Five good reasons to label this city 'Ottawa the Inept'
Here in Canada's capital, imagination is under house arrest, or worse, confined to a witness protection program.
ANDREW COHEN Updated: November 26, 2019
For years, the argument against the City of Ottawa has been its absence of vision. Imagination is under house arrest here, or worse, confined to a witness protection program.
Rest assured that the city’s leadership – Mayor Jim Watson, the councillors, the bureaucrats – will never threaten you with a new, splashy idea. Relax. You’re safe. Ottawa remains defiantly without originality, creativity or novelty.
This is a city unable to think boldly about itself. That explains its perennial failure in so many ways: To develop the shores of the Ottawa River, carefully, for cyclists, swimmers and small-craft boaters; to make downtown Bank Street more than a varicose vein; to cover the ByWard Market against the cold; to rethink the Sparks Street Mall after decades of deadness.
The harsher critique of Ottawa, however, is not about imagination but ineptitude. The capital of contentment has become the capital of incompetence.
Managing Ottawa has become a political and administrative mess. It is a failure to clear roads smartly in winter and fix them quickly in spring, which is why they feel and look like those of Jakarta. It is a failure to offer good, reliable public transit. It is a failure to preserve beauty and history, where bungalows give way to monstrosities. It is a failure to build new things well.
Here are five prizes for Ottawa the Inept, each beginning with “L,” the cruelest letter in the mayor’s limited alphabet of ambition.
Lansdowne Park. This was a once-in-a-century opportunity to create something unique on 40 acres. It could have featured a botanical garden, a museum, an urban art park by the Rideau Canal. It could have given Ottawa an international cachet the way the Guggenheim Museum has renewed the city of Bilbao in Spain.
But the city cancelled the international design competition. It renovated the football stadium and turned the rest of Lansdowne into a shopping mall. Beyond game days, the place is empty. Businesses are struggling. Congratulations.
The Library. Having decided belatedly that the central library – that grim Brutalist bunker – was inadequate, the city ignored arguments to keep a new one downtown. In fact, Watson dismissed critics contemptuously. When it is finished in LeBreton Flats, the new library will be fine. But because this is Ottawa, it will not be great like those dazzling libraries in Calgary and Copenhagen. Ottawa’s central library will be late, cheap, small – and not central.
Oh, champions of the new library say they’re ahead of their time. They may be right in 30 years. Congratulations.
The LRT. Most new urban transit systems are delayed and fitful. For now, though, our LRT is a maelstrom of mistakes by staff and council. Why, ones asks, has no one been fired?
The operational flaws in the system will be addressed eventually. What won’t imminently is where the train goes, when the second phase will open, and how effectively it will then serve the suburbs and the airport, too.
Meanwhile, OC Transpo charges among the highest single fares in North America. Its buses are uncomfortable and undependable. Congratulations.
Château Laurier. We ask government to protect the public interest. Ottawa has failed here miserably, too. Council didn’t know what it was doing and nor did staff when this carbuncle on the grand dame addition was initially approved. A mayor with a spine and a council with a vision would have said no to the château’s tone-deaf owners. The city could have refused them. It didn’t. Congratulations.
LeBreton Flats. It isn’t the city’s fault that RendezVous LeBreton had no rendezvous with destiny, but it isn’t surprising. This is the way things are in a dysfunctional capital. The new plan for LeBreton Flats, unveiled recently by Tobi Nussbaum and the NCC, is promising. But as always, it will be years before anything happens. Congratulations.
In other places, there would have been a penalty for this order of malpractice. In Ottawa, a city fiercely committed to mediocrity, no one seems to care.
https://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/column...sons-to-label-this-city-ottawa-the-inept
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