Time to put the market back in the ByWard Market | Letters to the editor

For Gias Salim Uddin, owner of Shafali Bazaar, the redevelopment plan for the ByWard Market Building tells him that the city doesn’t really care about merchants like him. Photo by Spencer Colby /POSTMEDIA

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ByWard Market upgrades miss the mark

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I’m not sure what council thinks Ottawans want in the Market. We live in the south end of the city. We willingly went to the Market when it was a real market, and to frequent its restaurants. And my hair salon is there, so I’m there once a month, now not by choice. I’m not going in order to have or see kids play on a plastic skating rink or play structures. Or for events.

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I want products and services I can’t get elsewhere. Like fresh farm produce. Small vendors. Galleries. Specialized shops, especially food. I frequent market square vendors and small, shops when I’m there once a month. But with the market part gone we no longer make special trips.

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I feel like council just wants this to be a tourist site. And Ottawans living outside downtown or the Market be damned. It’s, again, millions of dollars to serve whom? Is the vision for this to be a reincarnation of Landsdowne?

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I think the current council needs to be on notice that their tenure could be coming to a close. We do not need another frivolous event space at the expense of other needs. Especially one destroying the last vestiges of what the Market used to be.

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LJ Ridgeway
Ottawa

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Lansdowne 2.0 looks like a blunder

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One may agree with Randall Denley’s opinion that Mark Sutcliffe has a passable grade for his performance as mayor so far. His one big unaddressed issue, the failing infrastructure has big consequences we are witnessing today with thousand homes flooded from sewer back up. To be fair Sutcliffe has inherited that problem as it has been kicked down the road by previous mayors.

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However a major blunder entirely of Sutcliffe’s making is his unequivocal support of the financially devious Lansdowne 2.0 project. It was Sutcliffe’s arm twisting of the rural Councilors that swung the divided council to approve the dubious $420-million project which with rising inflation of material, energy and labor is bound to cost much more. Managing the finances of the city is one important if not the most important task of the mayor. With the Ottawa Charge leaving Lansdowne, general economy souring and public servants loosing jobs, Lansdowne 2.0 is unfortunately looking like a growing money sink hole with each passing day. As Denley mentions, the contest for the mayor in the fall is shaping up as a an interesting one.

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Rafal Pomian, Ottawa

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Let’s make a deal, America

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Much has been said regarding the smoke from Canadian wildfires making its way south to the United States. It’s been suggested that Canada should do a better job of managing our 1.3 Billion acres of boreal forest.

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To our American friends, let’s make a deal. If you stop allowing tropical storms and tornadoes from making their way north to Canada, we’ll stop all forest fires that send smoke south to the United States. Do we have a deal?

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John Haslip, Ottawa

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