Ottawa Tidbits

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.