Ottawa, The Town Caution Built: THE VOTER

09/04/2023

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The Voter takes aim at Saturday columnist Ron Benn’s piece, The Inconvenience Of Construction.

I was once told by someone in a position to make such statements that there are a couple of reasons they keep places like the lawn area at Baseline Station and Iris Street blocked off.

The first, and apparently most influential, is that people have a sense of entitlement in this town. If you move the fencing and they start to make use of the space and you later have to put the fencing back for some legitimate cause, the howling you get from people who think they now have the right to occupy that space is very loud and quite horrendous. It’s easier to close off the area and keep it closed than to take the flak for trying to close it after it’s been opened for any period.

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The second reason is the issue of liability. If you open up a space or a roadway before you’re finished whatever work you’re doing there and anything at all happens, you’ll get nailed to the wall. The injured party will go after the city, the contractor and any subcontractors that may in any way be connected to the incident. That’s not such a big deal for the city since they have deep pockets (yours) but for a private company, especially a smaller one, it could ruin them.

So they follow the principle that the best chance to take is none at all.

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The result is that we get closed out of places and blocked from pathways and roads that appear to have any construction work completed. This is Ottawa, the town that caution built.

The Voter is a respected community activist and long-time Bulldog commenter who prefers to keep her identity private.