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Peter Karwacki — Ward 13 (Rideau-Rockcliffe)
Saturday, 5 September 2026
#494 CBC questionnaire — for your enjoyment
This is the form. Unedited answers. If CBC uses them, good. If they don't, residents still have the record.
How many years have you lived in the ward?
I live in Overbrook. That is home. I have run in this ward three times — 2019, 2022, and 2026 — and I have been writing about these streets for years. The campaign email is peterkarwacki.overbrook@gmail.com for a reason.
I landed in Ottawa 27 years ago. I will not invent a precise ward-year count for a form if I have not already put that number on the public record. Length of residence is not the qualification. Knowing the files is.
Why do you want to represent your ward on council?
Because Rideau-Rockcliffe does not need another councillor who is good at events. It needs one who is good at oversight.
Those are not the same skill. One gets you a warm reception at a community barbecue. The other gets you asking the right question before council signs off on a $95 million landfill purchase that was appraised at $23 million, a $419 million Lansdowne structure the Auditor General already flagged, or an LRT tunnel inside this ward that engineers called urgent in 2020 and that is still not fixed.
I am running a third time because the ward's one vote at a multi-billion-dollar table is being used more often as a newsletter than as a governing instrument. I have made a one-term commitment. My livelihood does not depend on winning re-election. That is the point.
What professional or life experiences best prepared you to make city-wide policy and spending decisions? Provide up to three.
- Hospital administration in Northern Ontario. Fifteen years as financial director and CEO: budgets, boards, hiring and firing, strategy, and public accountability when the money is real and the consequences land on actual people.
- Cognos / IBM and federal project work. Business intelligence and OLAP modelling, then independent project management for Health Canada, CBSA, Export Development Canada, and Natural Resources Canada. That is how you learn to read a large organization from the inside without swallowing the press release.
- Peer Metrics, since 2013, and a PMP. I measure whether a program is working. City Hall is a multi-billion-dollar organization that still treats measurement as optional. I don't.
What professional or life experiences best prepared you to listen to constituents and weigh many competing interests? Provide up to three.
- Living in a two-market ward. Rockcliffe Park and Overbrook are not the same housing story, the same income story, or the same infrastructure story. Anyone who represents only one of those conversations is not representing Ward 13.
- Boards and hospital governance. You learn quickly that every dollar given to one priority is a dollar not given to another, and that the people in the room are not the only people affected.
- Door-to-door work across three campaigns. Residents do not speak in talking points. They speak in basement floods, missed buses, package theft, wait-lists, and parks that got the cheaper version of the upgrade. You weigh that against the city-wide ledger, or you are just collecting applause in the neighbourhood that already has the loudest association.
What is the single biggest challenge the City of Ottawa needs to make a priority in the next council term?
Council has no consistent system for turning warnings into action.
The St-Laurent LRT tunnel had an "urgent" finding flagged in 2020 that still has not been resolved. The Ottawa Police Services Board admitted its own auditing was not robust, years after a resignation statement promised otherwise. Lansdowne 2.0 keeps adding liabilities the city will be servicing long after this term ends. In every case the information existed. What was missing was a structural requirement to act on it — and to be measured on outcomes, not press releases.
Next council needs a real audit-and-disclosure standard: independent, recurring, and public. Cover transit safety, policing oversight, and major financial commitments alike. Ottawa does not have an information problem. It has an accountability problem. Fix that, and better decisions follow on their own.
The 2026 budget raises property taxes by 3.75 per cent. What is the maximum tax increase you would support for the upcoming 2027 budget and why?
I would not set a number in isolation. I would set a ceiling tied to what residents can actually verify they are getting for it.
If pressed: I would support a cap in line with inflation — roughly 3 per cent — and not a cent more without a public accounting of where the last increase went.
Ottawa is carrying liabilities that are not fully priced into the budget conversation: Lansdowne 2.0's financing structure, federal workforce cuts hitting local spending power, trade-war exposure flowing through the federal channel, and a capital plan that still treats deferred infrastructure as a future problem. Property-tax increases get debated as if they sit in a sealed box. They do not.
Before asking for more, council owes people three columns in plain language: what we owe, when it is due, and what last year's increase actually bought.
Beyond taxes, what should the city do to make life more affordable for residents?
Stop making housing, transit, and groceries more expensive through municipal sloppiness.
- When the city overruns capital projects, property taxes rise. When property taxes rise, operating costs rise for landlords. The renter pays that. Measure housing success by units that exist, wait-lists that move, and whether a renter in Overbrook can stay in the ward — not by signed agreements and ribbon-cuttings.
