#257 What's in store for 815?

 

A Coordinator, a Repaved Parking Lot, and a Secret List of Five Properties

Ward 13 residents who use the Rideau Community Hub at 815 St. Laurent Boulevard — the food bank, the seniors' programs, the cinema, the health and wellness services — might reasonably assume the building's future is settled. It isn't. And the people who could tell you otherwise aren't required to tell you.

I see the field as a new soccer stadium, not a stack if condition.

The building nobody officially closed

Rideau High School shut its doors in June 2017, a casualty of declining enrolment. Rather than sell the site outright, OCDSB kept it in public hands and let it evolve into a community hub through the province's Surplus Property Transition Initiative — a coalition of tenants including the Rideau-Rockcliffe Community Resource Centre, OrKidstra, Operation Come Home, and the Roberts/Smart Centre, with the Resource Centre coordinating operations and covering roughly $547,000 a year to keep the lights on.

That was the deal in 2018: community groups run it, OCDSB owns it, everyone benefits.

Two developments this year suggest that arrangement may be quietly ending.

What actually happened in 2025

May 2025: OCDSB repaved a large section of the Hub's parking lot, disrupting access for two weeks.

June 10, 2025: OCDSB's staff-recommended budget (Report 25-038) revealed a new mid-year position — a "Rideau Hub Coordinator," 1.0 FTE, $122,251 — funded directly by the District rather than by the community partners who've run the site since 2018. The same report noted the District has no plan to reduce its accumulated deficit through operating measures alone, and pointed instead to "the sale of several identified properties and the application of proceeds of disposition" as a supplementary strategy.

Which properties, the report doesn't say.

June 27, 2025: The Ministry of Education released the findings of a financial investigation into OCDSB, conducted by PwC. The board had run deficits for four consecutive years, fully depleted its reserves, and posted an accumulated deficit of $5.9 million in 2023-24, with $9.3 million projected for 2024-25. Buried in footnote 15 of that report is this line:

"OCDSB has currently five properties (three vacant school sites and two parcels of land) that could potentially create [proceeds of disposition] in the future... OCDSB has indicated that it expects to receive fair market value by the end of June 2025 for all five properties."

Again: not named.

July 9, 2025: The Ministry appointed Robert Plamondon as supervisor, transferring every power the elected Board of Trustees held: governance, financial management, policy to his office. Ottawa's largest school board has not been run by its own elected trustees since.

The math that doesn't add up — yet

Rideau High School is a closed, vacant school site. That is precisely the category — "vacant school sites" — the PwC report says makes up three of the five properties slated for potential sale. It is a strong circumstantial fit. It is not confirmation.

 I do not have the actual list of five properties. That list, if it exists in written form, almost certainly lives inside an in-camera real estate report — the kind of document the Education Act allows boards to withhold from public minutes entirely. That's not a conspiracy; it's routine practice for property and legal matters. But it also means the residents currently relying on the Hub have no way to find out whether their building is on it.

What I can tell you is that the timeline is strange enough to demand an answer:

• OCDSB spent public money repaving a parking lot at a site in May 2025.
• One month later, a budget report flagged property sales as a fiscal strategy without naming which properties.
• The same month, a Ministry-commissioned report confirmed five specific properties were being valued for potential sale, with fair market value expected within days.
• Weeks after that, the province stripped the elected board of all authority and installed a supervisor whose mandate is explicitly financial recovery.

An organization does not need to be hiding something sinister for this to be worth asking about publicly. It needs only to be under enough financial pressure that a vacant asset generating $547,000 a year in third-party cost avoidance starts looking, on a spreadsheet somewhere, like an asset that could instead generate a one-time cash infusion.

The question that should be asked in public

If OCDSB — now effectively run by a provincially appointed supervisor with a mandate to close a multi-million-dollar deficit — has already identified 815 St. Laurent as one of the five properties on that list, the people using its food bank, its seniors' programs, and its cinema deserve to know before decisions are made, not after a "for sale" sign appears.

If it is not on the list, that's a five-second answer for OCDSB to give, and there's no reason not to give it.

