Ottawa: fewer young families, and a widening affordability gap
Ottawa: fewer young families, a widening affordability gap
Two trends, tracked over time, using figures already on the public record.
OCDSB elementary enrolment shortfall vs. projection
Each fall, the school board projects enrolment; each fall since 2020 it has come in below that projection. The gap reflects fewer young children in Ottawa households than the board's own demographic models expected.
The 2024 gap was concentrated in kindergarten — 750 of the 1,130 missing students were kindergarten-age, the cohort born in the years rent rose fastest.
Source: CBC News reporting on OCDSB board figures, 2020–2025.
Rent vs. household income, indexed to 2014
Both lines start at the same point in 2014. The distance between them by 2024 is the affordability gap driving the enrolment numbers above.
Affordable housing wait list, a separate measure: up 67% since 2020, now over 15,000 households, with an average wait of up to 7.6 years.
Source: City of Ottawa 2025 Housing Needs Assessment.
Ottawa: how long before this becomes a haves and have-nots divide
How long before this becomes a haves and have-nots divide?
Some of it is already visible. Some is baked in but not showing yet. Some won't hit for a generation — and by then it stops being fixable with housing policy alone.
0–2 years — already showing
The classroom is the first place it appears
The OCDSB kindergarten shortfall isn't a forecast — it's 2024's actual enrolment. Homeowners are still having kids at roughly normal rates (rising home equity even nudges this up). Renters are the ones deferring. The divide isn't coming. It's already sitting in the enrolment numbers.
5–10 years — the sorting hardens
Delay turns into fewer kids, not just later kids
Right now most of the gap is timing — 32 instead of 27 — which is still individually recoverable. But delay compounds: each year shrinks the fertile window and raises the odds of stopping at one child instead of two or three.
This is also when the shortfall moves from elementary into high school, so the fiscal pain shifts from kindergarten classes to program and school closures.
10–15 years — labour market and tax base
The missing cohort was supposed to be the workforce
The renter households who didn't form families in the 2020s were the working-age cohort employers needed in the mid-2030s. A thinner local youth cohort plus an aging homeowner class means fewer prime-working-age taxpayers supporting more retirees — concentrated by ward, not spread evenly.
15–25 years — the wealth transfer locks it in
This is the part that makes it permanent
Owners' kids inherit a paid-off Ottawa property around 2040–2050 and can buy in even on a modest income. Renters' kids inherit nothing and face the same locked-out entry point their parents did — likely worse. This is the mechanism that turns a temporary affordability squeeze into a permanent divide: it stops being about income and starts being about which household you were born into.
The window that actually matters
Everything policy can touch — rental supply, tenure security, missing-middle housing that lets renters build equity sooner — has to happen in the 5–10 year window. After the property-wealth gap calcifies into inheritance, no municipal housing policy reaches back and fixes it. This isn't a slow-burn issue with decades of runway. It's a 5–10 year window before the divide stops being about affordability and starts being about who your parents were.
Stage 1 is grounded in OCDSB enrolment reporting and the City of Ottawa 2025 Housing Needs Assessment. Stages 2–4 project forward from established fertility research (Dettling & Kearney 2014; Clark 2012) on the tenure-based homeowner/renter split in housing-price effects on family formation.
Same streets, same summer, two very different public records. Here's what the incumbent is publishing next to what this campaign is publishing — line by line.
PETER KARWACKI · WARD 13 CANDIDATE · OTTAWA MUNICIPAL ELECTION, OCTOBER 2026
Rawlson King
Incumbent Councillor
VS
Peter Karwacki
Challenger
Every week, Ward 13 residents get a newsletter from their councillor. It's full of corn roasts, bottle drives, and construction notices — genuinely useful, and genuinely not the whole job. This ledger sets that record next to a different kind of publishing: the accountability reporting this campaign has been doing on the same issues, in the same weeks, often about the same ward.
The comparison isn't about who posts more. It's about what gets measured against what actually happened — and what doesn't get mentioned at all.
