THE WATSONIC YEARS: Failed Ottawa: DOUCET

This is the seventh instalment of former city councillor and author Clive Doucet‘s memoirs. Doucet has called the series, The Watsonic Years. The series will run periodically in The Bulldog.

Today, the world runs on feelings.

The problem is nations and cities don’t run on feelings.

They run on structure and function. Without a viable governance structure neither cities nor civilizations last. Roman stateman Marcus Tullius Cicero was famous for being a man subject to such intense feelings that his voice and sometimes his whole body trembled as he started a public speech. He died because Rome’s legislators couldn’t figure out how to make its governance structure work without violence. It was easier to kill him than listen to him.

Structure and function are vital sides of the same coin for every city and nation. Structure creates the framework for the nation’s house and function the animation to run it. Unfortunately, neither are working well anywhere. The United States, for example is literally coming apart at the seams trying to govern a nation in 2023 with an 18^th century constitution. But the U.S. is too easy a target, Let’s stick to a few Canadian examples of structural failures … The Ontario government’s massive amalgamation of Ontario cities from 1997 to 2000. When I was asked by provincial officials what should a new amalgamated Ottawa look like I said: “Twelve municipalities to one is too big a jump, but if you are determined on one, the city’s electoral districts (wards) must be rectangular, not square so that communities outside the greenbelt and are connected to those inside and thus forced to talk to each other, and hopefully care about each other”.

What happened? The old county municipalities were all amalgamated from the deep country of Burritt’s Rapids to Parliament Hill and the new wards were square. The effect of this structural, governance change means because a majority of the Ottawa’s amalgamated residents now live outside the Greenbelt and have little connecting them to those inside the Greenbelt, the wishes of all the old communities are regularly dismissed. Democracy is supposed to give you a choice, not take it away. Think of the light-rail route along the parkway or the privatization of green spaces inside the Greenbelt. These decisions have devastated communities inside the Greenbelt like Westboro.

The second Canadian example of a serious structural failure is the inability of the federal government to reform Canada’s 1867 voting system. One of the consequences is that a provincial separatist government can now be elected with a clear majority voting against it. This a nation-breaking time-bomb waiting to explode.

A media that cares a great deal about feelings is badly adapted to deal with problems such as a forced amalgamation or proportional voting. Structural problems are not sexy. They are not going to bring eyeballs to your streaming service. This has very serious consequences in the real world. A blinkered media means a blinkered, ineffective election vote.

The Lansdowne Park fiasco would never have happened if the city’s governance structure had not been wrecked by amalgamation. Instead of the right thing happening and it being renovated into a modern Central Park, Lansdowne became a mall and the template for 20 years of city mismanagement. The collapse of Ottawa’s new LRT, the abandonment of the recommended site for the city’s new hospital, the failure of the city to protect neighbourhoods from over development all go back to the local political structure which was imposed by the province and has never worked.

Ottawans Don’t Want Lapdogs On Council

There were many people who saw this coming. The resistance to the privatization of Lansdowne Park was phenomenal. Friends of Lansdowne which formed almost immediately to fight the public give-away did everything possible to save the park, ultimately going all the way to the appellate court in Toronto. It didn’t work. Outside of the Supreme Court, Canadian courts are loathe to take on duly elected governments.

After ‘my mayor’ (Bob Chiarelli) was defeated in 2006 and a developer-friendly mayor replaced him, the competitive process to re-design and build the park was set aside for the anticipated give-away to three Ottawa developers. It was begun by the city’s chief administrative officer without any authority from council. No one, not even the mayor, can summarily set aside a city-council motion which has been duly debated and voted on by council. The matter must rise to council again for another debate and another vote, but the city’s CAO did it. I remember getting a letter simply informing me that it had been done. Now that’s power.

Desperate, I cold-called a large Montreal construction firm, found someone in management and using a combination of bluster and pleading asked if his company would consider putting in a bid for the renovation of Lansdowne so that council would have at least one choice other than a mall. A voice on the other end listened and then said very calmly, he would look into it.

After three months, the answer was no. Why? There was a long silence and then, “there’s a lot of money in Ottawa. It’s the capital. We’d like to bid on Ottawa projects.”

I waited hopeful, conscious that something was going on in the man’s mind that was causing him to hesitate. I could almost hear him shrugging and he said, “Ottawa’s too corrupt.”

I did not reply.

“In Montreal, you pay a kickback. It’s part of the job price. Everyone has to pay the kickback, but everyone gets the chance to compete. In Ottawa you don’t get the chance to compete. It’s all decided in offline phone calls. If you’re not part of that conversation, you won’t get the job. We’re not part of that conversation.” There was another hesitation then “bids on big jobs cost. Sorry, I know it’s not the answer you wanted.” And he hung up.

In 20 years, nothing has changed in Ottawa. The site choice for the new Ottawa hospital was made in a few days after a few private conversations between local politicians. They couldn’t have made a worse choice. The west side of Dow’s Lake is part of a green, National Heritage Site, vital to the core and home to more than 700 mature trees. The ground itself is smack over the unstable, Gloucester Fault line, an area red zoned for earthquakes. The National Capital Commission’s choice for the hospital was also a central city one, but already zoned urban, sturdily situated on solid Canadian Shield rock, and without any recreational, heritage or environmental issues.

What moving the hospital site to the suddenly free land at the farm did was to liberate 50 acres at the old National Capital Commission office site for downtown, private development. The office land for the farmland deal was worth millions and made the 40 acres at Lansdowne Park look like small potatoes.

