LRT - How we got here from there

Ottawa City Council — Recorded Votes on LRT/O-Train, 2006–2021

Includes every publicly reported council-level tally found on the O-Train / Confederation Line / Trillium Line file, from the original north-south cancellation through the post-launch inquiry decisions. Mayor column shows who was in the chair at the time. Where news coverage didn't report individual names, only the tally is shown.

Full Table

Date	Mayor	Matter	Result	Named / notable votes
July 12, 2006	Bob Chiarelli	Award north-south LRT contract to Siemens/PCL/Dufferin ($778M)	14 – 7	Not individually reported
Dec 14, 2006	Larry O'Brien (newly elected, chaired meeting)	Cancel the north-south LRT contract	13 – 11 (to cancel)	Coun. Peggy Feltmate (Barrhaven at the time) voted against cancelling; general council split on suburban/urban lines
Feb 23, 2007	Larry O'Brien	Motion by Coun. Diane Deans to reconsider/reinstate the cancelled contract	Motion cancelled before a vote was held	Deans tabled it; withdrawn after O'Brien released a poll showing weak public support for revival
2010	Larry O'Brien	Endorse functional design for new east-west LRT line	Reported as "council endorses" — no tally found	—
2011	Jim Watson	Accelerate east-west LRT construction timeline (target: 2017)	No tally found in coverage reviewed	—
Dec 19, 2012	Jim Watson	Approve Confederation Line (Stage 1) — $2.13B fixed-price contract to Rideau Transit Group	24 – 0	Unanimous; no dissent recorded
Feb 2017	Jim Watson	Approve implementation plan / project definition for Stage 2 ($3.6B expansion)	No named tally found	Preceded June 2017 federal funding announcement
Mar 6, 2019	Jim Watson	Award Stage 2 contracts (East-West Connectors + TransitNEXT/SNC-Lavalin) — $4.66B total	19 – 3	Against: Coun. Diane Deans, Coun. Rick Chiarelli, Coun. Shawn Menard. Coun. Catherine McKenney's motion to delay the vote to Mar. 27 was defeated separately.
Oct 13, 2021	Jim Watson	Call a judicial (judge-led) inquiry into Stage 1 procurement/launch (McKenney motion)	10 – 13 (motion failed)	Watson and 12 councillors voted against; McKenney was the sponsor and a "yes"
Oct 13, 2021	Jim Watson	Procedural ruling on how to handle Gower's replacement motion vs. McKenney's inquiry motion (challenge to Chair)	11 – 11 tie (ruling sustained; tie goes to chair)	Diane Deans challenged Watson's procedural ruling; her mic was cut mid-argument (Watson later apologized)
Oct 13, 2021	Jim Watson	Refer Confederation Line investigation to city Auditor General instead (Gower motion)	14 – 9	Moved by Coun. Glen Gower; supported by Watson

Not full council recorded votes (context only)

Date	Event
2019–2022	Justice William Hourigan led a provincially-called public inquiry (not a council vote) into Stage 1's problems, reporting in late 2022/2023
Jan 29, 2025	Council approved dissolving the Light Rail Subcommittee created after the public inquiry report (tally not reported in coverage reviewed)

Gaps marked "no tally found" reflect what turned up in the news coverage reviewed, not necessarily an absence of a recorded vote — Ottawa's official council minutes (ottawa.ca) or Horizon Ottawa's Vote Tracker (2022–2026 term only) would have complete roll calls if you need to fill these in, especially the 2010, 2011, and Feb 2017 votes.

The Nail That Sticks Up

Conformity, dissent, and Ottawa's LRT file — a voting-record summary

Over nearly two decades and more than a dozen recorded council votes, Ottawa's LRT file shows a consistent pattern: as costs rose and problems mounted, the number of councillors willing to vote no barely moved. Council approved the original Confederation Line unanimously. It approved the ballooned $4.66-billion Stage 2 contract with only three dissenters. And even after years of delays, a public derailment, and mounting evidence of trouble, a motion for a judicial inquiry still failed. The story isn't that council was fooled once — it's that almost nobody was willing to be the one name standing alone against the file, meeting after meeting.