Topic
King is publishing
Karwacki is publishing
01
St‑Laurent LRT Station Tunnel
Not addressed
The tunnel beneath the St-Laurent LRT station — inside Ward 13 — has been closed over structural safety concerns. Across his July newsletters (July 3, 10, 17, 24), King's ward has covered corn roasts, bottle drives, and construction notices for streets across the ward. No public statement on the tunnel closure appears in that run, even as three mayoral candidates have publicly pushed for transparency on it.
Source: rideau-rockcliffe.ca newsletters, July 2026
01
"The Bypass Nobody's Proposed" traces the tunnel's structural failure history, St-Laurent's transit-oriented zoning pressure, and lays out a two-part ask: a firm bus-bridging commitment plus a study of a temporary bypass around the compromised Highway 417 crossing.
Source: campaign blog, HTML post
Gap: a safety issue in his own ward, absent from six weeks of his own newsletter.
02
Affordable Housing
Outputs, not outcomes
The July 24 newsletter message leads with program totals: up to 3,000 new units accelerated via Build Canada Homes (2,000 on federal land, 1,100 already in the City's pipeline), 79 affordable/supportive units completed in 2025, and the new city-wide Zoning By-law framed as the "most housing-friendly" in Ottawa's history.
Source: July 24, 2026 newsletter
02
"Ottawa Can Find $419 Million. It Just Doesn't Find It For You." sets Lansdowne 2.0's final $418.8M cost and $16.4–17.4M/year debt servicing against the Auditor General's own $565.1M estimate to hit the City's 5,000-unit affordable housing target — against 466 units actually delivered, a roughly 10,000-household wait list, and 5+ year wait times.
Source: campaign blog, HTML post
Gap: program totals cited without the delivery math that shows the shortfall against the funded target.
03
Police Services Board Oversight
Vouched, then quiet
King's 2022 resignation statement from the Ottawa Police Services Board vouched for the board's competence. Recent newsletters cover the Community Services Committee's homelessness and safety work, but no public accounting of the Board's subsequent problems appears in his current communications.
Source: 2022 OPSB resignation statement; 2026 newsletter run
03
Coverage tests that 2022 vouching statement against what followed: the quiet closure of an independent workplace investigations office, Auditor General findings of inaccurate reporting to the Board, a spring 2026 misconduct crisis, and the Board's own admission that database-misuse auditing is "not robust" — alongside a budget cut on the safe workplace program from $8.2M (2022) to $5.4M (current).
Source: campaign blog, OPS accountability series
Gap: a competence claim made in 2022, never revisited in public as events overtook it.
04
LRT & Transit Oversight
Calls without a seat
King has repeatedly called for stronger LRT oversight in public statements, most recently framed around City transit initiatives like the Customer-First Action Plan information sessions running July–August 2026.
Source: 2026 newsletter run; OC Transpo session listings
04
Coverage of the O-Train East extension delays (a July 2026 wheel assembly issue, a February 2026 train car shortage) ties the recurring timeline slippage to a documented structural fact: King has never sat on the Transit Commission or the Light Rail Subcommittee, across his full tenure.
Source: campaign blog, LRT record series
Gap: the public calls for oversight and the committee seats that would provide it don't line up.
05
What Gets Published, Period
On the record
Weekly newsletters built primarily from event listings, construction notices, and City press-release material — useful service journalism, credited to the councillor's own "Message" section even where the underlying program (Build Canada Homes, ANCHOR expansion) is a City or federal initiative, not a ward-specific one.
Source: rideau-rockcliffe.ca, ongoing
05
Primary-source reporting built from Auditor General reports, MFIPPA requests, and 311 open-data analysis — including a data-integrity finding (123,000+ 311 tickets bulk-closed in a six-day window) that emerged from that analysis and became its own story.
Source: campaign blog & Unpublished.ca
The real difference: one is a bulletin board. The other is an audit.
