What's in store for 815?

 

A Coordinator, a Repaved Parking Lot, and a Secret List of Five Properties

Ward 13 residents who use the Rideau Community Hub at 815 St. Laurent Boulevard — the food bank, the seniors' programs, the cinema, the health and wellness services — might reasonably assume the building's future is settled. It isn't. And the people who could tell you otherwise aren't required to tell you.

I see the field as a new soccer stadium, not a stack if condition.

The building nobody officially closed

Rideau High School shut its doors in June 2017, a casualty of declining enrolment. Rather than sell the site outright, OCDSB kept it in public hands and let it evolve into a community hub through the province's Surplus Property Transition Initiative — a coalition of tenants including the Rideau-Rockcliffe Community Resource Centre, OrKidstra, Operation Come Home, and the Roberts/Smart Centre, with the Resource Centre coordinating operations and covering roughly $547,000 a year to keep the lights on.

That was the deal in 2018: community groups run it, OCDSB owns it, everyone benefits.

Two developments this year suggest that arrangement may be quietly ending.

What actually happened in 2025

May 2025: OCDSB repaved a large section of the Hub's parking lot, disrupting access for two weeks.

June 10, 2025: OCDSB's staff-recommended budget (Report 25-038) revealed a new mid-year position — a "Rideau Hub Coordinator," 1.0 FTE, $122,251 — funded directly by the District rather than by the community partners who've run the site since 2018. The same report noted the District has no plan to reduce its accumulated deficit through operating measures alone, and pointed instead to "the sale of several identified properties and the application of proceeds of disposition" as a supplementary strategy.

Which properties, the report doesn't say.

June 27, 2025: The Ministry of Education released the findings of a financial investigation into OCDSB, conducted by PwC. The board had run deficits for four consecutive years, fully depleted its reserves, and posted an accumulated deficit of $5.9 million in 2023-24, with $9.3 million projected for 2024-25. Buried in footnote 15 of that report is this line:

"OCDSB has currently five properties (three vacant school sites and two parcels of land) that could potentially create [proceeds of disposition] in the future... OCDSB has indicated that it expects to receive fair market value by the end of June 2025 for all five properties."

Again: not named.

July 9, 2025: The Ministry appointed Robert Plamondon as supervisor, transferring every power the elected Board of Trustees held: governance, financial management, policy to his office. Ottawa's largest school board has not been run by its own elected trustees since.

The math that doesn't add up — yet

Rideau High School is a closed, vacant school site. That is precisely the category — "vacant school sites" — the PwC report says makes up three of the five properties slated for potential sale. It is a strong circumstantial fit. It is not confirmation.

 I do not have the actual list of five properties. That list, if it exists in written form, almost certainly lives inside an in-camera real estate report — the kind of document the Education Act allows boards to withhold from public minutes entirely. That's not a conspiracy; it's routine practice for property and legal matters. But it also means the residents currently relying on the Hub have no way to find out whether their building is on it.

What I can tell you is that the timeline is strange enough to demand an answer:

• OCDSB spent public money repaving a parking lot at a site in May 2025.
• One month later, a budget report flagged property sales as a fiscal strategy without naming which properties.
• The same month, a Ministry-commissioned report confirmed five specific properties were being valued for potential sale, with fair market value expected within days.
• Weeks after that, the province stripped the elected board of all authority and installed a supervisor whose mandate is explicitly financial recovery.

An organization does not need to be hiding something sinister for this to be worth asking about publicly. It needs only to be under enough financial pressure that a vacant asset generating $547,000 a year in third-party cost avoidance starts looking, on a spreadsheet somewhere, like an asset that could instead generate a one-time cash infusion.

The question that should be asked in public

If OCDSB — now effectively run by a provincially appointed supervisor with a mandate to close a multi-million-dollar deficit — has already identified 815 St. Laurent as one of the five properties on that list, the people using its food bank, its seniors' programs, and its cinema deserve to know before decisions are made, not after a "for sale" sign appears.

If it is not on the list, that's a five-second answer for OCDSB to give, and there's no reason not to give it.

Either way, the silence itself is the story. A board under provincial supervision, with an explicit disposition strategy for five named-but-unnamed properties, should not get to leave residents guessing about which properties those are — particularly not residents of a ward where the local building in question also happens to be delivering services the City and community partners have spent seven years building up.

I've asked the question. I'll publish whatever answer comes back — including a boring one.

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Peter Karwacki is running for City Council in Ward 13 (Rideau-Rockcliffe) in the October 2026 municipal election.