"Nobody wanted to be the nail that sticks up."

The Record

Date	Matter	Result	Who stood alone / stood apart
Jul 2006	Award original north-south LRT contract	14 – 7	Not individually reported
Dec 2006	Cancel that contract under new mayor O'Brien	13 – 11 (to cancel)	Genuinely close — the one vote in the whole file where council was actually split
Dec 2012	Approve Confederation Line (Stage 1), $2.13B	24 – 0	Unanimous. Not one councillor on record with a concern.
Mar 2019	Award Stage 2 contracts, $4.66B (up $1.2B in weeks, contracts not seen by council before the vote)	19 – 3	Deans, Rick Chiarelli, Menard voted no. Several "yes" votes were cast by councillors who said openly they didn't have the facts.
Oct 2021	Judicial inquiry into Stage 1 failures (McKenney motion)	10 – 13 (defeated)	Failed even after two derailments and years of public dysfunction. Watson voted with the majority to block it.
Oct 2021	Procedural ruling on how to handle the inquiry motion	11 – 11 tie	Broken by the mayor's chair vote. Deans's mic was cut mid-challenge.
Oct 2021	Refer investigation to Auditor General instead of a judge	14 – 9	The softer, lower-accountability option won out

What the Pattern Suggests

• Dissent never became a majority. Across every recorded vote on this file, from 2012 onward, the "no" side topped out at 10 votes — and only once, in the very first cancellation fight, was council actually split down the middle.
• The dissenters were a small, repeat cast. Diane Deans, Catherine McKenney, Shawn Menard, and Rick Chiarelli account for most of the recorded opposition on cost and oversight. The rest of council moved as a bloc, vote after vote, regardless of what had changed on the file since the last one.
• Unanimity at the start set the tone. A 24-0 vote in 2012 meant there was no dissenting voice on record to point back to later — no one who could say "I told you so" with a paper trail. That silence at the outset may have made it harder for anyone to break ranks once problems appeared.
• When accountability was finally on the table, council chose the weaker mechanism. Faced with a choice between a judge-led inquiry and a staff-directed audit, council chose the audit — the option with less independence and less power to compel testimony — by a wider margin than it rejected the inquiry.
• Procedure did some of the work opinion wouldn't. The one moment the vote was genuinely even (11-11), it wasn't decided by debate — it was decided by the mayor's tie-breaking power, with a councillor's microphone cut mid-objection.

Gaps: the 2010 functional-design endorsement, 2011 timeline-acceleration vote, and Feb 2017 Stage 2 implementation approval didn't have individually reported tallies in the coverage this summary draws on. Ottawa's official council minutes or Horizon Ottawa's Vote Tracker (2022–2026 term) would fill in specifics if needed, particularly for any votes cast by current-term councillors.

Sources: CBC News, Global News, Ottawa Magazine, CTV News, CPTDB Wiki, Horizon Ottawa Vote Tracker.

#430 How's that working for you?

Bathgate Park 

Bathgate Park needs the Riveraine treatment

Ottawa Passed an Anti-Racism Strategy. But is it Working?

Three years in, the City has plenty to say about activities completed and almost nothing to say about results.

In June 2022, Ottawa City Council approved a five-year Anti-Racism Strategy with seven priority areas, 28 recommendations, 132 actions, and a dedicated Anti-Racism Secretariat. Phase 1 (2023–2025) focused on internal awareness, training, and race-based data collection. That is a reasonable starting point. The problem is the absence of any published evaluation framework that shows whether the strategy is changing the outcomes it was meant to improve.

What the City Can Point To

A Secretariat was created and staffed. Consultation occurred with the Community Anti-Racism Advisory Table and racialized residents. Institutional infrastructure exists. Infrastructure, however, is not evidence of impact. Three years later, “we built a data process” remains the main answer to “what changed,” and that process has yet to yield public trend reports.

