1. I support the new east end crossing
2. I advocate for sensible public washroom strategy
3. I am advocating for animation of the JetForm Park
4. I am advocating for true open data
5. I am advocating for increased use of Artificial Intelligence
6. I am advocating for physical seperation in bike routes
7. We are different candidates, I offer different skills and abilities. I am a professional project manager and administrator. King is a pandering communicator.
8. If elected I will not run again. I want to get in and get stuff done, then get out.
9. Get those 18 wheelers out of the downtown.
10. Noise control
11. Road repair.
12. North South cohesion
Now it's up to you to act on this.
Let me know what you think. Invite me to your hood!
peterkarwacki.overbrook@gmail.com
This time around, vote differently, vote wisely, vote for Peter Karwacki for Rideau Rockcliffe .
OC Transpo: A National Capital That Can't Operate Its Own Transit System
Ottawa has a million people. We have one of the biggest geographic footprints for city services in Canada. And we cannot, for some reason, manage a reliable transit system.
This is not a failure of transit. It's a failure of governance.
The Structure of Failure
Here's what happened. We had buses. They worked—imperfectly, but they got people where they needed to go. Then someone/group decided: light rail is the answer.
They were wrong, but not in the way you might think.
The problem wasn't the LRT itself. The problem was that bus service was cut before the LRT was proven to work. They made a strategic decision based on a theory. When the theory fell apart, and it did, people had nowhere else to go.
This is what happens when non-transit people make transit decisions. You remove your safety net before testing the new one. It's not good risk management. It is negligent.
An ex-driver said it plainly: "I have no idea why the same management team has been in place for all these repeated failures." That's the real question. Why? And the answer is: because voters re elect incumbents rather than hold them accountable.
The Transparency Problem
Go ahead. Try to find OC Transpo's daily activity log. Try to pull their action items, timelines, pass-fail marks. Try to understand why vehicles are degrading until they're no longer serviceable, which is what happens when maintenance gets deferred.
You can't. It's not public. Operations are not transparent. There's a black box between the taxpayer and the service rather than clarity.
This is the opening for real change: demand open data.
Not just budget numbers but
daily performance logs,
maintenance schedules,
repair costs,
on-time performance by route,
customer complaint data,
internal recommendations from drivers that were ignored.
All of it.
Why ignored? Because you get a system where:
Management doesn't listen to drivers
Union protects members without fixing actual problems
Failures happen in the dark
New operators inherit the same broken culture with fresh paint on the org chart
The Midnight Service Gap (And What It Says About Priorities)
The O-Train runs until 2 a.m. Buses stop by 11 p.m.
If you work a late shift heading to Innes, Tenth Line, or Mer Blue, OC Transpo's official recommendation is: use Uber.
Let me be clear about what this is:
the city is already outsourcing public transit to private ride-sharing for people who can't afford it.
That's not efficient transit planning. That's a subsidy for people who do have alternatives, paid for by people who don't.
Buses should run every 45 minutes until the trains stop. Not at peak demand—just running. Because shift work doesn't stop at 11 p.m. and public transit shouldn't either.
This is the decision you make when you've stopped thinking about equity and started thinking about schedules.
Who This Hurts Most
Here's the math:
Youth: No car, can't get to jobs or university
Seniors: Can't drive, can't afford Uber, stuck
People with disabilities: Unreliable transit = unreliable independence
Newcomers: Unfamiliar with driving, dependent on public transport
Low-wage workers: Parking downtown costs $15–20/day. That's 20% of an $8/hour wage.
When the system fails, these people aren't just late. They miss job opportunities. They miss medical appointments. They don't go to school. They stop participating in the city.
And nobody tracks it. There's no public health data showing the cost of this in missed healthcare appointments. No economic data showing lost job prospects. Just anecdotes from people's lives that don't appear in council spreadsheets.
The $418.8 Million Question
While transit collapses, council approved $418.8 million for Lansdowne 2.0. A project phased to start in 2031. With 40-storey towers in a neighborhood already strangled by traffic and absent transit.
One resident after attending a downtown event gave up: "We drove and parked instead. We get home much earlier."
That's not a data point about parking preference. That's evidence that public transit has lost the city's downtown users. When reliable transit would create economy, we build towers instead.
This is the choice that happens when decision-makers aren't transit-dependent. They build what they want, not what the city needs.
Why Management Keeps Failing
The mayor has limited administrative experience running a city of a million people. It shows. Council members make decisions about transit without transit expertise. It shows harder.
And when failures stack up—wheels and tracks that don't work together, LRT sitting idle while tracks rust, express routes cut while the rail isn't ready—the response is: offer two free weekends of transit to people who commute weekdays.
That's not compensation.
What Actually Needs to Happen
MetroLinx or some other operator will take over OC Transpo soon. New coat of paint. Same broken system.
