Prier: Sutcliffe plays blame game instead of solving transit problems

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While Ottawa Mayor Mark Sutcliffe continues his efforts to pass the blame for OC Transpo’s financial woes onto the backs of federal public sector employees, the disingenuity of this argument is hard to swallow. Public sector employees, and many residents, have turned back to their cars because the transit system can no longer be trusted.

Instead of seeing this as a pivotal moment to truly solve the underlying problems facing Ottawa transit, the Mayor seems intent on ignoring the root of the crisis and continuing to drive this essential service into the ground. Or maybe he truly doesn’t understand the issues.

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So, let’s clarify a few things.

OC Transpo is struggling because of poor, unreliable service, sky-high fares; because years of cuts and inadequate funding have made it impractical and unaffordable for many who want to use it; and because our hallmark transit investment (the LRT) was one of the greatest public-private partnership boondoggles in Canadian history.

Just how unreliable has service become? In the first half of 2023, the Confederation Line train was out of commission for 23 days. And just last month, the LRT was offline for two weeks for what the city called “regularly scheduled maintenance.” No other city in the world takes the keystone of its system offline for an extended period.

Ongoing cuts to service — including a planned 74,000 hours worth of cuts which will come into force when the next stage of the LRT is launched — mean that relying on transit to get from point A to point B is no longer a practical solution for many Ottawa residents.

Even more fundamentally flawed is the idea that Ottawa’s transit system was designed to serve federal employees. The population of the National Capital Region is nearly 1.5 million. The number of federal employees in the region is just over 130,000. Continuing to operate an essential service designed with the needs of less than 10 per cent of the region’s population in mind was both shortsighted and discriminatory, and points to a stunning lack of vision from our city’s executive.

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Mayor Sutcliffe, in his recent fatuous petition to Justin Trudeau and Doug Ford, implies that remote work for federal public sector employees is a key source of Ottawa’s economic and transportation woes. Remote work and flexible work arrangements are here to stay. Australian and British Columbian public servants already have it, and Canada needs to catch up.

This was the direction that office work was heading before the pandemic and it has become clear that this will be the model of the future, despite the equally alarming lack of vision from the Treasury Board as it persists in forcing people back to decrepit offices for no clear reason.

Given the federal footprint in our city, our leaders should be demanding the government partner immediately with our city to convert its offices into better uses — affordable housing, new childcare centres, and better public spaces — instead of maintaining a dusty status quo that made us “the city that fun forgot.”

This moment should be the impetus to rebuild our downtown core into a vibrant, thriving centre – one hinging on residents, rather than grumbling public servants forced to commute and expected to buy lunches and happy-hour drinks to keep an incredibly stale vision of Ottawa’s downtown economy viable. And that means we need a transit system that is seen as a vital part of our infrastructure, and that is designed to serve more than federal employees.

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The mayor is correct on at least one thing: OC Transpo desperately needs more funding. But it needs so much more. It needs strategic investments and a vision that will ensure Ottawa’s transit system meets the needs of every resident — and doesn’t rely on outdated assumptions of who uses it and where they want to go.

It seems that Mayor Sutcliffe would rather assign blame, make threats and build political capital on the backs of hardworking federal employees rather than meet the moment with a vision to revitalize downtown and rebuild our transit system into a sustainable service that works for everyone. When he’s ready to get on board with a real plan, federal public servants are ready to work with him.

Federal public servants embrace a better, bolder future for Ottawa. It’s time for the mayor to catch up.

Nathan Prier is president of the Canadian Association of Professional Employees and an Ottawa resident.

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