Hate-Crime Numbers Are the Wrong Metric

Ottawa Police hate-crime reports are the default proxy. They show a sharp rise followed by a recent drop:

Year	Ottawa Reports
2019	116
2020	181
2021	340
2022	377
2023	487
2024	467
2025	358

The 2023 peak aligned with the Israel-Gaza conflict and national spikes in antisemitic and Islamophobic incidents. Online reporting (2017) and a dedicated hate-crime unit (2020) also increased reporting independent of underlying trends. National figures followed a similar pattern:

Year	Canada Reports
2021	3,355
2022	3,612
2023	4,828
2024	4,841
2025	4,708

Ottawa’s 2024 rate (27.7 per 100,000) remained well above peer cities and the national average (Toronto 20.1, Vancouver 14.9, Montréal 10.9, Canada 11.9). These counts cannot answer whether the strategy is working; the City has not supplied a better instrument.

Better Data Shows a Persistent Gap

National surveys paint a clearer, mixed picture. The Canadian Race Relations Foundation / Environics series (2019–2024) finds improved perceptions: 68 % of Canadians now describe race relations as generally good. Yet the share who report personally experiencing racial discrimination has stayed roughly constant at about one in four since 2019.

Statistics Canada data are consistent: 45 % of racialized Canadians reported racism or discrimination in the past five years; 81 % of those experienced it more than once. Attitudes have softened; lived experience has not. An evaluation framework is supposed to surface exactly this gap. “We launched a strategy” does not.

Ownership Is Clear

Councillor Rawlson King (Ward 13) has been Council Liaison for Anti-Racism and Ethnocultural Relations since 2020. His biography states he was responsible for creating the Anti-Racism Secretariat and “currently leads the implementation” of the strategy. Claiming credit for standing it up is fair. Ownership of the missing evaluation framework is equally clear.

What Needs to Happen Before Phase 2

• Publish the evaluation framework immediately, with defined outcome metrics.
• Separate activity counts (trainings, data points collected) from outcome measures (changes in self-reported discrimination and priority-area results) in every public report.
• Commission independent third-party evaluation.
• Tie Phase 2/3 funding to published results.

If the City spends public money and claims progress, residents are owed a transparent way to check the claim. That standard applies throughout City Hall. It applies especially when the councillor leading the file seeks re-election on its strength.

Sources

Ottawa Police Service annual hate-crime releases (2019–2025); Statistics Canada police-reported hate-crime tables and Daily releases; Canadian Race Relations Foundation / Environics Race Relations in Canada 2024 (and prior waves); Statistics Canada Survey Series on People and their Communities (2023–2024); City of Ottawa Anti-Racism Strategy documents and progress updates.

Statistics Canada Canadian Social Survey
Experiences of Discrimination or Unfair Treatment (Past 5 Years)

Source: Canadian Social Survey (pooled waves collected 2021–early 2024). Target population: non-institutionalized persons aged 15+ living off-reserve in the 10 provinces. Data are self-reported and national-level (not Ottawa-specific).

Discrimination is defined as being treated unfairly due to Indigenous identity, ethnicity/culture, race/skin colour, physical appearance, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, age, disability, language, sex, accent, or other reasons, across various settings.

