In Ottawa, Democracy Is Dead
The CBC reported last night that sources say the confidential settlements on Ottawa’s light-rail run into the hundreds of millions of dollars.
The settlements appear to be for the east and west extensions of Line 1 and the Trillium Line.
Why are there settlements? We don’t know. Who’s getting the money? We don’t know. How much are the settlements likely to be? We don’t know. Why has there not been a public discussion of them? We don’t know. When will the settlements be disclosed or will they be made public at all? We don’t know. How and for what will the money be dispersed? We don’t know. How much will the settlements be? We don’t know. We’re not likely to know in the future.
We hear rattled around that the city wants the settlements confidential because that mean these outlays, for who knows what, will be lower with the secrecy. You know, that piece of the Alexandra Bridge from a previous post is still for sale here at Bulldog World Headquarters. No takers yet but truly it’s a great deal. Trust me.
Some things we already know. City hall, particularly this city hall, cannot be trusted. It lies and it is incompetent. It tries to cover up its gross mistakes. Most of the time, it fails … at least we think it fails. We could be wrong. The scariest thing is not what you know, but what you don’t know.
So what do we know here? The city, which can’t be trusted, is asking us to trust that these confidential deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars will be of the best benefit to residents, who are paying these bills.
But that could be a lie. In fact, it probably is a lie if the city plays to form.
It is just covering up an extremely embarrassing and woefully expensive bunch of secret settlements and mistakes of which we know nothing.
This is a gross abuse of democracy. It is covering up ridiculous and costly mistakes because the politicians want to get re-elected and city staff doesn’t want to be humiliated by its own incompetence. City hall doesn’t want to be found wanting by the truth. There was a time when we expected the truth from city hall. You’d be a fool to think that now.
It gets worse. The head of the light-rail program, Michael Morgan, is leaving to take on new challenges. Not enough challenges with the LRT project? Methinks the challenges continue. Many people have left city hall because they can’t stomach the putrid culture there. Would you want to run the light-rail project? No, didn’t think so.
Trying to get a replacement for Morgan will be on a par with attempting to find a new guillotine tester. No one in their right mind would take that job.
Add to that an estimated $8.6 billion deficit in 30 years for transit. That’s quite a leap from OC Transpo losing a million dollars a month. Somewhere between $8.6 billion and $1 million there’s quite a bit of room for deceit and truth. Which of those two will city hall choose. If Laurier Avenue plays to form, the answer is obvious and no doubt “on-time and on-budget.”
If Mayor Mark Sutcliffe and city manager Wendy Stephanson refuse to reveal the exact nature of these settlements, provide no accurate assessment of the current LRT financial situation and do not tell us accurately when this LRT project will be completed … if it ever is … then they should not be in their jobs. The public has every right to know how its money is being spent, why it is being spent and how much is being spent.
City hall is not run for the convenience of politicians or city staff. It is the property of the people of Ottawa, not petty bureaucrats nor shrinking pols.
Part of democracy, that city hall is completely missing, is that government must … the word is ‘must’ … be open, caring and inclusive. This government is not. That means it is a failure and flies in the face of what proper governance is about. Ottawans should demand of city hall of competence, not one that governs by covering-up by public relations, lies or just plain silence.
The world was outraged when Canadian soccer officials stupidly flew a spying drone at the Olympics and were punished accordingly. The scandal of not revealing the spending of hundreds of millions dollars at the city pales the significance of that drone. City hall is more than Olympian in the size of the misdeeds it undertakes, one of which is this settlement scandal.
If, as the Washington Post says, that democracy dies in darkness, we are now pronouncing Ottawa democracy dead.
Ken Gray
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– The Bulldog – News Feed Enter 
When it comes to the elected officials and senior administrators who inhabit the ivory tower down on Laurier Avenue “They can’t handle the truth.”, with my apologies to the screen writers of A Few Good Men.
And yet, somehow, most of these same clowns will breeze to re-election in two years.
Apathetic voters? Perhaps.
More likely a lack of quality candidates who’ve come to realize that they don’t have the energy to invest the twenty to thirty years of their lives that it’s going to take to repair the damage done.
You forgot to list Mme Amilcar as one who shouldn’t be in her job if information isn’t forthcoming. The issue there, of course, is that if the facts were known, there is a strong likelihood that these people would be out of their jobs anyway. They have a huge incentive to keep things secret which I would suggest is a conflict of interest. We do know that “conflict of interest” is a concept that’s not well-understood down at City Hall.
Do we really need to have all the details to be able to figure out that settlements in the multi-million dollar range don’t come about without there having been serious and repeated (we are talking about settlements in the plural, not singular) incidents of wrongdoing on the part of one or more individuals at the City?
Is it time for another LRT inquiry? This time with some power and authority to follow up on any malfeasance.
Politicians are no longer paid to tell the truth; the person with the coolest social media presence is king/queen. What these people have become very good at, and I include everyone at city hall, not just our elected representatives, is “Politik speak”, my 21st century term for avoidance.