A worldwide pandemic is not an easy time to fight city hall. People face real-time problems, illness, jobs, insecurity of all kinds. Nonetheless, a small group of people gathered together not far from the farm to see if anything could be done.

They gave themselves a title, ReImagine Ottawa. It was a difficult meeting. Unfortunately, I saw no real possibility of stopping the developer juggernaut. Been there. Done that. The loss-leader at Lansdowne had been renovating the old stadium for football. The loss-leader at the Central Experimental Farm would be a hospital. Different projects but exactly same story.

Developers call it bait-and-switch. The actual hospital will only be a small part of the farm development, just like football was only a very small part of the Lansdowne deal. At the farm, five acres will be set aside for the hospital, 17 acres for surface parking and the rest of the 50 acres for access routes, offices and towers.

The good people of Ottawa don’t want to believe that there is sustained, systemic corruption in the governance of the nation’s capital. We’re Canadians. We like to believe our systems of government might not be perfect, but they are fundamentally honest. My experience at Lansdowne had taught me that reasonable arguments about the importance of legacy public land would never carry the day. Nor would protests. Nor would the courts. We had tried both and neither had worked.

We had to find something else. Something that would make systematic corruption the issue, not whether or not you liked greenspaces or trees. Hence, I proposed something very different for the farm. Something that was very low key and very Ottawa; that we convene a distinguished panel of Ottawans to look at what had happened and suggest a solution.

Whatever it was, it would have to involve all three levels of government because politicians from the city, provincial and federal levels had all been involved in the summary decision to reject the NCC choice for the new hospital.

The key would be the quality of the panelists. They had to have impeccable reputations and the gravitas which comes from a lifetime of accomplishment. For the legal side, a recently retired Superior Court judge of the Eastern Ontario District, volunteered. An internationally recognized and much-decorated medical physicist from the National Research Council and Carleton University came forward. An investigative journalist recognized internationally came forward. And an engineer and founder of an Ottawa water quality measurement firm.

At the city hall press conference, they all made the same, basic point. The weight of the evidence arising from a few phone calls over a couple of days was not sufficient to justify the city’s sudden rejection of the NCC’s six-month consultation study which had selected a large, surplus federal office site close to the downtown. The panelists recommended a public enquiry to discover what had happened.

I was hopeful these four distinguished Ottawans would receive the needed media traction to carry us into an Ottawa equivalent of Montreal’s Charbonneau Commission. It didn’t happen. The story caught media attention for the usual weekly Monday-to-Friday news cycle, then died.

The response of the city, and their developers has always been silence. Say nothing and keep on going with business as usual. Sooner or later, people get tired, and the media loses interest. Nonetheless, ReImagine Ottawa persevered, approaching all three levels of government asking for a public inquiry. Later, they would organize many protests; create a photographic memory book of the trees to be destroyed; organize coast to coast national singalongs; put videos together. They never quit.

Francois LeGault, Quebec’s premier, doesn’t believe in systemic racism. He thinks it’s all just a few bad apples in the barrel. The good people of Ottawa don’t believe in systemic corruption, it’s just a few bad apples in the barrel. Easily solved by kicking the bums out. Unfortunately, city hall doesn’t work that way.

You can talk about the craziness of building a multi-generational hospital over an active fault line or extending the urban growth line to include a bog against the advice of the city’s own planners until you are blue in the face, and I have. But nothing will change until the people of Ottawa can admit to themselves, they don’t have government for the people by the people. They’ve got government for private interests by private interests.

For a brief moment, I had thought when the city’s own integrity commissioner found the chairwoman of the city’ planning committee had a serious conflict of interest with developers by employing one in her own office, that things might change.

Finally, ReImagine Ottawa had some institutional corroboration, but nothing happened except she quietly stepped down. Not a single project she pushed through committee was reviewed. Everything stayed the same.

It was encouraging when the provincial inquiry into the LRT’s mismanagement unequivocally condemned the mayor and the city manager of unacceptable interference in the project’s management (serious stuff such as hiding needed information from council and privately over-ruling the advice of the project’s engineers). Surely now things would change, but systemic corruption like systemic racism doesn’t rely on one person or persons, that’s why it’s called systemic. The city manager and the mayor, like the planning chairwoman quietly resigned, and that was it.

LRT Tunnel To Close For Repair Assessment

In the real world, Ottawa transit is still a mess. The hospital is still being built in the wrong place. Lansdowne Park is still ugly and troubled. The police are still divided and ineffective. The city’s wealth dissipated on a vision of a city that’s the same as it was in 1976 with more pipes, more asphalt and spawl and an icing of the city centre of condos to make it look like something has changed.

I have become convinced that anger, outrage (feelings) about the mismanagement of any particular city project will never work to bring about the changes that are needed. Until the people of Ottawa have composed in their minds a very different image of what their city might look like, (its structure) and how it might work, (its function) nothing will change. Feelings won’t work except to get passing headlines in the media.

How systemic corruption works in Ottawa and how a reimagined national capital might without it might look will be the subject of my final Watsonic essay.

Thank you for hanging in.

Clive Doucet is a distinguished Canadian writer with many books to his credit, Urban Meltdown, Cities, Climate Change and Politics as Usual was written during his time as an Ottawa city councillor. His last book Grandfather’s Houses, Returning to Cape Breton was shortlisted for Atlantic Canada’s Dartmouth award for non-fiction. He was an Ottawa city and regional councillor from 1997 to 2010, and ran for mayor twice. He lives in Grand Etang, Nova Scotia.

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