The Scorecard
4 / 5
Topics where the incumbent's public record stays silent on the gap
5 / 5
Topics where this campaign has published a sourced, numbers-first account
None of this is about volume. King's office puts out a genuinely useful weekly newsletter, and residents rely on it for exactly what it's good at — knowing when the bottle drive is and which street is getting dug up next. That's real constituent service, and it matters.
But a newsletter that never mentions a tunnel closure in your own ward, a Police Board you vouched for, or a committee seat you never held, isn't accountability — it's a bulletin board with your name on the masthead. Residents deserve both: the corn roast and the ledger.
PAID FOR AND AUTHORIZED BY THE CAMPAIGN TO ELECT PETER KARWACKI, WARD 13 · PEERMETRICS.CA · PETERKARWACKI.BLOGSPOT.COM
Remember: its the "how" not the " what"
Neither Suttcliffe nor Lieper delivered the goods. Who can make things happen?
Ottawa 2026 Mayoral Platform Comparison
Issue
Mark Sutcliffe (Incumbent)
Jeff Leiper
Alex Lawson
Neil Saravanamuttoo
Transit
Continue investments (new buses, LRT Lines 2/4). Pursue Metrolinx LRT upload (~$85M annual savings). Reliability improvements and more frequent service for return-to-office.
Transit service guarantee (reliable or reimbursed). Reverse recent service cuts. More dedicated bus lanes. Restore comprehensive citywide service.
12-point reliability-first plan. Management reforms, better routes, express buses. Focus on buses that show up and match real travel patterns.
$1 fares citywide (“Buck a Ride”) with $40 monthly cap. Funded by LRT upload savings + ridership growth. Four-point recovery plan.
Housing
Housing Acceleration Plan: streamline approvals, cut development charges >50%, zoning for density. Double supportive housing pace. End youth homelessness by 2030. Build Canada Homes partnership.
1,500 new non-profit homes per year using city land + fast-tracking. Acquisition fund for at-risk rentals. Expand missing-middle zoning.
Cut development charges in half in year one. Speed approvals and cut red tape for family homes, missing-middle and rentals. Private sector first; city steps in if needed.
Focus on intensification inside existing communities. Rethink greenfield projects and population projections. Smarter infrastructure spending.
Taxes / Spending
Keep property tax increases among the lowest of major Canadian cities. Efficiencies + targeted investments while maintaining services.
Start budget process earlier with transparent options. Criticizes very low tax targets for underfunding services. Refuse developer donations.
Review spending, cut waste, deliver value for tax dollars. No unnecessary projects or blank cheques. Focus on cost of living.
Smarter spending and efficiencies. 100 days of open books. Online public database to track contracts and identify waste.
Public Safety
Public Safety Action Plan. Nearly 200 more officers and 120 paramedics hired this term. Continue investments in police and paramedics.
Focus police on core duties. Expand alternative response (e.g. ANCHOR) with funding that grows alongside the police budget.
Expand neighbourhood resource teams and alternatives like ANCHOR. Address visible disorder and support frontline services.
Strong supporter of alternative response programs (ANCHOR). Emphasis on accountability and effective use of resources.
Ring Road / Traffic
Focus on existing network, road repairs (doubled this term), and transit alternatives. Opponents say he previously took the idea off the table.
Views ring road as expensive distraction (billions) that won’t solve congestion. Prefer major transit investments.
Strongly supports southern ring road (with provincial funding) to move trucks off local roads and reduce gridlock.
Possible long-term, but not a near-term priority. Better construction coordination and smarter growth to ease traffic.
Transparency / Governance
Running on record of steady management. Regular public updates and detailed action plans.
Outsider “builder” approach focused on results and accountability for basic services.
100 days of open books. Full online spending transparency so residents can track contracts and find waste.
Source summary based on candidate statements, CBC, Ottawa Citizen, iPolitics and campaign materials as of 31 July 2026. Platforms are still developing. Check official campaign sites for updates.
