Ottawa's DND Carling Campus Hit With Parking Crunch as Staff Return to Office
Ottawa's Department of National Defence (DND) is running into a surprisingly mundane problem at its Carling Campus: not enough parking spaces to go around. As federal employees continue to navigate the government's return-to-office push, DND is now actively encouraging staff to schedule their in-office days on Mondays and Fridays — the two days of the week when the lot is most likely to have room.
What's Going On at Carling Campus
The Carling Campus, located on the west end of Ottawa, serves as one of Canada's most significant defence facilities and is home to thousands of federal employees. With the federal government's ongoing pressure to get public servants back at their desks — especially after years of hybrid and remote work arrangements that took hold during the pandemic — more and more staff are showing up on site.
The problem? The parking infrastructure hasn't kept pace. Mid-week days, particularly Tuesday through Thursday, have become especially congested as those tend to be the most popular days for employees to come in. The result is a scramble for spots that the campus simply wasn't designed to handle under these new patterns.
The Monday–Friday Fix
DND's response is a practical, if unconventional, nudge: spread the load by filling in the quieter bookends of the week. By encouraging staff to come in on Mondays and Fridays — days that have historically seen lighter office attendance — the department hopes to even out the daily traffic and ease the mid-week bottleneck.
It's a scheduling workaround rather than a structural fix, and it puts the onus on employees to rearrange their work weeks around parking availability. For many federal workers in Ottawa, the commute to Carling already involves navigating busy arterial roads or relying on transit options that don't always line up neatly with the campus's location.
The Bigger Picture for Ottawa's Federal Workforce
The parking crunch at Carling is part of a broader tension playing out across Ottawa's federal landscape. The federal government has pushed departments to increase in-office presence, but many workplaces were not designed with post-pandemic hybrid schedules in mind. When thousands of employees simultaneously decide Tuesday is their preferred office day, the strain on parking, transit, and building capacity becomes very real.
Ottawa is unique among Canadian cities in the sheer concentration of federal employees — an estimated 130,000-plus public servants work in the National Capital Region. Even small shifts in how and when those workers commute can ripple across the city's roads, transit lines, and parking infrastructure.
For now, DND is hoping a gentle push toward Monday and Friday office days will buy some breathing room at Carling. Whether it's enough — or whether a longer-term infrastructure solution is needed — remains to be seen.
Source: CTV News Ottawa via Google News