Either way, the silence itself is the story. A board under provincial supervision, with an explicit disposition strategy for five named-but-unnamed properties, should not get to leave residents guessing about which properties those are — particularly not residents of a ward where the local building in question also happens to be delivering services the City and community partners have spent seven years building up.

I've asked the question. I'll publish whatever answer comes back — including a boring one.

---

Peter Karwacki is running for City Council in Ward 13 (Rideau-Rockcliffe) in the October 2026 municipal election.

something needs to be done".

This time around, inform yourselves, vote differently, vote wisely. Vote for Peter Karwacki for Rideau Rockcliffe.

#256 Choo-choo but no DO - DO

 

The LRT Fleet Crisis How Ottawa Does Oversight.

Treat the subcommittee as more urgent than the next ribbon-cutting or community-profile piece.

     Karwacki

Ottawa's eastern LRT extension to Trim Road has no opening date. Again. It passed "substantial completion" back in February 2026, and since then the story has been a moving target: early 2026, then spring, then "before July," and now — as of June — no timeline at all. The official reason hasn't changed: 

OC Transpo needs 46 train cars available to run the mandatory 21-day trial-running test, and for most of this year it's had as few as 21.

The bearing defect behind the shortage — metal flaking off the cartridge bearing assemblies that connect axles to wheels — is real and technical. But the more interesting failure isn't mechanical. It's that this is at least the second time in this rail system's history that a foreseeable capacity problem has been managed through vague reassurance rather than disclosed and enforced against a hard number. The first time, it took a $14.5-million public inquiry to explain why.

The contract has teeth. The city doesn't use them in public.

Ottawa's P3 agreement with Rideau Transit Group was never toothless. The original contract included penalty provisions worth up to roughly $145 million for delay damages, and the city has, on paper, the ability to withhold monthly service payments from Rideau Transit Maintenance when performance falls short. During the original 2019 launch crisis, the city did levy liquidated-damages payments against RTG for missed trial-running dates.

What actually happened next is the more revealing part. In 2023, CBC reported that the city quietly repaid RTG's maintenance arm a portion of $65 million that had been withheld since 2019 — money that former mayor Jim Watson and former transit boss John Manconi had publicly cited for years as proof the city was holding the line on poor service. The repayment came through a settlement whose terms were kept mostly secret. A second settlement later that year resolved the city's outstanding default notices, again with details undisclosed.

Fast forward to today: OC Transpo still won't say whether it's currently withholding payment over the bearing crisis. Same posture, three years later.

So the mechanism for accountability exists. What's missing is the will to use it publicly and let it stand, rather than invoking it for a headline and quietly settling it out of view once the pressure passes.

Why this keeps happening regardless of who's on council

It's tempting to make this about individual councillors failing to ask hard questions. That's part of it, but the deeper problem is structural, and it would trip up almost anyone sitting in those seats under the current rules:

• Reporting is reactive, not triggered. The LRT subcommittee created after the 2022 public inquiry exists to receive updates on staff's use of delegated authority — it doesn't have a standing requirement to independently monitor fleet health metrics before they become a crisis. It depends entirely on staff choosing to disclose early.
• Financial penalties are confidential by design. Because the maintenance relationship runs through a 30-year P3 contract, payment withholds and settlements are treated as commercially sensitive. Councillors can't see the numbers unless the city solicitor decides to share them — and the record shows a consistent preference for public toughness followed by private settlement.
• The Auditor General only investigates what she's asked to investigate. Ottawa's AG has real power — she can compel contractors to testify under oath and review their work. But nothing routes an issue like a fleet-wide bearing defect to her office automatically. A councillor has to ask.

None of these are new observations. Justice Hourigan's 2022 inquiry report already concluded that senior staff withholding information "irreparably compromised the legal oversight ability of Council" — meaning even councillors acting in good faith were structurally locked out of the information they needed. That's the same shape of problem showing up again in 2026, just with bearings instead of wheel-track alignment.

Where individual accountability still applies

The structural argument explains why this recurs no matter who holds the seat. It doesn't fully explain whether a councillor who correctly diagnosed the problem put himself anywhere near the levers that could act on it — especially when that councillor's entire tenure has overlapped with the crisis.

