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Where’s Jeff Leiper on transit? On my wanderings across Ottawa’s wards, a question keeps popping up about Jeff Leiper’s mayoral bid: why doesn’t he challenge the Mayor more directly? Translated from polite Ottawa-speak, it usually means this: why does his messaging feel so… indirect when it comes to holding Mark Sutcliffe to account? Leiper’s recent Substack on Housing That Works is a case in point. Thoughtful, earnest, and curiously elliptical. Even people who know him well struggle to explain the reluctance to draw a clean contrast. For months now, I’ve wondered why Leiper declined the unofficial but very real role of “Leader of the Opposition” at City Hall when it was there for the taking. Why the hesitation? No one is asking him to go negative. Ottawa voters are not a blood sport constituency. But they do expect clarity. And clarity, occasionally, requires naming the problem — and the person responsible for it.
As I’ve observed in my columns, Sutcliffe has leaned into a tougher public posture, swiping at unnamed councilors (including Leiper) who dissent from his agenda. It’s a curious asymmetry: a mayor willing to throw elbows in silhouette, and a challenger who prefers to keep things genteel. At some point, “taking the high road” starts to look less like principle and more like a missed opportunity to lead the conversation. Leiper needn’t adopt Neil Saravanamuttoo’s sharper rhetorical edge. But he does need to speak more plainly about where the Mayor is falling short. There is, after all, no clause in Ottawa’s municipal rulebook that forbids a sitting councillor from publicly challenging the mayor before May 1. Democracy will survive the strain.
Which brings us to transit — the City of Ottawa’s most reliable punchline, coast to coast.
Veteran journalist Ken Gray recently delivered a characteristically unsparing verdict in The Bulldog. His complaint is less about personalities than about outcomes: why has the city’s leadership settled for “containing” a broken transit system rather than fixing it?
And where, in all of this, is Leiper — the candidate of “a city that works”?
Gray says: “Leiper should be driving this transit issue home. But all he is really driving is his car on weekends.”
Some might call this a cheap shot. I don’t. It’s fair game in the context of Leiper’s “I like to drive my car” video. Gray’s line sticks precisely because Leiper’s campaign leaves space for it.
