Pie Palace

Against the recommendations of the Pie Palace legal staff, I am going to continue my habit of posting while tipsy. You have been warned.

Earlier this week, Public Transit in Ottawa ran a post about the proposed downtown tunnel in Ottawa’s new rail-based transit network, which implied that a downtown tunnel is both necessary and that there are no other options.¹

We have many, many options for transit: we could put dedicated transit routes down Carling, under the Canal, or along Wellington, which would solve downtown congestion without having to spend hundreds of millions of dollars building and maintaining a tunnel. Similarly, we aren’t tied to the (diesel) rail solution that the city is proposing: we could use buses or electric streetcars. If we wanted to solve downtown congestion without spending hundreds of millions of dollars, we could close downtown (north of Laurier, say) to private vehicles during rush hour and set the traffic lights to a permanent east/west green.²

Simply put: we have options. But that is not how the transit debate is being framed. On the left, we have city councilor Clive Doucet saying that world class cities need rail transit. On the right, we have a mayor saying that Ottawa needs a tunnel. Neither of those things are true. I think it would be awesome if we had a rail network, and I think a downtown tunnel would be nifty, but we don’t need either of those things. We could solve our transit woes more cheaply, and maybe even more efficiently with other options.

I would argue that our quasi-debate is obscuring the larger issue: Ottawa’s burbs are built for cars, and no amount of dedicated transit will be useful to suburbanites. Until we increase suburban density to a point where it’s economical to lay track (or dig tunnels) out to Nepean, Orleans, and Barhaven, public transit will continue to be an expensive and unattractive way to move most of Ottawa’s population.

The four possibilities proposed by city staff in March of 2008 were essentially the same, differing only in where the train would leave off and pick up with buses. Now we’re being told that we can’t do without a downtown tunnel, again, without anything approaching the level of deliberation and consideration necessary before dropping hundreds of millions of dollars.

Happily, the City of Ottawa is revisiting the Comprehensive Five Year Plan that decides how our city should grow during the next half decade (and will be having public consultations at Ben Franklin place later this month). It remains to be seen whether city councilors and staff will use this opportunity to address the root cause of our problems, or will continue addressing the symptoms.

1. Peter, of Public Transit in Ottawa, posted a comment apologizing for his editorializing. Props to Peter. (back)
2. Please note that these solutions are just a few possibilities. They aren’t necessarily great, and I don’t endorse one over another. I’m just pointing out that there are other possibilities that haven’t been publicly floated. (back)

I have to say that I don’t fully understand the charges against Ottawa mayor Larry O’Brien. If we’re to believe Terry Kilrea, Larry O’Brien offered him a job with the National Parole Board if he give up his mayoral candidacy. Now O’Brien is being charged with influence peddling, but hasn’t been charged with an offense under the elections act.

Doesn’t that seem a little backward? Shouldn’t the (alleged) attempt to throw a municipal election be part of the charges? As an elections weenie, I would argue that any attempt to buy off a candidate is at least as serious as influence peddling. Does this mean that if Terry Kilrea had been offered a plum job with Calian, no crime would have been committed?

The Ontario Municipal Elections Act does specifically say:

No person shall [...] promise or agree to procure an office or employment to induce a person to become a candidate, refrain from becoming a candidate or withdraw his or her candidacy

That does kind of sound like the the first half of what O’Brien is alleged to have done, n’est pas?

Ottawa is a world-class city and deserves a transit system worthy of that status – together we’re getting it right.

For some reason, Mayor Larry likes to keep saying Ottawa is a “world-class” city. Then again, he also liked to say that “zero means zero” (or is that 4.9?).

I suspect it will be a few more generations, a few city-wide fires, and a revolution or two until Ottawa becomes a world-class city to rival Paris. We don’t have the boulevards, landmarks, or public transit system to rival the French capitol.

About the only place we can hope to compete is with our on-street food vendors. We have two advantages: our culture accepts eating while walking and we have a large francophone population. It’s only a matter of time before some bright lad or lass at Algonquin discovers that crepes can be made and sold on the street.

“Oh! But what about beaver tails?” you say. The answer to that is simple: savory crepes. Do beaver tails have ham, tomato, feta? No. What about cheese? No. Beaver tails are a culinary dead-end. Crepes are like prokaryotes. There isn’t a gastronomic niche crepes can’t handle. Bring on a Canadian school of crepes, I say.

Sure, our city is a sprawling mess. Sure, our future transit plans are pretty much what we have now (with a little more tunnel). Sure, our city has few landmarks almost no public art. Sure, we don’t have much in the way of urban parks. But we can at least have some decent street food, dammit!

Centretowners will have noticed “swap boxes” cropping up around town recently. I don’t know who puts them up, but they’re kind of fun. I have yet to find anything of interest in them, but I always look (and I usually try to leave something).

Most of the ones that I’ve seen have just been fun (and occasionally anti-consumerist). The most recent (seen outside of Invisible Cinema, and across from Venus Envy) took a decidedly political bent. It’s the “Mayor Larry Budget Edition (Running Ottawa Like a Business – Nortel!)“, with “Mayor Larry swapped libraries for a tax freeze. What’ll you swap?” painted on the side.

The piece de resistance has to be the “Ye Olde Apothecary” installed outside of Section off of Bank Street (across from the inappropriately located Telus building). It featured a series of vials in a case, with captions painted in the background “to attract a mate… essence of mayoral swagger“, “for virility, cat scrotum“, and “for charm, pompousness and obscurity harvested from local hipsters.” By the time I got to it (about a week after I first saw it), the front had been smashed in and the vials were gone.

So Mayor Larry is in a spot of trouble. It turns out that the allegations of wrongdoing have matured directly from immobile newborns to glowering adolescents. They’re hanging around Mayor Larry as if he were Quickie Mart. Not only that, they’re scaring away customers. Our mayor can’t even hold a Council meeting without them crashing the party and shutting it down.

It’s high time that Mayor Larry take a leave of absence. The charges against him are just allegations, but those allegations are overshadowing city business. Even though Council approved two budget items yesterday (more money for the police, and the library budget), that story was all but squeezed out of the morning news cycle. As long as these charges dog the mayor, you can bet that the media won’t bother with boring issues like municipal politics.

I’m not saying that the mayor should resign, only take a leave of absence until the charges have been settled. Our media can’t be trusted to sort the easy story from the important story.