Rideau-Rockcliffe's Rawlson King was first elected in an April 15, 2019 by-election — five months before the Confederation Line opened on September 14, 2019, and just in time for the launch failures that followed almost immediately. He has now been on council for the entire lifespan of Ottawa's LRT operating crisis, across two terms:

2019–2022 (first term): King chaired the Built Heritage Sub-Committee and sat on the Standing Committee on Environmental Protection, Water and Waste Management. No transit-oversight seat.

2022–2026 (current term): King sits on the Built Heritage Committee (as chair), Community Services, Environment and Climate Change, and Finance and Corporate Services. He has never had a seat on the Light Rail Subcommittee — created by a December 2022 motion from Coun. Steve Desroches and Mayor Mark Sutcliffe about a week after Justice Hourigan's scathing public inquiry report, specifically to give LRT projects "specific, focused attention by Council to enhance public accountability and transparency." Nor has he sat on the Transit Commission (renamed Transit Committee in January 2025), which oversees OC Transpo's operations directly. When council dissolved the Light Rail Subcommittee in January 2025 and folded its oversight role into the renamed Transit Committee, King wasn't added to that committee either — Desroches, the subcommittee's outgoing chair, was.

Against that seven-year span with zero transit-oversight committee seats, here's what he said publicly during the same period:

• March 2020: King joined seven colleagues asking Ontario's ombudsman for an independent review, specifically citing lost trust in staff answers and calling for an independent lawyer to examine the RTM maintenance contract.
• November 2021: When council voted down a judicial inquiry, King said the city needed "an investigation that brings sunlight in."
• June 2023: Roughly six months after the Light Rail Subcommittee he wasn't appointed to was created, King called council's LRT oversight challenge "massive" and spoke about improving democracy and accountability at city hall.

So all three statements, spread across two council terms and three-plus years, were made from outside the room, by a councillor whose committee assignments went elsewhere every single time seats were handed out. Council seats are finite, and every term spent chairing heritage matters, sitting on community services, and building a public profile on other files is a term not spent doing the slower, less visible work of the two bodies built for exactly the oversight problem he kept flagging.

That raises a fair question for a councillor on record calling this a "massive" challenge, more than once, over seven years in office: why not seek the seat built for it, even once? It's easy to sound the alarm from the sidelines. It's harder, and less rewarding in the short term, to do the unglamorous committee work — reading fleet-availability memos, pressing staff on delegated-authority reports, sitting through Light Rail Subcommittee meetings that don't generate headlines — that would have let him act on his own words instead of just repeating them across two terms. If time and political capital went instead toward higher-visibility roles and community-facing initiatives, that's a choice about priorities, and voters are entitled to weigh it as one.

Saying the right thing about oversight three times over seven years, then never once sitting on either committee with the authority to exercise it, is itself the pattern I am calling out.

Systemic failure

This should be read as a systemic failure first, an individual one second. Any councillor operating inside a subcommittee with no independent monitoring power, a contract that treats penalties as confidential, and an Auditor General who has to be asked rather than automatically triggered, is going to struggle to deliver real oversight — regardless of how sincerely they mean it. That lets him off the hook.

But "the system is broken" can't be the whole answer either, because it lets everyone who held office through the last seven years off the hook equally, including people who spent years correctly identifying the problem without ever sitting on a committee that could act on it. 

Ottawa needs both fixes: 

a subcommittee with independent, proactive monitoring power and mandatory public disclosure of contract penalties — and 

councillors who treat getting a seat on that subcommittee as more urgent than the next ribbon-cutting or community-profile piece.

What better oversight would actually look like in practice:

 automatic triggers for the Auditor General, mandatory public disclosure of penalty data, 

or proactive fleet-health dashboards. 

That would be my ask, not simply observing that "something needs to be done".

This time around, inform yourselves, vote differently, vote wisely. Vote for Peter Karwacki for Rideau Rockcliffe.

#255 The Yips in politics

 

Break the Paralysis and ...Lead

To the elected officials sitting in City Hall and chambers: 

You may have the political yips. Your hesitation may be costing our community the future it deserves.

