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Friday, 3 July 2026

This is not a popularity contest

Vote for Peter Karwacki for Rideau Rockcliffe


Rideau-Rockcliffe doesn't need a councillor who's good at events. It needs a councillor who's good at oversight.

Those are not the same skill. One gets you a warm reception at a community barbecue. The other gets you asking the right question before council signs off on a $95 million landfill purchase that was appraised at $23 million. Ottawa is a $5 billion-a-year operation. That is not a figure of speech — it is the size of the organization our ward's one vote at the council table is supposed to help steer. You don't steer that by showing up.

Attendance is not accountability.

I've been to the same events. I know the buffet circuit — the ribbon cuttings, the community association AGMs, the seasonal socials. They matter. They're where you meet your neighbours and hear what's actually breaking in their lives. But they are not where a $5 billion budget gets examined, and they are not where oversight failures get caught. A councillor who treats the circuit as the job has confused being liked with doing the work.

Look at what happens when oversight is optional:

  • An independent police workplace investigations office — created in 2022 specifically to fix a documented pattern of harassment and misconduct failures — was quietly shut down in 2023. The Police Services Board wasn't consulted. Members found out the day of their regular meeting.
  • In May 2026, the city's own auditor general found OPS reporting to the board contained flat-out inaccuracies, including outdated figures on the body-camera program. The auditor's word for it was "vague." An oversight board can only oversee what it's accurately told.
  • Council approved a $95 million purchase of a landfill site assembled for roughly $8 million, negotiated behind closed doors under an NDA, on a 20–5 vote.
  • OC Transpo has racked up years of missed performance targets against a backdrop of newsletters listing votes, motions, and commitments — activity without a matching improvement in service.

None of that gets fixed by attending more things. It gets fixed by a councillor who reads the reports, asks who verified the numbers, and is willing to be the one dissenting vote when the room wants to move on.

Popularity and governance pull in different directions.

A popularity contest rewards the councillor who never makes anyone uncomfortable. Serious governance sometimes requires exactly that — asking the question nobody at the head table wants asked, holding up a vote that everyone else is ready to wave through, telling a community association its process advantages incumbents even when that's an unwelcome thing to say to the room that just fed you dinner.



I'm not running to be liked by everyone in Rideau-Rockcliffe. I'm running because this ward, and this city, has real problems that don't get solved by charm: flooding basements with no coordinated protocol, a transit system that's been "improving" on paper for years while riders wait longer, a police oversight structure that keeps discovering after the fact what it should have known in advance, and a ward boundary that keeps producing outcomes nobody voted for.

What I'm asking of Rideau-Rockcliffe

Vote for the person who will read the budget line by line, not the person who remembers your name at the potluck. Those aren't mutually exclusive in theory — but when a ward has to choose, and it does, choose the one who takes the $5 billion seriously. That's the job. Everything else is garnish.

I know this is a harder case to make than it should be. It has been easier for Councillor King to keep this ward comfortable than it has been for me to convince residents they've been made comfortable on purpose. Trust, once given, doesn't ask to be re-examined — it just sits there, quietly renewed every October. Asking you to look again at a vote you've already cast three times is a bigger ask than "trust me" ever is. I'm making it anyway, because the budget and the oversight failures don't get smaller while we wait for that to feel easy.

I know that few people even watched the debate between the King and I.  Bottom Line...

I will not quit, but King did.

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




Twitter
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Peer Metrics
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YouTube
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TikTok
https://www.tiktok.com/@peterkarwacki

References:

1. Police workplace investigations office shut down (2023)2. Auditor General findings on inaccurate reporting to the Police Services Board (May 2026)3. $95 million landfill purchase
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1 comment:

  1. Peter Karwacki3 July 2026 at 20:41

    Community events matter. They’re where you hear about basement flooding or transit delays firsthand. But they are the inputs, not the outputs. The job is what happens with that information once you’re back at the council table—reading the reports, verifying the numbers, and being willing to slow things down when the evidence doesn’t support the consensus.

    As councillor I would push for mandatory independent verification of major reports before council votes, public performance dashboards for transit and police metrics, and greater transparency on land and infrastructure deals negotiated under NDA. Ottawa’s size demands professional-grade oversight, not just good intentions.
    My professional work in project management and metrics has trained me to ask exactly the questions that surface in these reports—before the money is spent and the problems become permanent..

    peterkarwacki

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