Market Violence Is A Job For The Police

06/09/2025

whopper.watch .12.26

“The team can also diffuse or de-escalate harassment or violence when they see it … in partnership with the security staff who already work at the businesses.”

The CBC quoting city nightlife commissioner Mathieu Grondin
on some of the duties of nightlife ambassadors

This isn’t a high-school hall-monitor program. This isn’t even student police on relatively tranquil university campuses (at least tranquil compared to the ByWard Market).

The market is the real world writ large. There have been shootings, stabbings, robberies and all sorts of other crimes. You have drug addicts desperate to get their next fix and prepared to do most anything to get the money to get that fix. You have criminals preying on citizens and each other.

These are the kind of situations that require trained social workers and the police.

Taxpayers footed the bill to put a police station near the market. What the so-called night ambassadors are doing is police work. And that requires professionals to do their job well with the tools to do it well. Intervening in violent situations is not what night ambassadors should be doing.

How long is it before one of these ambassadors gets badly hurt? Or they handle a situation poorly and somebody else gets hurt? These people aren’t trained for these things. They’re amateurs. Violent episodes require the police.

We’re not monitoring Nepean at 4 a.m. This is the market and some nasty people hang out there.

Grondin could do us all a favour by getting more police in the market so as to not expose amateurs to very serious, and possibly life-threatening, situations.

City council needs to put an end to this misguided program. We have 911 service for a reason.

One thing certain. The City of Ottawa should not be putting untrained people in the way of harm.

Ken Gray