Two Warnings, One Playbook: What Elliot Lake Should Have Taught Us About St-Laurent Station
Two Warnings, One Playbook: What Elliot Lake Should Have Taught Us About St-Laurent Station
Safety lessons from Ontario's deadliest structural collapse, and what they mean for the tunnel under Ottawa's busiest transit hub
In June 2012, a section of the rooftop parking deck at the Algo Centre Mall in Elliot Lake, Ontario gave way without warning. Two women, Lucie Aylwin and Doloris Perizzolo, were killed. Nineteen others were hurt.[1] The public inquiry that followed, led by Justice Paul Bélanger, produced a 1400-page report and a conclusion that should unsettle anyone responsible for aging public infrastructure: the collapse wasn't really a materials failure. It was a human one. Decades of water infiltration had quietly corroded a steel beam-to-column connection while a long chain of owners, engineers, and municipal officials looked at the warning signs and, one after another, decided not to act.[2]
I don't raise Elliot Lake lightly, and I'm not suggesting St-Laurent Station is about to fall down. But the physical failure mechanism, the pattern of ignored warnings, and the diffusion of responsibility across multiple parties are close enough to Ottawa's own LRT tunnel that residents deserve to hear the comparison plainly, not buried in a committee memo.
The mechanism is the same
The Algo Mall failed because water got into the structure and corroded steel that nobody was watching closely enough.[3] At St-Laurent Station, the pattern documented by CBC News through freedom-of-information requests is strikingly familiar: water penetrating through aging expansion joints and cracks in the tunnel's concrete, causing delamination — where the surface layer separates from the main slab — and, in the ceiling above the platform, corrosion severe enough that inspectors described the metal framing holding up ceiling tiles as detached and heavily corroded.[4]
That's not a cosmetic issue. That framing was suspending material directly over the heads of passengers waiting for trains.
A structure built for one purpose, repurposed for another
Part of what doomed the Algo Mall was that its rooftop parking deck was never really engineered for the punishment it took over 33 years.[5] The St-Laurent tunnel has a similar origin story: it was built in the mid-1980s as a bus transitway and later converted for LRT use when the Confederation Line opened in 2019.[6] Bélanger's inquiry flagged exactly this kind of adaptive reuse as a risk multiplier — structures quietly carrying loads and exposure conditions their original design never fully anticipated, with age-related wear getting waved away as normal because "it's an old structure."
City officials have used almost that exact soft pedaling language about St-Laurent, describing the deterioration as not unusual for a structure of that age.[7] That may be true. It's also precisely the reasoning that let the Algo Mall's condition go unaddressed for three decades.
Inspections that don't lead to fixes aren't safety systems
This is the part that should concern Ottawa residents most. The Algo Mall had roughly 30 inspections over its lifetime and still collapsed, because findings weren't translated into action.[2] At St-Laurent, an inspection report from 2020 identified areas of "severe" and "very severe" spalling and delamination directly over the eastbound track, labelled urgent — and those specific areas weren't patched until January 2024, only after concrete had already fallen onto the tracks.[8] The tunnel was due for another full inspection in 2022. It didn't happen; the City cited unrelated construction work above the tunnel as the reason.[9]
Then, in May 2024, ceiling panels were found littered with concrete debris, and the structure holding them up was found to be corroded and detached. Internal emails show City officials had concerns about the ceiling's stability before that point, and that the ceiling structure hadn't been checked again after a one-time inspection in February 2023.[4] The station was closed for five days while the immediate hazard was addressed.[10]
An inspection regime that documents "urgent" risk and then leaves it unresolved for years, or skips a scheduled inspection outright, isn't a safety system. It's paperwork that creates the appearance of oversight without the substance of it. That was Bélanger's central finding about Elliot Lake, and it applies here almost word for word.