We see it in every stalled transit initiative, every delayed housing development, and every endless, bureaucratic "feasibility study" that leads absolutely nowhere. 

This also applies to the proposed East End bridge. Of course we need the bridge!

Driven by a crippling fear of public backlash and social media outrage, you have abandoned your natural leadership instincts. You have fallen into the trap of hyper-deliberation—the exact psychological choke mechanism that turns confident leaders into paralyzed paper-pushers. 

Good governance sometimes does require careful consultation but trying to please everyone and micromanage every variable, you achieve nothing. 

The greatest risk to Ottawa right now is not making a wrong decision; it is the inability to make a decision at all.

The Human Choke: Fear-Driven Inaction

Our local council chambers have become breeding grounds for strategic paralysis. When faced with critical decisions on zoning, infrastructure, or budget allocations, our politicians freeze. They mandate another twelve-month consultation period. They wait for "perfect" data that does not exist.

This is the political version of missing a two-foot golf putt. You are overthinking the mechanics of public approval so intensely that you have forgotten how to govern. While you hesitate, roads deteriorate, housing costs skyrocket,  public trust erodes - worse, people get killed by 18 wheeler trucks. 

You were not elected  to hide behind committees; we elected you to lead.

The Cure: Decoupling Fear with Artificial Intelligence

If your human instincts are compromised by the fear of failure, it is time to upgrade your toolkit. Artificial Intelligence is the definitive antidote to the political yips.*

AI does not experience performance anxiety. It does not worry about the next election cycle, Twitter ratios, or angry town hall meetings. By integrating advanced predictive analytics and AI-driven decision-making matrices into municipal governance, you can bypass human paralysis entirely:

• Objective Risk Assessment: Instead of debating a policy for months based on emotional biases and fear, AI models can instantly simulate thousands of municipal outcomes—predicting exactly how a zoning change will affect local traffic, business revenue, and infrastructure strain over twenty years.
• Cutting Through Bureaucratic Noise: AI can synthesize thousands of pages of conflicting public feedback, fiscal constraints, and environmental data into clear, data-backed action paths in minutes, removing the excuse of "needing more information."
• Algorithmic Accountability: Utilizing AI for resource allocation—such as optimizing snow removal routes, predicting grid maintenance, or deploying emergency services—provides an objective, transparent shield. It removes the paralyzing fear of political bias, allowing choices to be made purely on what works.

The Ultimatim: Lead or Step Aside

Using AI in decision-making is not about outsourcing your responsibility to a machine; it is about using data to find your courage. AI provides the bedrock of objective truth so you can stop second-guessing your every move. It eliminates the fog of uncertainty that triggers your performance anxiety.

The time for trembling at the podium is over. Shake off the mental blocks, stop micromanaging your political survival, and harness the power of modern technology to make swift, impactful choices. Use the tools available to you, trust the data, and start governing with conviction again. 

If you are too paralyzed to throw the pitch, get off the mound.

This time around, inform yourselves, vote differently, vote wisely. Vote for Peter Karwacki for Rideau Rockcliffe.

Campaign Web Page

https://peterkarwacki.blogspot.com/p/peter-karwacki-for-rideau-rockcliffe.html?m=1#

* More Information:

You think this is impossible? It was actually done in Chile 50 years ago! The system architect was British operations research scientist Stafford Beer called Project Cybersyn, (1971 to 1973) Salvador Allende implemented it as a decision support system aiding in the management of the economy. THIS WAS LONG BEFORE GPT CHATBOT.

After the CIA orchestrated military coup on September 11, 1973, the project was abandoned, and the operations room was destroyed. Allende was assassinated. However, while operational, information from the field would be fed into MODELS. Managers could see relevant economic data, formulate feasible responses to emergencies, and transmit advice and directives to enterprises and factories.

#254 One ward - two communities

 

One Ward, Two Realities

Neil Young: ‘Instead of cursing in the darkness, light a candle for where we're going. There's something ahead, worth looking for...’:

Rideau-Rockcliffe may be one ward on the Ottawa map. It is not one homogenous community on the ground.

At one end sits Rockcliffe Park — one of the wealthiest postal codes in the country, home to embassies, Rideau Hall, and some of the lowest population density and highest median incomes in Ottawa. 

