Hurray For The Activists Who Promote City Democracy

08/30/2024

A few words about the community group Your Applewood Acres (And Beyond) Neighbours.

An unusual name to be sure but this is a group of very hard-working individuals who publish an email newsletter with terrific insights into Ottawa community affairs.

One person in the group was a topnotch former journalist who prefers anonymity.

The organization is all volunteer and great intelligent folks. Were there more people such as them in this apathetic community, we’d have a much better city. Instead, Ottawa suffers because of the lack participation from the populace and the diminishing role of the media on observing city hall.

We can blame city hall all we want about such monstrosities as Lansdowne and light rail, but were there a more active public to run for office and take interest in municipal affairs, residents would be better served.

But city hall likes the apathy because it better lets it control the message. One of the best examples of this was a missive from Happy Town News shortly after the opening of the Confederation Line. After encouraging the media to take lots of pictures of the politicians and the train at the opening of the line, HTN, The Bulldog’s nickname for the city public relations department, told the media they could no longer take pictures around the stations and on the trains.

Except HTN forgot one thing. Almost every person on the train had a camera, many with a Twitter account. So every blunder concerning the train was revealed on social media sites that became required reading. News from the ground up.

So bad was the city covering-up in the early days of the train that one media outlet tweeted out that if the municipality were to continue to mask the truth on the line, it would start taking its information from individual Twitter accounts that specialized in the rail screw-ups. HTN couldn’t control the message as it once did and the full extent of the LRT fiasco was revealed to the public.

Engage Ottawa is another effort by the city to control the message as uOttawa professor Evan Potter showed in his very revealing post in The Bulldog. People go to public consultations to make their voices heard but what comes out the other end is often the answers city hall and special interest groups want rather than the feelings of the public. And the questions asked in surveys avoid the real issues that can be sore points for city staff. The video public meetings are orchestrated and controlled in ways that avoid the real issues.

Particularly interesting, buried so deeply in the city website ottawa.ca that it might have stymied Sherlock Holmes, was a stilted report that said that 70 per cent of survey respondents said their opinions weren’t listened to by city hall. How did that question even get asked by the message-shapers?

It’s such blunders, numerous to be sure, that keep city hall from being trusted and prevent Laurier Avenue from becoming a chapter of 1984.

As the conventional media diminishes, it is the people such as Potter and volunteer organizations such as Your Applewood Acres (And Beyond) Neighbours, that keep a glimmer of civic democracy alive.

Their hard work and ability is much appreciated by The Bulldog and by the few concerned residents of this city.

Ken Gray