The frustrating, darkly funny story of Ottawa’s LRT mess

Jordan I live in Toronto, so I fully understand the urge across this country to laugh when something goes horribly wrong somewhere else. Which is why, unless you live there, the long, humiliating saga of Ottawa’s light rail transit system is objectively funny.

News Clip #1 Good evening. It’s now week four with no train service in the capital, no date on when the system will be back up and running.

News Clip #2 A rally pushing for accountability and a judicial inquiry into the system…

Jordan But here’s the thing. Beyond the doors that wouldn’t close, beyond the trains that wouldn’t run in Ottawa in the wintertime, and beyond numerous other dumb avoidable errors, there’s a lesson here. Transit infrastructure is one of the most important things cities build. It is how a city’s people move every day. If you get it right, you can drastically improve quality of life for entire neighbourhoods at a time. If you get it wrong, then you waste billions of dollars just trying to stay where you are and fix it, if you even can. So what exactly happened here to Ottawa’s LRT that should have become the crown jewel of the city’s public transit system? Where did things begin to go wrong and how did everything go so far? And I’m sorry, here, off the rails.

I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is The Big Story. Fatima Syed is the Ontario Reporter for The Narwhal. She also hosts a politics podcast called The Backbench. She has been following the inquiry into Ottawa’s light rail transit. Hey, Fatima.

Fatima Syed Hi, Jordan. It’s nice to be back.

Jordan It’s always nice to have you back. Why don’t we start with the best of intentions? Because presumably there were good intentions here at some point. Why did Ottawa build an LRT in the first place? What issue was it trying to solve?

Fatima Syed Oh, God, I don’t even know where to start. The saga is so complicated. The reason why the Ottawa LRT was imagined and started way back in the early to mid 2000s was because, like any city, Ottawa wanted to increase transit. If you’ve been to Ottawa, you have seen the buses. That’s their primary mode of transit. But the buses were becoming crowded, the roads were becoming crowded. There had to be a better way to move people around. So Ottawa thought of an LRT, which in theory at the time, and still is all the rage in transportation. It’s electric, it’s fast, it can carry a lot of people. So it was a good idea and it would have made Ottawa a capital city with an LRT system, which would have been major on the world stage. But when it comes down to the weeds of how it actually got constructed and how it currently functions, the story is just very different from its inception.

Jordan It is a sad story and not unamusing unless you live in Ottawa, because it has been kind of one bungle after another. Is that a fair way to describe it.

Fatima Syed Yeah. And I should disclaim I don’t live in Ottawa. I visited the city a bunch of times, but I’m not an Ottawa resident, which probably is a good thing for a conversation like this because if you had an Ottawa resident, they would just be very angry and groan the entire time they were telling you what’s wrong with the LRT. For Ottawa residents, this is an ongoing shit show with no end. And I live in Mississauga. I face terrible transit here in the greater Toronto area. But I cannot imagine living with this LRT that Ottawa has.

Jordan Just to make it clear, we’re talking to you today because things went so wrong with this LRT that there’s now an inquiry, right?

Fatima Syed Yes. So there is a public inquiry into the entire project. And the way it came about is last November, November 2021, the Ford government announced that there would be an investigation into the LRT saga, particularly in the way it was constructed and approved. And until the investigation or the inquiry was finished, the Ford government would hold back $1.2 billion in provincial funding for the continued expansion of the LRT system in the city. There’s a former judge who specializes in commercial litigation who is heading the inquiry right now. It’s called the Ottawa Light Rail Transit Commission.

The commission has gathered over a million documents, of which 10,000 were deemed relevant. They’ve interviewed 90 witnesses, 41 of whom are testifying during these public hearings that began on June 13th and will go on until early July. And that list includes everyone who ever had a hand in making a decision about this project. Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson, who’s on his way out and has decided not to seek reelection, the former Transportation General manager who was in charge of the project, executives, of all the companies that were involved in the construction and any city official that signed any document. It’s a big deal because Canada hasn’t seen a public inquiry into a transit project like this, at least not recently.

Jordan So let’s talk about why an inquiry was needed. When did it become clear that things were not going great with the LRT?

Fatima Syed Literally, day one, like the first day that it opened for passengers.

Jordan What happened?

Fatima Syed So the problems with the Ottawa LRT were actually building throughout construction and then passengers started using it and it still didn’t work. So construction started in 2013. A year later, a sinkhole opened during the construction of a tunnel for one of the main stations. Another sinkhole opened two years later at one of Ottawa’s busiest intersections. It actually swallowed a car that didn’t have a passenger in it and the streets have to be closed for six months. And construction was delayed as an investigation was launched into it. At one point, three workers with one of the subcontractoring companies were trapped after a section of the downtown tunnel collapsed. So construction was bad. And then the LRT opened, but it opened 456 days late because there were just issues constantly. The trains didn’t work, the wheels fell off, the tracks kept breaking down. Literally anything that could possibly go wrong with this train system went wrong.

