waterloowarrior
Dec 12, 2007, 7:43 PM
Another reason for despairing of Ottawa
JEFFREY SIMPSON
729 words
11 December 2007
The Globe and MailA23
The municipal council is often dysfunctional. The budget is a mess. The streets are potholed. It takes forever to get anything done. Two top transit officials just quit, presumably in disgust. The Harper government dislikes the place. And now, just to cap things off, the mayor has been charged with attempted bribery.
Welcome to Ottawa, your national capital.
The charges against Mayor Larry O'Brien, in office for a year, stem from allegations by a potential mayoral candidate that Mr. O'Brien had offered to cover the man's campaign expenses and seek a job for him with the federal government in exchange for leaving the 2006 race. Mr. O'Brien has denied the charges, and we must presume his innocence until otherwise indicated.
Leaving aside this affair, City Hall hasn't functioned well since Mr. O'Brien's election. He made one of those impossible promises in the campaign – to freeze taxes for four years – that has ensnarled everything. Mr. O'Brien, a successful businessman, brought the simplicity of the business mind to the complexity of governing, with predictable results. He thought that, as business people often do, by eliminating “waste and duplication” and privatizing certain services, he could balance the budget and avoid a tax increase.
It was great politics but lousy public policy. The city manager explained why it wouldn't work. The Mayor's first chief of staff quit. The council rebelled.
But that's only part of Ottawa's woes. It suffers from a weak business tax base that forces much of the budget burden on residential homeowners.
The same residential property in Ottawa will have considerably higher taxes than Toronto, hard as that might be for Torontonians to believe.
In addition, the downloading of provincial services has whacked Ottawa just as it has other Ontario cities, with predictable results for libraries, road repair and other municipal services. Amalgamation has put the sprawling suburbs in control of city council. What their representatives want more than anything else are new roads and widening of existing ones.
There was a plan – Ottawa never lacks for plans – to build a light-rail system. That scheme got completely mishandled, in part thanks to a maladroit intervention by federal Environment Minister John Baird, an Ottawa MP.
So now Ottawa has no train – but it does have a lawsuit from the German company that was to have built the train. True to form, the city just unveiled a $2-billion transit plan without any idea how to pay for it.
Meantime, $200-million from the province and another $200-million from the feds for transit go begging. The federal Conservatives now want to use some of the money not for rapid transit but for – you guessed it – a bridge.
Speaking of the Harperites, they obviously don't care for the nation's capital, but then few politicians from outside the city ever do. Indeed, as
Andrew Cohen cogently argued in his book The Unfinished Canadian, the national capital remains a bit of an urban embarrassment – an argument that produced the usual Babbittry from municipal worthies and even Premier Dalton McGuinty, an Ottawa MPP.
The Harperites have just done something inconceivable in a self-respecting country. Instead of building the National Portrait Gallery in the nation's capital, they are inviting bids from cities across the country. Can you imagine countries with a sense of their capital placing such a building in Denver or Lyon or Sheffield?
Mind you, in typical Ottawa fashion, the building that had been identified for the portrait gallery – the former U.S. embassy across from Parliament Hill – was given to the national archives. That was six years ago. Use it or lose it. Apparently, the archives will lose it.
Other buildings of historic note are in the hands of Public Works, which means that something awful probably will befall them. The National Capital Commission isn't much better. The grand scheme of the previous NCC chair was to buy up great swaths of a downtown artery to create a big boulevard as a kind of ersatz Champs Élysées.
Yet another debate has started on what to do about Lansdowne Park, former home of the Ottawa football team, and the surrounding area. Larry O'Brien's grandchildren might live to see a decision.
jsimpson@globeandmail.com
good summary! The politicians in Ottawa are doing a pretty poor job!
JEFFREY SIMPSON
729 words
11 December 2007
The Globe and MailA23
The municipal council is often dysfunctional. The budget is a mess. The streets are potholed. It takes forever to get anything done. Two top transit officials just quit, presumably in disgust. The Harper government dislikes the place. And now, just to cap things off, the mayor has been charged with attempted bribery.
Welcome to Ottawa, your national capital.
The charges against Mayor Larry O'Brien, in office for a year, stem from allegations by a potential mayoral candidate that Mr. O'Brien had offered to cover the man's campaign expenses and seek a job for him with the federal government in exchange for leaving the 2006 race. Mr. O'Brien has denied the charges, and we must presume his innocence until otherwise indicated.
Leaving aside this affair, City Hall hasn't functioned well since Mr. O'Brien's election. He made one of those impossible promises in the campaign – to freeze taxes for four years – that has ensnarled everything. Mr. O'Brien, a successful businessman, brought the simplicity of the business mind to the complexity of governing, with predictable results. He thought that, as business people often do, by eliminating “waste and duplication” and privatizing certain services, he could balance the budget and avoid a tax increase.
It was great politics but lousy public policy. The city manager explained why it wouldn't work. The Mayor's first chief of staff quit. The council rebelled.
But that's only part of Ottawa's woes. It suffers from a weak business tax base that forces much of the budget burden on residential homeowners.
The same residential property in Ottawa will have considerably higher taxes than Toronto, hard as that might be for Torontonians to believe.
In addition, the downloading of provincial services has whacked Ottawa just as it has other Ontario cities, with predictable results for libraries, road repair and other municipal services. Amalgamation has put the sprawling suburbs in control of city council. What their representatives want more than anything else are new roads and widening of existing ones.
There was a plan – Ottawa never lacks for plans – to build a light-rail system. That scheme got completely mishandled, in part thanks to a maladroit intervention by federal Environment Minister John Baird, an Ottawa MP.
So now Ottawa has no train – but it does have a lawsuit from the German company that was to have built the train. True to form, the city just unveiled a $2-billion transit plan without any idea how to pay for it.
Meantime, $200-million from the province and another $200-million from the feds for transit go begging. The federal Conservatives now want to use some of the money not for rapid transit but for – you guessed it – a bridge.
Speaking of the Harperites, they obviously don't care for the nation's capital, but then few politicians from outside the city ever do. Indeed, as
Andrew Cohen cogently argued in his book The Unfinished Canadian, the national capital remains a bit of an urban embarrassment – an argument that produced the usual Babbittry from municipal worthies and even Premier Dalton McGuinty, an Ottawa MPP.
The Harperites have just done something inconceivable in a self-respecting country. Instead of building the National Portrait Gallery in the nation's capital, they are inviting bids from cities across the country. Can you imagine countries with a sense of their capital placing such a building in Denver or Lyon or Sheffield?
Mind you, in typical Ottawa fashion, the building that had been identified for the portrait gallery – the former U.S. embassy across from Parliament Hill – was given to the national archives. That was six years ago. Use it or lose it. Apparently, the archives will lose it.
Other buildings of historic note are in the hands of Public Works, which means that something awful probably will befall them. The National Capital Commission isn't much better. The grand scheme of the previous NCC chair was to buy up great swaths of a downtown artery to create a big boulevard as a kind of ersatz Champs Élysées.
Yet another debate has started on what to do about Lansdowne Park, former home of the Ottawa football team, and the surrounding area. Larry O'Brien's grandchildren might live to see a decision.
jsimpson@globeandmail.com
good summary! The politicians in Ottawa are doing a pretty poor job!
