I agree: Ottawa’s transit failures don’t belong to one mayor

I only recently came across Walter Robinson’s June 10 response to my column, “Ottawa’s transit failure wasn’t an accident.” Perhaps surprisingly, I agree with the central premise of his headline: Ottawa’s transit woes do not lie at the feet of one former mayor.

In fact, that was precisely my point.

My column did not argue that former mayor Larry O’Brien was responsible for Ottawa’s current LRT problems. The cancellation of the north-south LRT project was one consequential decision in a history spanning multiple mayors, councils, administrations, procurement processes and engineering choices.

Robinson, who served as O’Brien’s chief of staff, provides useful first-hand context about the 2006 election and council’s 13-11 vote to cancel that project. Whether cancelling it was ultimately the right decision is a legitimate debate, and reasonable people can disagree.

Where I disagree is with the suggestion that examining that decision amounts to blaming O’Brien for what followed.

The central argument of my column was the opposite: responsibility became so diffuse over so many years and decisions that clear accountability became increasingly difficult to identify. No single mayor, councillor, bureaucrat, contractor or government can reasonably carry responsibility for the entire outcome.

Indeed, Robinson and I appear to agree on the larger issue. He writes that Ottawa’s LRT has suffered from “years of political and bureaucratic decisions lacking proper accountability.” Precisely.

After billions of dollars in public investment, Ottawa residents should be able to evaluate the system without first choosing a political team to defend. The appropriate measures are considerably simpler: reliability, travel times, accessibility, ridership and value for money.

There is enough responsibility to go around. The lesson should not be about finding one person to blame. It should be about building a system of governance in which responsibility for decisions and outcomes can never again become this difficult to locate.