Rick,

Welcome to Ottawa.

I’m going to be straight with you.

OC Transpo is in trouble.

It’s not the drivers. It’s not the mechanics. The people who keep this system running, the people who show up at 4 a.m. to get a bus out the door, they are not the problem.

The problem is management. Management failed the people it leads and the people it serves. Management failed to deliver the kind of public transit system that the people of Ottawa deserve.

The city’s Auditor General has a few ideas as to why. Management jobs are being filled by people who don’t meet the job requirements. Appointments are made against policy. According to the Auditor General, these “very blatantly obvious” issues are no accident.

That’s not a funding problem. That’s a leadership problem.

Half the fleet is past its useful life. The city needs 520 buses on the road every weekday. In January, it was averaging 467. On January 5th, 800 trips were cancelled in one day. Cancellations ran between 5 and 6 per cent of scheduled service for weeks.

Today, a day with 100 cancellations gets reported up as successful. We’ve redefined success so many times that nobody remembers what it used to look like.

With 110 new electric buses are arriving, and well over 200 more on the way this year, we need to be honest about what that means.

We are short roughly 50 licensed mechanics. Electric buses need more maintenance than the diesels they’re replacing. If we don’t close the mechanic gap before those buses show up, we’ll be worse off, not better.

What’s the plan? If the electric fleet doesn’t perform the way the brochure says, we need to know exactly how many diesels we’re keeping in reserve and where they’re coming from.

Ordering new equipment without the trades to maintain it isn’t a plan. It’s a hope.

Here is what I’m asking of you, and what I’ll be watching.

1)      Publish the numbers.

Route delivery rates. Fleet availability. Staffing benchmarks. Put the numbers out there where riders can see them.

No more system-wide averages that hide what’s happening on the ground. OC Transpo reports delivery rates north of 95 per cent when we have routes that run cancellation rates above 20 per cent at peak hours.

If the fleet is divided into sections, report by section. An extra bus sitting idle in one garage doesn’t cover a missing route out of another. We need to stop pretending because pretending is how we got here.

Count routes the way riders experience them. A bus that leaves the yard and breaks down mid-route is not a “successfully delivered” trip. The person waiting at the next stop knows it isn’t. Your numbers should reflect reality.

Get weekly cancellation numbers, by route and by section, on Open Ottawa. Visible to anyone who wants to look. Those numbers should be going down. Not being explained away.

2)      Review the management structure.

OC Transpo has grown its management layer since rail arrived. Give us a headcount of non-union management positions, by division, in 2018 and today. Make it public.

Look at Employee Management specifically. The AG told us how some of these people got hired. I want to know what the function actually delivers, and whether the work could be done with fewer people and clearer accountability for results.

Look at Planning. Route 95 used to connect Orleans and Barrhaven on a single bus. It was split apart in 2019. Today, that same trip takes multiple transfers and hours. Decisions like that were made by managers who are not the ones driving the bus or maintaining it. The people closest to the work need a real voice in how routes are designed.

And when Planning tells council it cannot deliver the service on the schedule council wants, Planning needs to hold that line. Over-promising a route and cancelling it at 5 p.m. is worse than being honest at 5 a.m.

3)      Show a credible plan to close the mechanic gap before the electric fleet scales up.

Trades first. Then buses.

OC Transpo’s mechanic job postings tell the story. New hires are expected to take evenings, weekends, on-call, nights. That is not a competitive offer for a 310T-certified tradesperson in Ottawa in 2026. If full shifts and a real wage are what it takes to attract them, figure that out now, not after the electric fleet is sitting in the garage.

Heavy-diesel mechanics and garage supervisors are in short supply across the country. Tell us how you plan to win that competition, concretely, and how long you think it takes.

Electric buses have real-world range limits and charging windows that take vehicles out of circulation for hours at a time. Those limits should be built into the operating plan up front, not the footnotes. Tell me how many electric buses we need on order, and how many diesels we need to hold in reserve, to actually deliver 520 on the road every weekday through next winter.

How we will know it’s working:

More buses showing up.

Fewer riders standing at a stop waiting for a route that was cancelled and never announced.

Cancellation numbers, by section and by route, published weekly on Open Ottawa. Trending down.

November 2026 is six months out. That’s enough time to show real movement.

I’m setting this standard publicly, and in advance, because riders deserve to know what they are owed, and because the people inside OC Transpo who have been doing the right thing deserve leadership that holds everyone to the same standard they’re held to.

If the numbers have moved significantly by November, that’s the city working like it should.

If they haven’t, I’ll be making leadership changes.

That’s not personal, Rick. That’s the job.

It’s the same accountability that exists in every private-sector operation in this city. It’s long overdue at OC Transpo.

Ottawa deserves better.

Alex

Future Candidate for Mayor of Ottawa