What? Toronto Notices Ottawa

Some issues facing Ottawa are common to other cities, such as homelessness, opioid addiction and mental health, all sadly evident in the downtown ByWard Market. Some blame falls on the city and the province. Ottawa is too big and should be broken up into urban and rural municipalities. Meanwhile, efforts to bring new attractions, such as an aquarium, have largely failed. The LRT system has encountered delays and operating challenges. Municipally managed infrastructure requires billions of dollars of investment.

Globe and Mail editorial board

You know the situation in Ottawa has become glaringly bad when the Globe and Mail, one of Toronto’s major newspapers, actually notices it.

For Toronto, which desperately wants to become New York, shares with the Big Apple a profound myopic nature. If it doesn’t play in Mimico, it doesn’t play at all.

Maybe it’s just summer when the news well is as dry as a parched Ottawa lawn. Perhaps that desperation produces an editorial on municipal Ottawa in the Big Smoke. Must be something odd. Next: Moose Jaw.

First Ontario Premier Doug Ford notices the sad state of the ByWard Market, Then the Globe and Mail. How long before the Wall Street Journal chips in?

This should be a wake-up call for Mayor Mark Sutcliffe, but won’t be. We’ve seen his track record. It shows you can’t fix problems with just words, public relations and a new police centre in a luxurious downtown mall. Instead, perhaps boots on the ground? This is a bigger problem than the local BIA can solve but it appears to be in the forefront of the fight to save the market. Maybe it’s because it lives there. It doesn’t have a chance.

It wouldn’t hurt if the ivory-tower staffers on Laurier Avenue actually put their Gucci loafers on ByWard Market pavement to get a feel for what’s going on there. It must be frustrating to have purchased a tony market condo only to walk outside to gunfire, stabbings and the worst social problems imaginable. But that’s someone else’s problem. Who? Who knows? Instead Ottawa City Council has Lansdowne to approve.

The Globe calls on the federal government to help but the feds appear wrought with passion for floating saunas, a dip in Dows Lake and bistros on deserted Ottawa River islands. How do you keep the folks on Bate Island once they’ve seen New Eddy?

The editorial suggest some federal land could be dispatched into the mighty maws of the development industry for housing which might happen at the speed of a super-charged LeBreton snail.

Is it bad in Ottawa? Oh yeah but the city doesn’t have the financial might to handle billions of dollars of its own infrastructure repairs, perhaps a never-finished and maybe permanently flawed LRT, plus half a billion into a fiscal sinkhole and glitter palace in the Glebe. World class no doubt. Just like Toronto.

Beyond a police station, nothing will likely happen in the ByWard Market unless the market helps itself which it appears unable to do. Instead, it is a receptacle for people not like us that keeps the riff-raff out of Rockcliffe. The solution? Turn your head the other way.

God bless the naively hopeful at the Globe who’ve not lived for decades in a town that makes the glacial look like a Ferrari. Maybe there is hope in Toronto. But in the ByWard Market, buddy you can’t spare a dime.

The problems of Ottawa will be addressed in the usual Ottawa way. Make speeches, do nothing and hope they go away.

It’s not that Ottawa is alone in procrastination. It’s just this city is better at it than most.

Ken Gray

The National Capital Commission in action.

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