Not on time..Not on budget

"Ongoing Risk": What the St-Laurent Repair Timeline Actually Tells You

The City just posted tendering documents for the St-Laurent station rehabilitation. Read past the reassuring framing and the numbers tell a different story than the press release will.

What the documents actually say

The City's own project charter for the St-Laurent tunnel renewal assumes full closure of the Confederation Line, in both directions, for an extended period beyond normal engineering hours, to physically complete the ceiling repairs. Stantec's engineering report describes concrete cracking and breaking off the ceiling, exposing corroded rebar, and states plainly that it poses a serious and ongoing risk to the travelling public, to OC Transpo staff, and to the trains themselves.

And construction is still at least two years away.

Sit with that pairing for a second: "serious and ongoing risk" is the language in the same document that also says work won't start for two more years. That's not a contradiction the report resolves — it's the report's own admission that the interim solution to a stated safety risk is "keep monitoring and patching."

This isn't a problem being caught early

The tunnel's water infiltration was flagged in a 2020 inspection. The station has already been shut down multiple times for the same underlying issue — a multi-day closure in May 2024, and further ceiling incidents since — each one treated as an isolated event requiring an "update by morning," rather than as recurring evidence of the same deferred structural problem. The tunnel itself dates to 1980s Transitway construction, repurposed for LRT, with leakage going back decades. This rehabilitation isn't a new discovery. It's a six-year-old known problem that's been reactively patched, closure by closure, until it became disruptive enough to require a full engineering study.

The numbers on the table are the best-case numbers

What's currently public:

• $1.6M — Stantec's estimate for further upper-level repairs
• $7.9M — Stantec's estimate for the lower level: tunnel, drain pipes, pedestrian bridges over the tracks
• ~$9.5M total, at the pre-design, pre-tender, engineering-recommendation stage
• 2+ years before construction begins, on a defect the city's own report calls an ongoing safety risk today

Every one of those numbers is the most optimistic version that will ever exist. There's no detailed design yet. No tender. No contingency priced against work Stantec itself calls "challenging and costly" to execute, given how difficult the ceiling is to access. Estimates at this stage exist to get a project approved, not to predict what it will actually cost once a contractor is on site working around live rail traffic and a partial closure schedule that hasn't been finalized.

Why I'm not giving this the benefit of the doubt

I've written before about the false-precision trap in reasoning about outcomes — treating an early number as though it carries the certainty of a final one. I'm not going to do that here by pretending I can predict an exact overrun. But directional skepticism isn't false precision — it's pattern recognition, and Ottawa has given plenty of pattern to recognize:

Comparable	What happened
Lansdowne 2.0	Council found a funded path from staff report to a $491M vote in roughly a year — when the political will was there.
P3/LRT liability line	The single fastest-growing item on the City's own consolidated liability statement, up $135.8M in one year.
O-Train East extension	Repeated timeline slippage in 2026 alone, from a wheel assembly issue to a train car shortage — an under-resourced maintenance and fleet capacity problem, not a one-off.
St-Laurent tunnel itself	A 2020 "urgent" inspection finding, a skipped 2022 inspection, and multiple reactive closures since — years of patching before this rehabilitation plan existed at all.

When the city wants a project to move, it moves. Lansdowne 2.0 proves that. When a project is a maintenance liability instead of a ribbon-cutting, the pattern is different: slow to fund, slow to start, and the number that finally gets approved tends to be the floor, not the ceiling.

The accountability gap

St-Laurent station sits in Ward 13. The tunnel has been a documented safety concern for years. And there has been no public statement from the sitting councillor on this file — not on the 2020 findings, not on the interim closures, not on this latest tendering release. A rehabilitation plan with a two-year runway and a pre-tender price tag deserves a councillor asking, in public, why "ongoing risk to the travelling public" and "two years away" are allowed to sit in the same sentence — and pushing now for a firm, published schedule with real contingency, not a number that will quietly grow once the actual contract is signed.

Sources: City of Ottawa tendering documents / project charter (St-Laurent tunnel renewal), Stantec engineering report, CBC News.

Self Driving Buses on St. LAURENT

Ottawa's careful Pilot can be Run on St. Laurent.

Kanata North spent a year proving a self-driving shuttle can work on Canadian public roads, through a Canadian winter, with real oversight. Ottawa should use what it already built — not reinvent it — to fix a real last-mile gap at St. Laurent station.

What actually happened, not what's speculative

Between October 2025 and January 30, 2026, a Level 4 autonomous shuttle from Aurrigo ran on public roads through the Kanata North Technology Park — Canada's first all-season, medium-speed automated shuttle trial. It wasn't a stunt. It carried a safety operator on board at all times, ran wheelchair and ASL-accessible service, and was built on a CSA Group regulatory and safety framework developed specifically so other municipalities could adopt it responsibly. It was federally funded through Transport Canada's Enhanced Road Safety Transfer Payment Program, delivered with Invest Ottawa's Area X.O test facility, and the Kanata North Business Association's executive director said on the record that she hopes it becomes a model for other parts of the city.

This is also not Ottawa's first attempt. It followed a 2019 closed-course pod trial and a 2021 EasyMile low-speed shuttle pilot at Tunney's Pasture. By the time the Kanata shuttle hit public roads, this was Ottawa's third iteration — tested, refined, and backed by an actual safety case, not a press release.

Next steps

Ottawa shouldn't be talking about automating transit broadly while OC Transpo can't reliably run the fleet it already has — the O-Train's wheel assembly and train-car shortages are a maintenance and governance problem, not a reason to add complexity. The Kanata shuttle wasn't a leap to full automation — it was exactly the kind of bounded, instrumented, safety-cased pilot that responsible sequencing looks like. The ask here isn't "automate Ottawa transit." It's: the City already built and paid for a tested model. Extend it, deliberately, to a second corridor — instead of letting a proven asset sit idle in Kanata while other parts of the city keep asking for solutions from scratch.

Why St. Laurent

The original case for the Kanata shuttle was last-mile connectivity — moving people between a major employment node and the LRT spine that didn't quite reach it. St. Laurent Blvd has the mirror-image problem: it already has the LRT station, and a large retail and institutional corridor around it, but the connections between the station and the destinations that aren't a comfortable walk are thin. That's precisely the use case the Kanata pilot was designed to test and validate — and Ward 13 is where the results should be put to work first, not last.

