Frequently Asked Questions

Sheetal Narwal is a candidate for Ottawa City Councillor in Ward 6, Stittsville, in the October 26, 2026 municipal election. She spent more than twenty years in technology, cybersecurity and operations — most recently as Chief Executive Officer of a cybersecurity firm, and before that as the manager responsible for critical infrastructure at Ontario Health. She holds a Bachelor's and Master's degree in Computer Science and lives in the Fairwinds neighbourhood of Stittsville.

Because Stittsville doesn't have an awareness problem. It has a delivery problem.

Everyone already knows the list — traffic, transit, recreation, health care, growth outpacing the infrastructure meant to support it. It's been the same list for a decade. Residents have raised it at meetings. Petitions have been signed. Motions have been passed. What hasn't happened is delivery.

Sheetal spent her career in roles where systems either worked or they didn't, and where "that's just how it works here" was never an acceptable answer. She ran a company, where a missed deadline came out of payroll. She managed critical infrastructure at Ontario Health, where failure meant people didn't get care.

That's the standard she's bringing to City Hall: name the problem, put a date on it, publish where it stands, and answer for it when it slips. Not more advocacy alone — accountability.

Stittsville doesn't need someone new to describe the problem. It needs someone who finishes things.

Yes — and she chose it deliberately.

Sheetal and her family moved to Stittsville from the Nepean area in early 2025, after looking at where in Ottawa they wanted to build their life and eventually raise a family. She's spent the months since knocking on doors across the ward — thousands of them — in Fairwinds, Blackstone, Edenwylde, Jackson Trails, Amberwood, Fernbank and the village core.

The question underneath this one is usually a fair one: does she understand Stittsville? The honest answer is that she has spent more time listening at Stittsville front doors this year than most people spend in a decade of living here. The campaign's positions on traffic, recreation and growth didn't come from a policy binder. They came from those conversations.

Twenty-plus years in technology, cybersecurity and operations, in roles where the work was measured by whether things actually worked.

Her most recent role was Chief Executive Officer of a cybersecurity firm. Running it meant doing, at a smaller scale, most of what a city councillor's job requires: negotiating with stakeholders who wanted different things, leading a team, designing solutions for complex systems, meeting payroll, building and defending budgets, managing procurement, and being the person accountable when results didn't land.

Before that, she was the manager responsible for critical infrastructure at Ontario Health — the network and security systems that the province's health services depend on. When those systems fail, people don't get care. That's the standard she worked to.

She has also served as a board director on the governance board of YWCA Durham, an organization that provides essential services and resources in response to the changing needs of women, children, youth and families.

No. Ottawa municipal elections are non-partisan. Councillors are elected as individuals, not as party candidates, and Sheetal is not running as a representative of any party.

No — this is her first run for elected office. But governance isn't new to her.

She served as a board director on the governance board of YWCA Durham, an organization delivering essential services to women, children, youth and families. Board governance is the same discipline a councillor needs: oversight of an organization you don't personally run, responsibility for budgets and outcomes you have to answer for publicly, and the judgment to ask hard questions of staff without taking over their jobs.

Combined with running a company and managing critical infrastructure at Ontario Health, that's the experience she's bringing to the council table.

Four pillars:

• Traffic and transit — enforcement of the rules that already exist, roads that reflect how many people actually live here now, and buses that show up.
• Safe and liveable neighbourhoods — growth that arrives with the recreation, green space and services attached, not a decade behind it.
• Better value for our tax dollars — Stittsville should be able to see where its money goes, and get a fair share of it back.
• Healthcare access close to home — using every municipal lever to bring care into Ward 6 instead of sending residents across the city for it.

Stittsville pays a lot in property taxes. That money should come back as services and infrastructure you can actually use — and you should be able to see that it did.

Right now you can't, easily. The City publishes lists of projects located in each ward, and councillors send out budget summaries when they choose to. What doesn't exist is an account: what Stittsville contributes set against what Stittsville receives, in one place, in the same format every year, whether the numbers are flattering or not.