Nobody clearly owns the risk
Elliot Lake's tragedy involved diffused responsibility across owners, engineers, and municipal inspectors, none of whom felt singularly accountable.[2] St-Laurent has its own version of that diffusion: the City's infrastructure department owns the tunnel structure, Rideau Transit Maintenance operates and maintains the Confederation Line under the P3 agreement, and OC Transpo runs the trains through it. Emails obtained by CBC show RTM raising safety concerns about the tunnel's condition to the City, and questioning how safe it was for their own workers to be in it.[8] When responsibility for a single structure is split across a city department and a private maintenance consortium, the person whose job it is to say "this needs to be fixed today, not scheduled for later" can get lost in the handoff.
The 2022 public inquiry into Ottawa's LRT system already found that the Confederation Line was rushed into service.[10] St-Laurent's tunnel — repurposed infrastructure, under split ownership, with a documented history of urgent findings sitting unresolved — is a continuation of that same story, not a separate one.
What this actually calls for
I'm not interested in scoring points off a coincidence of geography. I'm interested in the fact that Ontario already paid for the lesson once, in the worst way possible, and wrote it down. The Belanger inquiry's recommendations weren't complicated: findings labelled urgent need enforced follow-through, not discretionary scheduling; inspections that are due should happen, full stop, regardless of what construction is happening nearby; and someone — one accountable party, not a diffuse set of them — needs to own the safety condition of a structure people stand under every day.
St-Laurent Station sits in Ward 13 - Rideau-Rockcliffe. Residents and commuters who pass through it every weekday deserve a clear, public answer to a simple question: has the City closed the loop between "urgent" inspection findings and actual repairs, and who is accountable if it hasn't? That's not an unreasonable thing to ask of the people who represent this ward. It's the minimum.
References
CBC News, "'Apathy, neglect, indifference' led to 2 lives lost, says report into Elliot Lake mall collapse," cbc.ca
CBC News, "Elliot Lake fatal mall collapse comes down to 'human failure,' report says," cbc.ca
Daily Commercial News (ConstructConnect), "Lessons learned from Elliot Lake mall collapse," canada.constructconnect.com
CBC News, "City officials raised alarm over ceiling stability before St-Laurent station shutdown," cbc.ca
Global News, "Inquiry report into deadly Elliot Lake mall collapse due this morning," globalnews.ca
CBC News, "LRT service resumes after latest concern over ceiling at St-Laurent," cbc.ca
Ontario Construction News, "Ottawa LRT service halted for 'structural inspection' at St. Laurent station," ontarioconstructionnews.com
WARD 13 — RIDEAU-ROCKCLIFFEST-LAURENT STATION FILE
The Bypass Nobody's Proposed
Every mayoral candidate is asking the city to be honest about the St-Laurent shutdown. None of them — and not our own councillor — is asking whether there's a way around it.
Ottawa's own tendering documents now assume it: to fix the ceiling over the tracks at St-Laurent station, the Confederation Line will need to close there completely, in both directions, for five to six weeks — on top of nine to ten weeks of single-track closures before that. The city says construction is probably still two years off. But the plan is already on paper, and the corridor it runs through is one this city spent over a decade telling people to move to specifically because the train was there.
01 / THE FAILUREWhat's actually wrong
St-Laurent's tunnel was built in the 1980s for buses and repurposed for LRT in 2019 without ever being brought up to a comparable standard. Concrete began chipping badly enough to be logged as "severe" as early as 2020. Some of those flagged repairs weren't made until chunks of concrete actually landed on the tracks in January 2024. In May 2024, inspectors found ceiling panels held up by metal framing described as "detached" and "heavily corroded," directly over the platform where riders stand — a discovery that hadn't been caught because the ceiling had gone unchecked since a single inspection in February 2023. A 2025 review added expired expansion joints, one replaced in 2023 at 37 years old, well past its rated life.
A Stantec report commissioned by the city, dated April 2026, says the tunnel now poses a serious and ongoing risk to riders, staff, and the trains themselves. That report sat unreleased for months until a mayoral candidate found it in a subscription tendering portal and brought it to CBC.