What I'd ask the City to actually do:

1. Publish the Kanata North evaluation data before any expansion decision — ridership, safety incidents, accessibility uptake, cost per rider. If it worked, prove it in public first.
2. Reuse the existing vendor relationship and safety case (Aurrigo/Area X.O/CSA Group), rather than launching a second procurement from zero — that's the whole point of having already run the pilot once.
3. Apply the same municipal AI disclosure and audit standard I've proposed elsewhere: what the shuttle's automated decision-making does, who can appeal an incident, and who audits it — published before service starts, not after a complaint.
4. Set a fixed pilot window and a sunset/review clause, the same discipline I've argued for on every other capital and liability commitment — no open-ended pilots that quietly become permanent without a council vote.
5. Route the decision through council, not a single business association — so if it works, it's replicable anywhere else in the city that has the same last-mile gap, not a one-off tied to whoever has the relationships.

Ottawa has already done the hard, boring, correct part: it tested the technology carefully, in winter, with real oversight, and has the data to show for it. The mistake isn't asking whether St. Laurent should get a self-driving shuttle. The mistake would be paying for that proof once and then not using it anywhere else.

Sources: Invest Ottawa, Kanata North Business Association, University of Ottawa research communications, Transport Canada Enhanced Road Safety Transfer Payment Program, Ottawa Business Journal.

Switzerland's Baidu Deal Is a Preview of a Question Ottawa Hasn't Asked Yet

Baidu's Apollo Go has partnered with Swiss Post's PostBus division — branded "AmiGo" — and just won Level 4 driverless operating authority from Switzerland's Federal Roads Office for an 80 km² zone across three eastern cantons, with open-road testing underway since June 1, 2026. Baidu is framing it as the largest planned automated public transport rollout in Europe, backed by its China scale: 22 million rides across 27 cities, 330 million autonomous kilometres logged.

Switzerland just handed Level 4 driverless operating authority, inside its own public transit system, to a Chinese state-linked AV operator — before most North American cities have even settled who audits a shuttle's decision logs. That's not an argument against the technology. It's a preview of the disclosure question every city adopting AV transit will eventually face and most aren't asking yet: who owns the vehicle's software, where does the driving data go, and who has audit rights when the operator is foreign and the infrastructure is domestic. Ottawa's own AV pilots have so far kept that question simple because the vendors are Canadian or European. That won't stay true for long. Any municipal AI disclosure standard worth adopting needs an ownership-and-data-flow line item now, not after the first foreign-operated shuttle is already running Ottawa streets.

Source: Baidu Apollo Go / Swiss Post PostBus "AmiGo" Level 4 permit, Federal Roads Office (FEDRO), June 2026.

Hibou Says King will Cruise to a W

There! You don't even have to vote if Hibou says its already over. No discussion of policy, no analysis, no review of track record. Mon Dieu!

What would we do without such insightful commentary from Craig MacCaulay? 

Check out his other sometimes humorous musings especially about the mayoralty.

Vote differently, vote wisely. Vote for Peter Karwacki in Rideau Rockcliffe.

What Did we learn from the Convoy?

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Municipal Policy & Public Safety

Fixing the Capital's Shield: Operational & Policy Overhauls Post-Convoy

How Ottawa Police Service, City Council, and civil court precedents permanently reshaped policing, municipal governance, and emergency response in Ottawa.

PR

Ottawa Policy Review 8 min read • Governance & Law

The 2022 Freedom Convoy exposed severe fractures in municipal emergency management, inter-agency communication, and public order policing across Canada's capital. In the aftermath of auditor general audits, the Public Order Emergency Commission (Rouleau Commission), and grass-roots citizen action, Ottawa underwent an intensive restructuring of its municipal policies and policing operations.

From policing tactics to council oversight and civil court injunctions, here is how Ottawa’s governance framework was rebuilt to ensure local institutions are never caught off guard again.

Core Operational & Governance Pillars

• OPS Command Structure: Permanent adoption of Integrated Command Frameworks (ICC) between OPS, OPP, and RCMP.
• City Council & Governance Reforms: Updated Emergency Management Plans, streamlined Mayor-Council emergency powers, and active by-law enforcement protocols.
• The Zexi Li Injunction Precedent: How private legal action stepped in when public enforcement stalled, establishing a roadmap for community-led public nuisance relief.
• Financial & Infrastructure Protections: Enhanced FINTRAC oversight alongside provincial anti-blockade towing authority.

1. Ottawa Police Service (OPS): Operational Overhauls

The Rouleau Commission and City Auditor General reports revealed critical gaps in OPS intelligence gathering, public order preparedness, and executive governance. Following these findings, OPS enacted targeted operational changes:

A. Mandatory Integrated Command Structure (ICC)

During the blockade, effective enforcement only occurred after OPS, the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP), and the RCMP established an Integrated Command Centre (ICC). OPS policy now embeds multi-agency joint command protocols for major national events, establishing clear chains of command to eliminate jurisdiction turf battles between municipal, provincial, and federal forces.

B. Intelligence & Heavy Vehicle Management

OPS overhauled its intelligence operations to prioritize monitoring large-scale vehicular movements targeting the downtown core. Protocols now require pre-emptive perimeter controls, vehicle staging zones, and early deployment of heavy-vehicle barriers to prevent unauthorized commercial rigs from establishing footholds in residential areas.

3 AG Reports

Auditor General audits reviewing OPS, City, and Board responses

56 Recs

Rouleau Commission recommendations for policing and emergency coordination

10 Days

Initial horn injunction secured by Zexi Li protecting downtown residents

2. Ottawa City Council Policy & Procedure Reforms

During the early weeks of the occupation, Ottawa City Council faced public frustration over perceived paralysis, delayed decision-making, and suspended municipal services. Council has since revamped its governance and operational procedures:

A. Overhaul of the Ottawa Emergency Management Program

City Council revised its emergency management protocols to clarify the trigger points for declaring municipal states of emergency, establishing direct communication pathways between the Mayor, Council, the City Manager, and police chief. This ensures rapid mobilization of municipal services without legislative impasses.

B. Strict Enforcement of Municipal By-laws

One major criticism during the convoy was the non-enforcement of noise, idling, parking, and public safety by-laws due to fear of escalation. City Council updated By-law and Regulatory Services protocols to mandate immediate enforcement tactics in designated high-risk zones, backed by dedicated police escorts when necessary.

3. The Zexi Li Injunction: A Blueprint for Civil Defense

When municipal and policing mechanisms stalled, 21-year-old public servant Zexi Li took action by serving as the lead plaintiff in a landmark class-action lawsuit (Li v. Barber).

