Okay, I admit it. I
live in Ottawa. I know it is looked down
upon in polite society elsewhere in the country, but there you have it. This is where the Navy dropped me off and
where the work was. So even in
retirement, here I sit. In engineering terms, we used to call this stiction,
the difficulty in getting a stopped object to move. But talking about Ottawa,
here are a few bits of information and opinions that are worth sharing.
Monuments
There is a plan underway by a private group to build a
monument to the victims of communism. The original plan was for a huge, ugly
monolith to be built on grounds in front of the Supreme Court building. This has now, thankfully, been scaled down
and moved to another spot previously known as the Garden of the Provinces. Heaven knows what the park will be called
now. Of course, this private group,
thanks to our previous Conservative government, managed to finagle a promise of
more than half the cost out of our federal taxes. I always said that if such a monument were to
be built, then an equally large monument ought to be built and dedicated to the
victims of capitalism. There have been
many and they deserve recognition as well.
Speaking of monuments, a few years ago, the National Capital
Commission (more about them later) broached the idea of building one or two
monuments along Wellington Street which is the street that runs from the House
of Commons westward passed the Supreme Court and Library and Archives
Canada. My thoughts at the time were
that this was a good idea. At one end of
the street there should be a statue of a poor taxpayer and at the other end a
statue of a harried, low level civil servant.
I thought is summed up Canada quite well.
Governance
How many governments does it take to change a lightbulb
govern a city of a million people? If
you said four, you’re absolutely right.
Okay, so it is the nation’s capital. And it does have about the same
area as half of Prince Edward Island.
But four! That’s right,
four. You have, of course, the city
government including 23 counsellors and a mayor. Overseeing that is the government of the
Province of Ontario. You never hear much
from them since most of the MLAs have never heard of anything east of
Oshawa. Then you have the federal
government who always has a minister responsible for the nation’s capital and
who frequently wants to interfere in strictly local concerns. And last but not least is the National
Capital Commission (NCC). The NCC is an
agency of the federal government, supposedly set up to manage federal lands in
Ottawa and its Quebec neighbour, Gatineau (née Hull) “on behalf of the people of Canada”. The problem with the NCC is that it somehow
has managed to wrest jurisdiction over about half the area of these two cities
and feels it has the right to meddle in the affairs of the other half. Of course, if the NCC looks after all of the
Senators’ primary dwellings in Ottawa, maybe they do.
The result of all this is that almost nothing of consequence
ever gets done for the residents of Ottawa.
Of course, they are probably all civil servants who belong to one of the
governments so they presumably don’t count.
Think of it as some sort of old fashion mining town where everything
belongs to the company.
There is an area of the city called Lebreton Flats which
lies just to the west of downtown. It
used to be a residential and light industry area which had got a bit run down,
which many older areas of a city do at some point. For some reason, the NCC, which did not own
the land, decided that Lebreton Flats was an eyesore and must be expropriated
and torn down by the NCC but which
was, at the time, city controlled property.
The NCC had a better plan. It
would manage the renewal of the place.
Now this was fifty years ago. The
area lay virtually untouched for over forty years. The first and probably most significant
building was the new Canadian War Museum which is tucked into one corner of the
Flats by the river. About five years ago
a grand plan was unveiled to build a “world class” mixed residential
neighbourhood there. The result has been
a few insipid looking townhouses and condos.
This is certainly nothing to write home about. Finally last year a design competition was
held to develop most of the rest of the Lebreton Flats. Two groups responded both proposing a new
hockey arena, retail space and some “sites”.
The result was immediately criticized as not being “grand enough” with
no notable national sites or amenities.
It wasn’t “worldly” enough. Of
course what these critics forgot was that these areas was going to be developed
by private investors who would demand that the place eventually pay for itself
and make money. There is no future for
them to build “worldly” sites that do not make a profit. That is what private enterprise is all about.
Now let’s consider what would probably have happened if the NCC
had stayed out of the whole thing.
Because the area is so close to downtown, developers would have arrived
and bought up old homes and businesses and made their own improvements. This may have included new office buildings
or trendy housing developments. This
would have evolved over many years and could have been controlled by the city
through zoning and official plan restrictions.
We may have even got a hockey arena there. But it would all have been done without all
of the angst that the NCC has put the citizens of Ottawa through all these
years.
Personal
If I have been relatively quiet recently, it is because the summer
has been spent getting ready for and recovering from knee replacement surgery
in July. It all went well. But now that
I am able to move around much easier and can sit at my desk and write, I’m
baaaaaack! Unfortunately, there is
probably not going to be any golf for the rest of this year.
Enjoy the rest of your summer.
