#547 - You actually want more of the same?

Ottawa Keeps Making the Same Mistake. The Mistake Is How We Decide.

From the last streetcar to the LRT inquiry, the pattern is the same: the people who could catch a bad decision are the ones kept from seeing it.

1. 1891 Electric streetcars begin running in Ottawa.
2. 1948 The city buys the Ottawa Electric Railway and creates the Ottawa Transportation Commission.
3. May 1959 The last streetcar runs. The tracks are dismantled within a year.
4. 1967 The city considers rapid transit on the corridor it just cleared.
5. 2019 The Confederation Line opens, after a 16-month delay.
6. 2021 Two serious derailments. The province calls a public inquiry.
7. Nov 2022 The inquiry reports: “egregious violations of the public trust.”
8. Nov 2025 Former mayor Jim Watson receives the Order of Ottawa.
9. Jul 2026 The legal deadline for freedom of information requests moves from 30 calendar days to 45 business days.

In May 1959, 25,000 people lined the streets to watch Ottawa’s last streetcars parade downtown. Within a year the tracks were gone. The city had no concrete plan for the right-of-way it had just cleared. In 1967, it considered building rapid transit on the very corridor it had pulled up.

Sixty years later, we are still paying for that cycle.

The 1950s: expert consensus, no challenge

The experts of the day were not fools. The streetcar system had fallen into financial trouble and had an aging fleet. A consultant survey recommended buses, and planning ideas of the era, including the Gréber Plan, favoured removing rail from downtown. Cities across North America were making the same call.

That is the point. When every expert agrees and nobody inside the system has a reason to dissent, a bad idea can spread across a whole continent. The failure wasn’t stupidity. It was the absence of a mechanism to challenge the consensus.

The LRT: the same pattern, with better paperwork

The Ottawa LRT Public Inquiry gave us the most detailed public record we will ever get. Justice Hourigan found that both the city and Rideau Transit Group lost sight of the public interest amid political pressure to rush the $2.1-billion project. He called the timelines “entirely unrealistic.”

Then he turned to what the city did with the information. Council wasn’t told that the testing criteria had been lowered to let the line pass its final testing phase. Critical information about trial running went only to the mayor’s office and the chair of the transit commission. The commissioner concluded that the conduct of senior staff and the mayor “irreparably compromised” council’s oversight.

The people responsible for catching the problem were the people kept from seeing it.

That is a design flaw, and it didn’t go away when the individuals did.

And then, a medal

In November 2025, former mayor Jim Watson received the Order of Ottawa, an award created in 2012 under his own tenure. Its selection committee is made up of senior city officials and the mayor or deputy mayor. Mayor Sutcliffe said he does not endorse everything Watson did. Watson himself apologized after the inquiry and said he took “full responsibility.”

I’m not arguing that Watson didn’t earn recognition for a long career. I’m asking what a city is telling itself when the person at the centre of a “persistent failures in leadership” finding and egregious betrayal of the public trust is honoured by the same institution, with no public conversation about what the honour means.

And what about the rest of council? The inquiry did not blame council as a whole. It found council was kept in the dark. Yet council also voted against a judicial inquiry in 2021, and it was the province that called one. Responsibility is shared, and I haven’t heard a councillor say plainly what theirs was.

Asking questions shouldn’t take months

Here is what finding out looks like. I filed a freedom of information request. As of today, months later, I have no decision / not even a a partial response]. In Ontario, the legal timeline was 30 calendar days. As of July 1, 2026, it is 45 business days. By any count, I am well past it.

I don’t know why. It could be a backlog, a complex search, or something else, and I won’t pretend to know. But a records process only helps if you already know what to ask for. It cannot compel disclosure of information that was kept off the record to begin with. That is exactly what the inquiry found happened with the LRT.

The pattern

• A small circle controls the information.
• Deadlines are set by politics, not readiness.
• Nobody independent checks the technical claims.
• Consequences are rare and recognition is common.
• Reforms follow crises instead of preventing them.

How to break out

The inquiry made 103 recommendations. I’d start with these:

1. An independent overseer for major projects, reporting directly to council or the transit commission, which is what the report recommended.
2. Acceptance and testing criteria written into contracts, so they can’t be quietly lowered.
3. Publish by default. Contracts, test results, and reliability data should be public without a request.
4. Equal information for all councillors. No decision-relevant report should go to the mayor and a committee chair first.
5. Published post-project reviews that name who was responsible and what changed.
6. Automatic escalation of overdue access requests, so a missed deadline triggers action instead of silence.

Credit where it’s due: the city says the Trillium Line testing will run longer and be more transparent than the Confederation Line’s. That’s a step. But it is a promise, not a structure, and promises don’t survive the next deadline.

What I’m asking for

I’m not asking you to believe Ottawa is run by incompetent people. I’m asking you to look at a system that sorts good information away from the people who need it, and that has done it more than once. Fix the structure, and the people inside it can do better work. Leave it, and we will be writing this post again in 2060.

Vote Differently, Vote Wisely, Vote for Peter Karwacki for Rideau Rockcliffe.