Ottawa's DND Campus Has a Parking Problem — and a New Fix
Ottawa's Carling Campus, the sprawling Department of National Defence complex on the city's west end, is facing a very 2026 kind of problem: too many workers, not enough parking spots.
DND has told Carling Campus employees to come into the office just two days a week — and the reason isn't about collaboration or culture. It's about the parking lot.
The facility was built to house around 10,000 staff, but it has only approximately 5,000 parking spots. Do the math, and you can see the issue immediately: if even a majority of employees showed up on the same day, the parking situation would be untenable. Staggering attendance through a two-day-a-week in-office requirement is, in essence, a load-balancing solution for the campus parking infrastructure.
A Facility Built for a Different Era
Carling Campus — also known as the Carling Avenue complex — is one of the federal government's largest office campuses, consolidating thousands of defence workers under one roof. When the campus was designed and built, the assumption was that not everyone would be in at the same time, a hybrid-before-hybrid-was-cool approach baked into the architecture itself.
But with the federal government pushing a broader return-to-office agenda in recent years, that assumption has been stress-tested. More employees showing up more often means parking demand has spiked — and the lots simply weren't built to handle full attendance.
By formalizing a two-day-a-week schedule, DND is essentially threading a needle: complying with the spirit of federal return-to-office directives while acknowledging the campus physically cannot support a full-time in-person workforce.
What This Means for DND Employees
For the thousands of defence workers who commute to Carling from across the Ottawa region — from Kanata, Barrhaven, Orléans, and beyond — the two-day guidance offers some predictability. Staff can plan their week around their designated office days without worrying about circling the lot for 20 minutes every morning.
The arrangement also reflects the reality of how federal office culture has evolved since the pandemic. Full five-day attendance is increasingly rare across many departments, and hybrid schedules have become the norm. For Carling Campus employees, the parking crunch has simply made that hybrid reality official policy.
It's also worth noting that two days a week is on the lighter end of federal return-to-office expectations. Some departments have pushed for three or even four days, which would be logistically impossible at Carling without a major parking infrastructure overhaul.
A Broader Ottawa Story
The Carling Campus situation highlights a tension playing out across Ottawa's federal office landscape: buildings and infrastructure designed for one era of work now navigating a very different one. The city is home to one of the largest concentrations of federal public servants in the country, and how those workers commute — by car, bus, or bike — shapes traffic patterns, transit demand, and neighbourhood life across the capital.
For now, DND's solution is practical if unglamorous: fewer cars on the same days, more room for everyone to actually park.
Source: Ottawa Citizen / Defence Watch
