What to do about the National Capital Commission (NCC)?

[S-Man]

Well, the province did nix the plan/idea/pipe dream of an east-end interprovincial bridge, eliminating a nagging, decades-long problem in one fell swoop.

[Buggys]

The East end interprovincial bridge was actually a reason for keeping the NCC.... Who else has that sort of long term vision?

[J.OT13]

I don't consider a quarter century of studying one thing over and over again "vision".

[JeffB]

Originally Posted by J.OT13

I don't consider a quarter century of studying one thing over and over again "vision".

For some folks in this city, it might be.

[rocketphish]

Mayors can’t skate around fact NCC does good work in the region

By Joanne Chianello, OTTAWA CITIZEN January 31, 2014 9:00 PM

OTTAWA — It is somewhat ironic that the mayors of Ottawa and Gatineau chose the eve of the Winterlude festivities to launch their attack on the National Capital Commission over its alleged interference with the cities’ affairs.

Because while the NCC could use some rejigging — like a more accountable board of directors that should include mayors from both sides of the river — the people of Ottawa derive some excellent benefits from the commission’s work in this region.

And none is more obvious at this time of year than the skateway on the Rideau Canal.

Remember that our world-famous feature running down the centre of our capital was the brainchild of a visionary NCC, an idea opposed by the city council of the time. (A Citizen editorial thought the experiment quaint, but ultimately pronounced it untenable.)

What’s even more important to keep in mind is that as locals, we don’t pay for it. Or at least not much of it.

The NCC spends about $1.5 million to prep and maintain the canal for skating, money that comes from federal coffers — or every taxpayer in Canada. It’s true that the skateway is a tourist draw, but it’s locals who use it the most.

Then there are those gorgeous chalets. Sure, the NCC came under fire for spending $5.2 million to buy seven of them a couple of years ago, but almost immediately, skaters proclaimed them a hit. And again, the cost was shared by all Canadians, even though the biggest beneficiaries are the people of Ottawa.

So before we go completely overboard in the wake of this week’s discussion about how the NCC is always impeding progress on local files, let’s take a few deep breaths as we lace up our skates.

In a joint press conference with his Gatineau counterpart earlier this week, Mayor Jim Watson said that while he meant “no disrespect for people who live in Gimli, Manitoba, or New Brunswick who currently sit on the board ... the fact is they can make a decision, get back on a plane and not live with the consequences.”

Maybe.

But do we really think that, if asked, most people from Gimli — or anyplace else in Canada — are happy to support our winter skating pleasures? Maybe not.

This is not an argument in favour of the NCC governance status quo, but a reminder that the agency we love to hate is actually in charge of many of the things we love in the capital, and that the rest of the country pays for.

That’s why it’s not at all clear that it’s a good idea, as Watson proposed, for the majority of the NCC’s directors to be from the Ottawa area. Take Jacquelin Holzman. The former fiscally conservative mayor wanted the NCC abolished when she was in charge of the city. Now that she’s an NCC director, Holzman is “not willing to give up anything because of the city’s financial problems.” That was her declaration last summer when the commission was calling for the entire 1.2 kilometres of the western light rail route that runs through NCC-controlled land along the southern edge of the Sir John A. Macdonald Parkway to be buried, despite an estimated $300 or $400 million additional cost.

So more local representation won’t necessarily lead to less interference in city affairs. And despite the view we have of ourselves as not very patriotic, an NCC poll found that 75 per cent of respondents felt Canadians should have a say in the future plans of Canada’s capital. So it’s completely appropriate there be national representation on the board. (Whether it should come through patronage appointments is another question.)

There should be a healthy tension between the local cities — whose financial pressures may lead them to opt for the easiest, cheapest solution — and the coast-to-coast representatives who want the capital to act and look like a capital.

But that tension also needs to be productive. Putting the two local mayors on the NCC board, having both locally elected and national representative voices around the same table, can only help increase the communications between the two. They don’t need to agree, but they should debate the vision for the capital face-to-face, because it’s always easier to ignore the other side of an argument when no one is there to make it.

[email protected]

twitter.com/jchianello
© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Jo...307/story.html

[S-Man]

The east-end bridge was a failure of planning for the NCC strictly due to the duration of the study and the eventual cost of the location they favoured. However, they were still in favour of having some sort of a bridge, even if they were more comfortable with it remaining on planning paper and in imaginations.

(weak praise, certainly)

But, the province has nixed this, likely due to not wanting to commit cash to the project. God knows what the cost of that 40 years of NCC 'planning' was! (not that it was likely to have been spent on real, physical things in Ottawa)

[EdFromOttawa]

Originally Posted by rocketphish

Mayors can’t skate around fact NCC does good work in the region

By Joanne Chianello, OTTAWA CITIZEN January 31, 2014 9:00 PM

Joanne Chianello is a hack and a NIMBY alarmist to boot. Constantly claiming Ottawa should focus on 'being the capital it should be' but the fact of the matter is, it's a crap capital city for a lot of reasons (relatively speaking) and every time something progressive comes along to change it, she's the first to question it.

