Michael Bociurkiw is an international affairs analyst and senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.
Growing up in Ottawa, my family took great pride in showing friends, relatives, and even newly released Soviet dissidents around the Canadian capital. Compact, beautiful, and convenient, the city was superior to life for a “PK” (professor’s kid) in the other two capitals we sometimes called home during the holidays: Washington and London.
Sure, Ottawa was, and remains, one of the coldest capital cities in the world, but the joys of skating on the Rideau Canal, documenting the fall foliage in the Gatineau Hills with an Instamatic camera, or cycling the endless bike paths through protected green spaces on humid summer days more than make up for the brutal months of shoveling snow and freezing at bus stops. In my opinion, the ByWard Market in summer rivals any other famous seasonal space in the world.
My Ottawa is full of nostalgia. It's where I got my first job, selling ice cream from a bicycle cart while my musician brother played in the street. Carling Avenue is where I had my first kiss. Ottawa is where I graduated from high school and university, smoked my first cigarette, learned the craft of journalism, served Her Majesty's Government as a Parliamentary Secretary and produced an award-winning current affairs radio show on Carleton University's campus station, CKCU-FM.
Every time I return to Ottawa, cherished memories from my teenage years and early adulthood come flooding back to me like an unstoppable tsunami, bringing with it a warm, comforting feeling that nothing can replace.
But sadly, that didn't happen this spring when delegates from some 180 countries gathered for several days at the massive UN Plastics Summit.
Not only has the city centre become a ghost town (thanks in large part to the refusal of thousands of powerful union-backed civil servants to return to their offices), but many of my old downtown walks have become harrowing obstacle courses of homeless people camping out on the sidewalks. In fact, the last time I felt that way (and I've been to some of the worst cities in the world) was around last year's BRICS summit in Pretoria, South Africa, when I took a wrong turn into the diplomatic quarter and had a few unsettling encounters. Every time I strolled past my old house, I would think to myself, “This is not the Ottawa I know or love,” and shake my head in disbelief.
Turns out I'm not alone. Several foreign delegates at the UN Plastics Summit told me they were astonished by the chaos that homeless people and so many others are causing so close to the Ottawa Conference Centre. Old school friends who remain in the capital say they're not proud of what they see every day.
It's hard not to feel sorry for the small family-run businesses struggling to survive as footfall plummets, with countless cafes and lunch stops struggling, including the now deserted Press Cafe.
Hotels and corporate travel venues are struggling because the federal government is no longer hosting as many events as it used to. “Corporate travel has been slowed down a little bit because of the government and the way it's being operated, and because of the work-from-home policy, the federal government is not hosting the types of meetings right now that they used to,” said Steve Ball, president of the Ottawa Gatineau Hotel Association.
Currently, the federal government has mandated two days of work per week, but it is not widely enforced, and CTV Ottawa reported, citing Le Droit, that it is set to increase to three days per week in September.
I agree with most things about Ontario’s bombastic Premier Doug Ford, but he seemed to make some sense when he recently called on federal workers to return to work: “We’ve got to jumpstart our economy. [in Ottawa’s] “Downtown. Restaurants are hurting, stores are hurting, public transportation ridership is down. I think this is a normal request. If you're employed, come to work. Imagine if we told everyone else in the state they didn't have to go to work. Our economy would be devastated. So they shouldn't get special treatment.”
He's right, and I don't believe the current federal Liberal government can muster the courage necessary to bully the unions into submission anytime soon.
To be sure, Ottawa is a complex institution. Officials from multiple government agencies, including the Capital Commission, provincial, regional and city officials, and sometimes the transportation agency, have a say in its development and day-to-day operations. Quarrels between the unelected power brokers on the bloated Capital Commission and elected city councillors are commonplace, even over the location of sidewalks.
Another vivid example of Ottawa’s “too many chefs in the kitchen” style of governance is the notorious Rideau Street neighborhood between Sussex Drive and St. Patrick Street. The neighborhood has resisted attempts to turn it into an urban legend, despite decades and billions of dollars of investment. The 2016 sinkhole disaster may have been a sign from heaven that the neighborhood was destined to become something else.
As a budding reporter covering the city in the 1980s, I wrote for the Globe and Mail about ambitious plans to turn the boulevard into a covered, heated pedestrian mall. As I predicted, the plans never came to fruition, and the street is now open to buses, cars and pedestrians. Much of the street is lined with discount stores, fast food joints and marijuana stores. The mall is sleazy and seedy, and must be one of the most failed urban planning projects in the country (a TripAdvisor post calls it “the epitome of urban planning disaster”).
And the lack of agreement on renovating the Prime Minister’s House (24 Sussex Dr. was always included on city tours when I was chaperoning tourists around town as a kid) needs to be resolved immediately so that the building that Politico called “Canada’s most famous house in need of repair” can be returned to the NCC’s portfolio of tourist attractions.
Let's hope that aggressively attracting housing to our downtown core, primarily through the construction of high-rise residential buildings, will bring vitality back to the area and alleviate the severe housing shortage across the country.
Of course, it's easy to make surprise visits to your former home and criticize policymakers for their bad decisions. First, other world cities are grappling with different post-COVID problems. In New York, for example, city officials have been unable to lure restaurateurs away from their outdoor dining shacks, which take away valuable parking space from neighborhoods and impede access for pedestrians, sanitation work, pest control, and emergency vehicles. (For many restaurateurs, this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get free real estate and expand their business, but many shacks have fallen into disrepair and are now canvases for graffiti artists.)
Second, Ottawa has changed a lot since I was a boy growing up in Altavista, scattering newspapers on my neighbours' lawns. Today, the majority of households in the capital are two-person households, and the population is aging significantly.
But my perspective is shaped not only by living in the city for many years, but also by comparing it with the situation in other capitals: my visits over the past few months to major global capitals such as Washington, London, Rome, Warsaw and Brussels have shown me that these cities are recovering from COVID in different ways than Ottawa is.
Let's use this crisis as an opportunity to rethink what Canada, and especially downtown Ottawa, should look like. After all, if Canada wants to maintain its image as a middle-ranking G7 nation, it needs to fix its front porch first.
