The Nightmayor Speaks: What Ottawa Needs

Ottawa has not heard much from its new nightlife commissioner.

But Mathieu Grondin told the Ottawa Business Journal what he learned from his similar posting in Montreal.

And he likes the ByWard Market:

“Restaurants are full and there’s a great festival scene now wrapping up. It brings a lot of tourism, but there’s also a lot of smaller, independent venues. I’m amazed at the vibrancy of the ByWard Market. On one side of the street you have a folk singer at an Irish pub, then on the other, a heavy metal punk band playing in a tavern. You might have a hip hop band from Senegal then a drag queen cabaret next door at a techno club.”

The biggest lesson Grondin needs to learn is that Ottawa is different from most cities in Canada. In fact, different from most cities in the world.

Ottawa and Washington, D.C., are the two best-educated major cities in North America though you’d never know it by the way Ottawa City Hall works. So what might work on the streets of Montreal or Amsterdam might not work in Ottawa.

Also it has a fast-growing senior population. How will his work serves its needs? My guess is that it has never even crossed his mind. That’s not a criticism of Grondin. That’s a criticism of society as a whole.

Trying to paste Montreal on Ottawa will never work. This is a different city. What Grondin (and city hall) desperately needs to learn is that top-down administration is never successful. A city is about people. It is about serving people, not telling them what they should want. Instead, discover their needs and build infrastructure to serve them. You can’t tell people what they should have. That’s how businesses fail … trying to serve an audience that doesn’t exist.

Grondin likes the ByWard Market. Does he like the violence and social problems there? Saving the ByWard Market requires complicated solutions that police, city hall and the nightlife commissioner are unlikely to implement because they don’t know how. The problem is bigger and more complicated than them.

One thing certain is that the market’s problems are not solved by slapping a police office into a shopping mall, though the mall owners are likely to approve of it.

To read the nine major things that Grondin learned from his experience in Montreal, click here.

To read what he has learned about Ottawa, well, we will see.

Ken Gray

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