- Stop warehousing affordable housing only in the parts of the ward that already carry it. Overbrook should not be the path of least resistance while other neighbourhoods are treated as off-limits.
- Publish a liabilities ledger. Do not let dividends, reserves, and "flexibility" accounts quietly backfill cost overruns while council calls it infrastructure.
- Fix the basics that eat household budgets: unreliable buses, deferred roads and sewers, basement flooding with no coordinated protocol, and hotel-based homelessness spending that buys nothing that lasts.
Would you make any significant changes to the steps OC Transpo is taking to rebuild ridership and trust, and if so what?
Yes. Stop measuring the existence of a service and start measuring whether a rider can use it.
Reliability first. Fare politics second. It does not matter how cheap a ride is if the bus does not come.
I would tie any fare relief to published, audited targets for on-time performance, cancellations, and frequency on the local routes people in this ward actually use — 6, 7, 12 — not just the headline rail line.
Hold the line on LRT testing. Do not move the goalposts to hit an opening date. The St-Laurent tunnel is inside this ward. A five-year-old urgent finding that still has not been closed is not a communications problem. It is a governance problem.
Put a councillor who will do the work on Transit Commission and the Light Rail Subcommittee. Oversight from outside the room is a newsletter.
OC Transpo keeps running deficits. Beyond requesting funding from other levels of government, how should that primarily be addressed?
Not by pretending one lever fixes a system that is failing on operations, fleet, and contract design at the same time.
Increasing fares: Not first. Charging more for a service people cannot count on is how you shrink ridership further.
Transit levy: More honest than hiding operating shortfalls inside the general tax debate — but only if the levy is tied to published service metrics and cannot be raided for debt service on projects council already blew.
Service cuts: The worst option in a city that already cancels trips and parks buses. Cutting service to close a deficit is how you lock in the deficit.
Primary address: governance and cost control. Mechanic and spare-bus capacity. Contract oversight. Stop treating consultant reports as the achievement. Then, if a dedicated levy is required, put it on the table in public with a sunset and a scoreboard.
How appropriate is the budget for the Ottawa Police Service?
Other.
Please explain how you think funding for police should be changed.
The headline number is the least useful number on that file.
The Auditor General's 2026 findings were not ambiguous. OPS reporting to the board contained inaccuracies. The word used was "vague." The independent workplace-investigations office was shut down without proper board consultation. The safe-workplace budget went from $8.2 million to $5.4 million.
That is not a "more money / less money" slogan. That is a composition and accountability problem.
I would hold the police budget to clearance, response, and board-reporting standards before adding more unrestricted growth. Scale civilian crisis response so police are not the default for calls they should not own. Require public metrics on performance, risk, and database-misuse auditing. Proper board consultation before major structural changes. Accurate, timely reporting. A board that treats "not robust" as a finding to fix, not a phrase to survive until the next news cycle.
If those conditions are met and the service still cannot meet its core mandate, then argue for more money in public, with numbers attached. Do not write the cheque first and invent the scoreboard later.
Ottawa has experienced tornadoes, wildfire smoke and flash floods. Should the City of Ottawa prioritize investments that make its infrastructure more resilient to extreme weather, even if it means spending less in other areas?
Yes — if "resilience" means sewers, stormwater, roads, trees, and power, not branding.
Feel free to expand on your answer above about infrastructure and extreme weather.
Residents in this ward experience extreme weather as flooded basements, downed trees, and streets that fail in the same places every time. That is an asset-management problem.
I will fund stormwater, sewer separation where it is still combined, road drainage, and canopy replacement before I fund another signature project that photographs well and floods later. I will not treat "climate resilience" as a blank cheque that protects Lansdowne while Overbrook waits.
Spend less on the files council already chose over the basics. The 15–9 Lansdowne vote told you the priority order. Reverse it.
How would you describe your ward to people who don't live there?
Rideau-Rockcliffe is two cities sharing one ballot.
Rockcliffe Park, New Edinburgh, Lindenlea, and Manor Park sit beside Overbrook and the east-end streets that carry more renters, more core housing need, more deferred infrastructure, and more of the city's social load. The river, the Aviation Parkway, Beechwood, St-Laurent, and the Rideau are the seams.
It is a capital ward with embassy streets and a working-class ward with basement apartments. Anyone who describes only one of those things is selling a brochure.
What is the biggest improvement you have seen in your ward since the 2022 municipal election?
I will not invent one to be polite.