Overall Prevalence

Group	Percentage
All people aged 15+	36%
Racialized people	51%
Non-racialized people	27%

By Specific Population Groups

Group	Percentage
Canadian-born racialized	57%
Racialized recent immigrants	48%
Racialized established immigrants (>10 years)	49%
Canadian-born Black people	71%
Recent Black immigrants	51%
Established Black immigrants	59%
Indigenous (First Nations off-reserve, Métis, Inuit)	46%
Non-Indigenous	33%
2SLGBTQ+	61%
Non-2SLGBTQ+	32%
People with a disability	44%
People without a disability	32%
Women	37%
Men	30%

Most Common Settings Where Discrimination Occurred

Setting	Overall %	Notes by Group
At work / applying for job or promotion	41%	Black: 48%; other racialized: 39%; non-racialized: 41%
In a store, bank, or restaurant	33%	—
Using public areas (e.g., parks, sidewalks)	29%	—
Attending social gatherings / friends or family	22%	—
On the Internet / social media	18%	—
Attending school or classes	17%	Higher among some racialized groups
Using public transit	15%	—
Seeing a medical professional / healthcare	13%	—
Seeking or applying for housing	10%	Black: 13%; other racialized/non-racialized: 6%
Crossing the border into Canada	6%	—

Perceived Reasons for Discrimination (Selected)

• For racialized people: Race or skin colour (66%), ethnicity or culture (49%), accent (28%), language (27%)
• Other common reasons overall include physical appearance, age, sex, disability, sexual orientation, etc. (varying by demographic group)

Source: Statistics Canada, The Daily (16 May 2024), based on the Canadian Social Survey (survey 5354). Data reflect self-reported experiences and have remained relatively stable since 2021. A later 2023/2024 analysis reported approximately 45% of racialized Canadians experienced race/ethnicity-based discrimination in the prior five years.

Full tables, charts, and methodological notes are available on the Statistics Canada website under the referenced Daily release. No detailed city-level (Ottawa) breakdown of this survey data was identified in official releases.

Premier Ford announced that the next round of applications is open for the Community Sport and Recreation Infrastructure Fund, which offers money for sport and recreation upgrades, repairs or new builds. If elected I'd be all over that.

#429 Layin' Pipe

Why Kilmory and Bowmoor Keep Flooding:
Ottawa’s Aging Pipes vs. Modern Standards

Parkwood Hills, Ward 9 (Knoxdale-Merivale) · August 2026

Residents on Kilmory Crescent and the neighbouring street Bowmoor Avenue in Ottawa’s Parkwood Hills neighbourhood have lived through the same frustrating cycle for years: heavy rain arrives, basements flood, streets turn into temporary rivers, and the cleanup begins again. The July 1, 2026 Canada Day storm was the most dramatic recent example, but it was not the first. Similar problems appeared in August 2023 and during earlier intense rainfall events.

The root cause is not mysterious. These two streets share a mid-20th-century stormwater and sanitary system that was never designed to the standards the City of Ottawa applies today.

What “Modern Standard” Actually Means

Since at least the early 2010s (formalized in the City of Ottawa Sewer Design Guidelines, October 2012 edition and later updates), Ottawa has required the dual-drainage principle for new development and major upgrades:

• Minor system (underground pipes and catch basins): sized to carry the 2-year to 5-year storm under free-flow conditions without surcharging.
• Major system (streets, ditches, parks and planned overland routes): sized to safely convey the 100-year storm, with strict limits on ponding depth and freeboard to building openings.

In practice, the minor system is most often designed for the 5-year event. Excess water from rarer storms is expected to travel on the surface without entering basements.

Key performance targets under current guidelines:
• Building openings must sit at least 0.30 m above the 100-year water surface elevation.
• Surface flow depth is generally limited to less than 0.35 m.
• Post-development peak flows are typically restricted to the 2-year or 5-year pre-development rate (runoff coefficient C ≤ 0.5).

How 1960s Design Differs

Parkwood Hills was largely built in the 1950s and 1960s. At that time, engineers commonly sized storm sewers for a 2-year return period (or an equivalent lower standard). There was little formal requirement for a continuous, engineered major system that could handle a 100-year event. Once the pipes filled, water had nowhere planned to go except onto streets, into yards, and often into basements through foundation drains or sewer laterals.

That is why Kilmory and Bowmoor experience nearly identical flooding: they sit in the same legacy drainage catchment.