Jordan But that’s why it’s good to take 400 something plus days and do it right, so that when it opens, everything works, right?

Fatima Syed You’d think that was the case, but in actual fact, as we’re slowly learning through this inquiry, through the various testimonies, even though the project was delayed, it wasn’t done properly.

Jordan What do you mean by that?

Fatima Syed Just last week, there was a testimony from a city engineer and a rail manager who confirmed that the city knew the entire system was plagued with problems, but they just approved everything anyways. So in spite of all the delays that were conditional upon the companies fixing things that the city kept finding, they knew that when they launched the train, it would still have problems, and they thought that they could fix it while passengers were going to use it. To quote this engineer and rail manager, he said the city knew that the reliability issues could interfere with the provision of reliable service to the public. That’s shocking, that the city knew that it wouldn’t work and they still opened it anyways.

Jordan Can you maybe describe, and again, you weren’t there, but you’re sitting through a long inquiry that’s kind of detailing it, and I think actually probably a certain percentage of Canadians are at least familiar with this because the story was so darkly stupid that I think it kind of made the rounds. Can you maybe just explain, like, what happened in the first few days after the LRT opened to the public?

Fatima Syed The rail line opened on September 14, 2019, with just twelve days of testing. Now, normally the requirement is that these be twelve consecutive days of testing, but things kept going wrong. So the city actually changed the rules for this LRT project and decided that they just needed twelve days of testing whenever they happen, where everything was perfect.

Jordan Well, you don’t need to use a train every day, so that makes sense.

Fatima Syed So when it opened in September 2019, there were small issues like the doors wouldn’t close, so the train would just stand there at the station. And then when a train launches in September, you live in Canada, you live in Ottawa. Winter is about to come very, very soon. And when I see cold weather hit, the tracks just froze and the heaters on the line wouldn’t work. And trains just couldn’t function because they literally could not ride the tracks. And the trains had been bought specifically for North American winters. That’s what they’ve been designed for, but they’ve never been tested in North American winters. And that’s according to documents that the CBC obtained through Access to Information request.

So the train froze or broke in the cold, like parts of it anyway. Not the entire train. So during the winter, people would be just standing at these stations waiting for the train that just wouldn’t work or wouldn’t come because they weren’t functioning properly. And it was just chaotic. As these trains broke down, they couldn’t replace them because they had only bought a limited number of trains. So there were fewer and fewer trains on the line, which meant longer wait times and platforms were overcrowded. Think of all the things that happen when the train doesn’t come on time. At one point, even Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson said, can you just solve these issues already? But they couldn’t. The trained computers failed repeatedly. People, because of the internet age, turned everything into a meme. But underlying it was an extreme frustration because billions of dollars had been invested in this project and it was meant to solve their life problems. Instead, they were facing like twelve consecutive days of delays in October 2019, literally a month after opening.

Jordan This is a ton of public money. Can you maybe actually just rewind a bit and explain like, how was this project funded? How much did it end up costing people?

Fatima Syed So this is a $2.1 billion project and that’s just for the first stage of the LRT that’s been constructed. The stage that has failed since 2019 and is now being investigated with this inquiry. Most megatransit projects in Canada are funded the same way, they’re funded by all three levels of government. So for this stage of the Ottawa LRT, $600 million was given by both the Federal and Ontario governments. The city allocated 162ish million dollars of the money that it got from federal gas transfers. It got like around $300 million from provincial gas tax transfers to the project. And then the remainder came from a bunch of development charge fees, which is just like fees that you collect as a municipality from developers to help pay for the cost of providing municipal services like transit.

So it was a lot of money and it was going to be a lot more money because this was the first stage of a big LRT project across the city. And this is an important point, Jordan, because the failure of the Ottawa LRT shows the failures in the ways that transit projects are funded and approved in this country. Because first of all, you’ve got three levels of government with a stake in this project, but then they’re also working with a bunch of private companies, right? It’s a public private partnership and they’re the bosses. Like the city is the boss of these companies and it’s getting money from the federal and provincial governments. It’s a big part of bureaucracy that is seeing this project to fruition a lot of money. A lot of players would like their own interests, like they want to make money as well. And a lot of taxpayers on the line for everything that goes well and everything that goes bad.

Jordan Is this just a matter of something went badly wrong with this project. Are LRTs in general effective in North America, especially in tough northern cities? I guess I’m trying to get a sense of how big of an own goal was this. Did they try to do something hard and fail, or did they try to do something that should have been not too difficult and just wildly with?

Fatima Syed So I don’t think I’m qualified to answer this question quite honestly, but my sense is, after reading everything and watching a lot of the conversations that are happening at the inquiry and learning from a lot of transit experts, my sense is that transit projects don’t have to be as complicated as we make them, right? I think sometimes we are more ambitious than we need to be when it comes to creating alternative modes of transportation. And if we take a step back, right, like, why do we need alternative modes of transportation? It’s because we are in a climate emergency series and we need to take fossil fuel based cars off the road. In order to do that, you have to create effective transits. LRT are theoretically effective, but are they the most effective solution for the city in question? For Ottawa, it made sense. They have a limited road space and an LRT made sense versus like, a complicated bus system.

