sisco farraro says:
03/20/2025 at 10:22 AM
This is an issue that needs to be addressed by the city manager, Wendy Stephanson. How often have you made a phone call to an organization and while you’re waiting for someone to pick up listened to a recording noting that offensive language or behaviour will result in immediate termination of the call? But what happens when the caller is forced to put up with abuse from the person who answers the phone? Nothing. There is no action the caller can take other than to call again and hope someone else answers the phone or ask to speak to a supervisor. In the instance Mike describes Wendy Stephanson owes the groups in Kanata and Nepean a public apology as well as a plan explaining how she will be dealing with the offending staff (and yes, she can find out who these people are). I suggest that those who attended the meetings contact their councilor and tell them that unless an apology and followup plan is issued he/she will be getting their vote in 2026. Whenever you run into a problem you can’t resolve on your own, escalate”.
Watching Carefully says:
03/20/2025 at 12:35 PM
Well the suburbs have gotten treatment the established neighborhoods have been getting since intensification and the 15 minute neighborhood were introduced about 5 years ago. “Racists, NIMBYs, privileged!!!
All conversation stoppers. Will 15 minute neighbors work when the city is over $3.8 billion in the hole for maintenance of recreation and other buildings? When the city has no mandate or funds to ensure that small retail, grocery stores, parks or other amenities will appear, no answer for parking when they will only allow one parking space per building, and there is no reliable transit. And no plans to measure the success of 15 minute neighborhood besides how many people are packed in. One senior planner told an older participant who asked where elders would go – “Into a one bedroom apartment or two bedrooms if there are two of them and one has a “sleeping” problem and then he laughed.
Ron Benn says:
03/20/2025 at 12:38 PM
sisco, many of the insulting responses that Mike refers to were made by elected officials in public settings. Public gatherings called by elected officials to shout down those who were raising concerns.
To be fair, some of the concerns being raised were questionable. However, some of the concerns expressed were about legitimate matters of public policy. About the willful decision by council to abdicate of their statutory obligations of oversight. About major decisions being made behind closed doors. About staff structuring the decision making process to direct a de facto sole source contract. About willfully ignoring due process by not consulting the communities that would be affected the most. About placing a tent like welcoming centre, as Mike says, in the middle of a field in the middle of no where. No where being no where close to the services that temporary residents need the most.
The rhetoric, led by a ‘select’ group of councillors, of calling anyone who dared to object to this orchestrated abuse of both statutory and common practice public policy NIMBYs, bigots and racists speaks volumes about those councillors. Of how closed minded they are. Of how blind they are to their own shortcomings. Of their arrogance in presenting themselves to be superior to those who dare to object.
The apologies should come from council as a whole and from individual councillors.
It should start with a resolution presented to council by the mayor that censures council for allowing and enabling the abuse of process. A resolution that declares that council will no longer delegate authority to staff for significant matters of public policy. For reasons of ensuring that they meet the minimum standard set out in statutes regarding an obligation of oversight. For reasons of ensuring that they never fail to give clear guidelines to staff when they ask them to produce a report. Guidelines like ‘do not willfully circumvent established due process and policies’ need to be stated every time, because clearly staff didn’t think that such an obvious requirement applied ‘this time’.
It should be followed by apologies, from each and every councillor individually (because group apologies allow individual councillors to point their fingers at the other signatories) who organized and/or attended the rallies whose primary purpose was to shout down anyone and everyone who dared to challenge what was clearly a political decision to avoid public scrutiny until it was too late to stop the process.
Finally, Knoxdale-Merivale Councillor Sean Devine needs to apologize for his acts of commission and omission.
To the people who attended the city led public lecture in early December. For playing a leading role in a farce of a public consultation. For refusing to allow questions from the audience.
To the communities near the Sportsplex for failing to keep himself apprised of a file that he knew or ought to have known would have a profound negative impact on those communities. For failing to ask the same questions as the councillors who handle Barrhaven (Brown and Lo). In short, for being asleep at the switch and not meeting his obligations to his constituents.
The Voter says:
03/20/2025 at 5:53 PM
Mike,
I don’t think the problem here is restricted to people living near the Woodroffe or Hearst sites. I live nowhere near either of the chosen sites and none of the other sites on the longer list are anywhere near me.
My concerns have been around a) the dumping of newcomers in questionable facilities, which might or might not meet their needs, that were some distance from support services and b) the secretive, closed-door process that was used throughout the entire fiasco.
The inmates of these places would have limited money of their own to access transit to get to those services they needed as well as to participate in normal life and integrate into the community. There was no guarantee that there were any prospects of long-term, permanent housing options for them and they would have been shuffled around various temporary housing offerings for who knows how long. Placing anyone in those circumstances let alone someone involuntarily fleeing war and other desparate situations in their homeland could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be described as a kindness.
The way the City went about the whole process is of concern to me since it displayed a complete disregard for the procedures and policies in place at the City. If they can behave this way on this file, one can expect they will do the same in other situations. We have oversight procedures in place, such as the role of Council in overtseeing staff, for the very reasons demonstrated here. Left to their own devices and able to operate out of the public eye, staff can stray into inappropriate behaviour and come to believe that they are in charge of the City.
As we saw in this instance, both staff members and members of Council berated residents who tried to find out what was going on and expressed their opinions. Concerned residents were called names and had their integrity attacked for simply asking reasonable questions.
As you point out, those questions were later proven to be legitimate as we found out when the City backed away from the whole proposal. It’s very telling that, in dropping the proposal in its entirety, the City has acknowledged that it was faulty in every aspect and there was not a smidgen of it that was worthy of being kept. Had there been any parts of it that were redeemable, they would have kept them and made adjustments to the proposal.
This whole experience should be of concern to everyone in the city since the epithets addressed to the people who questioned the City would have been used against any of us who had dared to have the temerity to question the plan the City was putting forward and the process they had used. In my view, those residents asking the questions of City staff and councillors were asking them on behalf of all of us and the City’s responses were addressed to all of us. If they were NIMBYs or bigots or worse, those names and insults applied to all of us who were questioning the process.