Comparative Chart: Design Criteria and Pipe Capacity Implications

Exact pipe diameters on these streets vary by catchment area and slope, but the design return period drives capacity. The table below shows the practical difference.

Design Aspect	1960s-Era System (Parkwood Hills / Kilmory–Bowmoor)	Current Ottawa Dual-Drainage Standard
Minor-system design storm	Typically 2-year return period	5-year return period (free-flow)
Major-system design storm	Limited or informal overland flow	100-year return period (planned routes)
Target level of service	Protection against frequent, smaller storms	No basement flooding or excessive street flooding up to 100-year event
Typical intensity ratio (short-duration storms, Ottawa IDF)	Baseline (2-year)	~1.3–1.5× higher intensity for 5-year; ~2.0–2.5× higher for 100-year
Pipe capacity implication (Manning’s equation, same slope & roughness)	Smaller diameter sufficient for design flow	Larger diameter required; capacity scales roughly with diameter8/3. A 30–50 % increase in design flow often needs a noticeably larger pipe.
Inlet control / surcharge control	Rarely used	Commonly required so pipes do not surcharge during the minor-system design storm
Freeboard to buildings	Not systematically required	Minimum 0.30 m above 100-year water level
Climate-change allowance	None	Often +20 % intensity applied in modern designs

Note: Actual pipe diameters on Kilmory and Bowmoor are not published in a single public inventory for every segment. The comparison above reflects the governing design criteria rather than a specific measured pipe. Capacity differences compound across an entire neighbourhood network.

What This Means for Residents

When a storm exceeds roughly the 2- to 5-year intensity—events that climate data show are becoming more common—the old pipes fill, the hydraulic grade line rises, and water seeks the path of least resistance. That path frequently leads into basements. The 2026 Canada Day storm (locally exceeding 140–160 mm in parts of the west end) simply made the deficiency obvious at city-wide scale.

Partial upgrades have occurred in some nearby streets over the years (sewer replacements and inlet controls after earlier floods), but the overall network serving Kilmory and Bowmoor has not been brought up to full dual-drainage standards.

Practical Next Steps

• Report every flooding incident to 3-1-1 so the City’s data accurately reflects the problem.
• Consider private protective measures (backwater valves, sump pumps with battery backup). The City’s Residential Protective Plumbing Program offers rebates for eligible homes built before certain dates.
• Advocate, through the Ward 9 councillor’s office, for a targeted drainage study and capital upgrade of this catchment.
• Support broader city initiatives that combine bigger pipes where needed with low-impact development (rain gardens, permeable surfaces, downspout disconnection) to reduce the volume reaching the sewers in the first place.

The infrastructure under Kilmory Crescent and Bowmoor Avenue was built to the standards of its time. Those standards are no longer adequate for the rainfall intensities Ottawa now experiences. Until the system is brought closer to today’s dual-drainage criteria, repeated flooding will remain a predictable outcome rather than a surprise.

Based on City of Ottawa Sewer Design Guidelines (2012 and updates), public flood investigation reports, and documented performance of Parkwood Hills during the 2023 and 2026 extreme rainfall events. Pipe-sizing relationships follow standard hydraulic principles (Manning’s equation). Individual property conditions vary; professional assessment is recommended for specific homes.

#428 Dividend? Infrastructure not LRT

Ward 13 · Infrastructure Accountability

Ottawa Finds $22 Million a Year. It Should Say So, In Writing.

Hydro Ottawa hands the City a dividend every June. It lands in general revenue, gets used for whatever council needs that year, and nothing on paper stops it from quietly absorbing LRT-related debt service. It should be earmarked, in a council-approved policy, for core infrastructure renewal — and explicitly walled off from the P3/LRT liability line.

$22.1M

2026 Hydro dividend

$0

Earmarked for core infrastructure

$1.23B

City's own stated funding gap

Every June, Hydro Ottawa's board walks into council chambers, presents its annual report, and hands the City a cheque. It's treated as good news — and on its own terms, it is. But look at what happens to that money after the handshake, and the story changes from "the utility is healthy" to "the City has a discretionary slush fund with no name on it."