[Buggys]

I had no idea that bridge study took 40 years!
Nevertheless, their balls to table a report at the end is better than the cities' and provinces' shortsightedness.

[Kitchissippi]

Originally Posted by Buggys

I had no idea that bridge study took 40 years!
Nevertheless, their balls to table a report at the end is better than the cities' and provinces' shortsightedness.

There were several studies over 40 years, not just one. That's not as long as the fact that the NCC and its predecessors have also tabled plans for 100 years now.

[rocketphish]

City of Ottawa is being hijacked by NCC without regard to cost or consequences

By Susan Sherring, Ottawa Sun
First posted: Friday, January 31, 2014 08:21 PM EST | Updated: Friday, January 31, 2014 09:35 PM EST

If you're unsure about how badly Ottawa needs better representation on the National Capital Commission, read on.

There are major decisions with long-lasting ramifications being made about our city -- without our input.

They're being made by unelected citizens who fly into town, then fly out and never have to live with the consequences.

And if you don't care about any of that, hear this.

The NCC board of directors don't appear to care one iota how much their decisions cost the Ottawa taxpayer or hurt the development of this city.

In fact, it doesn't appear that they any of them see their role as taking cost into consideration.

On that alone, residents in Ottawa-Gatineau need to be very concerned.

Case in point.

The Sun obtained a list of design demands from the NCC for the LRT's Confederation Line - and if you think the city can be too bureaucratic, you'll see it's got nothing on the NCC.

For starters, the info the Sun received is one of many versions - with the city and the NCC going back and forth

And no, none of this is being made up.

The NCC doesn't want just to be able to tell Ottawans where the Confederation Line should go, but wants a say in the types of plants that are used, the design of the planters and the type of fencing.

It's all really quite unbelievable.

Unfortunately, you have to believe it because it's hitting you in the pocket book.

In talking about a proposed canopy at one of the LRT stations for example, here's the NCC's point of view: The proposed canopy could be treated as a more organic, sculptural element in greater contract with the strong presence of the exiting VIA canopy. Alternatively it could be handled in a more subtle, transparent and minimalist way in order to make is disappear between two very distinct design shapes ... The NCC will lead negotiations with the stakeholder for design approval," it reads.

Heaven help us.

The city's response: The canopy will be redesigned to be subtle, transparent and minimalistic.

The NCC holds the cards, Ottawa really has little ground on which to stand.

At the Bayview Station for pathway planting, here's what the NCC had to say: Linear planting along the pathway is not of the same character of cultural landscape of the ORP. Mass planting with biodiversity is recommended," the document reads.

Shuddering? You're not alone.

And this about sidewalks in a particular area: Plans should indicate the continuity of the Albert St. north sidewalk passing the station to the west.

The city doesn't have a lot of leeway, but finally, a protest they can afford to make.

"Disagree: Not within the scope of the project."

Thankfully.

The whole situation is frustrating to Mayor Jim Watson, who has called for increased representation for Ottawa and Gatineau on the board.

Seriously, this just makes sense, and to turn this into a political battle of wills only hurts residents of the national capital region.

Watson is increasingly frustrated at an organization which purports to be represent a Canadian point of view, then demands to control the size of picket fences.

"How do we get into this kind of debate with the NCC, where they're telling us the types of plants we should be using," Watson asked on Friday.

And frankly, it's not just the types of plants, if that wasn't bad enough, the NCC wants to dictate the location of the plants and the size.

At Rideau station for example, here's what they have.

"Calipers to be as large as they can from the onset," the NCC insists.

Really?

Seriously? Couldn't make this stuff up. And why would you want to?

And how much time does the NCC staff have on its hands to figure out all of this out?

Is there no chance the NCC could simply trust that Ottawa politicians want the best for the city and LRT, within the budget they have.

Apparently, that's just not good enough.

Frankly, it should be.

[email protected]

Twitter: @suncityhall

http://www.ottawasun.com/2014/01/31/...r-consequences

[JeffB]

Originally Posted by rocketphish

[B]Mayors can’t skate around fact NCC does good work in the region

I don't think that the fact the NCC does some good work means that there aren't issues in terms of how it deals with the municipalities. It seems that too often the NCC and the City of Ottawa (in particular, I won't speak to the relationship between the NCC and Gatineau) are at loggerheads rather than trying to work in tandem. While the two bodies may have some differences in mandate, they need to work together. Both ultimately are charged with making Ottawa better - and neither group should feel like they are alone in trying to do it.

[rocketphish]

The awesome power of taking the long view

January 30, 2014. 4:37 pm • Section: City Hall
Posted by: David Reevely

The latest tiff between the mayors of Ottawa and Gatineau and the National Capital Commission has some pretty harsh rhetoric in it, but the actual remedy proposed by Mayors Jim Watson and Maxime Pedneaud-Jobin is fairly mild: that they should be among the NCC’s 15 board members, and eventually that the 8-7 balance in favour of people from away should be tilted the opposite way.