"The Zexi Li injunction proved that when state enforcement falters, private civil litigation can act as an emergency shield for public health and safety."

On February 7, 2022, the Ontario Superior Court granted a 10-day interlocutory injunction banning truck horn honking in downtown Ottawa, which was subsequently extended. This legal action reshaped post-convoy strategy in key ways:

• Empowering Police Enforcement: The court order gave OPS officers clear, unambiguous legal authorization to arrest individuals violating the civil injunction, bypassing administrative ambiguities.
• Mareva Asset Freezes: The legal team secured a court order freezing millions in crowdfunded donations and cryptocurrency wallets, establishing a powerful financial restraint mechanism.
• Precedent for Municipal Emergency Response: Municipal legal teams across Canada now view private/public civil injunctions as a rapid-response tool to curb systemic public nuisances when routine policing is impeded.

4. Policy Evolution Matrix

Domain	2022 Breakdown	Post-Convoy Reform
OPS Command	Isolated municipal command with fragmented intelligence	Pre-integrated command structures (OPS, OPP, RCMP)
City Governance	Delayed emergency declarations & unclear council oversight	Revised Emergency Management Plan & streamlined Mayor/Council powers
By-Law Enforcement	Enforcement suspended due to safety concerns	Escalation-resistant joint By-law and Police response units
Public Nuisance	Relying solely on Highway Traffic Act & Criminal Code	Utilization of civil court injunctions & legal precedent (Zexi Li ruling)

Conclusion

The post-trucker convoy era transformed Ottawa's policy ecosystem. Through integrated policing structures, proactive council emergency planning, and the legal precedent of citizen-led civil injunctions, the capital has established a far more resilient defense against systemic urban blockades.

© Ottawa Policy Review. Analyzed with scannability and legal context.

A balanced scorecard for Ottawa

Balanced Scorecard: Selected City of Ottawa Decisions (2022 – mid-2026)

This table presents the original criticisms alongside the city’s stated context, supporting data, external factors, and remaining open questions. It is intended to give a fuller picture rather than a one-sided view.

Issue	Criticism & key numbers cited	City / administration context & additional facts	Notes / open questions
Housing & development charges	Charges on a new single-family home outside the Greenbelt rose by roughly $21,000+ before construction. Cost falls on the buying family.	Development charges are intended to make growth pay for infrastructure. Rates rose through indexing and master-plan updates (2024–2025). In mid-2026 the city proposed a 54 % cut (e.g. singles outside Greenbelt from ~$62,500 toward ~$28,800) conditional on federal/provincial infrastructure funding. Housing Action Plan measures (fee deferrals, streamlined approvals) are underway.	Exact $21,146 figure is difficult to isolate in public schedules. Overall trajectory was upward until the proposed cut. Net effect on housing starts remains debated.
Open drug use / overdoses	ByWard Market overdose calls: 77 (2018) → 467 (2023). Crisis teams expanded into additional neighbourhoods because the problem is spreading. Goal should be recovery, not permanent management.	Numbers confirmed by paramedic and police data (≈500 % increase). City response includes expanded paramedic “extended care” model, supervised consumption sites, naloxone distribution, and crisis-response teams. Broader Ontario/national opioid-fentanyl crisis is the dominant driver.	Expansion of services acknowledges growth of the problem. Effectiveness of harm-reduction versus recovery-focused approaches remains actively contested.
Traffic congestion & ring-road study	Two-thirds of residents say traffic worsened; 77 % disapprove of the city’s handling. Mayor voted with the majority to remove ring-road evaluation language from the Transportation Master Plan.	Council (16–8, including the mayor) removed late-added “full and fair evaluation” language, arguing a ring road is primarily provincial, previously studied/rejected, costly, and would encourage sprawl. The province has since signalled interest in exploring a southern ring road. Congestion reflects post-pandemic recovery plus population growth.	Public dissatisfaction is real. Whether a ring road is the right tool versus transit, demand management, or provincial highways remains a long-standing local debate.
Transit (“New Ways to Bus”)	≈70,000–74,000 fewer annual service hours. Auditor found the redesign was driven mainly by $10 million cost savings and used 2023 data that became outdated.	Framed by OC Transpo as a network redesign to improve connectivity to new O-Train Lines 2 & 4 and match post-pandemic ridership. Ridership has recovered somewhat but remains below pre-COVID peaks; the system carries a large operating deficit. New general manager has accepted the audit recommendations and is adjusting schedules.	Auditor’s findings of cost-driven design and outdated data are uncontested. Service reliability and frequency remain major resident complaints.
City Hall staffing	≈1,283 additional positions since the mayor took office; after stripping front-line roles, ≈175 head-office positions ≈ $22 million/year.	Total FTEs have grown (city reports ≈17,100–17,200 by 2025). Majority of growth is front-line, growth-related, or provincially/federally mandated/funded. Council later directed a soft cap near current levels for the 2026 budget, exempting many front-line categories. City notes FTEs have grown slower than population/households since 2016.	“Head-office only” residual figure is an estimate; exact administrative share is not broken out the same way in official reports.
Alto high-speed-rail NDA	City signed an NDA covering route maps; neighbouring municipalities refused. Landowners kept in the dark.	City staff signed to obtain detailed mapping so Ottawa’s own infrastructure data could inform Alto’s planning. Mayor stated the NDA covers city-owned properties, not a general secrecy order, and that Alto itself is running public consultations.	Transparency concern is legitimate for affected private landowners. Degree of actual information withheld from the public is disputed.
Lansdowne 2.0	$419 million project approved 15–10. More than 5,000 residents requested a referendum (denied). Transit improvements to the site promised while bus hours were cut.	City/OSEG partnership claims net taxpayer cost closer to 31 % after revenues, air-rights sales, and property-tax uplift; aims to replace aging facilities and keep sports teams. Auditor had raised cost and revenue-risk concerns. Later public polling showed majority disapproval.	Financial projections remain contested. Opportunity-cost argument (money versus other priorities) is central to critics.
Food-bank visits	Visits more than doubled since 2019 (reported +68 %, +90 %, +101 % in successive years). Shipments cut; more than 1 in 4 households food-insecure.	Ottawa Food Bank data confirm ≈101 % rise in visits by 2025 (≈589,000). City has directed staff to develop a food-insecurity strategy. Drivers cited include housing costs, inflation, fixed incomes (seniors), and newcomer settlement gaps—issues spanning municipal, provincial, and federal responsibility.	Municipal levers exist but are partial. Broader affordability crisis is multi-level.
Zoning for daycares etc.	New zoning by-law removed daycares and places of worship from permitted uses in certain light-industrial / business-park zones; medical clinics size-capped.	Changes made to comply with provincial Planning Act definition of “areas of employment,” which restricts institutional uses in pure industrial zones. Existing operators grandfathered. New by-law overall expands housing permissions, reduces parking minimums, and aims for faster approvals. Daycares remain permitted in many other zones.	Net effect on daycare supply near workplaces is a valid concern for parents on wait-lists. Provincial conformity was the stated legal driver.