Stantec-proposed lower-level closure schedule
Total project duration11–13 months
Single-track closures9–10 weeks
Each direction platform closure4–5 weeks
Full dual-track closure (both directions down)5–6 weeks
Design completion (target)Dec 2027
Construction completion (target)Dec 2029
This city has a well-documented pattern of major infrastructure projects running over budget and behind schedule. The original Confederation Line opened more than 15 months late. Stage 2 has already climbed past $5 billion with repeated contingency top-ups and multi-year delays on the Trillium Line and the east and west extensions. Other high-profile files — the new central library among them — have roughly doubled in cost while slipping a year or more. What reason do residents have to treat the 11–13 month St-Laurent timeline and the December 2029 target as firm rather than optimistic starting points?
02 / THE PROMISEBuilt on the premise of the train
St-Laurent has been a designated Transit-Oriented Development zone since city council approved the plan in 2012. The city has spent the years since actively upzoning around it: a nearly 1,770-unit, six-tower approval southwest of the station in 2025, a 30-storey mixed-use tower proposed along the boulevard in early 2026, both justified in planning documents on the grounds of proximity to rapid transit. People bought and rented in that corridor, some of them recently, on the understanding that the train made a car optional. That was the pitch. The station is the infrastructure the pitch depended on.
03 / THE SILENCEEveryone's talking except the one person representing this ward
Three mayoral candidates went on record within hours of the CBC story. Jeff Leiper, who surfaced the report, called out the city for sitting on it since April without warning residents. Neil Saravanamuttoo called it a breach of public trust and said it shows a city hall that treats residents as an afterthought. Alex Lawson said it fits a pattern of the city letting infrastructure "fall into disrepair" while withholding word of it. All three said they'd release reports like this the moment they land, not months later.
I've seen no statement from Councillor Rawlson King on this — not to CBC, not through his own channels. This is his ward. His constituents are the ones who'll lose the station for six weeks straight.
As of publication
04 / THE ASKWhat nobody else has put on the table
The candidates who've spoken up are asking for transparency — tell residents sooner, don't bury the report. That's necessary, but it isn't sufficient. Transparency about a six-week shutdown is not the same as a plan to reduce what that shutdown costs the people who live through it. Nobody has asked the actual engineering question: is there a way to physically route around the failed section of tunnel while it's being fixed, instead of just replacing the train with buses and hoping the schedule holds?
FIG. 1 — CONFEDERATION LINE, CYRVILLE TO TREMBLAY. ST-LAURENT SITS DIRECTLY ATOP THE 417 CROSSING — THE SAME PINCH POINT NOW FAILING STRUCTURALLY.
To be clear about the scale of that ask: St-Laurent and Tremblay stations sit about 1.4 kilometres apart, and the reason there's no existing route between them is that the LRT crosses Highway 417 underground right at St-Laurent — the very crossing that's now structurally compromised. A temporary bypass, whether an elevated guideway alongside the highway or a dedicated busway/pedestrian structure, is a real civil engineering undertaking constrained by the 417 right-of-way, utilities, and approvals. It is not a weekend project. I'm not pretending otherwise.
Near-term: a real bus-bridging plan, not a vague one. The city's default during past St-Laurent closures has been R1 shuttle buses between Hurdman and Blair. Riders have already said for years that OC Transpo communicates disruptions badly. Before the 5–6 week full closure hits, the city should commit publicly to specific shuttle frequency, capacity, and reliability targets — published in advance, not announced after the fact — so residents can plan around something more concrete than “replacement service will be provided.”
Longer-term: cost out a temporary bypass structure and put the number in public. Nobody at the city has studied, or at least published, whether a temporary route around the compromised crossing is feasible or what it would cost against 11–13 months of degraded east-end transit. Given that this corridor was deliberately built up around the promise of this train, the city owes it to those residents to at least know the number before defaulting to buses again.