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01 — The mechanismWhat the dividend policy actually says

Hydro Ottawa Holding Inc. is a private company, 100% owned by the City of Ottawa, created when the province forced municipal electricity utilities to incorporate under the Electricity Act, 1998. As sole shareholder, council sets the dividend policy. Since 2006, that policy has directed Hydro Ottawa to pay the City 60% of net income or $14 million, whichever is greater — and in 2016, council locked in a guaranteed floor of $20 million a year starting in 2017, specifically so budget staff could plan around a predictable number rather than a number that moves with storm damage and commodity prices.

It has worked, in the narrow sense that it delivers cash reliably. Cumulative dividends passed roughly $369 million by the end of 2023. The 2025 payment was $22.3 million; the 2026 payment, presented at the June 2026 Annual General Meeting, is $22.1 million.

The dividend has been a reliable annual transfer for two decades

hydro ottawa → city of ottawa, selected years, $ millions

Sources: CBC News (2016); Hydro Ottawa 2022 & 2023 AGM reports to Council; Hydro Ottawa Group June 2026 AGM release.

The direction of travel is up, not down — and that's the point of this piece. It's not a rounding error. It's a growing, dependable stream, and right now it has no destination written into policy beyond "general revenue."

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02 — The gapWhere that stream disappears into

Hydro Ottawa's own language on this is consistent, year after year: the dividend "will be used by the City to fund municipal programs and services." That's it. That's the entire earmark. It is, by design, fungible — the same undifferentiated pool that funds the police budget, transit operations, road resurfacing, and debt service on every capital project council has ever approved, including the ones I've already documented running over budget or piling up as off-balance-sheet risk.

Hydro dividend — $22.1M/yr → General Revenue Fund (undifferentiated)

↳ could offset any budget line, including P3/LRT debt service

↳ could offset any budget line, including transit operating shortfalls

Meanwhile, the City's own Long Range Financial Plan work has already put a number on the problem this money could be solving. Council's June 2026 infrastructure and transit motion explicitly names a $1.23 billion funding gap for maintaining and renewing City infrastructure — a separate, narrower figure from the $10.6–10.8 billion ten-year infrastructure gap I've written about previously, but pointing at the same underlying problem: the basics (roads, facilities, water and sewer renewal) are underfunded, on the record, by the City's own staff.

One year's dividend, next to the gap it could be chipping away at

log scale — the bars are not proportional to pixel height below $100M; see labelled values

Sources: City of Ottawa, "Council approves City joining federal clean-fuel program" (June 2026 council motion coverage); Peter Karwacki, "Ottawa Doesn't Have $419 Million Lying Around..." liabilities series (10-year gap).

Let's be honest about scale: even fully earmarked, $22 million doesn't close a billion-dollar gap. That's not the argument. The argument is that a growing, guaranteed, publicly-owned revenue stream is currently doing the least accountable thing money can do at City Hall — disappearing into "general revenue" — when it could be doing the most accountable thing: showing up, every year, as a named line against a named backlog.

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03 — The exception that proves the ruleCouncil already knows how to do this — for climate, not for infrastructure broadly

Here's what makes the current setup frustrating rather than just imperfect: council has already built the mechanism once. In the same June 2026 motion that named the $1.23 billion gap, council directed staff to create a new reserve fund for climate-related infrastructure capital projects, funded in part by "a portion of revenues from the annual Hydro Ottawa dividend."

What this proves

Council does not need new legal authority, a provincial ask, or a charter change to earmark dividend revenue. It already voted to do exactly that — for one category of spending. The precedent exists. It's just scoped narrowly to climate projects, and it's "a portion of," not all of, the dividend.

That's a good start on a program that should be the default, not a one-off carve-out attached to a single climate motion. If a portion of the dividend can be walled off for climate infrastructure by council motion, the rest of it can be walled off for core infrastructure renewal — roads, water and sewer mains, facilities — the same way, by the same mechanism, this term.

