Traffic Cones: Tierney Is Not A Serious Person

Some councillors, when they see white lines on streets prematurely fading, might walk down the hall to contact a staffer at Ottawa City Hall to tell the works department.

Or pick up the phone.

Or they could call the federal government which changed the white-line formula because it had deleterious health effects and say that cars banging into each other with no white lines is bad for your health, too.

But not Beacon Hill-Cyrville Councillor Tim “Showboat” Tierney who immediately takes it to the media.

Some people get tattoos … even Nickelback tattoos … and show them to their friends but not Showboat. He takes them to the media.

And when it is deemed necessary to name snowplows (because of the outrageous demand from the public for snowplow nomenclature), does Showboat organize a little contest? No, you guessed it. He goes to the media.

But that’s not all. When Showboat hears the east-end public is concerned about traffic (this is new?), he decides to throw around some heavy safety cones on a road ramp that he perceives is finished and … well … safe.

Now we might defer to Showboat’s expertise in tattooing or snow-plow-naming, but we’re not sure he has a degree in highway engineering where safety really … seriously … matters. Like white road lines you can see.

That’s what the Highway Traffic Act says. Damn serious. Any person who “wilfully removes, defaces, alters or in any manner interferes with any… traffic control device … lawfully placed on a highway under this or any Act” commits an offence. The punishment is a fine of $200 to $1,000 or six months in prison, or both.

So there’s a picture of Showboat in the Ottawa Citizen throwing around highway safety cones. What more does the Ottawa Police Service need to investigate?

Bad enough that night-time drunken kids do this after imbibing in a city hall-sanctioned booze park, now we have dead sober politicians throwing cones.

So what to do with Showboat? Perhaps he could get tattooed on his Nickelback arm “I will not throw around construction safety cones anymore” one hundred times.

But if Showboat really wants to provide a community service, he could do the residents of Beacon Hill-Cyrville a favour and resign so taxpayers could get a serious councillor who would address the important issues facing the city such as Lansdowne, or the light-rail fiasco, or the monstrously over-budget central library project, or the municipal illegal budget hole.

These are serious times with serious issues that require they be addressed by serious people. Showboat is not one of those people.

And as for the under-staffed and over-worked media, there are a million stories here in River City and every one of them is more significant than a councillor tossing around safety cones to increase his electoral visibility and power of incumbency.

Do some serious work.

Ken Gray

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