This format does not declare a winner. It supplies both the criticism and the missing half of the ledger so a reader can form an independent judgment. Sources include City of Ottawa reports, Auditor General findings, OC Transpo statements, Ottawa Food Bank Hunger Reports, CBC, Ottawa Citizen, and official council records.

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Cancer in Ottawa

These figures matter. Earlier detection improves outcomes; declining participation is a concrete policy signal.

Ottawa Can’t Easily Tell You Its Own Cancer Rates

A look at local cancer data transparency — and why open numbers matter for residents and policy

If you live in Ottawa and want a clear answer to a simple question — “How do our cancer rates compare with the rest of Ontario, and are they changing?” — you will find the path surprisingly difficult. That difficulty is itself the story.

Ottawa Public Health (OPH) maintains detailed, regularly updated surveillance for infectious diseases and publishes recent mortality figures. Yet for cancer — one of the leading causes of death and a major driver of health-system demand — the most accessible public resources still leave residents without easy local numbers, trends, or clear analysis.

What the public-facing cancer page actually offers

OPH’s dedicated cancer information page lists general risk factors (including alcohol among dietary factors linked to increased risk) and directs readers to external organizations: the Ottawa Regional Cancer Foundation, Canadian Cancer Society, and Cancer Care Ontario / Ontario Health. It contains no Ottawa-specific incidence rates, no trend lines, and no comparison to the provincial average.

The last standalone local report, Cancer in Ottawa 2012, used data from 2007. More recent figures exist, but they are not presented on the cancer page itself.

What the 2023 State of Ottawa’s Health report actually shows

Buried inside the broader State of Ottawa’s Health 2023 report are age-standardized cancer incidence and mortality rates for 2018, drawn from the Ontario Cancer Registry. These are the most recent detailed local figures OPH has published in a population-health document.

Figure 1. Age-standardized cancer incidence rates (per 100,000), Ottawa vs. rest of Ontario, 2018. Source: Ontario Cancer Registry via OPH State of Ottawa’s Health 2023.

Key takeaways from the 2018 incidence data:

• Overall cancer incidence in Ottawa (499.5 per 100,000) was statistically similar to the rest of Ontario (506.4).
• Colorectal cancer incidence was virtually identical (51.0 vs. 51.9).
• Melanoma incidence was significantly higher in Ottawa (27.1 vs. 22.7).
• Thyroid and kidney cancers were significantly lower.

Figure 2. Age-standardized cancer mortality rates (per 100,000), Ottawa vs. rest of Ontario, 2018. Source: Ontario Cancer Registry via OPH State of Ottawa’s Health 2023.

On mortality:

• Overall cancer mortality was similar (180.0 vs. 185.4 per 100,000).
• Colorectal cancer mortality was essentially the same (19.2 vs. 19.6).
• Breast cancer mortality was significantly higher in Ottawa (16.0 vs. 12.6).
• Lung cancer remained the leading cause of cancer death, consistent with national patterns.

Self-reported prevalence from the 2019/20 Canadian Community Health Survey (also cited by OPH) shows approximately 1.8–2% of Ottawa adults aged 18+ and about 4.9–5% of those aged 65+ reporting a cancer diagnosis of any type.

Screening trends — a more recent signal

The same 2023 report includes screening participation data through 2020, showing clear pandemic-era declines:

Figure 3. Cancer screening participation and overdue rates in Ottawa, 2018–2020. Source: Ontario Health (Cancer Care Ontario) via OPH State of Ottawa’s Health 2023.

• Breast cancer screening participation fell from 65% (2018) to 58% (2020).
• Cervical screening fell from 64% to 56%.
• The share of eligible residents overdue for colorectal screening rose from 37% to 43%.

These figures matter. Earlier detection improves outcomes; declining participation is a concrete policy signal.

Why the gap matters

Cancer data in Ontario is largely managed through the provincial registry, so public-health units are not solely responsible for generating incidence numbers. That does not remove the responsibility to make the best available local analysis accessible.

OPH already demonstrates it can do this well for other conditions: infectious-disease dashboards are current and usable. The contrast is noticeable. In a city whose population is aging (OPH projects that adults 65+ will reach 20% by 2030), the absence of routinely updated, easy-to-find local cancer indicators limits both individual decision-making and evidence-based local policy.

What residents currently cannot easily check:

• Whether Ottawa’s colorectal, lung, or breast cancer rates have moved since 2018
• Neighbourhood or socioeconomic patterns (where privacy allows)
• Stage-at-diagnosis trends that would reveal whether screening gaps are translating into later-stage disease

A practical path forward

The solution is not complicated. OPH could:

• Publish (or prominently link) current Ottawa-specific incidence and mortality by major cancer type on its cancer page and open-data portal, updated as new registry releases become available.
• Provide short, plain-language analysis of trends and comparisons — exactly the “clear analysis” that turns raw numbers into usable information.
• Maintain the same standard of accessibility already applied to infectious-disease and some chronic-disease indicators.

The ask is modest and constructive: Treat cancer surveillance data with the same transparency and regularity that OPH already applies to many other population-health indicators. Open data plus clear analysis lets residents make better decisions and gives elected officials and the Board of Health better evidence for resource allocation, screening outreach, and prevention programs.

The 2018 numbers show that Ottawa’s overall cancer profile was not dramatically different from the rest of Ontario. That fact strengthens, rather than weakens, the case for openness. When the data are ordinary, the public still deserves to see them clearly — and to see them updated.

Better local open data will not prevent every cancer. It will, however, give Ottawa residents and policymakers the same basic tools that good public-health practice already provides for many other conditions. That is a reasonable expectation in 2026.

