Trust And Lansdowne: GRAY

 

 

How good a deal is Lansdowne 2.0?

Critical to the Lansdowne project is the Ottawa Redblacks, a football team playing in the second-tier Canadian Football League. Also a soccer franchise in the fledgling Canadian Premier League plays there.

What the city turned down was a team in the new Major League Soccer operation which the late Senators Eugene Melnyk had in his back pocket.

What has the city chosen to spend a billion dollars on? The minor league CFL club and a soccer league of unknown but very low fiscal value.

The Redblacks would be very hard-pressed to find a viable buyer were it for sale. If the team went under like a couple of versions of the Rough Riders and the Renegades, it would likely be collapsed rather than sold. You’d have an empty stadium.

That is the point isn’t it? To have teams that need a 20,000-seat stadium. An empty stadium accomplishes nothing.

Now let’s look at the Melnyk MLS option and how it turned out. The two least-valuable franchises in the MLS are the Vancouver Whitecaps and CF Montreal valued, according to Sportico, at $470 million and $450 million respectively. Austin FC, in the Texas city about the same size as Ottawa, is priced at $865 million.

Then there are other teams in the league such as Los Angeles FC at $1.28 billion and Inter Miami at $1.19 billion. Five teams in the 29-city loop are valued at more than a billion dollars.

Ottawa City Council chose the CFL Redblacks that have minimal value. Woefully inept business.

It was a bad decision in 2012 and an appallingly bad choice in 2025. Soccer was the game of the future in a well-run and growing league. Football teams in Ottawa had a history of folding. In retrospect, the choice was incompetent. Football fans have always had a fear, real or imagined, that the Redblacks could disappear at a whim in a struggling league that has a long history of teams in financial trouble.

Lansdowne 1.0 was designed to provide the City of Ottawa very little money in relation to the capital outlay with its so-called waterfall generating, in time, producing less. Do you trust that this city council, a weak one in most estimations, will make the right decision with Lansdowne 2.0?

In marketing, the fool-proof way of discovering if a product will sell is to sell it. Ottawa Sports and Entertainment Group and its “partner” the City of Ottawa put Lansdowne out to the market. It didn’t work. Do you trust this council is making the right decision with the new Lansdowne? Are you willing to bet a billion dollars on OSEG and the city being right given an abysmal record?

Not a chance.

This city cannot get big projects right. The new central library is woefully over-budget. The light-rail project might be the biggest failure in Canadian municipal history.

And you trust these people to make the right decision on Lansdowne 2.0? This is one of the most petty councils in modern Ottawa governance. From safety-cone throwing, to snow-plow and light-rail vehicle naming to designating Ottawa the shawarma capital of Canada. Perhaps having the national capital of Canada wasn’t enough. Ottawa City Hall shames the country as the capital of a G7 nation. Small eastern Ontario towns get better governance than Ottawa.

The city would fail to run a successful bake sale but we know a former mayor and Lansdowne booster who would be in attendance.

So you can’t trust the city to give you the straight goods on Lansdowne. It was wrong before and very capable of being wrong again.

Furthermore, you can’t trust the local private media on this issue because these financially desperate organizations have a built-in bias. They welcome an infusion of advertising that might (emphasis on ‘might’) land in their wallets. What’s good for business is good for Ottawa except Lansdowne has not been good for business. It’s nobody’s business. Thus Lansdowne 2.0. And in it, the city is practising failure.

City Makes Ridiculous Demands On LRT Uploading

One other thing on trust.

The light-rail project was so inept and corrupt that the province had to hold an inquiry into the plan. The city’s mantra throughout the construction was “on-time and on-budget.” How did that turn out.? Late with derailments. This municipal government is so bereft of competence that it can’t keep top employees or get good new ones.

The inquiry unearthed a shocking level of misdeeds, lies, municipal rot and ethical challenges. Has the city rooted out all the perpetrators? Don’t kid yourself. Many still walk the halls of the Laurier Avenue bylaw factory and are unlikely to have changed a bit. A few are still on city council.

The city has failed gruesomely on big projects and now is asking for permission to start another large project … one that has already failed. People of good conscience, the ones who can still be found at city hall if you look hard enough, cannot approve Lansdowne based on the record of big-plans and hideous follow-through.

This city hall needs to get back to basics. Good roads. Good garbage pickup and good landfill planning. Who will pay for the skyrocketing demand for electricity at the public utility Hydro Ottawa in the digital age? You. What was OC Transpo’s solution to lack of hydro capacity for its troubled ebus fleet. Natural gas generators. This is a green project or a fool’s game of public relations and ideology? Another city-hall fail.

The city needs to get back to basics as municipalities were originally designed to do. But an incompetent staff and council have an insatiable appetite for massive projects but fail at them miserably … practically and ethically.

The municipality and its residents live in a real world of crisis like this country has not seen since the Second World War. This is a serious time that demands serious people. Good infrastructure, not triviality. Basic good government, not the lies, deception, incompetence and corruption of the past

Lansdowne addresses nothing of real consequence in a world that demands good leadership and practicality. Lansdowne 2.0 should be rejected completely and emphatically.

Ken Gray is an award-winning journalist who worked at five major Canadian newspapers. He is an educator, broadcaster and at present is the editor and founder of the 16-year-old pioneering internet publication, The Bulldog.

 

For You:

Here Are the Lansdowne Reports

3 Levels Of Gov’t Contribute To Traffic Mayhem

Sutcliffe Wants City To Run Uploaded LRT

 

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