There have been announcements. There have been consultations. There have been park upgrades that were not applied evenly — Riverain got the fuller version; Bathgate got the scaled-back version, basketball court removed and not replaced. The NCC has done useful work on shorelines and animation. That credit belongs there.
What I have not seen is a public trend line that says roads, buses, police clearance, housing wait-lists, or the St-Laurent tunnel are measurably better because of the last four years of ward representation. "We built a process" is not an improvement. An outcome is.
What is the top infrastructure need in your ward?
Two, and they are connected.
First: the local network we already own — St-Laurent, Beechwood/Vanier, Hemlock, sidewalk gaps, sewer and stormwater capacity, and the crossings that are unsafe for pedestrians and unpredictable for drivers.
Second: the East End Crossing. Truck traffic still cuts through King Edward and Rideau because there is no interprovincial crossing east of downtown. I support leading on Kettle Island now so Ward 13 shapes design and mitigation instead of being shaped by a decision made without leverage.
Roads and pipes first. The bridge as a planning file we enter, not a slogan we hide behind.
Agree or disagree: Intensification will be important to deal with housing issues in my ward.
4 out of 5 — agree, with conditions.
Intensification is necessary. Blanket intensification is sloppy.
Overbrook needs units that people who already live here can stay in. Rockcliffe and New Edinburgh need growth that does not pretend heritage fabric is an inconvenience. The city cannot keep putting the same housing load on the same streets because those streets complain less effectively.
Intensification without buses, sewers, schools, and parks is just a taller version of the same gap residents already name.
Residents often say city infrastructure and services aren't keeping up with new development. What specific policy or funding changes would you push for to fix this gap?
- Publish a ward infrastructure scorecard before approvals: road condition by segment, sewer capacity, sidewalk gaps, park space per resident, transit frequency. If the numbers are not there, the application waits.
- Stop collecting charges and then spending them as if they were general revenue. Community benefits and development charges should track to the streets that generated them, with a public ledger.
- Require service-level commitments — bus frequency, 311 response, waste, water — as conditions of major intensification, not as hopes in a secondary plan.
- Kill the habit of approving growth first and funding the pipe later. That is how you get new units on streets that already flood.
What would you do to improve traffic problems in your ward?
Traffic in this ward is not one problem. It is a handful of specific choke points that keep getting deferred.
- St-Laurent Boulevard and Vanier/Beechwood need real traffic circles, not just another overlay of asphalt.
- The Aviation Parkway and Birch / Sir George-Étienne Cartier Parkway crossings are pedestrian-safety issues and traffic issues at the same time. Uncontrolled crossings force unpredictable stopping.
- Get through-trucks out of the downtown approach. That is why I support the East End Crossing rather than pretending opposition is a traffic plan.
- Physical separation on bike routes where the data and the pavement show the current paint-and-hope model fails. I ride an e-bike. I also drive when the trip or the weather requires it. Infrastructure that only works for the fearless is not a network.
What other priorities matter to you in your run for councillor that might not have been captured above?
- Municipal AI governance. Ottawa is adopting AI tools in city operations without a public disclosure standard for how, where, and with what oversight. That standard has to exist before the technology outruns accountability.
- Park equity. Neighbouring communities are not receiving the same standard. Name it and fund it evenly.
- Open data that does not require a freedom-of-information request. Road condition, sidewalk gaps, 311 closure rates, capital-plan slippage. If city hall is managing it, city hall can publish it.
- Police-board competence, not police-board attendance.
- One-term commitment. I can name structural problems — low turnout entrenching incumbents, urban wards being outvoted 16–9 on council, slush-fund politics dressed up as flexibility — instead of sanding them down for the next brochure.
In our coverage, how do you wish to be identified?
He/Him
What will your age be on election day?
I will provide the number directly to CBC for the form. I am not going to guess my own birthday in a blog post.
Do you identify as part of a minority group?
No — unless the question is fishing for a category I do not use in public life. I am a Polish-Canadian father of two, including a trans daughter. I do not campaign as a demographic. I campaign as a project manager who reads the books.
On October 26, one of the two names on the Ward 13 ballot will be mine.
This time around, inform yourselves.
Vote differently.
Vote wisely.
Vote Peter Karwacki for Rideau-Rockcliffe.
Peter J. Karwacki
Candidate, Ward 13 (Rideau-Rockcliffe)
peterkarwacki.overbrook@gmail.com
613-304-5844
peterkarwacki.blogspot.com
Campaign page
Paid for and authorized by the campaign to elect Peter Karwacki, Ward 13.
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