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)

> i

#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

#420 A splakin' and a spawlin'

Five Years, No Root Cause: The Confederation Line's Bearing Problem

A rail system, a wheel bearing, and two French companies who still can't agree on why it keeps failing.

Ward 13 Accountability Series · peterkarwacki.blogspot.com

Every time Ottawa's Confederation Line goes down, the explanation eventually lands on the same part: the bearing that connects a wheel to its axle. It happened in 2021. It happened again in 2023, shutting the entire line for nearly a month. It happened again this past January. Five years in, the people responsible for the trains — the manufacturer, the maintainer, and the City — still haven't agreed on why.

Here's what's actually on the record.

The part, and who built it

Ottawa's LRVs are Alstom's Citadis Spirit, a model designed specifically for the Confederation Line and mounted on what Alstom calls an Iponam bogie. Each axle carries two wheel hubs and two cartridge roller bearing assemblies, held together by a large locking nut. According to the Transportation Safety Board of Canada, that cartridge assembly was designed and manufactured by Texelis, a French company based in Limoges, built to Alstom's specification and shipped to Canada for installation.

Both companies are French. Both signed off on the design. Neither has fully owned the failure.

A recurring problem, not a one-off

September 2019 Stage 1 of the Confederation Line opens. Ottawa is the first city in North America — and one of the first anywhere — to operate the Citadis Spirit.

August 8, 2021 An axle bearing fails on an out-of-service train near Tunney's Pasture, dislodging a wheel. The TSB's investigation traces it to an undetected loosening of the locking nut holding the cartridge assembly together — a bolt that had moved by fractions of a millimetre. The TSB also flags a design gap: there was no wayside or onboard system monitoring bearing temperature, so an overheating bearing could fail without anyone noticing.

September 19, 2021 A second derailment, this time with 12 passengers aboard, near Tremblay station. The province calls a public inquiry.

July 2022 More trains pulled from service over unusual vibrations. Maintainers find a damaged wheel hub — the same family of failure as 2021.

July 17 – August 14, 2023 The entire line shuts down for nearly a month after a routine inspection turns up another bearing problem. Investigators later describe it as "bearing play" — the bearing had gone loose. During the inquiry, Alstom and Texelis jointly argue the stress came from excessive pressure going around the Confederation Line's sharpest curves — track design, not the part itself. The City doesn't fully accept that.

Fall 2023 – 2024 Alstom commits to a full redesign of the wheel bearing assembly, publicly called a "final fix." City staff are told to expect years of design and testing.

May 2024 Alstom quietly walks away from the redesign. Instead, the company points back to the wheel-rail interface — recommending higher-strength rail on curves, gauge-face lubrication, railhead reprofiling, and ballast strengthening. The City doesn't accept that reversal either, and formally tells Alstom to resume the axle work. Alstom and RTG still have not agreed on what caused the original failure.

January 21, 2026 A spalling issue turns up in the cartridge bearing assemblies. OC Transpo pulls every train with an axle logging more than 100,000 km from service for maintenance.

Failures by year

Laid out by year, the pattern is hard to read as anything but recurring — not a single bad batch of parts, but a fault line that keeps reopening.

What the experts have said

A former director of rail investigations at the TSB put a number on how unusual this is: bearings like these are typically designed for a minimum ten-year service life before failure. Ottawa's started failing inside two.

The TSB's own comparison is worth sitting with. Other cities run Alstom vehicles on similar cartridge assemblies with far fewer defects — Paris and Istanbul among them. What's different in Ottawa, per the TSB, is that our trains are longer, heavier, and carry more passengers at higher speed than those systems, on a bearing cartridge that stayed the same size. A University of Ottawa mechanical engineering professor who reviewed the City's 2023 "root cause review" made a similar point more bluntly: the trains got bigger and heavier, but nobody scaled up the part that has to carry that load — and even a report titled "Root Cause Review" never actually named one.

Not a manufacturing-defect story. A design and accountability story.

There's a version of this story that's simpler and less accurate: bad parts from a sketchy supplier. That's not what the record shows. Alstom and Texelis are both established French rail manufacturers with long track records elsewhere. What went wrong in Ottawa looks less like a defective part and more like a system — vehicle, track curvature, restraining rail placement, and passenger load — that was never fully reconciled to each other, and a five-year dispute between the manufacturer and the operator over whose job it is to fix that.

That distinction matters for what residents should actually be asking their council for. It's not "find a better supplier." It's: who is responsible for reconciling vehicle design against track design when the two don't agree, and why did it take a public inquiry and five years to get a straight answer on where the fault lines are?