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References

1. Ottawa Public Health. State of Ottawa’s Health: 2023 Report. Ottawa (ON): Ottawa Public Health; 2023. Available at: https://www.ottawapublichealth.ca/en/reports-research-and-statistics/resources/Documents/2023_Status_of_Ottawas_Health_Report_EN_FINAL.pdf (cancer incidence and mortality tables for 2018; screening data 2018–2020; self-reported prevalence).
2. Ottawa Public Health. Morbidity and Deaths Attributable to Chronic Conditions (web page, data through 2023). https://www.ottawapublichealth.ca/en/reports-research-and-statistics/chronic-conditions.aspx.
3. Ottawa Public Health. Cancer in Ottawa 2012 (and companion Knowledge to Action report). Archived reports using 2007 data. Available via OPH reports archive.
4. Ontario Health (Cancer Care Ontario). Ontario Cancer Profiles (source for screening participation figures cited in the 2023 OPH report).
5. Ontario Cancer Registry (SEER*Stat Package – Release 12 – OCR, March 2021), as cited in the 2023 State of Ottawa’s Health Report.
6. Canadian Community Health Survey 2019/20 (Ontario Share File), Statistics Canada — self-reported chronic conditions including cancer, as reported by OPH.

Data notes: All incidence and mortality rates shown are age-standardized. 2018 is the most recent detailed local breakdown published by OPH in a major population-health report as of the 2023 document. More recent provincial figures are available from Ontario Health / Cancer Care Ontario, but Ottawa-specific breakouts are not routinely presented on OPH’s primary cancer page.

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Why the resignation is important four years later

You Can't Defend the Record and Quit the Job in the Same Breath

In February 2022, in the middle of the Freedom Convoy occupation, city council voted to remove Diane Deans as chair of the Ottawa Police Services Board. Councillor Rawlson King resigned his own seat on the Board that same night, alongside Carol Anne Meehan. In his resignation statement, King didn't say the Board had failed. He said the opposite: that the mayor's claim the Board hadn't been effective in its oversight function was "highly disingenuous and insulting" to colleagues who had been working tirelessly within their scope of responsibility. The Board, he argued, had exercised oversight in the strongest way available to it.

Sit with that for a second. The Board's own vice-chair for community equity looked at its record during the worst governance crisis in the city's modern history and pronounced it sound — and then walked away from it.

The fair version of his defence

It's worth stating the strongest version of King's position, because the weak version is too easy to knock down. King wasn't resigning because he thought the Board had botched oversight. He was resigning in protest of council overriding a legally independent civilian body — removing its chair mid-crisis for what looked, to him and others, like political reasons. On that read, quitting wasn't a verdict on the Board's competence; it was a statement about the Board's independence being violated by the very council that had no formal authority to fire its chair in the first place. That's a coherent position. People resign in protest of processes they think are broken all the time, without believing the underlying work was broken too.

If that were the whole story, there wouldn't be much of a contradiction here — just a councillor making a principled exit over governance interference.

Where the fair version runs out

But it isn't the whole story, because King wasn't only defending the Board that week. He was also on the record saying Ottawa Police's actual handling of the occupation had been "wholly inadequate, and ineffective" — his words, about the service the Board exists to oversee. So in the same stretch of days, King held three positions at once: the police response was failing residents, the Board overseeing that response had done its job well, and he was leaving the Board regardless. The first two claims already sit uneasily together. The third makes it worse — the oversight body he'd just vouched for lost one of its seven members, at the exact moment its job mattered most, over a dispute that had nothing to do with the policing failure he was simultaneously condemning.

You don't get to hold up your own report card as excellent and then leave the class. Either the oversight was working, in which case staying and using that seat mattered more than ever during a crisis — or it wasn't, in which case the resignation statement should have said so instead of defending it.

Why it's not just a 2022 argument

This wouldn't be worth revisiting four years later if it were only about consistency in a single week. It's worth revisiting because the claim in that resignation statement — that the Board's oversight was effective — is one you can now test against what actually happened next: the quiet closure of an independent workplace investigations office, an Auditor General finding that reporting to the Board had been inaccurate, a budget line for the safe workplace program that fell from $8.2 million committed in 2022 to $5.4 million now, and a misconduct crisis this past spring. None of that supports the "strongest oversight available" framing King offered on his way out the door. If anything, it suggests the seat he left empty in protest was one that needed more attention in the years after, not less.

Why this isn't just old news

Four years is a long time to keep raising a resignation letter. Here's why it still matters:

It's not a closed chapter — it's a pattern that kept going. The seat King left empty in 2022 wasn't a one-time lapse followed by course correction. The Board's oversight capacity kept eroding after he left: the independent workplace investigations office was quietly closed, the Auditor General found reporting to the Board had been inaccurate, the safe workplace program's budget fell from $8.2 million to $5.4 million, and this past spring brought a misconduct crisis. The 2022 resignation statement isn't a historical footnote — it's the first data point in a four-year trend line, and the trend line is the story.

The oversight gap has a real cost residents are living with right now. Ward 13's own 2025 crime trends show clearance rates falling even as reported crime rises — robbery clearance dropped from 42.4% to 20.0%. That's not an abstract governance debate; it's the practical output of the accountability structure King says he defended and then left.

It fits a broader pattern, not an isolated incident. King has made repeated public calls for stronger LRT oversight without ever sitting on the Transit Commission or Light Rail Subcommittee. Taken together with the OPS Board resignation, it points to a consistent gap between the oversight King calls for in public and the oversight seats he's actually willing to occupy and use.

It's on the ballot this time, directly. This isn't a case where voters have no alternative to weigh it against. There's a choice in front of them between a councillor who left an oversight seat during a crisis he says the seat was handling well, and a challenger telling them plainly he wouldn't have. Voters can't make that comparison if they don't know the first half of it — which is exactly why it's worth restating four years on.

I've said before, and I'll say it again: I would not have quit. Not because walking away is never justified, but because if you believe the work is being done well, the answer to an attack on that work is to stay and keep doing it — especially when the thing under attack is the safety and accountability of your own residents. You don't get to have it both ways: defend the record, then abandon the post.

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— Peter Karwacki

Lansdowne vrs. St. Laurent

Nobody wants another one of these

Ward 13 accountability · infrastructure

The same council, two emergencies

Lansdowne 2.0 went from staff report to a $491-million council vote in about a year. The St-Laurent LRT tunnel has had documented, safety-flagged concrete failure since 2020 — and is still waiting on funded repair.

Peter Karwacki · Ward 13, Rideau–Rockcliffe

Two aging pieces of city-owned infrastructure. Two engineering reports telling council something needed to happen. One got $491 million and a council vote within about a year of the staff report that flagged it. The other has had inspectors documenting “severe” concrete failure since 2020, and five years later is still working through a repair estimate in the single-digit millions — for a hazard the city's own consultant says poses a real risk to riders.

