Canada’s top bureaucrats are quietly worried that Ottawa’s struggling public transit system could undermine the federal government’s ambitious return-to-office push and they’ve been meeting with city hall to sort it out before things come to a head.
An internal memo prepared for Privy Council Clerk Michael Sabia ahead of a February 19 meeting with Ottawa Mayor Mark Sutcliffe reveals just how seriously federal officials are taking the city’s transit troubles. The gathering brought together Canada’s most senior public servant, his deputy Isabelle Mondou, and the mayor to hash out whether Ottawa’s roads, buses, trains, and parking infrastructure can actually handle a massive influx of returning government workers.
The timing is no accident. The federal government rolled out a sweeping return-to-office mandate earlier this year. Executives have already been logging five full days a week at the office since May 4, and the rest of the eligible hybrid workforce is expected to follow suit at four days per week starting July 6.
The memo, obtained by The Canadian Press through an Access to Information request, doesn’t mince words about the state of OC Transpo’s bus service. Transit reliability ranked among the most frequently heard complaints from federal employees in the National Capital Region which is precisely why Public Services and Procurement Canada reached out to the city in the first place.
The numbers tell a discouraging story. Between late 2025 and early 2026, OC Transpo completed somewhere between 97.8 and 98.4 percent of its planned bus trips a figure that sounds reasonable until you measure it against the system’s own target of 99.5 percent. That gap translates into hundreds of cancelled trips every single day, with peak commuting hours bearing the worst of it.
On-time performance is even grimmer. Only about one in five buses on frequent routes actually showed up when they were supposed to. On less frequent routes, the failure rate climbed to roughly one in four. Riders gave the bus network a satisfaction score of just 2.91 out of five a number that speaks for itself.
Ottawa’s light rail network presents a more mixed picture. The two north-south O-Train lines are running well and drawing relatively decent marks from passengers a satisfaction rating of around 3.29 out of five. But the east-west Line 1, which has lurched from one crisis to another since its launch, remains a sore spot.
Faulty axle bearings have forced OC Transpo to run single train cars rather than double-car sets, choking the line’s capacity at exactly the wrong time. The memo acknowledges that while crews are working on a fix, nobody can say with confidence when Line 1 will return to full service.
Rather than wait and hope the situation resolves itself, federal and municipal officials have moved into active planning mode. Public Services and Procurement Canada and the city are now holding regular meetings to work through transit demand projections and coordinate logistics ahead of the July surge in office attendance.
Mayor Sutcliffe, who has staked considerable political capital on turning OC Transpo around since taking office in 2022, acknowledged at a recent news conference that the system still has a distance to travel. “We need to fix the trains. We need better leadership. We need a stronger workforce. We need more reliable buses,” he said, while expressing cautious optimism that the right pieces are beginning to fall into place.
For its part, the federal government says it appreciates the efforts being made. Privy Council Office spokesman Pierre-Alain Bujold said Ottawa and neighbouring Gatineau home to a significant share of the federal workforce just across the Quebec border are both working to improve transit availability and reliability.
Whether those efforts bear fruit before tens of thousands of public servants begin their daily commutes in earnest remains the central question. For now, the memo makes plain that Canada’s federal leadership isn’t leaving that answer entirely to chance.