Before that happens, demand this:
Open data mandate — Daily activity logs, maintenance records, service performance, driver recommendations (the ones management rejected), cost per route, everything accessible online.
Synchronized service — Buses and trains working together, including after midnight for shift workers. Every 45 minutes minimum.
Driver expertise — Drivers have spent years experiencing this system. Stop ignoring them. Document their recommendations, publish the response.
No more false choices — Stop forcing people to choose between reliable transit and affordable housing. Stop subsidizing Uber for people who have no other option.
Leadership that knows what it's doing — We need people running this city who have actually managed complex systems. Not amateurs learning the job.
The Real Cost
It's not just that you're late to work. It's that transit has become infrastructure for sorting people: those who can afford alternatives, and those who can't.
A sustainable economy needs a functional public transit system. Not just for environmental benefits, we're building a city that's accessible to people who lack money.
Ottawa can do better. Is Leary the guy? Start with transparency, accountability, and someone finally admitting that the same management team has failed—repeatedly—and needs to change.
Demand open data. Demand accountability. Vote for people who actually have experience running things.
This time around, inform yourselves, vote differently, vote wisely. Vote for Peter Karwacki for Rideau Rockcliffe
When "Neutral" Isn't: Rideau-Rockcliffe's Community Associations and the Incumbent's Free Pass
There's a phrase that gets used a lot in civic life: "we're staying neutral." Community associations love it. It signals fairness, evenhandedness, a refusal to play favourites in an election.
These are volunteers. They mean well. "Lord, forgive them, they know not what they do."
Neutrality is a choice made through action, not just through words — and the choices being made by community associations across Rideau-Rockcliffe this campaign season are anything but neutral in effect even if they may think so.
Here's what's happening. The incumbent councillor, King, has had multiple opportunities to meet with these associations — repeat visits, ongoing conversations, relationships built over a full term in office and reinforced again during the campaign.
The challenger, so far only me, the people asking voters to consider something different are being offered exactly one shared opportunity: a single debate.
One meeting, for everyone running against the incumbent, to do what the incumbent has already done several times over.
That's not neutrality. That's a structural head start, dressed up as fairness because it technically offers "equal" access to the one event that exists. But equal access to a single, constrained event is not equal access. It's a fig leaf.
The five-minute rule
And it gets worse once you look at how that one debate tends to be run. "You have five minutes to answer" sounds organized.
It sounds fair — the same clock for everyone. But rigid timing rules like this don't create a level playing field; they create a format that rewards whoever already has the most practiced, most repeated, most pre-tested answers.
That's the incumbent, every time. They've answered these questions before — in committee, in council, in the associations' own previous meetings with them. A challenger encountering many of these issues for the first time in public needs room to think out loud, to push back, to actually engage — not a buzzer.
Real dialogue needs follow-up questions. It needs the ability to challenge a vague or evasive answer. It needs more than one room and more than one association's blessing.
What we get instead is a format that — intentionally or not — protects the status quo: minimize exposure, minimize spontaneity, minimize the risk that a challenger says something compelling enough to move votes.
How incumbency advantage actually gets built
This is how it happens , not through one dramatic, unfair act, but through a dozen small structural ones.
Name recognition.
Established relationships.
Inside access.
And now, the gatekeeping of the very venues meant to inform voters.
Community associations occupy a strange and powerful position in municipal politics.
They're not the media. They're not the city. But for a lot of residents, they're the most trusted source of information about who's running and what they stand for.
That trust comes with responsibility. When an association grants the incumbent unlimited access while rationing challengers to a single, tightly controlled forum, it isn't staying out of the election. It's shaping the outcome.
What would actually be fair
None of this requires an association to endorse anyone. It just requires a few honest changes:
Offer challengers the same number of meetings, and the same kind of access, that the incumbent gets not symbolically, but actually.
If one debate is truly all that's feasible, design it for substance instead of stage management: real time for follow-up questions, real time for rebuttal, real time to actually compare candidates instead of just clocking them.
Be transparent about why access has looked so lopsided and fix it before the next campaign, not after voters have already made up their minds with half the information.
It's no wonder incumbents win so disproportionately when the institutions meant to inform voters keep handing them the microphone and handing everyone else a stopwatch.
This is why King's resignation from OPS is so infuriating to me. He took credit for his work on OPS yet quit when the going got tough. He had an opportunity to make changes but went to the Buffet instead.
But who knew, who even bothered to watch? This is the only debate Rogers removed from its library.
https://youtu.be/5ruPIt2fzXw?feature=shared
This time around, inform yourselves, vote differently, vote wisely, vote for Peter Karwacki for Rideau Rockcliffe
It's that time of year again. Diplomas are being handed out, caps are being tossed in the air, and for many young people in Rideau-Rockcliffe, a dangerous thought is creeping in: I'm done. I've finished school. For some, that feeling of relief is well-earned and the next chapter of learning is already planned. But for others, June marks the moment they quietly decide to stop — and that decision can follow them for the rest of their lives.
