OC Transpo rang up $44.4 million in overtime last year. An audit shows why the City still cannot explain it.

The Ottawa Citizen reported that OC Transpo workers at the city's bus garages are still recording their overtime on paper. A supervisor signs the timesheet. Nobody checks the total against a system that tracks hours automatically, because no such system exists at those garages.

That is the finding at the centre of the city auditor general's review of overtime, presented to the city's audit committee on November 3, 2026. The review, tabled by the Ottawa Office of the Auditor General on March 31, 2026, makes 13 recommendations for how the city should change the way it tracks, approves and reports overtime across all departments. OC Transpo sits at the top of the list.

What the numbers show

The city spent $61.7 million on overtime across all departments in 2024. In 2025 that figure rose to $70.3 million. Together, that is $132 million in two years.

OC Transpo's share was the largest. The transit authority accounted for $44.4 million, or 36 percent of the city-wide total, in 2025. Emergency and protective services came next at $23.5 million (17.8 percent), followed by road works at $18.7 million (14 percent).

The review found that OC Transpo has gone over its own overtime budget every year since 2021. The overruns, by year: $5.25 million in 2021, $6.2 million in 2022, $7.1 million in 2023, $6.7 million in 2024, and $9.1 million in 2025. The trend has moved in one direction for five years.

Paper in an era of scheduling software

The audit's sharpest finding is a technology gap. Most city departments track time with a system that logs hours automatically and flags unusual patterns before a manager ever sees a timesheet. OC Transpo's bus garages do not use that system. Workers fill in paper, supervisors approve it by hand, and the numbers flow into payroll without a cross-check.

The auditor general's report describes this as a risk: a manual process creates room for errors, for miscounting, and for overtime that cannot be verified after the fact.

The 13 recommendations ask the city to:

• Replace manual timesheets at bus garages with the automated tracking system the rest of the city uses
• Review how Bus Operators are booked for shifts, to find whether scheduling drives some of the overtime
• Set up monitoring for Hours of Service violations so managers catch problems before they grow large
• Require documentation before overtime is approved, not after
• Take a proactive approach to overtime monitoring rather than reviewing it once it has already been spent

The recommendations cover all city departments, though OC Transpo is the department the report singles out for the technology gap.

The committee's reaction

The Ottawa Citizen quoted the audit committee chair, Cathy Curry, the councillor for Ward 4 (Kanata North): "I could not believe what was in this audit. This technology has been around forever. I cannot believe that we at the City of Ottawa and OC Transpo would still have paper anything."

Curry chairs the audit committee, which means she receives these findings and directs management to report on its progress. Her page on this site records her commitments on transit accountability.

OC Transpo General Manager Rick Leary told the committee that overtime is "a symptom of broader operational challenges," according to the Ottawa Citizen. OC Transpo management agreed to the 13 recommendations.

Why this matters for riders and taxpayers

Ottawa residents who use OC Transpo pay fares, and Ottawa taxpayers fund the gap between what fares cover and what the system costs. When overtime runs $9.1 million over budget in a single year, that gap widens. The audit does not say riders will pay more directly, but it does say the city cannot currently explain where all of that overtime came from, or whether all of it was necessary.

The city's own budget process depends on departments forecasting their spending accurately. A department that has missed its overtime target every year for five years, and that cannot produce automated records to support what it has spent, makes that process harder.

The audit does not assign blame for specific overspending to named managers or bus operators. It describes a system with weak controls: approvals that happen without data, reports that reach senior management too late to act, and a planning process that has not corrected a five-year trend.

What OC Transpo has agreed to do

Management's response, included in the March 2026 report, committed to acting on all 13 recommendations. The report does not say when each change will be finished. The audit committee's formal follow-up schedule has not been published.

OC Transpo's overtime problem is not new. The transit authority has run over its overtime budget every year since 2021. Each year the overrun grew larger, from $5.25 million to $9.1 million. The review's key argument is that the city's current system cannot tell managers when overtime is about to exceed a threshold, only after it already has.

The broader picture

Ottawa's total overtime bill of $132 million across two years covers all departments. Emergency and protective services, which includes police and paramedics, accounted for $23.5 million in 2025. Road works came to $18.7 million. The review found documentation problems more broadly, but did not identify the same technology gap in those departments.

Mayor Mark Sutcliffe chairs full Council but does not sit on the audit committee. The mayor had not commented publicly on the November 3 hearing as of the Ottawa Citizen's report.

The audit committee does not vote to accept or reject audits. It receives them and directs management to report back on progress. Residents who want to follow the committee's work can find meeting records at pub-ottawa.escribemeetings.com, the city's publicly accessible meetings site.

The news index for this election has earlier coverage of the city's auditor general reports from November 2, including audits of garbage collection and 311 services.