Planning committee approves site plan for contentious Salvation Army shelter project in Vanier
"This is a facility that's needed in our city. I think we all wish it wasn't. Maybe someday it won't be. But it is now."
Taylor Blewett, Ottawa Citizen
Jun 03, 2022 • 1 hour ago • 5 minute read
A five-year fight over the Salvation Army’s plan to build a large shelter on Montreal Road continued Friday at a special planning committee meeting.
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The bulk of committee voted to sign off on the site plan for the 211-bed facility, granting the last political approval the Salvation Army needed before it can put shovels in the ground.
They faced considerable pressure not to do so. Vanier community leaders reiterated objections Friday to the development itself and its potential impacts on the area and described recent consultation efforts as disingenuous and unproductive.
“I can assure you at this time that Vanier and its community is not in need of a shelter,” said Michel Gervais, outgoing executive director of the Vanier Community Service Centre. “(It’s) healthy, clean, permanent affordable housing that are urgently required for this community and all throughout Ottawa.”
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However, what was up for debate Friday was not whether a shelter should be permitted at the site. That battle has already been decided, and the site plan control process, staff and planning committee leadership pointed out, is supposed to address development elements such as landscaping, building location and parking layout.
“We’re not dealing with zoning today, we are not dealing with programming today, and we’re also focused on the exterior of the building, rather than the interior of the building,” co-chair Glen Gower reminded his colleagues.
Council granted the Salvation Army the zoning and official plan amendments it needed for its vision for 333 Montreal Rd. more than four years ago, and those were upheld in 2020 by the provincial tribunal that hears land-use planning appeals.
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Staff recommended approving the site plan and described the proposal in a report to committee as “well-designed in consultation with staff” and with “safety and security in mind.”
A presentation by the Salvation Army’s project team outlined the ways its plan for the low-rise, H-shaped complex had evolved, including replacement of an addictions program with supportive-housing units and reductions to building height and footprint. The design principles shaping the development took lessons from “the evident shortcomings” of the Salvation Army’s existing George Street shelter, they noted.
According to Ottawa Inner City Health executive director Wendy Muckle, the lone public delegate to endorse the site plan, local shelter clients and staff have consistently reacted in a very positive way to the blueprints for its design. A regular observation, she said, was that it didn’t look like an institution and instead more closely resembled a fancy apartment building or college campus.
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“Of all the voices that you’re going to listen to today … the voices of the people who actually need to access and use the facility should perhaps be the most important,” Muckle said.
She noted her organization intended to provide services at a “special care unit” planned for the site and had significant say in its design, as had the homeless clients they served.
It was an exception to the disregard that a number of the community organizations and service providers to address committee reported feeling met with in attempts to engage on the project. They shared particular frustration about their experience with a council-created advisory committee on the site plan and future programming, which involved staff and the Salvation Army team.
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Marc Maracle, executive director of Gignul Non-Profit Housing Corporation and representative of the Ottawa Aboriginal Coalition, described the committee process as “profoundly disillusioning” and said it was “tactically and strategically focused on the site plan review, and any conversation about programming has been avoided, to a fault.”
Maracle predicted the project would have a disproportionate impact on the area’s sizeable Indigenous population and said the Salvation Army had yet to provide an adequate response to this impact, particularly when it came to the safety of Indigenous women, girls, seniors and children.
Future clients consuming drugs and alcohol in the surrounding community, in the absence of a space to do so onsite, was a concern for the Vanier Community Association’s Lauren Touchant. Council’s housing and homelessness liaison, Coun. Catherine McKenney, objected to the swap-in of supportive-housing units onsite. “Nobody should live within a shelter or attached to a shelter,” McKenney said.
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Gervais spoke to concerns about duplication of services already available locally and the potential for this to impact government funding to existing community service providers.
They want to work with the Salvation Army, Quartier Vanier Business Improvement Area executive director Nathalie Carrier said, and their community does need services.
“But the services they’re suggesting and what is actually needed is different, and they refuse to hear that; so that is where the animosity comes from.”
ND Management’s Marco Manconi told committee the Salvation Army is “100 per cent, absolutely committed to detailed engagement with all of the stakeholders that you’ve heard today, and others,” and acknowledged that “we absolutely haven’t been perfect, by no stretch, but we’ve been making attempts based on getting to this site plan approval process.”
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There’s a desire to eventually transition all beds in the complex to supportive housing, Salvation Army’s Glenn van Gulik told committee. The other residential uses currently planned for the facility — 99 emergency shelter beds, plus transitional independent living and a special care medical unit — account for most of its bed count.
“This is a facility that’s needed in our city. I think we all wish it wasn’t. Maybe someday it won’t be. But it is now,” Gower said in his closing remarks to committee colleagues.
Nine of 11 planning committee members voted in favour of site plan approval. Coun. Shawn Menard voted against it and Coun. Tim Tierney was absent.
Area councillor Mathieu Fleury, a longtime opponent of the Salvation Army proposal, secured planning committee and staff support for a number of additional site plan conditions, such as a segregated sidewalk at the front of the property, securing several access points to the site and directions on the use of security cameras.
At the meeting’s conclusion, Fleury vowed to continue fighting against the project. He pointed out that Ottawa-Vanier MP and cabinet minster Mona Fortier and newly re-elected MPP Lucille Collard were both opposed to it and provincial and federal funding were expected to be sought for the project.
tblewett@postmedia.com
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