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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