

None of this asks OC Transpo to be perfect. It asks the City not to repeat the specific failure the inquiry already spent years documenting: quiet decisions, kept quiet, until it was too late to matter.

Orléans and the east end have waited long enough for this line. They shouldn't have to wonder, a second time, whether “passed testing” actually means what it says.

— Peter Karwacki, candidate for Ward 13 (Rideau–Rockcliffe)

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#421 Just the basics at the pond please

  

Basic Equipment. That's the Whole Ask.

McKay Pond, Rockcliffe Park — August 2026

McKay Pond has never been a supervised beach — no lifeguard, no washrooms, swimming permitted 7am–2pm on the honour system. Nobody's arguing for a lifeguard tower. But there's a wide gap between "swim at your own risk" and "there is nothing here to help you if something goes wrong," and right now this site sits on the wrong side of it. There is no ring buoy, no reach pole — nothing to grab or throw someone in trouble. And when it comes to what actually saves a life in a case like Friday's, there's no AED either.

Part of why nothing's ever been installed is likely no accident. This is a spot locals have quietly kept semi-hidden for years — there's a real reluctance in the neighbourhood to see it formalized, signed, or equipped, out of concern that doing so draws a wider crowd from outside the area. That's an understandable instinct for a small, informal swimming hole. But it can't be the reason basic safety equipment never shows up. A ring buoy on a post doesn't turn a spot into a destination; it's not a billboard. Keeping a site under the radar and keeping it safe aren't the same goal, and treating them as if they trade off against each other means residents are accepting a real safety gap in exchange for something equipment placement doesn't actually threaten.

Ottawa's Public Access Defibrillator program has put more than 1,200 AEDs into City buildings since 2001 — recreation centres, pools, arenas, libraries. Outdoors is a different story: the City's paramedic service has only recently started placing AEDs in outdoor public spaces at all, and the one precedent — St. Luke's Park downtown, added in 2024 — exists because a private foundation paid for it, not because the City's own program reached that far. A designated public swimming site with a senior-heavy user base falls entirely outside that coverage model.

To be clear about Friday specifically: the person was pulled out unconscious, and what mattered in that moment was bystander CPR — no piece of equipment on shore would have changed that outcome. But that's exactly why this isn't really a story about one incident. It's a story about a baseline that's never been met, incident or no incident. A ring buoy, a reach pole, an AED — none of it is expensive, all of it is standard at comparable sites, and none of it has been there. Seven years is enough time to have noticed.

The ask is simple: basic equipment at a basic minimum. Audit what's missing, and put it there.

ii It is very difficult to have a debate on any topic when the official position is that there is no problem