Decorum Isn't Manners. It's Infrastructure.
Ottawa is about to get a new mayor and, in many wards, a wave of new councillors. That turnover is an opportunity; but only if the people walking into City Hall in November understand what they're actually inheriting.
They're inheriting a police services board that, according to its own chief, doesn't have robust auditing of database access. They're inheriting an LRT extension still slipping timelines years after "fixed." They're inheriting a Lansdowne 2.0 debt load north of $16 million a year serviced against promises that taxpayers would carry none of the risk. They're inheriting a consolidated balance sheet with billions in liabilities that live off the books; an OMERS shortfall, an infrastructure gap in the double digits of billions, a utility whose own liabilities never show up in the city's official numbers. And they're inheriting a 311 system where a single data-integrity failure closed more than 120,000 tickets in six days without anyone flagging it as a governance problem.
None of that gets fixed by a council that spends its first year relitigating personalities, settling scores from the campaign, or performing outrage for a two-minute clip. It gets fixed by a council that can sit in a room, disagree on substance, and still do the work.
That's what decorum actually means in this context. Not politeness for its own sake; the capacity to hold institutions accountable without the process collapsing into theatre. Ottawa’s has had plenty of both this in the 2022 term: strong words at the podium, resignations framed as accountability, and very little in the way of follow-through once the cameras were off. The last OPS Board chair to resign did so vouching for the board's competence. Eighteen months later, an independent workplace investigations office had been quietly wound down and the Auditor General found the board's own reporting inaccurate. Strong words did not survive contact with the actual record.
A council that wants to be taken seriously in a term with this much to fix needs a different posture:
Disagree on the record, not around it. The public deserves to see committee votes and floor debates that actually engage with evidence; not statements crafted for a press release while the substantive positioning happens elsewhere.
Treat oversight as a job, not a talking point. You cannot call for stronger transit oversight for years and never sit on the Transit Commission or the Light Rail Subcommittee. Decorum includes doing the unglamorous committee work that oversight actually requires.
Let data close arguments instead of opening new ones. When a chief says database-access auditing "isn't robust," that's not a talking point to be managed; it's a gap to be closed, with a plan and a timeline. The same goes for liabilities, for the infrastructure gap, for crime clearance rates that have fallen even as headline numbers get debated. Bring the numbers. Argue about what they mean, not whether they're inconvenient.
Separate structural failure from individual blame; most of the time. Most of what's broken in this city is a structural problem: incentives, funding formulas, ward boundaries that concentrate voting power in ways that don't match where growth and strain actually are. A council that spends its energy chasing individual villains will miss the fixes that actually change outcomes. But structural focus isn't an excuse to let genuine failures of judgment go unaddressed either; decorum cuts both ways.
Commit to sunset reviews, not permanent positions. Every major liability decision, every big capital commitment, should come with a built-in point where council has to look at it again with fresh eyes and current numbers. That's a decorum issue too: the discipline to admit a prior decision needs revisiting, without treating that as a defeat.
None of this is about lowering the temperature for its own sake. Ottawa's problems are serious enough that they deserve a council capable of sustained, adversarial, evidence-based work; the kind that doesn't burn itself out in the first six months on grievance and instead spends four years actually closing the gaps it inherited.
The mess didn't accumulate because people were too polite. It accumulated because too much of the last several terms was spent on statements instead of follow-through. A new council that wants a different result should start by deciding what decorum is actually for.
Even the Councillor Everyone Wanted Gone Was Right About This One
Rick Chiarelli's name doesn't come up in Ottawa politics without the context that ended his career: a year-long integrity commissioner investigation that found he had subjected staff to repeated, serious harassment, followed by council voting to strip his pay and duties, followed by more complainants and more findings after that. There's no rehabilitating that record, and no reason to try. It was serious misconduct, independently investigated and independently confirmed.
But on March 6, 2019, sitting on a council that voted 19–3 to hand SNC-Lavalin a $1.6-billion contract to extend the Trillium Line, Chiarelli was one of the three votes against. He was right, and it's worth asking why, because the reason has nothing to do with his character and everything to do with a habit council should have kept.
The bid in question had failed the technical evaluation for the project — twice. Council wasn't told that. When Coun. Diane Deans pressed staff directly on whether SNC-Lavalin had cleared the minimum threshold, she was told she couldn't have that information, and arguably shouldn't be asking for it. An earlier motion to delay the vote by two weeks, just to allow more time to review the report, failed. Council approved the largest capital project in the city's history without the one piece of information that would have told them whether the winning bid was actually qualified to win.
The auditor general later found that staff followed the process correctly and weren't the ones who broke any rule. That's arguably worse, not better: the process itself was built to let this happen, and it took three votes out of twenty-two to say so out loud before the fact.
This is the part of the story that gets lost when a vote gets remembered only through the lens of who cast it. Diane Deans and Shawn Menard voting no is unsurprising — consistent with their broader records on procurement scrutiny. Chiarelli voting no fits no such narrative, and that's exactly the point. A no vote grounded in "we don't have the information to say yes" doesn't require the voter to be admirable. It requires the claim to be true. In this case it was: the information genuinely wasn't there, and the bid genuinely hadn't passed.
Ottawa's incoming council is going to face the same test repeatedly — not on this file, but on the next one, and the one after that. The instinct to sort every vote by who's popular, who's controversial, who's likeable is exactly the instinct that let a $1.6-billion contract sail through on a 19–3 vote while the people asking the hardest questions got told to stop asking. Evaluating a position on its merits, independent of who's making it, is not a nicety. It's the only way procurement failures like this one get caught before the money is spent instead of years after.
None of this is an argument for rehabilitating anyone's record based on a single vote. It's an argument for keeping the two questions separate: what someone did, and whether what they said on a given Wednesday afternoon happened to be true. Council conflated those questions in October 2020 when it debated Chiarelli's conduct, understandably and correctly. It had already conflated them in reverse eighteen months earlier, when the loudest objections to a flawed process came from voices council had reason to dismiss — and dismissed them anyway, at a cost of $1.6 billion and years of downstream construction delays.
A council that wants better procurement outcomes next term should get comfortable with an uncomfortable habit: taking an argument seriously regardless of who's making it, and holding people accountable for their conduct regardless of whether they happened to be right about something else. Both things can be true in the same council term. Ottawa's recent history shows what happens when they get treated as mutually exclusive.
