#422 Hold the Line on LRT testing!

Before the East Extension Opens: Ottawa Needs to Hold the Line on Testing

Peter Karwacki · Candidate for Ward 13 (Rideau–Rockcliffe)

OC Transpo confirmed this week that it's in “final preparations” for trial running on the O-Train East Extension — the 12.5-kilometre link from Blair to Trim Road that Orléans commuters have been waiting years for. There's still no opening date. Trial running itself has to run at least 21 consecutive days without major faults before the line can carry passengers.

That's a good moment to ask a question this city has answered badly before: what happens when the trains don't perform?

We already know the answer

In 2019, Ottawa's original Confederation Line was supposed to prove itself over 15 trains running a full schedule for 12 consecutive days. It didn't come close. Rather than let the line fail the test, the City quietly lowered the bar — dropping to 13 trains, and no longer requiring the days to be consecutive. Even that reduced standard wasn't cleanly met: one scorecard from the trial period showed the system failing at roughly 73 percent. The line opened anyway.

The Ottawa Light Rail Transit Public Inquiry later found this wasn't a technical judgment call — it was a decision made under political pressure, communicated privately, and kept from the rest of council while the trial was underway. Then-Transit Commission Chair Allan Hubley was part of a small group — alongside the City Manager, the Mayor, and OC Transpo's general manager — who discussed testing failures over WhatsApp without briefing the councillors and citizen transit commissioners who were supposed to be providing oversight. When the report came out in 2022, colleagues on council called on Hubley to resign. He didn't, and he remains on council today.

This is the precedent the East Extension is testing against. Not “will the trains work” — that's an engineering question. The accountability question is whether the City will tell the public honestly if they don't, or quietly move the goalposts again.

How council answered the accountability question — in public, on the record

When Coun. Catherine McKenney brought forward a motion for a full judicial inquiry into the LRT, it was defeated 13–10. That vote is worth revisiting now, because it's the clearest record of where every sitting councillor stood on public accountability for this file.

Nov. 10, 2021 · McKenney's motion for a judicial inquiry into the LRT was defeated 13–10.

How every councillor voted, Nov. 10, 2021. Rawlson King (Ward 13) and Allan Hubley are highlighted.

Two names on that list matter directly to Ward 13 voters.

Rawlson King voted Yes. He supported the judicial inquiry — the harder, more public, more accountable route to getting answers about the LRT's failures. That's on the record, and it deserves to be said plainly: on this vote, King was on the side of transparency, not against it.

Allan Hubley voted No — and turned out to be one of the people the inquiry found had personally withheld testing information from the rest of council. His seat on the transit file, and his refusal to resign after the inquiry report, is the clearest illustration of what happens when “no” votes on accountability motions turn out to matter later.

What this means for the East Extension, right now

Council doesn't get a do-over on Line 1. It does get a chance to apply the lesson to the East Extension, while trial running is still ahead of us instead of behind us. Three concrete asks, all grounded in what the inquiry documented:

1. Publish the trial-running pass/fail criteria before testing starts, not after. The 2019 fiasco happened partly because the target moved mid-test without public notice. There's no reason the 2026 criteria can't be public from day one.
2. Report any change to the criteria to council and the public in real time, not in a memo after the line has already opened. If reliability targets are adjusted mid-trial, residents should hear about it the week it happens.
3. Name who has the authority to approve a criteria change, and require that decision to go through council rather than being settled in a private channel between senior staff.

None of this asks OC Transpo to be perfect. It asks the City not to repeat the specific failure the inquiry already spent years documenting: quiet decisions, kept quiet, until it was too late to matter.

Orléans and the east end have waited long enough for this line. They shouldn't have to wonder, a second time, whether “passed testing” actually means what it says.

— Peter Karwacki, candidate for Ward 13 (Rideau–Rockcliffe)

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