Jeff Leiper says Ottawa needs to work better. Here’s how he would change it

When Jeff Leiper won a third term as Kitchissippi Ward councillor in the fall of 2022, he expected it would be his last.

After first arriving at city hall in 2014, Leiper had made little secret of the fact that he wasn’t planning to seek a fourth term. By the end of this one, he would have spent 12 years representing the west-end urban ward, and life outside municipal politics was beginning to look appealing.

But then a few years ago, his thinking started to change.

Over the last four years, Leiper said he became increasingly frustrated with the direction Ottawa was heading. He believed the city was underinvesting in basic services, its infrastructure deficit was growing, and housing was becoming increasingly unaffordable. But one issue in particular helped sway his decision to run for mayor: public transit.

Ottawa has spent much of the past decade transforming how people move around the city. The Confederation Line opened in 2019, the Trillium Line reopened in 2025, and construction continues on extensions of the LRT network farther east and west.

At the same time, the bus network has faced declining ridership, financial pressures, an aging fleet and persistent reliability problems. In April 2026, OC Transpo recorded 5.6 million bus and rail trips, with 68.7 million trips taken over the previous 12 months — still well below the more than 100 million annual trips the system carried before the pandemic.

“Transit is not delivering a service that people want to use,” he said. “People are missing time from work, they’re missing time from their appointments, they’re missing time from socializing with friends, because transit is not working.”

However, his concerns aren’t limited to OC Transpo.

“The cost of housing is far too high, particularly, I think, for young people who are trying to find their first apartment, their first home,” Leiper said. “I believe we are on the wrong track with respect to trying to create more affordable housing. The city could be doing a lot more to encourage affordable housing.”

Then there is the infrastructure residents rarely think about until something goes wrong: roads, sewers, recreation centres, pools and other municipal facilities.

Instead of leaving city hall, the three-term councillor is now campaigning to lead it. And much of his platform is centred on what he believes Ottawa needs to do differently with the services it already provides.

Leiper’s first move, if elected, would be to revisit New Ways to Bus, the sweeping restructuring of OC Transpo’s bus network implemented in April 2025.

“We lost routes, we lost frequency. When your bus is late, and it’s not as frequent as it used to be, your waits become intolerable,” he said.

Restoring service would require more operating money.

Leiper argues that some of the headline growth in Ottawa’s transit spending can obscure what is happening on the bus side of the system. The city’s 2026 budget included $938.7 million for transit, including money needed to operate the eastward extension of Line 1 to Trim Station, purchase new buses and support other transit initiatives. Leiper argues that more money needs to be directed specifically toward day-to-day bus operations and frequency.