But it feels like after reviewing the entire saga, that the City of Ottawa just bit off more than it could chew, and that it didn’t have the checks and balances and accountability mechanisms in place to do this properly. And when you don’t do a transit project properly, you’re not just wasting the money you’ve already invested, you’re costing taxpayers and yourself and the companies more money and more time. And we’re seeing that now. There are so many legal cases surrounding the Ottawa LRT, with people just suing each other for the delays, for the construction mishaps. It’s costing us more now than it should be. So why don’t we do it properly, is the main question.

Jordan What could a properly done transit agreement look like? If public private partnerships involving all three levels of government create a huge mess, what’s a simple way that Ottawa could have approached this that might have spared them all these problems?

Fatima Syed I mean, to start, they could have been more transparent about some of the issues that had been appearing. So the project started in 2013 and it wasn’t until 2019, when passengers were actually trying to use the train and then dealing with all the problems that the train was throwing at them, that I’ve tried to describe, but really can’t do justice to. It’s only then that we started to learn all the mistakes that the city made in their dealings with the consortium of companies that were given the contract to build this thing. There was no transparency at any stage. Even when the sinkholes happened in 2014 and 2016, we didn’t learn about the cause or the way the city managed that situation until years later through just dogged reporting by journalists who tried to get information through access to information laws and just sources and so forth. And that’s one of the main issues that comes up time and time again with this LRT project. That why didn’t the government tell people and residents in Ottawa what was going on? If they had been honest about all the construction issues that they were dealing with, that would have been at least one way to keep things in check and keep things in accountability.

Instead, you had a group of city officials in a back room talking to a consortium of companies saying, like, no, we got to get this finished. We got to get the LRT finished. Just finish it. At least that’s what it sounds like. Over, oh my God, this is a major series of issues that might take us longer. Maybe we should tell the taxpayers whose money we’re using to invest in this project that it’s going to take longer because of X-Y-Z. Yeah, and that’s the case for all transit projects, by the way, across the province. Look at in Toronto, you’ve got a bunch of mega transit projects in construction. There’s one, the Eglinton Crosstown, that has been built for a decade and it’s still not finished. And we still don’t fully know what’s going on with that project, or we still don’t fully know what’s happening with the Mississauga LRT that they’ve just started to build last year.

These things are clouded in deep layers of government bureaucracy and kept quiet. We don’t actually know whether they’re handling it right or not, which is why this public inquiry is so important to keep an eye on, because it’s actually shedding light on the mismanagement, and oh my God, the degree of mismanagement that the city of Ottawa undertook when it came to approving this transit project.

Jordan So what happens now? What is the state of the LRT kind of like as we’re talking, and what’s next for it?

Fatima Syed So my friends in Ottawa told me that it does work okay, so that’s a good sign that it has gotten better. The public inquiry, however, is shocking, right? And the public inquiry can give us a report of findings. But how do you hold a city accountable for those findings is the big question. Will the Doug Ford government still provide funding for the next stage of the LRT expansion? And will they do that with conditions? For example, will the federal government withhold their additional funding, or will they make it conditional to ensure that something like this doesn’t happen again? And more importantly, what was the role of the companies involved? We’re talking about big names like SNC Lavalin who were part of creating this transit project. What kind of accountability do we have to hold them to for their sake in failing the residents and transit users of Ottawa?

Also, there’s a municipal election coming up. So there’s going to be a new mayor in town. Will that new mayor have a different stance and a different approach to the LRT project? And will that complicate matters further? It’s just a lot of uncertainty right now about the future of the Ottawa LRT. But one thing a lot of people are sure of is that this inquiry and its findings could change the game for future mega transit projects because of what we’ll learn from it. And for the very first time, we’re learning that maybe a municipal government doesn’t have the capacity or the ability to create transit sustainably and effectively. And if that is true, what does that mean for all the other transit projects that A, we really need in this province to reduce transportation emissions and just get people moving faster, and B, what does that mean for all the ones that are under construction right now? Are they going to have the same fate as the Ottawa LRT? I hope not, but it’s scary.

Jordan Fatima, thank you so much for talking to us about this. I’ve wondered for a long time what was going on with that mess, and now I know a little more. So thank you.

Fatima Syed Thanks for having me on, Jordan.

Jordan Fatima Syed of The Narwhal. That was The Big Story. For more, head to thebigstorypodcast.ca. Find us on Twitter at @TheBigStoryFPN. Don’t go looking for us if you’re from Ottawa and you’re mad. We don’t mean to make fun, it’s just funny. Listen, we called in the army for the snowstorm. I know. You can also email us at the address [click here!]. And of course, call and yell at us or praise us or anything in between. Leave a voicemail at 416-935-5935. Thanks so much for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow.

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