At the other end sits Overbrook — a neighbourhood the City's own socio-economic classification places in the lowest of five tiers in the city, where roughly a third of residents spend more than 30% of their income on shelter, where home ownership is the exception rather than the rule, and where the housing stock needs repair at a higher rate than the city average.

One councillor represents both. That's not a criticism of any individual — it's a structural fact about how this ward was drawn, and it's worth naming plainly before we talk about anything else.

The numbers, side by side:

• Ward-wide, the average after-tax income sits below the Ottawa average — not because every neighbourhood in the ward is struggling, but because the ward blends one of the city's richest communities with one of its poorest and reports the average as if that tells you something useful about either one.
• Overbrook: 64% of residents rent rather than own. Roughly a third spend more than 30% of income on housing. Eight percent of dwellings need major repairs — higher than the city average.
• Rockcliffe Park: among the lowest population density and highest incomes anywhere in Ottawa.

When a ward contains both a neighbourhood fighting for its next affordable-housing unit and a neighbourhood where that fight is simply not part of daily life, "ward-wide priorities" stop meaning very much. 

A single set of talking points cannot serve both realities honestly.

What this actually calls for:

This isn't an argument for more studies or another layer of committee oversight — Ottawa has plenty of both. It's an argument for a councillor who treats these as two distinct communities with two distinct sets of needs, and says so plainly, rather than defaulting to mealy language that sounds good everywhere and changes nothing anywhere.

The need behind these numbers isn't hypothetical. 

North-South Development Roots and Culture Canada, which delivers youth safety and community programming in the ward, recently confirmed to me directly that it secured three years of funding from the Ontario Trillium Foundation. A multi-year commitment like that doesn't happen for a problem that's marginal or temporary — it happens because the underlying need is real, ongoing, and persistent.

That's exactly the kind of sustained investment the south end of this ward requires, and it should be a standing City priority, not something that depends on which outside funder happens to say yes in a given year. 

Overbrook residents don't need to be talked about in the abstract language of "equity" — they need transit that actually runs on time, housing stock that gets repaired, and a councillor who shows up to the Overbrook Community Centre with the same regularity as the Rockcliffe Park Residents Association speaker series. 

I live in this ward. I know both ends of it, not as talking points but as neighbourhoods I actually walk through. The job isn't to smooth over the differences between Rockcliffe Park and Overbrook with unifying language — it's to be honest that they're different, and to make sure the end of the ward with fewer resources doesn't keep getting the smaller share of attention because it has the smaller share of political capital.

— Peter Karwacki

I will not quit, like King did.

This time around, inform yourselves, vote differently, vote wisely. Vote for Peter Karwacki for Rideau Rockcliffe.

Campaign Web Page

https://peterkarwacki.blogspot.com/p/peter-karwacki-for-rideau-rockcliffe.html?m=1#

#253 A Challenger you can trust and an advocate you can count on.

 

Twenty Years Later, I'm Fighting the Same Fight

Long before Ward 13, before City Hall, before Rawlson King's voting record, I spent years fighting a different institution over a different river.

In the mid-2000s, a stretch of the Kipawa River — one of the best whitewater runs in the country — was under threat from a hydro project that would have gutted its flow. I wasn't a lawyer, a lobbyist, or an elected official. I was one of a small group of paddlers who decided that "someone else will handle it" wasn't good enough. We went to court. We lost more than we won. We kept going anyway.

I bring this up now, in the middle of a council campaign, for a specific reason: if you want to know whether a challenger's promises about accountability are real, don't read the platform. Look at what they were doing when nobody was watching and there was nothing to gain.

Here's what that fight looked like:

• The evidence, not the emotion. Every argument I made about Kipawa was built on flow data, court filings, and documented commitments — not appeals to sympathy. That's the same approach behind the posts on this blog about the $95M landfill purchase, the Police Services Board's oversight record, or OC Transpo's reliability numbers. I still don't ask you to trust my read on a situation. I show you the vote tally and the dollar figure and let you check it yourself.

