Pellerin: City of Ottawa has work to do – and fall is the season for it

The end of August is a good time for stock-taking: a few thoughts on the files that make Ottawa more livable.

Published Aug 29, 2024  •  3 minute read

The lifeguards leave Ottawa city beaches before the crowds do. Photo by Ashley Fraser /Postmedia

It’s back to school season and, like every year, it comes at the precise moment when I was finally getting into my summer groove. There’s something wrong with my internal settings, evidently. For all that, I do like the fall. There’s that crisp in the air, a return to familiar things — pumpkin spice is back, yippee! — and new, exciting prospects.

Even if you didn’t have kids moaning and groaning on their way to class, you’d know summer is officially over because Ottawa’s beaches are closed for the season due to lack of lifeguards or water-testing capacity, for some weird reason that’s never explained. No, it doesn’t matter that it’s still warm outside and that for many on a tight budget those beaches are a great way to have healthy fun outdoors. It’s the end of August and we blindly follow the calendar, not the needs of Ottawa residents. You should know that by now.

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Among exciting new things in this household, Eldest is starting university. Did you know that University of Ottawa full-time students must pay for a mandatory transit pass? Me neither. This measure, voted on by students, is a great way to discourage the use of private vehicles on the downtown campus. And it’s working: the school says more than 80 per cent of its student body walks, cycles or takes transit to class. I wonder if that’s going to change now that OC Transpo is reducing service.

Meanwhile, in Toronto, the transit authority announced this week it would boost frequency and reliability, as Mayor Olivia Chow is publicly encouraging people to drive less and reduce congestion. She knows improved transit is key and her administration is prioritizing that. “We’re heading in the right direction,” she says. And boy, do I agree.

Ottawa-Toronto rivalries feel seasonally familiar. So is, by now, the federal government trying to come up with more ways to frog-march employees to the office. At this point, employees who resist trudging back to an arbitrarily assigned cubicle chair in order to be in Zoom meetings half the day understand the pros and cons of remote work and don’t need Treasury Board or whoever patronizing them on top of everything else.

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And how would all these people get to the office given the mess that OC Transpo has become? Driving? At what cost to the climate? For a government that pretends to care about reducing emissions, the least we can say is that this office mandate thing is counter-productive.

Besides, the federal government has better things to do with all that unused office space, such as converting it to affordable housing. The updated news this week that 22 federal buildings in Ottawa would be used for that purpose is good, although as my friend, the architect Toon Dreessen, never tires of repeating, if we want the right kind of result (beautiful, sustainable, below-market affordable, family-sized units that don’t take 10 years to build), we’ll need to “reform the way we hand out design contracts because currently our procurement system is long, slow, full of pointless roadblocks and too often results in a ‘meet the minimum’ outcome.”

Toon points to the Slayte building on Albert Street, near the Lyon LRT station. It used to be offices and is now lovely rental units. The developer, CLV Group, picked the right talent in hiring Linebox Studio to come up with creative solutions, he says. There’s no reason why public-sector conversions can’t use a similar model “to pick the best team, the most creative outcome. Design is a fraction of a per cent of the value of the project and can influence outcomes, make lives better and create better value so it makes sense to pay for good results.”

We have work to do to make this city the best it can be. There’s always a bit of new and invigorating energy in the air this time of year, and I don’t just mean the pumpkin spice. Let’s use that energy and get to work.

Brigitte Pellerin (they/them) is an Ottawa writer.

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