That's not a coincidence of timing. It's a pattern worth naming plainly before we vote on who manages the next four years of it.

Lansdowne 2.0

~1 year

from 2021 staff report to a funded $491M council vote

St-Laurent tunnel

5+ years

from “urgent” 2020 inspection findings to still-pending repair

What each report actually said

Lansdowne's case was never framed as a safety emergency. City staff called the north-side stands and arena “functionally obsolete” and reaching the end of their useful life — leaks, mould, not enough washrooms, poor energy performance.^1,2 Engineers confirmed the stands themselves were structurally sound.² This was a capacity and viability argument, and council treated it that way: within about a year, council voted 17–7 to advance a $332-million design plan, later growing to $491 million with the Civic Centre included.^3,4

St-Laurent's file reads differently. A 2020 inspection flagged “spalls, delaminations and cracks with efflorescence” and active leakage at one tunnel joint, plus a corroded cover plate and perforated steel curb armouring on the bus terminal above it — findings some of which were labelled urgent.⁵ They weren't patched before concrete began falling onto the tracks in January 2024.⁵ A scheduled 2022 inspection of the area was skipped entirely.⁶ When corrosion turned up behind ceiling tiles in May 2024, it was caught by chance during a routine walk-through — not because anyone had gone looking, since the January repair crews hadn't checked that area.⁶

The most recent engineering report, from Stantec, doesn't hedge: parts of the ceiling are cracking and breaking off, exposing corroded rebar, and concrete risks falling onto the platforms — a serious and ongoing risk to riders, staff, and the trains themselves.⁷

Side by side

	Lansdowne 2.0	St-Laurent tunnel
Problem first documented	2021 staff report	2020 inspection, “severe” findings
Framed as a safety risk	No — capacity/viability case	Yes — “serious and ongoing risk”
Time to funded council action	~1 year	5+ years, still pending
Dollars committed	$491M	~$9.5M recommended so far
Interim condition while waiting	Remained in normal use	Netting installed, repeated closures, reactive patching
Inspection follow-through	Tracked through committee process	2022 inspection skipped; 2024 corrosion found by chance

“It's not the structural hazard that people might think it is. However, it is still a hazard.”⁸

That's about the fairest possible read of where St-Laurent stands today — not on the verge of collapse, but a documented, recurring hazard in an active transit tunnel that keeps resurfacing because the thing actually causing it, water infiltration through joints as old as the tunnel itself, still hasn't been fixed.⁹

The pattern, stated plainly: this council term moves fast and finds real money for capital projects with a development upside — Lansdowne's towers and OSEG's business case gave it a natural, motivated champion at the table. A transit tunnel that only serves the people riding through it does not have one. It got a mayor's public frustration and a fast vote in one case, and a skipped inspection in the other.

Why this belongs in a Ward 13 conversation

St-Laurent station sits in Ward 13. It's the ward's transit gateway to the rest of the city. And yet the incumbent councillor's public record shows no statement on the tunnel's safety findings, despite years of documented, urgent inspection results and a station that has now closed multiple times.

Infrastructure accountability isn't about picking one project to be angry about. It's about asking whether the same standard of urgency applies regardless of whether a project comes with a ribbon-cutting attached. On that test, the last several years say no.

Sources

1. CBC News, “North side sucks, and so does the arena at Lansdowne, report says,” July 2021. cbc.ca
2. Same source as above — engineering assessment of stand condition.
3. CBC News, “City council votes to move ahead with Lansdowne 2.0,” June 8, 2022. cbc.ca
4. Ontario Construction News, “Ottawa city council green lights $491 million Lansdowne 2.0 project,” Nov. 2023. ontarioconstructionnews.com
5. CBC News, “Skipped inspection, warning signs preceded falling concrete in LRT tunnel,” Apr. 18, 2024. cbc.ca
6. CBC News, “OC Transpo still can't say what's causing the leaks plaguing LRT stations,” May 22, 2024. cbc.ca
7. CBC News / Yahoo News Canada, “Sorry state of St-Laurent station could eventually shut down its LRT tracks for weeks,” 2026. ca.news.yahoo.com
8. CBC News, “Ceiling corrosion disrupts LRT service at St-Laurent station,” May 2024 — quoting Coun. Wilson Lo. cbc.ca
9. CBC News, “Expired joints, cracked pipes: new details emerge about leaky LRT tunnel at St-Laurent,” June 18, 2025. cbc.ca

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Vote for Peter Karwacki for Rideau Rockcliffe

Its a matter of valence

The Tone You Trust Isn't the Record You're Voting On

Why "this feels reassuring" and "this is true" are two different tests — and Ward 13 keeps getting asked to grade on the first one.

Peter Karwacki — Ward 13 (Rideau-Rockcliffe) — Campaign Blog

There's a well-documented reason people trust a friend, a brand, or increasingly an AI chatbot: not because every claim they make has been individually verified, but because their responses are consistent, and the consistency happens to land in a direction the listener approves of. Say something reassuring often enough, in the same warm register, and the pattern itself starts to feel like evidence. Psychologists call the underlying shortcut a "consistency heuristic." It's not irrational — most of the time, in most relationships, predictability really does track reliability.

But it's also exactly the failure mode that shows up on the list of AI reasoning traps: mistaking a consistent tone for a verified outcome. A model that always answers confidently, always in the same reassuring register, will earn a user's trust regardless of whether any individual answer was actually correct. The fluency and the friendliness do the persuading. The facts, if anyone bothers to check them, do something else entirely.

Municipal politics runs on the same shortcut. A newsletter that consistently frames the ward as moving in the right direction, delivered in the same steady, positive-valence voice every week, builds exactly the kind of trust a friendship builds — approval of the pattern, not verification of the content.

What "consistent tone" actually covers for

Councillor King's weekly newsletter is professionally done and it is, week over week, remarkably consistent in register: measured, positive, forward-looking. That consistency is a communications skill. It is not a substitute for the underlying record, and in several places this year the two have pulled apart:

The consistent message	What the record shows
The Build Canada Homes federal partnership was framed as city housing progress.	Construction hasn't started — it's slated for fall 2026 to spring 2027. The city delivered 79 units in 2025 against its own 500-unit annual target.
Repeated calls for stronger LRT oversight, in consistent language, across his tenure.	He never sat on the Transit Commission or the Light Rail Subcommittee across that same tenure.
A 2022 resignation statement vouching for the Ottawa Police Services Board's competence.	Since then: a quietly closed independent workplace investigations office, Auditor General findings of inaccurate reporting to the board, and a spring 2026 misconduct crisis.
"Meaningful progress on ending homelessness."	Chronic homelessness rose from 813 to 1,279 people between 2018 and 2024. The 2026–2035 housing plan projects continued risk growth under both of its own modeled scenarios.

