Calling Mock Disaster- where are you?

 

We Drill for Disaster in Hospitals. Ottawa Just Waits for the Real Thing.

Before I ran for council, I spent years as a hospital administrator. Every accreditation cycle, one requirement never moved: we had to prove — not promise, prove — that our emergency response actually worked. That meant running a mock disaster. A full mock code, with staff pulled from real duties, decision points scripted in, gaps written up, and a corrective action plan due before the next survey. You don't get to keep your accreditation by having a binder called "Emergency Plan" sitting on a shelf. You get to keep it by demonstrating, under simulated pressure, that the plan survives contact with reality.

Ottawa doesn't work that way. And on July 1, we all found out what that costs.

Like Nostrodammus, I wrote about this back in 2023.

I have skills man.

The Test We Didn't Choose to Run

The Canada Day storm wasn't a drill. It was real: over 100 mm of rain in a matter of hours, basements filling with sewage and stormwater, thousands of residents without power, the National Canada Day fireworks cancelled outright. In Britannia, 167 millimetres fell in about five hours — a rainfall total the city's own general manager of infrastructure and water services called a one-in-200-year event. By the time the city tallied it up, nearly 5,800 basement flooding reports had come in and crews had hauled away more than 2,500 tonnes of storm debris.

That's not a criticism of the weather. Storms like this are becoming the norm, not the exception, and no city can engineer its way out of a 200-year rainfall event overnight. What's fair to ask is a different question entirely: when the storm hit, did the systems the city has spent years building — the Emergency Plan, the Emergency Operations Centre, the escalation protocols — actually activate the way they were supposed to?

By the account of a sitting councillor, the answer was no.

A Colleague Says the Quiet Part Out Loud

College Ward Councillor Laine Johnson didn't mince words. In an email to fellow councillors, she called the city's response "unacceptable," writing that Ottawa has "an emergency services department and an emergency response program," but that "the city was slow to make the decisions that would activate that response." She said the city's senior leadership team "took way too much time to [do] what they needed to do in an emergency response, and residents were left holding the bag." More than 40 percent of storm-related service requests came out of her ward alone.

This isn't a challenger's talking point. This is a member of council, from inside the tent, telling the public that activation was too slow, and that the delay had a real cost measured in flooded basements and residents left waiting.

That's the sentence that should worry anyone who cares about how this city is actually run: an emergency response program existed on paper, but nobody could say with confidence it had ever been tested to see whether it would work under pressure — until it was tested for real, on thousands of people's basements.

Where Was the Practice?

Here's where my hospital background is directly relevant, not just analogous.

In healthcare, disaster preparedness isn't a nice-to-have. Under Accreditation Canada's Required Organizational Practices, disaster response is a required organizational practice — meaning a hospital cannot be accredited without it — assessed against specific, measurable, scientifically driven standards. Crucially, the standard doesn't stop at having a plan. It requires that facility training include periodic exercises covering all components of the disaster response, objectively assessed for quality improvement. You run the drill, you document what broke, you fix it, and you run it again next year.

To be fair, this isn't a perfect analogy and I won't pretend it is. Critics inside emergency medicine have pointed out that Accreditation Canada's own standards for what counts as an adequate exercise are fairly rudimentary compared to evidence-based disaster-medicine tools, and that accreditation alone doesn't guarantee a hospital will perform well in an actual crisis. Paper compliance isn't the same as real readiness, even in a system that requires drills.

But that's exactly the point. Even a flawed, rudimentary drill requirement produces something Ottawa's municipal emergency system doesn't appear to have: a documented rehearsal, with an after-action report, before the real event arrives. The City of Ottawa's Emergency Plan is reviewed annually, on paper. What's not evident anywhere in the public record is a documented, scenario-based activation exercise — of the Emergency Operations Centre, of the decision chain that determines when a storm response gets escalated — run and assessed before residents needed it to work.

We found out how the system performs by living through it.

The Accountability Gap Nobody's Naming

This is where it gets specifically relevant to who's been sitting where at City Hall.

The body responsible for overseeing the City's Emergency and Protective Services — including Ottawa Fire Services and the Ottawa Paramedic Service — is the Emergency Preparedness and Protective Services Committee. For this entire term of council, that committee has been chaired by Riley Brockington. Rawlson King, Ward 13's incumbent councillor, has not sat on it. Not once, in four years.

That's not a coincidence worth glossing over, and it's not the first time this pattern has shown up. It's the same structure I've pointed to before on LRT oversight: repeated public calls for stronger accountability, from a councillor who never took a seat on the committee that could have delivered it directly. Emergency preparedness now joins that list. You don't get to call for a stronger response after the storm if you weren't in the room, for four years, where the readiness of that response was actually being built and reviewed.

I'd also note the timing on the one concrete step the city has taken. A pilot Extreme Weather Preparedness Grant Program, meant to help community groups prepare for climate emergencies, only went to council for approval on June 24, 2026 — one week before the storm hit. It's a good program. It's also proof the city knew there were gaps: the survey behind it found that fewer than one-third of the 72 community organizations surveyed had a community emergency plan at all. That's not a new problem discovered on July 1. It's a known gap that took until a week before disaster struck to produce a funded response — and even then, only a pilot.

What Accountability Actually Looks Like

I'm not arguing Ottawa needs to become a hospital. Municipal emergency management is a different discipline with different constraints, and no accreditation body is going to walk into City Hall with a survey checklist. But the underlying principle isn't healthcare-specific — it's basic project management, and it's basic government accountability: you don't wait for the real disaster to find out whether your plan works. You test it, you document what fails, and you fix it before the stakes are real people's homes.

Residents in West Rockcliffe and Manor Park already live with a combined sewer system that makes this ward more exposed than most to exactly this kind of event. That's not a hypothetical risk. It's the specific, documented vulnerability our own infrastructure carries into every major storm.

Four years is enough time to have run that test. It's enough time to have sat on the committee where readiness gets built. It's enough time to have asked, before the storm — not after — whether Ottawa's emergency systems would hold. That test didn't happen. The storm ran it for us, and Ottawans paid the difference.

— Peter Karwacki, PMP, candidate for Ward  (Rideau-Rockcliffe)