If you're paying for it, you should be able to see it. Sheetal will:

• Publish an annual Ward 6 account — what was spent here, what's committed for next year, in plain language and the same format every time. Not a newsletter when it suits the councillor. A report you get every year, so you can compare it to the last one.
• Open the parkland accounts — publish Ward 6's cash-in-lieu balance and what it's committed to, so you can see whether money collected here is being spent here or sitting idle while families wait for facilities.
• Push where it's decided — the City is updating its Cash-in-Lieu of Parkland Policy by Q3 2027, inside the next term. Stittsville is one of Ottawa's fastest-growing wards, and Sheetal will argue high-growth wards should keep more of what their own growth generates.

Fair share isn't a complaint. It's a reporting requirement.

This is one of the most heard concerns at almost every single door. We need action, not more studies.

What Sheetal can do is make specific problems impossible to ignore — and answer for them.

• A 10-business-day response standard. Every traffic concern a resident raises gets a real answer from Sheetal's office within ten business days: what's happening, who's responsible, when. Not an acknowledgement — an answer. No council vote required; she can just do it.
• Get signal timing fixed at Ward 6's worst peak-hour intersections. The City already runs these reviews. They just have to be asked for, by someone who names the intersections and follows up.
• Traffic calming near schools and crossings — practical, proven measures, prioritized where children are.
• Crosswalk and sidewalk upgrades where the evidence points, and a Ward 6 share of the City's road safety spending that reflects how much this ward has grown.
• A public construction communications plan on every major road project in the capital pipeline — detours, business access and school bus routing shared well ahead of time, not discovered the week the equipment shows up.
• More police presence and mobile patrols. Enforcing the rules that already exist does more for daily safety than most new measures.

None of that is dramatic. All of it is doable, checkable, and overdue.

Reliability first. A route that exists on paper but doesn't arrive is worse than no route at all.

• Real reliability data, published. Push OC Transpo for route-level on-time performance on Ward 6 routes and report it publicly. Citywide averages hide local failures. Residents should be able to see how their own route actually performs.
• Connections to where people actually go. Advocate for better links to workplaces and the wider network — and be honest with residents about where that advocacy stands with OC Transpo and Council, including when the answer is no.
• Service for people with no other option. Seniors, students, and families who can't afford a second car need evening, weekend and winter reliability built into future service plans — not just peak-hour buses.

The second one matters as much as the first. Residents can handle being told no. What they can't stand is being told nothing.

Only responsible development — which means infrastructure comes before growth, not a decade after it.

Stittsville has spent ten years learning what happens when that order gets reversed: the houses go up, and the roads, recreation, schools and health services arrive late or not at all. Residents didn't get a say in the sequence, but they've been living with the consequences.

Being honest with you: much of the growth ahead is already approved, and a significant share of planning authority sits with the Province, not the City. Any candidate promising to stop development is promising something a councillor cannot do.

What a councillor can control is the sequencing — whether the recreation capacity, road capacity, school infrastructure and green space are funded and planned alongside the houses or requested years later once the shortage is unbearable. That question gets asked at planning committee on every approval, and it's where Sheetal will apply pressure.

Parents don't need to be told life is busy and expensive. They're living it. The question is whether anything changes.

Teams drive out of the ward for ice.

Teenagers have nowhere within walking distance that isn't a parking lot or a screen.

Seniors have too few places to simply gather during the day, which takes a toll on both physical and mental health.

Stittsville grew for a decade; the recreation capacity didn't keep up.

Six things Sheetal will do:

• Advocate for more parks and recreation planned with new housing — not requested a decade later.
• Road safety, crosswalks and sidewalks in base capital planning.
• Advocate for environmental and tree-canopy review on major developments — before approval, not after the land is cleared.
• More places built for young kids, teenagers and seniors — more drop-in space teens can walk to, daytime space for older residents. What exists is weighted heavily toward organized programs for young kids, and even those are struggling to find space.
• More community events. A growing community only stays a community if people actually meet each other — and when a ward of tens of thousands turns out a few hundred people for a local event, we can do better than that.
• Youth and senior workshops. A community where young entrepreneurs find their first customers, and students see real opportunity close to home — mentorship, internships, work experience. Plus free fraud and online safety workshops — something the ward office can simply do.