Study the bypass option, publish the number, and give riders a real bridging plan before defaulting to another multi-week R1 replacement.
Where this stands
This isn't a costed commitment — it's a demand that the option be studied and the results published, the same transparency standard other candidates are already asking for on the Stantec report itself. If the number comes back too high, residents deserve to see that too. What they don't deserve is a city that never even asked the question, a councillor who hasn't asked it either, and another project whose optimistic timeline quietly expands the way so many others have.
i
Note:
If your councillor's response is merely "something needs to be done". Maybe you need to vote differently?
This time around, inform yourselves, vote differently, vote wisely. Vote for Peter Karwacki for Rideau Rockcliffe.
The Shape of the Comparison: Two Very Different Records in Rideau Rockcliffe Ward XIII
Rideau-Rockcliffe voters have a straightforward choice on the ballot this October: incumbent Rawlson King, seeking a third term, against challenger Peter Karwacki, running for a third time. Both records span three decades. What’s worth looking at isn’t just the length of each record, but its shape — because the shape tells you what kind of judgment each candidate brings to council.
Dimension
Rawlson King
Peter Karwacki
Overall shape
A single political track upward Linear progression through communications, civic boards, and council.
Broad, technical, executive, repeatedly tested Wide base of operational leadership, deep technical work, independent advocacy, and multiple challenges for the same seat.
Education
Journalism and law at Carleton; master’s in communication.
B.Sc. (Biology) and post-graduate diploma in Business Administration from Lakehead University.
Core professional career
20+ years in communications and high-tech market research
Steady climb through community-association presidency, resource-centre board, gallery presidency
15 years as hospital CEO / Administrator and financial director in Northern Ontario — full responsibility for budgets, boards, hiring/firing, strategic planning, policy, and public relations
13 years at Cognos and IBM (no stint): database, programming, financial OLAP models, business-intelligence applications, and sample projects for customers and education programs
Federal project-management roles (Health Canada, CBSA, Export Development Canada, Natural Resources Canada)
Independent consulting practice built around benchmarking and performance measurement; Managing Director, PeerMetrics
Council / elected experience
Six years on Ottawa City Council: committee member → committee chair → Deputy Mayor. Seeking third term.
Elected school-board trustee (early 1980s). Ran for this exact Ward 13 seat in the 2019 by-election, 2022 general election, and now 2026 — without incumbency advantage.
Primarily board and association roles that feed into institutional standing.
River preservation leadership: founding / past president of Les Amis de la rivière Kipawa; past president of Whitewater Ontario
Technical papers on cumulative effects of dam projects; judicial and advocacy efforts to protect navigability (Laniel Dam) and free-flowing reaches against diversion schemes
Long-term defense of whitewater habitat and public access
Primary working instinct
Communications and consensus-building: “How do we explain this decision, and who needs to be brought on side?”
Executive accountability + technical measurement + structural protection: “What does the data actually say? Does the report hold up to independent verification before the money moves? Are we protecting the underlying asset — budget line or free-flowing river — for the long term?”
Orientation toward institutions
Builds relationships and institutional standing; rewarded with increasing formal responsibility.
Audits performance, benchmarks against peers, and has repeatedly tested the same seat from outside incumbency. Certified PMP and trained data analyst.
Why the shape matters more than the length
Both candidates have put in the years. The question for voters isn’t who has “more experience” — it’s which kind of experience you want sitting across the table when a $400-million infrastructure report or a transit oversight question lands on the council agenda.
Ward 13 has had the first kind of instinct on council for six years. Whether it wants to add the second kind — hospital-CEO-level operational accountability, multi-year technical analytics at Cognos/IBM, project-management discipline, benchmarking, and proven willingness to defend structural integrity (including rivers) when it is inconvenient — is what’s actually on the ballot in October.
Peter Karwacki is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP) and trained data analyst running for Ward 13 (Rideau-Rockcliffe) on a platform of structural accountability, open data, and infrastructure oversight — with a stated one-term commitment.
