Jeff Leiper: The former drama kid who wants centre stage at City Hall

Jeff Leiper’s high school had all the social groups one would associate with the 1980s. There were the stoners. There were the preppies. And there were the drama kids.

“I was one of the drama kids,” the 56-year-old says, not concealing the pride he felt of the theatre community he fostered during his years at Cairine Wilson Secondary School.

Luckily or coincidentally, that OCDSB high school was also one of the strongest contenders for drama schools at the time — alongside Sir Robert Borden High School, the alma mater of Ottawa-born actress Sandra Oh.

“Sir Robert Borden, as I recall it, always won,” Leiper quips, boyishly. Even then, Leiper recalls Oh being one of the standout performers at Friday night student-organized “improv-athons” at the Gladstone Theatre.

Leiper found community as part of a citywide network of drama enthusiasts as a young adult. That sense of tight-knit community would follow him years later in his political career when he was elected as city councillor for Kitchissippi ward in 2014.

After nearly 12 years as councillor, Leiper is asking Ottawa for their votes (again), but this time as mayoral candidate.

The Ottawa Citizen spoke at length with Leiper, one of the front-runners in Ottawa’s mayoral race. We open the curtains — in four acts — on the idyllic “15-minute community” that shaped him as a child, how he found his way back to academia after dropping out of the University of Ottawa, how his views as councillor evolved over the years, and the lowest moment in life working at City Hall.

When Leiper met his biological mother 15 years ago, they were meeting for the first time. “It took me a few minutes,” he says, recalling his reaction when she asked him to visit Eastview.

“Eastview?” he thought. “Oh … you mean Vanier!” He lets out a laugh.

Born and raised in Ottawa, Leiper was adopted into a family where his maternal adoptive mother was part of a Transcendental Meditation community that built its own housing co-operative. The goal was for community members to be together in their Orléans town houses. The co-ops were possible thanks to former prime minister Pierre Trudeau’s initiative in the 1970s that gave residents access to “very inexpensive” mortgages.

The spiritual community existed in its own bubble, a “tight-knit” community as Leiper put it. Growing up, it was a haven for Leiper, whose high school and many other amenities were “just down the street” from where the co-ops were located in the area of Orléans and Jeanne d’Arc boulevards.

The town houses (there were approximately 73 units, Leiper says) backed onto one of the creeks in Orléans. The community’s play structure kitty-cornered into what was then the vibrant Convent Glen Mall.

“When we were playing outside, all our friends’ parents could see. Everybody’s parents took turns feeding all the different kids at lunchtime. Babysitting was a shared task,” he said.

“My memories of being a teenager look like what you think the ’80s look like.”

This notion of everything close by was a beacon in Leiper’s childhood, and he says it gave him “a strong sense of community that I have taken with me ever since.”

“I’m not a jock,” Leiper prefaces as he begins the story of his days covering the varsity basketball team at Algonquin College

He initially studied history at uOttawa, but dropped out and moved in with his now wife, Natalie Hanson. He picked up a retail job in a paint shop, but quickly realized there might be more than working in retail for the rest of his life. He went back to finish an undergraduate degree at uOttawa and was entertaining the idea pursuing a master’s degree. One of his professors who loved his work stopped him in his tracks.

“I’d really like you to come back and do your master’s with me,” he told Leiper, but that offer came with a condition: Leiper first needed to “learn to respect deadlines.” So the professor asked him not to come back until he’d studied journalism.

So it was off to Algonquin College, whose Thunder basketball squad was a powerhouse at the time. Leiper had the privilege of going to all of their road games.

“I got to know the guys, and basically the only reason I wanted to cover basketball — which I knew nothing about — was because I wanted to take pictures,” he says.

Leiper, a print journalism major, was an amateur photographer, would deliberately submit very short articles so editors would be forced to run his photos bigger.

“It was fun being at Algonquin because the main study in Algonquin’s print journalism program was to put out the Algonquin Times (student newspaper),” he says.

And Leiper’s cohort at the college was one of the last classes to shoot photos using film. Students also had to learn how to develop the film, he adds.

