Choo-choo but no DO - DO

 

The LRT Fleet Crisis How Ottawa Does Oversight.

Treat the subcommittee as more urgent than the next ribbon-cutting or community-profile piece.

     Karwacki

Ottawa's eastern LRT extension to Trim Road has no opening date. Again. It passed "substantial completion" back in February 2026, and since then the story has been a moving target: early 2026, then spring, then "before July," and now — as of June — no timeline at all. The official reason hasn't changed: 

OC Transpo needs 46 train cars available to run the mandatory 21-day trial-running test, and for most of this year it's had as few as 21.

The bearing defect behind the shortage — metal flaking off the cartridge bearing assemblies that connect axles to wheels — is real and technical. But the more interesting failure isn't mechanical. It's that this is at least the second time in this rail system's history that a foreseeable capacity problem has been managed through vague reassurance rather than disclosed and enforced against a hard number. The first time, it took a $14.5-million public inquiry to explain why.

The contract has teeth. The city doesn't use them in public.

Ottawa's P3 agreement with Rideau Transit Group was never toothless. The original contract included penalty provisions worth up to roughly $145 million for delay damages, and the city has, on paper, the ability to withhold monthly service payments from Rideau Transit Maintenance when performance falls short. During the original 2019 launch crisis, the city did levy liquidated-damages payments against RTG for missed trial-running dates.

What actually happened next is the more revealing part. In 2023, CBC reported that the city quietly repaid RTG's maintenance arm a portion of $65 million that had been withheld since 2019 — money that former mayor Jim Watson and former transit boss John Manconi had publicly cited for years as proof the city was holding the line on poor service. The repayment came through a settlement whose terms were kept mostly secret. A second settlement later that year resolved the city's outstanding default notices, again with details undisclosed.

Fast forward to today: OC Transpo still won't say whether it's currently withholding payment over the bearing crisis. Same posture, three years later.

So the mechanism for accountability exists. What's missing is the will to use it publicly and let it stand, rather than invoking it for a headline and quietly settling it out of view once the pressure passes.

Why this keeps happening regardless of who's on council

It's tempting to make this about individual councillors failing to ask hard questions. That's part of it, but the deeper problem is structural, and it would trip up almost anyone sitting in those seats under the current rules:

• Reporting is reactive, not triggered. The LRT subcommittee created after the 2022 public inquiry exists to receive updates on staff's use of delegated authority — it doesn't have a standing requirement to independently monitor fleet health metrics before they become a crisis. It depends entirely on staff choosing to disclose early.
• Financial penalties are confidential by design. Because the maintenance relationship runs through a 30-year P3 contract, payment withholds and settlements are treated as commercially sensitive. Councillors can't see the numbers unless the city solicitor decides to share them — and the record shows a consistent preference for public toughness followed by private settlement.
• The Auditor General only investigates what she's asked to investigate. Ottawa's AG has real power — she can compel contractors to testify under oath and review their work. But nothing routes an issue like a fleet-wide bearing defect to her office automatically. A councillor has to ask.

None of these are new observations. Justice Hourigan's 2022 inquiry report already concluded that senior staff withholding information "irreparably compromised the legal oversight ability of Council" — meaning even councillors acting in good faith were structurally locked out of the information they needed. That's the same shape of problem showing up again in 2026, just with bearings instead of wheel-track alignment.

Where individual accountability still applies

The structural argument explains why this recurs no matter who holds the seat. It doesn't fully explain whether a councillor who correctly diagnosed the problem put himself anywhere near the levers that could act on it — especially when that councillor's entire tenure has overlapped with the crisis.

Rideau-Rockcliffe's Rawlson King was first elected in an April 15, 2019 by-election — five months before the Confederation Line opened on September 14, 2019, and just in time for the launch failures that followed almost immediately. He has now been on council for the entire lifespan of Ottawa's LRT operating crisis, across two terms:

2019–2022 (first term): King chaired the Built Heritage Sub-Committee and sat on the Standing Committee on Environmental Protection, Water and Waste Management. No transit-oversight seat.

2022–2026 (current term): King sits on the Built Heritage Committee (as chair), Community Services, Environment and Climate Change, and Finance and Corporate Services. He has never had a seat on the Light Rail Subcommittee — created by a December 2022 motion from Coun. Steve Desroches and Mayor Mark Sutcliffe about a week after Justice Hourigan's scathing public inquiry report, specifically to give LRT projects "specific, focused attention by Council to enhance public accountability and transparency." Nor has he sat on the Transit Commission (renamed Transit Committee in January 2025), which oversees OC Transpo's operations directly. When council dissolved the Light Rail Subcommittee in January 2025 and folded its oversight role into the renamed Transit Committee, King wasn't added to that committee either — Desroches, the subcommittee's outgoing chair, was.

Against that seven-year span with zero transit-oversight committee seats, here's what he said publicly during the same period:

• March 2020: King joined seven colleagues asking Ontario's ombudsman for an independent review, specifically citing lost trust in staff answers and calling for an independent lawyer to examine the RTM maintenance contract.
• November 2021: When council voted down a judicial inquiry, King said the city needed "an investigation that brings sunlight in."
• June 2023: Roughly six months after the Light Rail Subcommittee he wasn't appointed to was created, King called council's LRT oversight challenge "massive" and spoke about improving democracy and accountability at city hall.

So all three statements, spread across two council terms and three-plus years, were made from outside the room, by a councillor whose committee assignments went elsewhere every single time seats were handed out. Council seats are finite, and every term spent chairing heritage matters, sitting on community services, and building a public profile on other files is a term not spent doing the slower, less visible work of the two bodies built for exactly the oversight problem he kept flagging.

That raises a fair question for a councillor on record calling this a "massive" challenge, more than once, over seven years in office: why not seek the seat built for it, even once? It's easy to sound the alarm from the sidelines. It's harder, and less rewarding in the short term, to do the unglamorous committee work — reading fleet-availability memos, pressing staff on delegated-authority reports, sitting through Light Rail Subcommittee meetings that don't generate headlines — that would have let him act on his own words instead of just repeating them across two terms. If time and political capital went instead toward higher-visibility roles and community-facing initiatives, that's a choice about priorities, and voters are entitled to weigh it as one.

Saying the right thing about oversight three times over seven years, then never once sitting on either committee with the authority to exercise it, is itself the pattern I am calling out.

Systemic failure

This should be read as a systemic failure first, an individual one second. Any councillor operating inside a subcommittee with no independent monitoring power, a contract that treats penalties as confidential, and an Auditor General who has to be asked rather than automatically triggered, is going to struggle to deliver real oversight — regardless of how sincerely they mean it. That lets him off the hook.

But "the system is broken" can't be the whole answer either, because it lets everyone who held office through the last seven years off the hook equally, including people who spent years correctly identifying the problem without ever sitting on a committee that could act on it. 

Ottawa needs both fixes: 

a subcommittee with independent, proactive monitoring power and mandatory public disclosure of contract penalties — and 

councillors who treat getting a seat on that subcommittee as more urgent than the next ribbon-cutting or community-profile piece.

What better oversight would actually look like in practice:

 automatic triggers for the Auditor General, mandatory public disclosure of penalty data, 

or proactive fleet-health dashboards. 

That would be my ask, not simply observing that "something needs to be done".

This time around, inform yourselves, vote differently, vote wisely. Vote for Peter Karwacki for Rideau Rockcliffe.