Where things stand

Question	Status
Root cause identified?	No — disputed between Alstom/Texelis (track/wheel-rail interface) and the City (wants axle redesign resumed)
Axle redesign ("final fix")	Abandoned by Alstom in May 2024; City has asked for it to resume
Restraining rail adjustments	Completed at several curve locations, millimetre-scale shifts
Most recent bearing incident	January 21, 2026 — spalling found, high-mileage axles pulled fleet-wide
Independent monitoring for bearing temperature	Flagged as absent by the TSB in 2021; status of any fix not confirmed in public reporting reviewed here

What I'd want confirmed

• Has a bearing-temperature monitoring system — the gap the TSB flagged in 2021 — actually been installed fleet-wide, and when?
• Has the axle redesign the City asked Alstom to resume in 2024 actually restarted, and on what timeline?
• What was the specific cause of the January 2026 spalling, and is it the same failure mode as 2021 and 2023, or a new one?
• Has anyone — the City, Alstom, or an independent body — published a single document that reconciles the competing "track design" and "vehicle design" theories, rather than each party pointing at the other?

Ottawa spent nearly two decades and well over a billion dollars building this system. Five years after opening day, the two companies responsible for its most safety-critical moving part still can't agree on why it keeps breaking. That's not acceptable.

References

• Transportation Safety Board of Canada, Rail Safety Advisory Letter 617-02/21, "Roller bearing failure resulting in derailment of Ottawa Light Rail Transit vehicle" — tsb.gc.ca
• Transportation Safety Board of Canada, Rail Safety Advisory Letter 01/23, "Ongoing failures of cartridge roller bearing assemblies on Ottawa Light Rail Transit vehicles" (occurrence R22H0037) — tsb.gc.ca
• Transportation Safety Board of Canada, Rail transportation safety investigation R21H0099 — tsb.gc.ca
• CBC News, "Bearing problem led to broken axle in Sunday's LRT derailment," Aug. 14, 2021 — cbc.ca
• CBC News, "Rideau Transit Maintenance continues to investigate cause of axle failure on LRT car on Aug. 8" (CTV News), Sept. 2021 — ctvnews.ca
• CBC News, "Former rail inspector 'concerned' about Ottawa LRT axle issues" — cbc.ca
• CBC News, "Theories of August 2021 train derailment emerge at LRT inquiry," July 4, 2022 — cbc.ca
• CBC News, "Axle bearings on Ottawa LRT might need to be redesigned," April 29, 2023 — cbc.ca
• CBC News, "OC Transpo LRT update, July 28" — cbc.ca
• CBC News, "OC Transpo LRT update, August 3" — cbc.ca
• CBC News, "OC Transpo LRT briefing," July 2023 — cbc.ca
• CBC News, "Here's what you need to know about the LRT bearing problem," July 19, 2023 — cbc.ca
• CBC News, "Unreliable LRT keeps undermining public confidence in system, observers say," July 19, 2023 — cbc.ca
• CBC News, "City has a 'final fix' for the LRT but hasn't ID'd root cause," July 25, 2023 — cbc.ca
• CBC News, "Troublesome LRT restraining rails are on the move. What are they?" Aug. 4, 2023 — cbc.ca
• CBC News, "LRT crews complete additional restraining rail adjustments," Aug. 18, 2023 — cbc.ca
• CBC News, "LRT inquiry commissioner still concerned about wheel and track problems," July 18, 2023 — cbc.ca
• CBC News, "LRT root-cause review raises more questions than it answers," Oct. 13, 2023 — cbc.ca
• CBC News, "Alstom resuming work to redesign troublesome LRT bearing," Sept. 12, 2024 — cbc.ca
• CBC News, "Alstom halts work on redesign hailed by city as 'final fix' to LRT woes," May 27, 2024 — cbc.ca
• Trains News Wire, "Manufacturer halts work on axle redesign for Ottawa light rail equipment," May 28, 2024 — trains.com
• Global News, "Ottawa's troubled LRT remains shut down" — globalnews.ca
• OC Transpo, "Line 1 service updates" — octranspo.com
• Wikipedia, "Citadis Spirit" (accessed August 2026) — en.wikipedia.org
• Wikipedia, "Alstom Citadis Spirit" (accessed August 2026) — en.wikipedia.org

Peter Karwacki is a candidate for Ward 13 (Rideau-Rockcliffe) in Ottawa's October 2026 municipal election.