• A willingness to keep pushing after losing. The Kipawa case didn't end with a win. It ended with a process I still think was handled badly, and I said so publicly at the time, knowing it wouldn't make me popular with anyone inside that process. Twenty years later, the instinct hasn't changed. Being outvoted, or told this "isn't the right time," has never been a signal to me that the question was wrong.

• Institutions protecting themselves before they protect the public. The pattern I saw in that fight — process captured by the people who are supposed to be guarding it — is the exact pattern I've written about here regarding the oversight office that was quietly wound down, or the audit findings that took years to surface. I didn't learn this lesson from a campaign strategist. I learned it on a riverbank, watching how slowly and reluctantly a powerful institution moves when the public interest and its own interest point in different directions.

I'm not telling you this story to relive an old fight. I'm telling you because Ward 13 residents deserve more than a candidate's word that he'll hold City Hall accountable. You deserve a track record. Mine happens to start on a river most people have never heard of, and it's been consistent every year since — public housing, transit reliability, police oversight, and now the ward I live in.

The fight is never really about the river, or the landfill, or the intersection. It's about whether the people asking the hard questions get to keep asking them, or get worn down until they stop. I haven't stopped yet.

— Peter Karwacki

I will not quit, like King did.

This time around, inform yourselves, vote differently, vote wisely. Vote for Peter Karwacki for Rideau Rockcliffe.

Campaign Web Page

https://peterkarwacki.blogspot.com/p/peter-karwacki-for-rideau-rockcliffe.html?m=1#

#252 Sandy Hill Japan - Natsu Matsuri

 It was LOVELY to attend.

I met Rawlson King who would not shake my hand. "You are a racist" he said.

So there is that. It is ironic this was at the Japanese fair.  For example, Japan is 97% ethnic Japanese, not allowing immigrants. The Japanese have their own word, Gaijin for foreigners.

It is also ironic that the government of Canada incarcerated 50,000 Japanese Canadians, also confiscating their property. Mercifully there was post war redress. Now this was real racism and it was perpetrated by our own government!

We were both there enjoying the fair.

So I was not surprised that Ottawa's first black councillor would raise that as an objection in 2026.  If anti-racism is your big tool, every problem you see is racism.

In a rush of blood to the head I was able to confidently say, " you obviously do not know me at all"

My criticism of Councillor King has always been about his votes and his decisions — the police board resignation, the landfill purchase, OC Transpo's budget record. Notably pandering and his illogical position on the proposed East End Crossing. It goes on.

I asked him directly what specifically concerned him, and he referred to my use of ai caricatures but I have now taken the initiative to remove anything remotely questionable.

If I offended him, I apologize.

But, I also will not quit, like King did.*

This time around, inform yourselves, vote differently, vote wisely. Vote for Peter Karwacki for Rideau Rockcliffe.

*for context see

https://unpublished.ca/opinion/police-services-board-why-does-it-exist-why-would-a-councillor-resign-from-the-ops

#251 Community Calender additions

RIDEAU Rockcliffe

https://calendar.google.com/calendar/u/1?cid=ZTczMDNlYjI0MTQ1M2NmNmExZDlhMWUzNGExYTM0Y2E4ZDg4NjgyYjFiOWFkZGQ1YWFkNzU4Mzc1MjRiM2Y0N0Bncm91cC5jYWxlbmRhci5nb29nbGUuY29t

Rideau-Rockcliffe Community Calendar

July 4 – October 26, 2026 (Ottawa Municipal Election Day)

A running list of community events, recurring programs, and key election dates for Ward 13 — Rideau-Rockcliffe. This list will be updated as more dates are confirmed. If you know of a community association event that should be here, get in touch.

Ongoing Through Summer

Rideau-Rockcliffe News, Events and Engagement Opportunities 

 Join the TD Summer Reading Club at the Ottawa Public Library - June 29 to August 22 TD Summer Reading Club is back this year with the exciting theme Dive In! 

From June 29 to August 22, children aged 4 to 12 can explore fun, water-themed learning activities—both online and in branches. Registration is now open. Explore the program and register your children for activities that will engage, inspire and spark their curiosity! Teen Staycation: A Summer of Skills, Fun, and Growth: Teens aged 13 and up can look forward to a fun and enriching summer at OPL. Teen Staycation offers a variety of creative and educational opportunities, both online and in-branch, that helps teens develop valuable skills, discover new interests, and thrive. Explore our summer programming for teens! 

