Ottawa, Gatineau mayors demand seats on NCC board
By David Reevely, OTTAWA CITIZEN January 29, 2014 8:30 PM
OTTAWA — The National Capital Commission doesn’t know enough about local affairs and is getting in the way of progress, the mayors of Ottawa and Gatineau charged Wednesday, and putting them on its board is their solution.
After their first formal meeting since Gatineau’s Maxime Pedneaud-Jobin was elected last fall, he and Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson emerged with a list of grievances, from “relentless obstruction in the City of Ottawa’s efforts to create a world-class transit system for the National Capital Region” to the “unilateral decision to close Rue Gamelin” in Gatineau. They signed it and sent it to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, demanding reforms that should start with adding an elected official from each city council to the 15-member NCC board.
Joint Letter re NCC
Ottawa West–Nepean MP John Baird, the minister responsible for the commission, gave the idea a chilly reception.
“The idea of putting city officials on the board is an idea this and the previous government have not endorsed,” his spokesman Rick Roth said by email. For eight years, he pointed out, the NCC has answered to a local member of Parliament, which adds a degree of local accountability — before Baird, the minister in charge was Pontiac’s Lawrence Cannon, a former Gatineau city councillor. That was a change the Conservatives made from the previous tradition of having the commission overseen by whoever was heritage minister.
Baird’s office was taken aback by the mayors’ demand; the two mayors had told Baird they were meeting and would talk about the NCC, Watson admitted, but not that they expected to come out asking for it to be reformed.
The commission should be more like Montreal’s Port Authority, Watson said, with a national purpose but locals dominating it. The change would take an amendment to the National Capital Commission Act.
The composition of the NCC board, which has eight members from places outside the capital, made some sense when Ottawa and Gatineau were fractured, he said. “A few years ago, we had 11 municipalities, a regional government, several municipalities in Gatineau before the amalgamation. And there was a conflict, because Gloucester was competing with Ottawa, with Vanier, and then you had Aylmer and Gatineau and Hull. We now have two governments in two cities in two provinces,” he said.
Naming a council member from each city, typically the mayor, to the board would be a first step toward reversing the balance. Eight board members should be from the capital region and seven from elsewhere, Watson said.
The commission’s refusal to accept Ottawa’s plans for running a light-rail line along the Ottawa River near Highland Park clearly angered Watson the most. The board’s constant demands for the city to spend more on the project, which is already estimated to cost $980 million, are just unreasonable, he said, calling them “micromanagement and second-guessing.” He scorned the commission’s demands in the first stage of the rail line, now under construction — which went as far as approving the shrubs the city intends to plant around its new stations.
Watson also complained about the state of Sparks Street, where the NCC is a major landlord and famously indifferent to the needs of small businesses. Few restaurateurs want to invest in outfitting kitchens if they can only get the short-term leases the NCC insists on, for instance.
For Pedneaud-Jobin, Rue Gamelin is the biggest irritant. The commission closed the east-west route across the southern tip of Gatineau Park in 2012 with little consultation with the City of Gatineau. “They treat us more like a customer than like a partner,” he said in French. “We need a solution to the situation we’re in.”
Watson and Pedneaud-Jobin made a point to praise some of the NCC’s accomplishments over the years, particularly where it’s worked with local governments: Creating a majestic Confederation Boulevard, for instance, and rebuilding the Plaza Bridge. And they lauded the Conservative government for making commission board meetings open by default, rather than closed to the public.
That means there’s hope, in their view: “We’re not willing to give up on the NCC yet,” Watson said.
The fact the NCC board had an open meeting last week, where member Robert Tennant got involved in the debate on the city’s rail plans, helped expose that Tennant’s private urban-planning firm also works for a client whose development plans are directly implicated in the rail project, Watson pointed out. More openness and accountability is always a good thing, he argued.
The mayor said he’s not worried that an attack on the commission will make getting its co-operation on things like the rail project more difficult.
“Are you suggesting there’s going to be retributions because we dared to offer a way to open up and make the NCC more accountable?” he shot back in response to a reporter’s question. “I think that would backfire on the federal government, if they’re going to all of a sudden start saying, ‘These mayors are asking too much and we’re going to take out on them, charging more for parking in Gatineau Park and we’re going to make it more difficult for light rail.’ I hope they don’t go down that path because I don’t think the public would be too pleased and impressed with that.”
Besides their shared complaints about the NCC, the two mayors said they agreed on the need to better co-ordinate transit and pedestrian and cycling links (including with a joint project to open the Prince of Wales Bridge across the Ottawa River to bikes and pedestrians), to work together on reducing sewage dumps into the river, and to promote tourism and private-sector jobs.
© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/bo...676/story.html
Prev
) in addition to the mayor's of Ottawa and Gatineau have a seat on the board - not just random people from all over Canada without any accountability.
Linear Mode
