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. 

OC Transpo’s financial pressures have not disappeared. At the end of the second quarter of 2026, Transit Services was running an $8.92-million year-to-date deficit, part of a broader $38.59-million deficit across the city’s tax-, transit- and rate-supported budgets at that point in the year.

Leiper said he would increase spending on bus operations to restore frequency and improve reliability, while also changing how Ottawa replaces its fleet.

“It will be expensive, so it will be slow, but we have to build into our capital budget enough money to start buying 30 or 35 buses every single year,” he said.

Leiper argues the city created problems for itself by purchasing a large portion of its fleet around the same time, meaning many buses also aged at roughly the same time.

OC Transpo has already acknowledged that vehicle availability is one of the factors affecting reliability. Its Customer-First Action Plan identifies a functioning fleet, realistic schedules and sufficient vehicles and staff as three key pieces required to deliver reliable service. The agency has also been correcting running times on routes where schedules have not reflected real-world conditions.

Leiper’s plan would also put more emphasis on getting buses out of traffic.

He wants to increase spending on transit-priority measures — relatively inexpensive changes such as queue-jump lanes, traffic-signal priority and other infrastructure that allows buses to move through congested corridors more quickly.

The larger version of that idea is bus rapid transit. Ottawa has several BRT corridors on the books that have either not been built or remain incomplete, including projects intended to serve Baseline Road, Kanata North, and Cumberland eventually.

Leiper has singled out the Baseline corridor as one he wants accelerated.

The city completed the environmental assessment for the project years ago. The full plan stretches about 14 kilometres from Bayshore Station to Heron Station along Holly Acres, Richmond, Baseline and Heron roads, with a detour through the Algonquin College area. It would include 25 stations, pedestrian and cycling improvements and, through much of the corridor, dedicated median bus lanes.

The concept is intended to create a major east-west transit connection without requiring riders to travel through downtown, linking Bayshore, Baseline, the Trillium Line and the area around Billings Bridge. But construction of the full corridor has remained dependent on funding, with more modest transit-priority measures identified for portions of Baseline in the meantime.

He argues that the city has demonstrated an ability to borrow for projects it considers priorities.

“I would remind people that we found the financial room to borrow $414 million to build Lansdowne Park,” he said. “We can certainly find room and creative approaches to accelerate much-needed transit infrastructure.”

Leiper is also proposing something that would impose a financial penalty for poor transit performance. His “Transit Service Guarantee” would establish public reliability standards and some form of compensation for riders when OC Transpo repeatedly fails to meet them.

Leiper suggested that Presto pass data could help identify some riders affected by recurring problems on individual routes.

“We have failed on multiple occasions to deliver the bus service on Route 14. Could we then, at the end of the month, give everyone who’s tapped onto the 14 a credit?” he said. “I think there are some interesting creative ways that we can do this.”

He would also return a non-elected resident to the Transit Commission — reversing a decision Leiper acknowledges councillors themselves helped make.

Another uncertainty hanging over Ottawa’s transit finances is the proposed transfer of the O-Train system to Metrolinx.

The city’s transit action plan anticipates that an eventual upload could free up about $85 million annually to reinvest in transit. But no final agreement has been completed, and the city itself has previously acknowledged that the transit system has a systemic funding deficit. Leiper cautions against using the potential savings to finance new campaign promises before the details of an upload are known, arguing that much of that fiscal room may already be needed to address existing pressures within OC Transpo. 

Ottawa is responsible for billions of dollars worth of roads, bridges, water and sewer infrastructure, recreation facilities, libraries, parks and other assets — many of which require increasingly expensive repairs or replacement as they age. 

As many reach the end of their usable lifespans, the city is lacking a vision — or funding — to keep them in operation. 

“People rely on those community facilities for, in many cases, a significant part of their quality of life,” he said. “We teach kids to swim in city pools. And if you don’t have a city pool that’s close by and you have to travel to a far-off suburb to learn to swim, that’s a significant diminishment of quality of life.”