 A Company of Fools presents A Midsummer Night's Dream - June 29 to August 15

Dates	Event	Location
June 23 – Aug 17	Pack your picnic blankets and prepare to sail away as a Company of Fools brings you to the shores of the Greek islands! This year the Fools are setting Shakespeare’s most famous comedy against a backdrop inspired by seaside revelry, moonlit dances, and the toe tapping energy of your favourite 70’s disco (you may feel an inexplicable urge to clap along, and we encourage you to follow that feeling!). A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a tale of love, magic, and mischief. Opening night takes place in Strathcona Park on June 29 from 7 to 8:30 pm. Shows continue at parks across Ottawa including in and near Rideau-Rockcliffe Ward: Strathcona on July 6 at 7 pm Beechwood Cemetery on July 13 at 7 pm Strathcona Park on July 20 at 7 pm Nault Park on July 23 at 7 pm Strathcona Park on July 27 at 7 pm Strathcona Park on August 3 at 7 pm Strathcona Park on August 10 at 7 pm Stanley Park/New Edinburgh Park on August 14 at 7 pm For the full schedule and more details, please visit www.fools.ca/a-midsummer-nights-dream-2026	525 Côté Street
Pools and Splash Pads Water is spurting out of a City of Ottawa splash pad. The sun is hitting the water and creating rainbows. Looking for ways to beat the heat? Ottawa's supervised beaches are open daily from noon to 7 pm, and outdoor pools, wading pools, and splash pads are opening across the city for the summer season. Before you head out, check opening dates, hours, and locations for beaches, pools, wading pools, and splash pads on the City of Ottawa's website. Wading pools in and near Rideau-Rockcliffe Ward. Alvin Heights Park wading pool - June 29 to August 23 Optimiste Park wading pool - June 30 to August 23 St. Laurent Complex Wading Pool - June 22 to August 15 St. Paul's Park Wading Pool - June 29 to August 23 Overbrook Park Wading Pool - June 29 to August 22 Dogs in Wading Pools: At certain locations, while the wading pools are being drained, dogs are welcome to splash and play in the remaining water. This usually amounts to about 15 to 30 cm (six to 12 inches) of water. Details: ottawa.ca In Rideau-Rockcliffe Ward: Overbrook Park wading pool: Tuesdays from 7 to 7:30 pm St. Paul's Park wading pool: Mondays, from 6 to 6:30 pm  June 23 – Aug 23 website. Wading pools in and near Rideau-Rockcliffe Ward. Alvin Heights Park wading pool - June 29 to August 23 Optimiste Park wading pool - June 30 to August 23 St. Laurent Complex Wading Pool - June 22 to August 15 St. Paul's Park Wading Pool - June 29 to August 23 Overbrook Park Wading Pool - June 29 to August 22 Splash pads in and near Rideau-Rockcliffe Ward: Eugene Martineau Park - undergoing repairs Veterans' Park - undergoing repairs Wing Officer Willa Walker Park, 305 Lysander Place Thornecliffe Park, 45 Provender Avenue Dr. John Hopps Park, 300 Den Haag Drive Trojan Park, 901 Trojan Avenue Cummings Park, 1060 Cummings Avenue Whiterock Park, 1245 Matheson Road New Edinburgh Park, 203 Stanley Avenue Manor Park, 100 Thornwood Road Lawson Park, 481 Lawson Avenue
June 29– Aug 17		525 Côté Street
June 1 to July 31, 2026⁠ FREE Back to School Supplies! Kindergarten to Grade 12⁠ For families living in Ward 13 with a postal code of K1K, K1M and some cases K1G⁠. Registration online only! See poster for computer access details. June 1 to July 31, 2026⁠  Kindergarten to Grade 12⁠  For families living in Ward 13 with a postal code of K1K, K1M and some cases K1G⁠. Registration online only! See poster for computer access details Rideau-Rockcliffe News, Events and Engagement Opportunities   FREE Back to School Supplies!