OTTAWA — Former bus operator Chris Petersen antagonized his bosses at OC Transpo by speaking his mind in public no matter what, and he’s not going to stop now that he finds himself in unexpected early retirement.

During the 2008-09 strike by his union, Petersen was one of the few members of the rank and file to pipe up about how the work-scheduling system, the issue at the core of the strike, affected him personally, in interviews with the Citizen and the Orléans Star. He kept it up afterward, commenting from time to time on online stories about OC Transpo — defending company policy on passholders’ having to write their numbers on their monthly passes, for instance.

That outspokenness wasn’t necessarily welcome, though. The second-last straw for his OC Transpo career, Petersen says, was a letter to the editor he wrote to the Citizen last winter, responding to an op-ed by former mayor Larry O’Brien saying that the operators’ union was spoiling for another labour dispute. He was harsh. About O’Brien, yes, who was out of office by then, but also about his own boss, OC Transpo general manager Alain Mercier, who was hired on O’Brien’s watch.

“The problems at OC Transpo remain because the people O’Brien placed in charge have no knowledge of how to run a transit system,” Petersen wrote. Mercier had “stumbled and bumbled” and “engineered” the strike.

Petersen was scolded for talking about OC Transpo business in public without the written permission of the general manager, he says. But he kept his job.

What really did him in was an incident last October that took till the end of the summer to work through the discipline system, he says. Stopped in his empty bus at Kent and Albert streets at 9:30 at night, waiting to start a run, he was accosted by an angry supervisor who demanded to be let aboard by kicking the door.

“I looked at him a little bit strangely, I guess, like, ‘What’s on your mind?’ And he kicked again and started screaming at me,” Petersen says.

“I told him, ‘You can talk to me through a window. I’m not letting you on the bus’.” Petersen says. “I was relieved of duties … They sent me home and later suspended me because when the supervisor ordered the door open and I didn’t, it was insubordination.”

In the end, Petersen says the union wouldn’t back him in a full arbitration hearing because he’d run for the executive and lost.

Union president Garry Queale says that choice is actually up to the members, who vote on which grievances to take to arbitration and which not — though the union leaders had recommended, based on a legal opinion that the grievance’s odds were slim, that it not be pursued.

“It was about 4-to-1 to not go ahead with it,” Queale says, adding that the executive’s recommendations aren’t always followed.

Queale says the usual way a supervisor would talk to a driver is through the window, but the supervisor supposedly was concerned about passing traffic.

OC Transpo is in a difficult position with Petersen’s case: it’s a personnel matter and employers are constrained by privacy rules, so they can’t publicly respond to his story. “We can confirm that Chris Petersen was a former employee of OC Transpo. Due to a confidentiality agreement coupled with the fact that this is a personnel issue, we cannot comment any further on this particular situation,” reads a statement from city spokeswoman Jocelyne Turner. She provided a link to the city’s code of conduct, too.

Petersen acknowledges that he built up an extensive discipline record for things like refusing to drive buses he believed weren’t up to safety standards — as a former driving instructor, he’s a stickler — on things like braking systems and signal lights. A letter of termination, which the city rescinded in favour of letting Petersen retire instead, notes four suspensions dating back to 2006 and more than one nasty comment he left on feedback forms and time sheets. “Bloodsucking schedulers,” in one instance.