The career you will work in probably does not currently exist!
Some may falsely believe they can use bad habits and unexamined thinking to get to some place better than where they are now.
They won't.
Wishful thinking is not a strategy — but education is!
The data makes this undeniably clear. Your wellness, your healthiness, is directly linked to your disposable income. Higher-income Canadians are 29 percentage points more likely to describe their health as excellent or very good compared to lower-income Canadians — and that gap is growing. In Canada, individuals in lower-income brackets have significantly shorter life expectancies compared to those in higher-income brackets. It's not just physical health either. Research demonstrates that Canadians living in the lowest income group were three to four times more likely than those in the highest income group to report their mental health as fair to poor.
The more money you have, the healthier you will be. That's not an opinion — it's a documented reality in this country.
And the statistics are just as clear on what drives income: education.
University graduates aged 25 to 34 in Canada earned an average of $18,868 more per year than similarly aged high school graduates — and that gap only grows with time, reaching $52,782 more per year for those aged 55 to 64. Over a working life, the median cumulative earnings difference over a 15-year period was $568,748 higher for male bachelor's degree holders than for high school graduates, and $472,270 higher for women. That's not a small edge — that's the difference between financial security and financial stress.
If you are a young member of Rideau-Rockcliffe, you need to understand this: staying in school and getting as much training and certification as you can is not optional — it is the single most proven investment you can make in yourself. Spending time in school rather than in the labour market, and acquiring debt to do so, is an investment that appears to pay off for most graduates, with cumulative earnings far greater than the cost of that education.
So before you let this June be the last one you spend as a student, think carefully. Education is your ticket to employment, to a career, and ultimately to good health. The numbers prove it.
Now it's up to you to act on them.
Let me know what you think. Invite me to your hood!
peterkarwacki.overbrook@gmail.com
This time around, vote differently, vote wisely, vote for Peter Karwacki for Rideau Rockcliffe.
Society enforces its rules through force. Countries enforce theirs through armies.
We accept that bargain: a small percentage of the population gets legal authority to detain, restrain, and if necessary kill, while the rest of us navigate daily life with nothing sharper than good manners.
We don't get to escalate. They do.
Here's the part nobody likes to say out loud: there are bad actors already inside that system,
There are dangerous people who haven't been identified yet, moving through our institutions like free radicals. Some of them wear a badge.
That's not a slander against the profession, it's just math. Any group large enough, given enough unchecked power, will contain people who abuse it.
The question was never whether that's true. It's what we do about it.
What we've done about it, historically, is very little, and the structure of policing makes that almost inevitable.
Police unions exist to protect officers, which is reasonable, but it breeds a brotherhood reflex that doesn't distinguish between protecting a good cop from a bad accusation and protecting a bad one from a fair one. Add nepotism, seniority politics, and good-old-boy loyalty, and misconduct doesn't need approval to survive, it just needs tolerance.
Meanwhile the public gets none of the oversight that would let us check the work. Confidentiality and privacy protections, meant to protect victims, end up protecting the institution from its own people. It's a club. We pay its dues. We're not members.
It has ever been thus. But for the first time we have a tool that doesn't care about brotherhood or seniority: data.
This isn't theoretical. Researchers at the University of Chicago, working with the White House's Police Data Initiative, built a predictive model from over a decade of Charlotte-Mecklenburg's own records.
The strongest predictor of an officer having a problem next year turned out to be that officer's own history of problems this year, information the department already had, just never connected, because connecting it depends on a colleague flagging a colleague.
Charlotte piloted the system anyway. LA County and Knoxville built their own. Miami, Minneapolis, and New Orleans already run versions of an "early intervention system."
This isn't science fiction. It's a maturity problem, not a technology problem.
That's the opening AI widens.
An algorithm doesn't get invited to the Christmas party of the guy it's flagging, and it doesn't owe anyone a favor.
It looks at complaint histories, use-of-force reports, body-cam metadata, and lawsuit records, and turns "everybody sort of knew about that guy" into a documented, time-stamped flag that someone has to answer for.
I'm not naive about the failure mode. A system is only as honest as the data fed into it, and departments have already been caught gaming exactly this kind of oversight, softening reports, even misreporting details to make problems disappear on paper.
AI doesn't fix a culture determined to hide its own evidence. But it raises the cost of hiding it. A quiet word in a locker room leaves no record. A flagged pattern that a supervisor chose to ignore leaves a very inconvenient one, for the supervisor.
We accepted the bargain that gave police authority the rest of us don't have.
