Leiper out of touch with voters on return-to-office | Opinion

Mayoral candidate Jeff Leiper made a campaign announcement about return to office in Ottawa. August 24, 2026. Photo by Jean Levac /POSTMEDIA

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One of the challenges for Ottawa mayoral candidates is not saying anything that could be considered laughably out of touch by the typical voter interested in reasonable taxes, decent roads, reliable garbage pickup and maybe even an effective transit system.

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Candidate Jeff Leiper has fallen into that trap by making an issue of how many days a week city employees work in the office. How does that affect the life of the average person?

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Since January, all city workers have been required to be in the workplace five days a week. Even before that change, 85 per cent of workers were already spending five days in the office or on the job site.

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The city move was in synch with new rules for provincial public servants. In neither case did people in the private sector rise up to support these beleaguered public employees. No surprise there. The boo-hoo about having to work in the office doesn’t exactly resonate with people who go to the workplace five days a week and consider it normal.

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Leiper wants to reverse the city plan, offering city workers “maximum” flexibility to choose the work arrangements they like, subject to operational requirements.

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Of course, Leiper’s promise to make workplace requirements laxer for a small minority of city employees isn’t really about that group. The veteran councillor is pandering by proxy, hoping to win support from federal public servants opposed to the government’s decree that they must work in the office four days a week.

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Leiper vowed to “push back” against the federal government policy. That’s guaranteed to be futile, but the odds of Leiper implementing his city goal as mayor aren’t much better. The return-to-office decision was made by city manager Wendy Stephanson and council affirmed her authority to do so by a 15-10 vote. With little change likely in the makeup of council, all Leiper could do is lose on the same issue from the mayor’s chair instead.

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Undaunted, Leiper attempted to give his pitch a blend of emotion and faux rationality.

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Mayor Mark Sutcliffe’s “back-to-office orders are costing people time and money,” Leiper said. “Higher child care, gas, transit, parking and coffee costs hurt people. And every moment you’re stuck in transit is time stolen from your loved ones, and that hurts even more.”

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Wow, “time stolen from your loved ones.” Most people just call it getting to work.

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Opponents of working in the office like to cast their argument as a matter of practicality. “By adding tens of thousands of trips to Ottawa’s transportation network, Sutcliffe snarled an already-struggling transit system and made traffic worse,” Leiper contended.

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But wait a minute, Leiper is a huge transit fan. Doesn’t he want more people to use it?

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The additional volume anticipated by OC Transpo is hardly an overwhelming burden. The city estimates additional public service workers could add 65,000 commuting trips a week. Transpo already provides 1.4 million trips a week and transit delivers just 12.7 per cent of commuters.