A councillor is one vote of twenty-five and can't build a rink alone. What she can do is put Ward 6's numbers on the record at every budget, build the coalition with Ottawa's other fast-growing wards facing the same squeeze, and publish where each file stands.

Every candidate supports families. Here's what I'll actually do about it.

By treating the two things business owners actually raise — how long City processes take, and whether customers can get to them — as the priorities they are.

Sheetal has been in the same boat. She built and ran a small business, and she has lived every difficulty a Stittsville owner will describe — making payroll in a slow month, chasing an approval that sat on someone's desk, absorbing the cost of a delay she had no control over, competing for contracts against firms ten times her size. She isn't sympathetic to small business. She has been small business.

That's the point. It takes a small business owner to actually understand what another one needs — and right now, that voice is missing at the council table.

Three commitments:

• Permitting and approvals with published timelines. Owners should be able to see where a file sits and how long it should take. "It's in process" is not a status update.
• Access and traffic. A storefront on a corridor people avoid at rush hour is a storefront in trouble. Road and transit decisions are business decisions in Ward 6.
• A councillor who calls first. Business owners shouldn't have to find out about construction, detours or lane closures affecting their door from a sign that went up that morning.

Sheetal will also push for Ward 6 businesses to be genuinely able to compete for City work, rather than losing out by default to larger firms that know the process better.

Yes — more than most people assume.

The honest part first: health care is provincial. A councillor doesn't fund clinics, recruit doctors, or set wait times. Anyone promising to fix the family doctor shortage is asking for your vote on something they can't deliver.

Here's what Sheetal will do.

• Make it easier for medical practices to open. Zoning, permitting and approvals are entirely municipal — and when they drag, clinics open somewhere else. This is the fastest thing a councillor can change.
• Advocate with evidence. Take Ward 6's growth and healthcare numbers to the Province — not a letter saying Stittsville needs doctors, the actual figures.
• Deliver the Health Hub. Council has made land at 1655 Maple Grove Road available for a Family Health Team serving roughly 50,000 residents across Kanata-Stittsville. But a motion is not a clinic. Sheetal will hold the Province accountable for the funding and publish where the file stands, so you see progress instead of being told it's in process.
• Community hubs. Healthcare, recreation and social services together, closer to home — so residents aren't crossing the city for what should be here.
• Mental health included. Part of the healthcare-access solution from the start, not an afterthought.

Sheetal won't promise to fix health care. She'll promise to stop the City being one of the obstacles — and to be relentless about the rest.

Stittsville was promised this. The job now is delivering it.

Ward 6 trail networks and green space are the most frequently cited reason residents give for choosing Stittsville. They are also the easiest thing to lose incrementally, one approval at a time.

Sheetal supports preserving existing trail connections, pushing for fast-growing wards to retain more of the parkland funds their own growth generates, and treating recreation capacity as infrastructure that must scale with population — not as an amenity to be added if budget allows.

Email info@sheetalnarwal.ca or call (343) 543-6363. Sheetal reads what comes in and responds personally where she can — and if you'd rather talk in person, she's out at doors across the ward most days.

She brings a combination of real-world leadership, business experience and grassroots community work that isn't on offer anywhere else in this race.

She's built and led businesses, managed people, and run critical infrastructure — careers spent in environments where you don't get to make excuses. You deliver, or you answer for it.

She's brought that same standard to this campaign. As of August, Sheetal has personally knocked on nearly 10,000 doors in Ward 6.

She isn't running to learn on the job. She's running to bring an outside perspective to City Hall — to challenge assumptions, ask the hard questions, and make sure decisions actually deliver for residents.

She knows how to build things. She knows how to manage accountability. And she knows who she works for: the residents of Ward 6.

That's what sets her apart.