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04 — Why "not LRT" has to be explicitThe P3/LRT liability is exactly the kind of hole this money would otherwise fall into

This is the part that needs to be written into the policy in plain language, not left to budget-season discretion. I've already documented that the City's off-balance-sheet P3/LRT liability line was the fastest-growing item in the consolidated financial statements — up $135.8 million in a single year, the smallest line item but the fastest mover. I've documented the East Extension's repeated timeline slippage. I've documented the St-Laurent tunnel's still-unrepaired structural risk. None of that is a reason to send utility dividend revenue chasing after it.

General revenue is fungible by definition. Without an explicit exclusion, a dollar of Hydro dividend that nominally goes toward "infrastructure" can simply free up a dollar of tax levy that then flows to LRT debt service, transit operating shortfalls, or Lansdowne 2.0's $16.4–17.4 million a year in debt servicing — and nobody outside the budget office would ever be able to tell the difference. An earmark that doesn't name what it excludes isn't really an earmark.

What "earmarked, not LRT" should mean in the policy text

A dedicated Infrastructure Renewal Reserve, funded by the full annual Hydro Ottawa dividend, with an explicit clause excluding its use for P3/LRT debt service, Lansdowne 2.0 debt service, or any transit capital cost overrun — reported publicly, dollar-for-dollar, against the $1.23 billion gap each budget cycle.

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05 — The askFour things council can do without asking anyone's permission

1. Convert the dividend policy from a revenue target into a renewal fund. Amend the shareholder declaration so the full annual dividend flows to a named Infrastructure Renewal Reserve, not general revenue, by default.
2. Write the LRT exclusion into the policy text. Explicitly bar the reserve from being drawn on for P3/LRT debt service, Lansdowne 2.0 debt service, or transit capital overruns — the same discipline already applied, informally, to the climate carve-out.
3. Extend the June 2026 precedent citywide. The climate infrastructure reserve fund already proves council can do this. Use the identical mechanism for the core renewal backlog instead of inventing a new process.
4. Report it against the $1.23 billion gap, every budget cycle. One page, public, showing what the reserve took in, what it spent, and how much of the stated gap it closed that year — the same transparency standard I've asked for on the liabilities file generally.

None of this requires the OEB, the province, or a new tax. It requires council deciding that a City-owned company's profits should be visibly rebuilding the City that owns it — not quietly patching whatever budget line is short that December.

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• City to get guaranteed $20M a year from Hydro Ottawa after policy change approved
  CBC News · Kate Porter · June 22, 2016
• Why does Hydro Ottawa pay the City of Ottawa a dividend?
  Hydro Ottawa · corporate FAQ
• Hydro Ottawa presents 2022 Annual Report to City Council
  Hydro Ottawa Group newsroom · Oct. 25, 2023
• Hydro Ottawa presents 2023 Annual Report to City Council
  Hydro Ottawa Group / CNW · June 25, 2024
• Past progress, future powered: Hydro Ottawa highlights record 2025 investments and launches 2026-2030 Strategic Direction
  Hydro Ottawa Group / CNW · June 24, 2026
• Powering the Capital: Hydro Ottawa Group Reports on Big Investments and Bigger Demand
  Ottawa Life Magazine · June 27, 2025
• Council approves City joining federal clean-fuel program
  City of Ottawa newsroom · June 2026 — source of the $1.23B gap figure and the climate infrastructure reserve motion
• Ottawa approves $1.2-billion infrastructure funding plan, transit investments and housing measures
  Ontario Construction News · July 2, 2026

Peter Karwacki is a candidate for Ward 13 (Rideau-Rockcliffe) in Ottawa's October 2026 municipal election. PMP-certified, trained data analyst, 13 years at IBM and Cognos.

#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

i

#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

 For the "How" I'm your man

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.