City Hall Is Part Of The Problem: WHOPPER WATCH

“I feel upset because this isn’t Ottawa,”

Mayor Mark Sutcliffe

Yes it is.

Ottawa has been suffering through a wave of hate, racism and obstruction of freedom of expression.

If those things happened here, that is Ottawa.

Maybe Sutcliffe is thinking of the Ottawa of his youth when it was a community of quiet neighbourhoods and where social and economic problems were swept under the rug. Those things happened to “other people.”

Those neighbourhoods and their vital social links are being destroyed by extremification and block-busting, all at the behest of the City of Ottawa. Who cuts the elderly person’s front lawn when the kind-hearted neighbour who did it is block-busted out of his or her home? What strain does that put on the social safety net when that senior can no longer live in their house? And just how alone is that senior when all their neighbours move away because their community has declined.

Former mayor Jim Watson loved to call Ottawa a “world-class city.” Well guess what? Watson was right. The skyrocketing population has “world-class” problems. Take a walk in the ByWard Market like Ontario Premier Doug Ford did recently and be as shocked as him at the decay there. “World-class” woes. The farmers who used to populate the market are gone to be replaced by homelessness, crime, harassment, grinding poverty  and drug-and-alcohol abuse. That’s what you get when you cram 1.4 million people on two sides of the Ottawa River.

The job of the municipal government is to provide the services that make a community work. Instead we get a bus system dubbed New Ways To Wait. When will the train be finished and working properly? You’ve had three years, Your Worship. Why isn’t the largest project in Ottawa municipal history finished on time and why isn’t that front-of-mind at city hall? Will the train ever be finished? It’s not good enough to say that big projects are always late. Tell that to the rich and poor who depend on a transit system designed to feed the train that isn’t there or is broken? How did Barrhaven and Kanata miss getting the “world-class” train that might work … some day.

Why is the city building huge unnecessary infrastructure when it is billions of dollars behind in fixing the structures it already has? What happens when you have to start closing recreation centres because they aren’t safe and what do the kids do who use them? That infrastructure problem morphs into a social problem.

Instead we have crumbling roads and a vital transit system that doesn’t work and nobody doing anything about it at city hall except making speeches. Most times, there aren’t even speeches.

So don’t talk about yesterday’s Ottawa because it is gone or being destroyed by misplaced planning and short-sightedness. The Ottawa Sutcliffe references was 20 years ago before the two-decade-old clown show at city hall began.

Things are so bad that city hall can’t find good people to replace the previous civil servants who couldn’t take it anymore. And then the city makes finding good people even more difficult when they can no longer work from home. Innovative companies in the tech field and elsewhere have people working for them across an entire continent … maybe even the world. Then there is Ottawa City Hall. It has people working for it as far away as in another city building in Centrepointe.

The City of Ottawa is a big part of the “world-class” problem, not the solution.

No more words (if even that), Your Worship.

What are you going to do about it? It’s your problem now.

You have an election approaching where residents can decide on your job performance.

Your opponents, if they are bright, should set their video election pitches right in front of the fiasco of a construction site that is the late and unreliable light-rail project.

Do your opponents need to say more?

Ken Gray

For You:

Council Caused Plante Controversy: BENN

Plante Issue: Debate Don’t Attack: READER

O-Train To Close At Times in Sept., Oct.

Plante Issue Has Roots In Sprung Structure Outcry

Cullen Takes On Famous Plante Post

Bookmark The Bulldog, click here