Knowing the What Isn't the Job.
I can tell you what needs to change in this city. So can a lot of people. The job is getting a hundred different departments, contractors, and residents to actually move — and that's a different skill entirely.
Opening argument
Every council in Ottawa's history has known what needed to happen. Fewer of them have known how to make it happen — through staff who don't report to them, contractors who don't answer to voters, and departments that operate on their own clocks. That gap has a name in project management. It's the whole reason a framework like ADKAR exists.
I'm a certified Project Management Professional. I trained as a data analyst. I spent thirteen years at IBM and Cognos learning, in practice, that a good plan and a delivered plan are two entirely different projects. Ottawa's council chamber is full of good plans. This city's actual record — on transit, on infrastructure, on oversight — is a record of the second project going sideways.
This post does three things: explains the framework I use to think about this, shows exactly where it's breaking down in Ward 13 right now, and lays out what running the "how" would actually look like.
Part One — The Framework
ADKAR isn't a slogan. It's a sequence, and every step is a place to fail.
ADKAR breaks organizational change into five stages a person — or a city — has to pass through, in order, before a change actually sticks. Skip a stage and the change doesn't happen; it just gets announced.
ADKAR's five stages, staged ascending — and where three live Ward 13 files actually stall.
Awareness and Desire are the easy stages, politically. They're a press release and a vote. Knowledge, Ability, and Reinforcement are the hard ones — they require someone to sit in the room with the people actually doing the work, build the capacity to do it, and check back later to make sure it didn't quietly slide backward. That's not a communications job. It's a delivery job. It's the job I've done for a living.
Part Two — The Case Log
Where Ward 13's own files stall — and who's supposed to be pushing them
These aren't hypotheticals. They're three open files in this ward, each one stuck at a different late-stage ADKAR gate, each one sitting on a desk that reports, one way or another, to your councillor.
Transit oversight without a seat at the table
Councillor King has made repeated public calls for stronger LRT oversight. But across his full tenure, he has never sat on the Transit Commission or the Light Rail Subcommittee — the two bodies where the operational knowledge that makes oversight real actually lives.
You can't build the "how" of fixing a rail system from outside the room where the rail system's problems get explained. Awareness and Desire, repeated in a newsletter. Knowledge, never acquired.
A tunnel with a five-year-old warning, still not fixed
The St-Laurent LRT station tunnel had "urgent" structural inspection findings flagged in 2020. The follow-up inspection in 2022 was skipped. As of this writing, repair is still years out, even as the risk has been described in the City's own tendering documents as ongoing and serious — and the pre-tender estimate is a floor, not a ceiling.
The station sits in Ward 13. Councillor King has made no public statement on it. Knowing a tunnel needs fixing is Awareness. Funding, staffing, and scheduling the fix is Ability — and that's the stage where this file has sat, unmoved, for years.
Pre-tender estimate: ~$9.5M · Warning age: 5+ years
"Not robust," and nothing built to fix it
Ottawa's Auditor General has flagged the Ottawa Police Service's database-misuse auditing as inadequate — the Chief's own word for it was "not robust." That's a known problem with a known, off-the-shelf technical fix: anomaly detection on access logs is not exotic technology in 2026.
Councillor King sat on the Police Services Board and resigned from it in 2022, vouching for the board's competence on the way out. The safe workplace program's budget has since been cut from $8.2M to $5.4M. A known gap, publicly acknowledged, with no reinforcement mechanism built to close it and keep it closed.
Safe workplace budget: $8.2M (2022) → $5.4M (current)
Three files. Three different late-stage failures. One common thread: nobody stayed in the room long enough to do the unglamorous part.
Part Three — Running the How
What "getting things done through others" actually looks like on council
This isn't a promise to work harder. It's a specific method, applied to specific files, with the same discipline I'd apply to any delivery project — because that's what a council term is.
Awareness
Make the liabilities visible, on one page, every quarter
A consolidated liability statement — on- and off-balance-sheet, OMERS, the infrastructure gap, Hydro Ottawa's own debt — published on a fixed cycle instead of assembled by residents from scattered financial statements.
Desire
Tie a funding source to every debt motion, no exceptions
Council votes for things constantly. A standing rule that no debt motion passes without a named funding source attached forces the "want to do this" stage to actually confront the "how we pay for it" stage, on the record, before the vote.
Knowledge
Sit on the committees where the operational knowledge lives
Transit Commission. Light Rail Subcommittee. The bodies where you actually learn how the system works before you claim to oversee it. Not optional, not a newsletter substitute.
Ability
Fix the 311 pipeline so tickets connect to projects
Modify 311 itself — GPS-aware project lookup, ticket-to-project linking at creation — instead of building a parallel app. Reuse the budget and the users the City already has. That's how 123,000 orphaned tickets stop becoming a bulk-closure story.
Reinforcement
A standing accountability motion, every budget cycle, plus a sunset clause
A quarterly infrastructure-gap tracker. A recurring liability accountability motion. A four-year sunset review on major liability decisions. Reinforcement is what stops a fix from quietly reverting once the press release cycle moves on.
Closing argument
A council seat is, functionally, an executive delivery role: you don't do the work yourself, you get a hundred people who don't report to you to do it, on schedule, and you keep checking that it stuck. That's the job I've done for thirteen years, under a name — change management — that most councils have never once applied to themselves.
Knowing the what has never been Ottawa's problem. This ward has a five-year-old tunnel warning, a transit file nobody with a vote has ever really studied, and a police audit gap everyone agrees is "not robust" and nobody has funded a fix for, to prove it.
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