We never got the other half: real visibility into how that authority gets used. AI won't deliver bias-free policing, nothing will, because people still run it.
But it can start dragging the receipts into the light, where the rest of us, the people who aren't club members yet fund it and live under its rules, can finally read them.
Real leadership means demanding that kind of transparency even when it's uncomfortable, especially from your own people. Rideau-Rockcliffe watched someone walk away from that fight instead of having it.
This is why King's resignation is so infuriating to me. He took credit for his work on OPS yet quit when the going got tough. He had an opportunity to make changes but went to the Buffet instead.
Who even bothered to watch? This is the only debate Rogers removed from its library.
https://youtu.be/5ruPIt2fzXw?feature=shared
This time around, inform yourselves, vote differently, vote wisely, vote for Peter Karwacki for Rideau Rockcliffe
I attended a meeting with the Overbrook Community Association with Neil.
He is my recommendation for Ottawa's mayor.
He said:
“The big spending decisions are lining up with the priorities of powerful developers, not ordinary residents,” said Saravanamuttoo. “These [Tewin and Lansdowne] are both investments that I see very few people in the community asking for, whereas I see a lot of demand for better transit, for community recreational services, for frankly just getting the roads fixed and keeping up with basic services.”
I agree with all of his policy planks. I also advocate for more and better open and easily accessible data whether financial, statistical or social.
It's time we make council accountable. No incumbent should simply sleep walk back to their seat on council.
This time around, inform yourselves, vote differently, vote wisely, vote for Peter Karwacki for Rideau Rockcliffe
Some are bemoaning that CBC's beloved Hockey Night In Canada is going off the air after decades.
But this has been in the works since soccer achieved parity in participation numbers in the early 80's.
Soccer , NOT HOCKEY is Canada's most popular participatory sport, especially among youth and diverse communities such as Rideau Rockcliffe.
Canada's appearance in the 2026 FIFA World Cup is only its third time: 1986 (Mexico),2022 (Qatar): 2026 is the first time the men's World Cup has been played in Canada.
Soccer is already Canada's top participatory sport (nearly 700,000 registered players, ~50% of youth), having surpassed ice hockey in registration numbers since the 1980s–90s.
It is accessible, inclusive, and popular across immigrant communities. The World Cup amplifies this growth, inspiring the next generation and showcasing Canada's multiculturalism.
Expectations are high Canada will secure its first-ever World Cup win(s), and advance from its group stage and possibly reach the knockout rounds.
What is the significance to Ottawa's hockey facilities and soccer fields? You do not need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing!
We need to improve and expand soccer facilities!
Hockey gets more money. Soccer has a clear cost advantage: Families spend roughly $325/year per child vs. ~$1,400 for hockey. This drives the higher participation (soccer now tops hockey as Canada’s most-played youth sport, with roughly twice as many kids involved).
For example, there's no single authoritative "ward facility inventory" I could pull a hard utilization number from, so this is built from community association sites, league listings, and the city's general parks info rather than one official source.
**What exists in Rideau-Rockcliffe:**
New Edinburgh Park, along the Rideau River between Beechwood and the river, has playing fields and a fieldhouse that's been the neighbourhood's hub since 1998.
Rockcliffe Park Public School's field and The Rockeries (Hillsdale Park)
These host the Rockcliffe/Lindenlea children's soccer league, which draws kids from Rockcliffe Park, Lindenlea, Manor Park, and New Edinburgh together — meaning multiple communities are already sharing a fairly small number of pitches.
Overbrook Community Centre and Manor Park Public School
These turn up as bookable fields in city-wide adult league location lists.
Carson Grove Park is used similarly.
**Are they enough?**
Compared to other parts of Ottawa, the ward looks thin.
Millennium Sports Park in Orleans alone has 15 dedicated soccer/football fields on one 34-hectare site — there's nothing remotely comparable in scale within Rideau-Rockcliffe.
What the ward has instead is a scattering of school fields and small park pitches shared across several community associations, which is consistent with the pattern in my "Hockey Night" post: participation has grown faster than dedicated capacity has been built out.
**On utilization**
As usual we do not have a hard booking-rate or occupancy data — that would live in the city's recreation/parks permitting system, not in anything publicly indexed.
If you want a real number (e.g., "X% of permit slots booked" or average wait time for a league to get a weekday evening slot), that's the kind of thing you'd likely need to FOIA or request directly from Parks Permitting (parks@ottawa.ca), or ask the community associations how oversubscribed their seasonal signups are — that anecdotal pressure
(e.g., the multi-community sharing arrangement at Rockcliffe Park PS) is probably your most concrete, citable evidence of demand outstripping supply without needing to wait on a data request.
This time around, inform yourselves, vote differently, vote wisely, vote for Peter Karwacki for Rideau Rockcliffe