He wants Ottawa to allocate more funding to renewal rather than continue deferring work. Leiper’s proposal includes a dedicated infrastructure levy, with the money segregated for infrastructure renewal and accompanied by public reporting that shows residents which projects were funded.

Leiper has said he is open to affordable and predictable property-tax increases when needed to maintain city services, but wouldn’t provide an exact number for what taxpayers could expect under his leadership. 

In addition to tax increases, Leiper said the city needs more financial support flowing from upper levels of government. He said that what happened this summer, with repeated flooding, helps reinforce that. 

 The July 1 storm resulted in more than 6,000 reported basement floods, widespread property damage and power outages affecting more than 30,000 residents. About 100 people were displaced from their homes.

The city’s initial assessment found the volume and intensity of the rainfall overwhelmed sanitary sewers, storm sewers and localized drainage systems in the hardest-hit areas. Saturated ground also meant that some water travelled over the surface rather than through underground pipes.

Leiper is resisting calls to prescribe a solution before that work is complete. His first task, though, would be to determine exactly why particular areas flooded and then identify what infrastructure changes would actually prevent it from happening again.

He pointed to Moodie Station as an example. The station was heavily affected by the storm. But Leiper said decisions about how to rebuild or harden infrastructure there cannot necessarily be made independently of work upstream that could change how water moves through the surrounding area.

Housing is another part of Leiper’s argument that Ottawa needs to invest differently.

His housing platform calls for a target of 1,500 new non-profit homes annually, although he acknowledges reaching that number would require significant provincial and federal participation. He also wants an acquisition fund that would allow non-profits and organizations, such as the Ottawa Community Land Trust, to buy existing rental buildings at risk of losing their affordability, rather than relying exclusively on new construction.

Leiper has also proposed stronger enforcement of property standards and higher fines for landlords who fail to maintain rental housing.

In the east end, Leiper said transit has been among the issues he hears about most frequently. But he also sees opportunities to build more complete suburban communities as Ottawa intensifies around existing commercial and transit corridors.

“As we get more residents living in proximity to transit in Orléans, the market will respond with services and amenities that respond to that new populace,” Leiper said. “I’m really excited for St. Joseph Boulevard and what’s that going to look like in 15 years?”

He also connects suburban economic development with another issue that has become prominent during the campaign: return-to-office mandates.

Leiper opposes blanket mandates and has promised to restore flexible work arrangements for municipal employees where feasible. He has also said he would advocate that the federal government reconsider its approach, arguing that long commutes put additional pressure on transit and roads while taking workers — and their spending — away from their home communities.

“When we’re asking residents of Orléans to use crappy transit and crappy transportation to come downtown, they’re not spending their money in their local economy,” said Leiper. “We’re robbing time from their lives, and a lot of this could be addressed simply by not going forward with blanket return-to-office mandates.”

He wants the city to think differently about suburban cultural life as well.

Leiper said his arts and culture plans would include a stronger focus on community-level events and programming outside the core, including support for community associations and facilities such as the Shenkman Arts Centre.

Rural Ottawa presents a different set of challenges. Leiper said his infrastructure message has resonated there, particularly in communities where roads and other municipal assets are major concerns.

He also wants to bring city economic-development services directly into rural communities, including having rural business ambassadors rotate through centres in Ottawa’s villages. The idea would give small-business owners more direct access to municipal assistance without requiring them to travel into the urban area.

Leiper said he wants more predictable support for rural food banks, many of which operate largely through volunteers and local donations.

“There should be a firm city commitment to ensuring that those food banks have predictable funding to help them serve the people they need to serve,” he said.

Editor’s note: Jeff Leiper isn’t the only candidate with a vision for Ottawa’s future. The Ottawa Lookout has already sat down with Alex Lawson and Neil Saravanamuttoo to dig into their plans for the city.  And we’re not done yet — stay tuned for our upcoming profile of incumbent Mayor Mark Sutcliffe.