“The notion was, if you went to Algonquin, you were probably going to wind up at some small community newspaper somewhere that didn’t have a lot of technology, so they taught you all the basic skills,” he says.

Leiper didn’t end up at a small community newspaper, though.

By the time he received his journalism diploma, there were a number of major shifts in various sectors of the capital region.

High-tech in Kanata was exploding, and the National Post was founded in 1998, a national newspaper to compete with The Globe and Mail.

“All of sudden there were a bunch of new jobs in journalism,” Leiper remembers.

He moved on from the Algonquin Times to Silicon Valley North, a tech-focused regional newspaper.

From there, he worked at a trade newsletter, then as an analyst for the technology research and consulting firm Yankee Group. He advised clients like Bell, Rogers and Telus on market research.

Finally, in what he described as one of the best jobs he had before being elected as councillor, he worked at the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), saying the independent regulatory body gave him a hint about how city hall would work.

In hindsight he says the CRTC “was familiar grounds” where he saw first-hand how city staff proposed and debated policy. CRTC commissioners were somewhat like city councillors, the stand-alone CRTC legal department was similar to city staff and the CRTC chair could be compared with the mayor.

In the decades that followed, Leiper’s “tight-knit” community was changing — and fast. The development that Kitchissippi residents are used to now was just getting underway at the time.

“We were uncomfortable at the pace of change in our neighbourhood,” Leiper admits.

When Leiper ran for Kitchissippi office in 2014, beating incumbent Katherine Hobbs, he won on a promise to give the Hintonburg community a voice at City Hall about their efforts to preserve and strengthen the sense of community in the ward.

“When I first got elected, I was working to constrain it.”

But over the years as a city councillor, his view on development slowly evolved.

Now the chair of council’s Planning and Housing committee, Leiper says he developed a strong understanding of why planning law is the way it is — and his role evolved from an advocate for the community to a figure that would help them understand and come to terms with the developments in his ward.

“The temptation often is just to say, ‘Yeah, I’ll fight that. I’ll vote against that.’ But now I have a much more nuanced understanding of the land of the planning framework in Ontario.”

As mayor, Leiper now wants to hold Ottawa’s hand through the changes to come in the next four years.

It was the summer day of 2016 when Leiper started getting bombarded with messages about a death in his ward.

Abdirahman Abdi, who was only 38 years old, had just died in an Ottawa hospital after a violent arrest by Ottawa Police Service officers on July 24, 2016.

“The most alone I have ever felt in my life … was when he passed,” Leiper says.

There were plenty of times that were challenging in his ward, like when power went out after a heavy storm, or the convoy, or even the COVID-19 pandemic.

But as a councillor, he found solace in his ability to deliver trustworthy information to his residents. He was helpful.

Abdi’s death, however, left Leiper feeling helpless.

The killing of the Somali-Canadian man led to years of outrage and pain among Somali, Black and Muslim communities in the city, beyond what Leiper could have imagined on that summer day.

The issue became controversial because of the circumstances surrounding Abdi’s arrest. Ottawa Police Service officers said they responded to multiple 911 calls about a man who had allegedly sexually assaulted women at a Hintonburg coffee shop.

Abdi had died on July 25, 2016 in police custody. One officer was tried and acquitted of manslaughter in the case. In 2024, a five-person coroner’s jury ruled that Abdi’s death was a homicide (a non-criminal, non-binding finding) and issued 57 recommendations to the police force, its board and various ministries.

Leiper said he spent a number of days with Abdi’s family, helping them process what had happened.

From searching for answers in those moments, a decade ago, Leiper is now trying to lead the city with answers. That’s why he proposes making ANCHOR crisis response funding permanent — to help people like Abdi, who police learned was having a mental health episode at the time of his arrest — as well as shifting the non-core responsibilities of Ottawa Police to alternative response models.

Under his leadership, he says Ottawa will also have 1,500 new non-profit homes built each year on city-owned land, giving homeowners an affordable place to live, like Leiper’s family had in his youth.

And he would reverse certain OC Transpo service cuts by funding core routes, in hopes that service can be as reliable as the popular 95 bus was back when in the days when he was riding it to get to drama practice in youth.

Leiper talks like he wants to be on centre stage at City Hall.