None of this requires assuming bad faith. It requires noticing that a consistent, approved-of tone and a verified outcome are two separate things, and that most of us — by design, not by flaw — are much better equipped to notice the first than to check the second.

Why this matters more in October than it usually does

Every election, some version of this dynamic plays out. What's different this cycle is that we're all getting daily practice at exactly this discernment problem somewhere else — in how we've learned, or are learning, to talk to AI systems. Ask a chatbot something and get a confident, friendly, consistently-toned answer, and the instinct to treat the tone as the proof is strong enough that entire literacy campaigns now exist to counter it. We're being trained, in real time, to ask a second question after the first one: not just "does this sound right," but "can I check it."

That's the same question worth bringing to a councillor's weekly update. Not "does this sound like good news," but "what does the underlying number, the committee record, or the audit say."

What I'm asking you to grade me on instead

I'm not asking Ward 13 to trust my tone. I've built this campaign's content around the opposite bet: that every claim I make should survive a records request, an Auditor General report, or an open-data pull, whether or not the conclusion is flattering to me. That's why the 311 bulk-closure analysis, the OCDSB property filing, the liabilities breakdown, and the LRT committee record are all published with their sourcing attached rather than asserted in a friendly paragraph and left there.

If a claim of mine doesn't hold up when you check it, that's a reason not to vote for me — not a reason to trust me more because I said it consistently.

The test I'd ask you to apply on October 26: not which candidate's updates make Ward 13 feel best week to week, but whose claims still hold up after you've pulled the record yourself.

Sources: City of Ottawa 2026–2035 Housing and Homelessness Plan; chronic homelessness count data (2018–2024); Auditor General reports on OPS Board reporting accuracy; Councillor King's July 24, 2026 newsletter; Build Canada Homes partnership announcement; Transit Commission and Light Rail Subcommittee membership records.

Get your AI Guard up

Ten AI Logical Fallacies Every City Hall Should Know

A field guide for early adopters — because in municipal governance, there's very little tolerance for a mistake.

Peter Karwacki · Candidate, Ward 13 (Rideau-Rockcliffe)

Ottawa is already using AI. Staff are using Copilot by the thousands, resume screening tools are in the hiring pipeline, and infrastructure-mapping AI is quietly informing capital decisions. That adoption curve is not slowing down — and the tolerance for error in city governance is not the same as the tolerance for error in a casual chat with a chatbot.

A wrong answer in a personal conversation is a minor inconvenience. A wrong answer baked into a zoning decision, a budget line, or a benefits determination becomes a public record, a headline, or a legal exposure. The tool isn't necessarily the problem. The gap between how confident a piece of AI output sounds and how reliable it actually is — that's the problem. And that gap has a name, or rather ten of them.

Here's a top ten list of the logical fallacies I think every early adopter in municipal government — councillors, staff, and residents alike — should be able to recognize on sight.

1. 1. Fluency Fallacy Mistaking confident, well-structured prose for accuracy. A wrong answer delivered smoothly reads as more credible than a hedged right one. Fluency is a style property, not a truth property.
2. 2. Authority by Automation Treating "the AI said so" as if it settles a question, the way you might defer to a credentialed expert. A model has no accountability, no license to lose, and no reputation at stake — it shouldn't get expert-level deference by default.
3. 3. Sycophancy Blindness Not noticing when a model is agreeing with you because you want it to, not because you're right. Especially dangerous when a leading question comes back as your own opinion, reflected as if it were independent analysis.
4. 4. Introspection Illusion Trusting an AI's explanation of why it produced an answer as if that were a real account of its process, rather than a plausible-sounding reconstruction generated after the fact.
5. 5. False Precision Treating a specific number, date, or citation from an AI as verified just because it's specific. Specificity feels like rigor. It isn't evidence.
6. 6. Consistency-as-Truth Assuming that because a model gives the same answer twice, or two different AI tools agree, that increases confidence in correctness. Shared training data and shared blind spots produce agreement too.
7. 7. Verification Decay Starting out by fact-checking every AI output, then quietly stopping as trust builds and workload increases. The failure doesn't happen on day one. It happens once the habit of checking has eroded.
8. 8. Responsibility Laundering Using "the AI recommended it" to diffuse accountability for a decision, consciously or not. The tool doesn't bear consequences. The person who acted on it does — and pretending otherwise is where governance trust breaks.
9. 9. Static Expertise Assumption Assuming a model that's good at one task — drafting, summarizing — is equally reliable at another, like legal interpretation or financial modeling, just because the interface and tone feel the same across tasks.
10. 10. Silence-as-Confirmation Reading a model's lack of pushback as evidence that an idea has been checked and holds up, rather than as a model doing what it was optimized to do: keep the conversation smooth.

The failure isn't usually the AI being wrong. It's the human's confidence outrunning the actual reliability of what's in front of them.

That gap — between felt-confidence and actual-verification — is the whole risk in a governance context. It's also fixable, but not by asking people to "just be more careful." Verification has to be structural: mandatory citation to source documents, a named human sign-off, and treating any AI output the way you'd treat a draft from a junior staffer — useful, but never final without review from someone who has skin in the game and answers to the public.

It also means residents have a right to know where AI is being used before an error surfaces, not after. Disclosure changes the incentive. It's much easier to skip verification on a tool nobody knows you're using.

Where this connects: I've written separately about the disclosure gaps in Ottawa's current AI use and what a real Municipal AI Disclosure & Audit Standard should look like. If accountability — human and algorithmic — is something you want in your next councillor, I'd welcome your support.

— Peter Karwacki, Ward 13

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AI Goverance Issues

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Peter Karwacki — Rideau-Rockcliffe ward 13 / Oct 2026

Accountability File · Municipal AI Governance

Ottawa's AI Use Isn't Coming. It's Already Here — And Growing Faster Than the Rules Around It.

3,200 staff. 114,000 prompts and counting. An AI hiring tool. An AI system reading the city's own infrastructure footage. This is where Ottawa's municipal AI footprint stands today — and every signal points to it expanding, not slowing down. The governance framework meant to keep pace with it is still, a year later, a promise rather than a document.

