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.
— Peter Karwacki
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