Ottawa Needs A Civic Revolution: DOUCET

Published 06/07/2023 · Updated 06/07/2023

By Clive Doucet

We live in a time of great hope.

We live in a time when the world is struggling to become a world to do what no other species has ever done. Think of ourselves outside of the boxes of language, ethnicity and history. To think of ourselves as one.

No species has ever done this before. If you are a bee from another hive, you are an enemy. A lion from another territory and there will be a fight to the death.

Today, humans are trying to behave as a single species beyond all the normal borders of nation, religion, ethnicity, and history. It’s a hard road. Many wars have already been fought over it with limited success. The women in Afghanistan and Iran are still treated as if they were not full members of the human species.

Today, people and governments are trying to change their economies and reduce planet heating for the good of all nations and peoples. The despair comes from the sure knowledge that governments whether elected or imposed clearly can’t cope. Each year, the weather becomes more unpredictable. The irony is on the eve of this global seismic change in human sensibility, the planet’s climate threatens to slip out from under our feet leaving us stranded in a world that controls us.

Why Must Residents Pay For City’s Failures?

We need a revolution, not a French-style revolution but a revolution of practical, human sensibility that can connect how we live and what our planet needs to remain stable. This revolution has to start at the local level because it’s clear national governments are like deer caught in the headlights. They can’t move in any direction without fear of offending some significant part of the population, so they don’t, and nothing significant ever happens.

The good news is we can change locally quickly and significantly. Eighty per cent of Canadians live in cities. Change Canadian cities and you will change the nation, and what better place to start than the national capital. I have spent most of my adult life trying to convince Ottawans that the developer-led growth model is harmful to the public treasury, individual life and brutal to the environment.

Privatizing public spaces such as Lansdowne Park and the Central Experimental Farm are toxic, specific examples but only a small part of the traditional developer subsidy system which controls the city. The construction of the new light-rail system to satisfy developer land interest instead of public needs is a continuing tragedy.

I used to think that a public inquiry could put an end to it. I no longer do. We have now had two damning public inquiries. The city’s integrity commissioner documented developer conflict of interest at city hall. A provincial inquiry documented the mismanagement of the city’s light-rail system. Nothing happened. No sanctions were imposed and nothing changed at city hall. The privatization of public land continues. The sprawl has accelerated at places like Tewin in the far east end of the city.

It’s a very humbling thing to realize that at the end of your working life, you never even got close to where you wanted it to be, that you couldn’t even save an old park in a community you loved and represented at city hall. It’s been a bitter pill and it has for many others. What to do? How do we convert the worst of times into the best of times?

Fixing the mess

Lansdowne

– No more public-private partnerships. None. No more Lansdowne deals. It’s clear private-profit and public-good can’t mix because everywhere they do it’s a mess, Lansdowne, Experimental Farm, LRT. Stop negotiating. Just say no and take responsibility for park and public projects.

– Demand city council takes responsibility for the mess. Get a forensic accountant in now to assess the costs of Lansdowne to the city. Stop pretending the Lansdowne mess is a city responsibility. The city simply did what the developers asked. Remember the developers promised revenue neutrality for the city? Demand reparations.

Light Rail

Salvage what can be salvaged, replace what can’t. The reality is the LRT mess is so large that nothing will be done until the flooding at the Rideau station section can’t be fixed. The inadequate trains will continue to stumble along until there is a calamitous accident. The question that needs to be asked then is why couldn’t city hall act before?

In the meantime, No Stage 3 LRT. Stage 3 makes even less sense than one and two. LRT west should be on Carling Avenue as was originally envisaged. The hole the city has dug with LRT is already big enough. When the tunnel becomes inoperable put the trains on the streets where they should have gone in the first place.

In the meantime, demand action on the provincial inquiry into LRT mismanagement. Without costs and accountability for a procurement process which hired contractors who didn’t meet the technical qualifications, nothing will change. Why should it?

City hall bad faith

Stop participating in all City Hall public consultations. Their only purpose is to absorb community energy in false-front public meetings and tick Planning Act box requirements. They are a waste of time. If necessary, the mayor simply ignores the results of the public consultation and mandates what the developers want. Stop wasting your community’s time. Simply issue a press release stating what you want and why. There’s no point in doing anything else. Stop being used.

Sprawl

– What happened at Tewin?

– Demand the city respect its own zoning.

– Ratchet back the urban growth line and hold it.

Preparing for the Future by Reinventing the Past

In 1960, Ottawa had more people using public transit per capita than there are today with much less public investment. It all depended on surface, street level streetcars. They were built locally, powered locally with green energy and required very little public subsidy. Streetcar lines were built on the principle that the longest walk to your home line should be no more than 10 minutes. It was called the 10-minute pedestrian shed.

The communities were Lego communities in that they were independent, fully-serviced. Residents didn’t need to jump in their cars to go to the mall. The city was composed of these Lego communities attached to each other via surface streetcar lines. It was an amazingly resilient, cheap urban model. Since 1960 and the destruction of the city’s electric streetcar system and their replacement with malls, buses and expressways, the city has become less sustainable and the subsidies to developers have become deeper and deeper.

Cleaning up city hall

– Get all development money out of city elections and impose real sanctions when there is found to be developer and ghost-funding of political candidates. Perhaps a punishment of no business with the city for 10 years. This will change the world. Do this now.

– Break up the city into four boroughs and one metro government. The city is simply too big and geographically disparate for good governance. What does West Carleton or Cumberland have to do with a mall, condos and an arena at Lansdowne Park?

– Reconvene the city’s citizen advisory committees.

The city’s landscape and public resources

– Re-purpose the city’s old heavy-rail lines into commuter lines as we did with the O train. It’s cheap ($2-million a mile) and effective.

– Get the LRT back on city streets, not on separate rights of way. Separate rights of way cost a fortune and serve the status quo by making sure private vehicles remain the transit priority.

– Take control of city resources such as water. End cheap take-water permits for industry.

– Advantage city and valley farmers with better markets and food hubs with the objective of improving local food supply and reducing long-haul supply.

– Advantage local, green electric supply and improve reliability by burying wires.

– Gravity fed water supply prioritized. Stop building forced mains

Last Words

Sometimes revolutions are necessary. Don’t spend the next four years waiting for another city election which won’t change anything. Start the revolution now. It couldn’t be clearer. What happened at Lansdowne was wrong. No public land was supposed to be sold. No land was approved to be sold. It was all supposed to be leased. This is what we were told.

Look at the most recent city map of Lansdowne and you will see white spaces indicating land along the canal is now designated as private. The most recent deal moves the entire park into a fully subsidized private development. The public gets nothing but costs.

Lansdowne was supposed to remain local. There’s nothing about this ‘revenue neutral’ deal that doesn’t stink. The bigger question is why can’t city council act in the public interest? What happens behind the public announcements?

We need a revolution of sensibility that makes this kind of manipulation of city hall by developers impossible. We can make our times the best of times but not without confronting the worst of the old.

Clive Doucet sat on city council from 1997 until 2010. Among other books, he is the author of “Urban Meltdown: Cities, Climate Change and Politics as Usual”.