Most of this campaign's accountability work has been about a simple mismatch: what the City says it's doing, and what it can actually show it's done. AI is that mismatch on a faster clock. This isn't a hypothetical about robots someday running city hall — it's already running spreadsheets, screening resumes, and reading the streets through a windshield camera. The trajectory only points one way: more staff, more prompts, more departments, more decisions touched. The question this campaign is raising isn't whether the City should use AI. It's whether governance is being built at the same speed adoption is happening — and right now, it isn't.

Section 01The Growth Curve

Every piece of this puzzle the City has confirmed publicly comes with the same coda: more is coming. IT staff told council in December 2025 that AI rollout would keep expanding across departments. That's not a guess — it's the City's own stated plan, and the numbers already show the shape of it.

→ Today: 3,200 staff, one toolCopilot inside Outlook, Word and Excel — drafting and internal search. 114,000+ prompts filed so far.

current footprint

→ Already expanding: two new systems liveAI hiring screens for high-demand roles; AI infrastructure-mapping reading GATsmobile survey footage.

rollout underway

→ Where this is headedOntario's provincial government already has over 15,000 staff on Copilot weekly — roughly five times Ottawa's current base — showing the ceiling municipal adoption is likely climbing toward.Source: AI Business Weekly, Dec 2025 (Ref. 2)

trajectory

The pattern across every Canadian government deploying AI so far: pilot small, expand fast. Ottawa is already past the pilot stage.

Section 02The Disclosure Ledger

Every line below is either something the City has confirmed in a public meeting or news record, or something it has not addressed at all. No line is speculation.

Confirmed / On the Record	Undisclosed / Unaddressed
Confirmed3,200 city employees use Microsoft Copilot inside Outlook, Word and Excel, and have filed over 114,000 prompts to date.Source: City IT presentation, Dec 2025 (Ref. 2)	UndisclosedNo published inventory of every AI system in use across departments — hiring, infrastructure, or otherwise. No single public list exists.
ConfirmedAn AI resume-screening tool is being deployed for high-demand hiring positions.Source: City budget committee, Dec 2025 (Ref. 1, 2)	UndisclosedNo published bias or accuracy testing for the hiring tool, despite AI hiring being one of the most litigated bias categories nationally.
ConfirmedAn AI system is being built to auto-identify streetlights, signs and infrastructure from the City's GATsmobile survey footage.Source: City IT presentation, Dec 2025 (Ref. 2)	UndisclosedNo stated accountability chain for what happens when the system misses or misidentifies an asset.
ConfirmedCity Manager Wendy Stephanson told council a governance framework — covering structure, privacy and use guidelines — was coming in 2026.Source: City budget committee, Dec 2025 (Ref. 2)	UndisclosedWhether that framework has actually been adopted, what it contains, and whether it includes resident disclosure or an appeal right for an AI-assisted decision.
ConfirmedConsumer chatbots (ChatGPT, Gemini) are restricted for most staff; Copilot is the sanctioned enterprise tool.Source: reporting on federal/municipal IT policy (Ref. 2)	UndisclosedData-residency and retention terms — where prompts and data go, and what a resident could obtain under a records request.
ConfirmedOntario's provincial government has an AI Trustworthy Directive in force since Dec 2024, and its Auditor General ran a dedicated 2026 performance audit of provincial AI use.Source: Ontario Auditor General special report, 2026 (Ref. 4)	UndisclosedNo equivalent independent audit function has been announced at the municipal level in Ottawa.

Section 03The Risk Register

None of this means the City shouldn't use AI — Copilot for drafting memos and computer vision for cataloguing streetlights are genuinely low-stakes today. The risk is the gap between two speeds: adoption is compounding, and governance has moved once, in December 2025, when a framework was promised for "sometime in 2026." Nothing since. Ranked here by how exposed the City is if that gap is still open when adoption reaches higher-stakes territory — permitting, bylaw enforcement, service eligibility.

01 Disclosure gapResidents affected by an AI-assisted decision may have no way of knowing AI was involved.

exposure: high

02 No appeal mechanismWithout a guaranteed human-review step, an AI error has no clear path to a remedy.

exposure: high

03 Bias without auditHiring and service-delivery AI can encode bias already in its training data — unverifiable without independent testing.

exposure: high

04 Governance theatreA framework announced as "responsible AI governance" that is, in practice, internal IT policy with no public reporting or teeth.

exposure: moderate–high

05 Procurement opacityAI tools bought from vendors with no disclosed, independent testing standard.

exposure: moderate

06 Scope creepLow-stakes use cases (drafting, asset-mapping) normalize adoption before governance exists for the higher-stakes uses likely to follow.

exposure: moderate

07 No independent auditThe Province has already run one AI performance audit. Ottawa has announced no municipal equivalent.

exposure: moderate–high

Exposure = how much residents currently rely on the City getting this right, with no way to check.

Section 04What I'd Commit To

This isn't a call to slow AI down inside city hall — the growth curve above is coming whether council plans for it or not. It's a call to make governance grow at the same rate. Right now the City has a one-line promise from a December 2025 committee meeting and nothing published since. That's not a framework. That's a placeholder.

A Municipal AI Disclosure & Audit Standard

1. Publish the inventory. A public, regularly updated list of every AI system in municipal use, what it does, and which department owns it.
2. Disclosure by default. Any City decision that used AI assistance — permitting, enforcement, benefits eligibility — says so, in plain language, to the resident it affects.
3. A guaranteed human-appeal right for any AI-assisted decision affecting a resident directly.
4. Independent testing before deployment for any tool touching hiring, enforcement, or eligibility — not vendor self-certification.
5. An annual Auditor General review of municipal AI use, matching the standard the Province has already set for itself.

I'll be filing a records request for the City's current AI inventory and the status of the promised 2026 governance framework, the same way I did with OCDSB's property list. Findings will be published here as they come in.

References

1. Pringle, J. "City of Ottawa developing policy for using artificial intelligence." CTV News Ottawa, Dec 2, 2025. ctvnews.ca
2. Khan, S. "Ottawa Uses AI for Hiring, Productivity as 3,200 Staff Adopt." AI Business Weekly, Dec 3, 2025. aibusinessweekly.net
3. "AI is entering council chambers across Ontario." Canada's National Observer, Apr 30, 2026. nationalobserver.com
4. Office of the Auditor General of Ontario. "Performance Audit: Use of Artificial Intelligence in the Ontario Government." 2026. auditor.on.ca

FILE STATUS: OPEN — pending City response to records request · Ward 13 Accountability File