You can watch the city's press conference introducing him here.
Mr. Leary has held executive positions in Boston, York Region, and Toronto. According to the memo City Manager Wendy Stephenson sent to Council:
Rick has extensive experience overseeing integrated bus, light rail, subway, and streetcar systems, with responsibility for operations, maintenance, safety, and long‑term asset management ... [his] experience includes managing aging infrastructure, supporting the integration of new and expanding services, and ensuring the successful delivery of capital projects.
Given his extensive experience, I am confident that Rick is well positioned to lead the Transit Services department in an inspiring and empowering way while strengthening Ottawa’s growing multi-modal transit system.
Actually, Mr. Leary has extensive experience in obfuscating service quality, hiding safety issues, and agency mismanagement. With his record, Council should question the hiring process that led to his appointment.
Safety at the TTC and MBTA
The LRT is currently in the midst of issues with spalling of the cartridge bearing assemblies of Line 1 vehicles. This has forced service cuts due to a limitation on vehicle mileage while OC Transpo searches for solutions. Before the press conference announcing Mr. Leary's onboarding, rumours had been circulating about a long-term Line 1 shutdown.
With this background, transparency and communication should be top of mind for the public and for Council.
Rick Leary has a poor safety track record. At the TTC, he covered up a near-miss between two subway stations at Osgoode Station for a year until the Toronto Star obtained internal reports detailing the incident. The TTC claimed to have conducted an internal review, but a public presentation (including to its board) was not made until after the leak. What would have happened if, say, the spalling issue had been covered up? The state of local media in Ottawa is much weaker than in Toronto.
Meanwhile, the Scarborough Rapid Transit, a short subway spur, was permanently closed ahead of schedule when a train derailed in June 2023 [note: the line was scheduled to close in September 2023, following a decades-long controversy over the Scarborough Subway Extension]. In the aftermath, TTC management was accused of hiding the truth, posting its report to an obscure corner of the website, and not properly applying lessons to the rest of the subway network, which was covered in slow zones within a year.
Leary left the TTC in June 2024 after an internal struggle and rumours that newly elected mayor Olivia Chow had tried and failed to oust him in October 2023.
It gets better in Boston.
Rick Leary's transit career started at the MBTA. In May 2008, a westbound train on the Green Line (the city's streetcar-subway hybrid line) struck another train which was stopped at a signal, killing the driver of the former vehicle and injuring another eight people. Leary was the chief operating officer at the time, but according to the Boston Globe, he was absent when the NTSB report on the incident was presented to the MBTA board, and "retired" less than a month later. The MBTA's general manager did not know where Leary had gone during the meeting, and board members and other executives called him "nonresponsive" after the crash.
Challenges, Challenges
In Mr. Leary's defence (it is said), maintenance is not solely due to the general manager, but is impacted by budgetary constraints and political needs. However, leadership matters too - information should be presented to Transit Committee and the public as transparently as possible. As the head, he sets the tone for the response to new situations.
No one should expect budgeting miracles from City Council, but Mr. Leary's history is suggestive. Pulling a disappearing act from the meeting on a fatal crash is not budget-related. Hiding near-misses from the board is not budget-related. All of these acts are a reflection of Mr. Leary's leadership in Boston and Toronto, and what they show is failure.
If you have made it this far, please write to your Councillor and the mayor asking why a man with such a history has been hired to lead OC Transpo. Council is typically not involved in hiring decisions, and it is good to pressure the mayor on his faulty appointments.
As Leary himself said at the press conference, OC Transpo is facing major challenges. It is unclear whether Rick Leary, new general manager, is up to the job.
Until next time.
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