City Is Not Worth The Taxes You Pay

“She mentioned to me a number of times that she felt it was a cultural shift to be as open and transparent as possible. It has been an extremely different approach.”

Councillor Glen Gower, chairman of the city’s transit committee
on outgoing OC Transpo chief Renee Amilcar

Well …. no.

Take a New Way To Bus.

This program was to make OC Transpo more efficient and a better service. In fact, the plan cut 70 routes and left people in Barrhaven (and maybe elsewhere) with two-hour one-way commutes to downtown (see The Bulldog’s Ron Benn’s post). It should have been called a New Way To Car. Unless you are desperate, and some people are, you don’t want to spend four hours on a bus daily.

A New Way To Bus was a deceptive, and not very effective way, to slash service. Perhaps that is necessary but should the city be gift-wrapping a wrong media message only to have those scribes open the package to find it was full of manure.

Here’s a concept for Ottawa City Hall. Don’t just tell the truth because it is the right thing to do, but also because the municipality is hopelessly ineffective at covering up. Transparent no. Deceptive yes.

Take the CBC coverage on the Alstom report concerning Ottawa’s faulty light-rail system. The city fought tooth-and-nail to keep the document under wraps. Eventually, after persistent CBC prodding, it was released through access to information. Just one problem … there was nothing new in it. And CBC ran with nothing new.

But this begs a question. Why would the city fight so hard to not release something the public already knew? It’s because the municipality has a gut reflex to cover up. And if you ran an operation as poor as the City of Ottawa, both staff and council, you’d try to cover up, too. Problem is … the city, like in so many other things, isn’t very good at covering up. The media relations department plays to form.

The city issued a release saying that a Transportation Safety Board report on a light-rail derailment agreed with the city … except the TSB didn’t. And to add insult to the injury, media relations attached the TSB report that disagreed with the city to the release in which the city said the TSB agreed. It took reporters about five minutes to see through that hopeless effort to cover up. Closed government and incompetence.

The Globe and Mail editorial board yesterday suggested that mayors attend premiers’ meetings. Beyond the fact that they are premiers’ meetings and not mayors’ meetings, having read the above in The Bulldog, do you really want mayors at premiers’ meetings? Not a chance.

As for Gower, could the transit committee chairman stand atop of a barnyard compost heap to give a speech and call it perfume?

And would Happy Town News get it wrong and call it a bed of roses?

Residents support all this nonsense through their taxes. Obviously, they have over-paid.

The Keystone Cops were better organized

Ken Gray

Ottawa City Hall (as per the Keystone Cops) in action.

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