There are all sorts of things the federal government could do, even given such constraints, to maintain an NCC that did exactly what the feds wanted. Russell Mills, the chairman who’s the spokesman for the moves the mayors are unhappy about (refusing, so far, to allow rail by the western Parkway, closing Rue Gamelin) is from here, after all. Not that Mills is one of these, particularly, but being from Ottawa or Gatineau is not in itself an inoculation against being a crony or hack.

I didn’t cover the NCC news conference Thursday afternoon responding to the Watson/Pedneaud-Jobin broadside, but in watching the coverage this line from Mills stood out to me:

Kate Porter @KatePorterCBC

NCC chair Russell Mills says NCCmust be able to stop "bad idea" like a "railroad on the waterfront" #cbcott
2:37 PM - 30 Jan 2014

One of the NCC’s founding projects was removing railroad tracks from beside prominent waterways. It’s the sort of thing you remember if you feel as though it’s always your job to take the very long view. Mills and interim CEO Jean-François Trépanier have said a couple of times lately that they’re planning for a capital 100 years from now. That’s the sort of time scale they think on.

This can easily become a cognitive trap, though. If you’re always thinking in century-long time scales, your bias will always be against doing anything in particular right now. Any idea can benefit from more study and analysis. If we wait, we’ll always know more later than we do now, just by letting time pass and observing. Any decision, at any point, can be put off, any proposal dismissed as a rush job. In the case of the western LRT … well, 100 years from now, who’s to say there will even be any such thing as trains?

By this standard, the 40 years it took to get a plan for LeBreton Flats was only a moderate pause. Waiting 10 more years to get more than a couple of things built there isn’t even long enough to justify looking at our watches. Indeed, the fact that the NCC is having to re-evaluate the 10-year-old plan because thinking has changed on what sorts of things Ottawa should build near transit on the edge of downtown — well, if you want to, you can see that an argument that the 40-year wait should have been 50 years. Why, in another decade, we could be even more sure. That’s what you get for rushing things.

Even the Gréber plan didn’t have much helpful to say about what might happen 50 years later, let alone 100. Now we have lots of suburban development that’s hopped the Greenbelt. What do we do about about it? Gréber roughly anticipated that would happen but he didn’t know how to respond. We thank our stars that some of Gréber’s grand 1950s-modern boulevards proved too expensive or complicated to build. In 2013, we realize that building a capital explicitly as a living monument to the dead of a particular war, while perhaps noble in the moment, is problematic in the long term. If even the Gréber plan didn’t think long-term enough, how could anything whipped up by a local transit-planning unit be worth more than a passing glance?

The best thing about this device is that if we want it to, it can give any sort of obstructionism an air of moral superiority. Yes you might want to do something you’ve spent six years studying, but I have the perspective necessary to recognize that you’re being rash. You might even be right and have a good idea, but all I’m doing is helping make sure. Nothing meaningful is lost by delaying things another couple of years, or increasing the price — which is anyway just an investment in the future. I’m really doing you a favour here, holding you to a standard your great-grandchildren will thank me for.

You don’t see it that way? Well, that’s the sort of reckless, short-sighted behaviour I’ve come to expect from you, isn’t it.

It’s an impossible argument to counter. It’s always applicable, and sometimes it’s even right — you just can’t tell with certainty when.

Maybe it is this time. Watson, for one, has talked about the importance of building a Chevy rail system, not a Cadillac. The NCC thinks of itself as being in the Cadillac business. No wonder the commission isn’t crazy about what the City of Ottawa is pushing.

Watson also talks how the billion dollars or so the city is willing to spend on a Tunney’s-Pasture-to-Baseline rail line as if it’s an immutable law of the universe, not a consequence of a whole lot of assumptions and principles that city council had to vote on. That council decision on what sort of transit program is “affordable” has consequence, but it’s also understandable that the NCC would say: “That’s fine and we respect your position. Our position is different. If you want to use land you control, we have no place to say anything about that. But if you want to use our land, that’s different.” Which is pretty much exactly what the NCC has, in fact, said. It worked pretty well there, for a while, with the city quickly revising its plan after a first refusal and making it $80 million more expensive and undeniably nicer at the same time.

Watson’s only real option at this point, other than giving in, is to undermine the legitimacy of the NCC’s stance — not merely to say that it’s wrong, but that for the NCC to take any position on this is inherently inappropriate.

But that’s getting back to the practicalities, which aren’t supposed to be the point.

Most futurists will tell you it’s foolish to try to predict much of anything more than a couple of decades out. Certainly nothing specific. We have a regrettable tendency, as a species, to imagine that the future will be pretty much like now, only more so. So by now we were all supposed to be working 15-hour weeks while robots cleaned our houses. (We could use the extra time to go on long drives by the Ottawa River.) It didn’t turn out that way. Even just 10 years ago, who’d have guessed what ubiquitous smartphones would do to our lives?

Making a 100-year planning horizon the foundation of your thinking means you’re always going to have a hard time justifying doing anything.

http://blogs.ottawacitizen.com/2014/...the-long-view/

[S-Man]

The amount of articles coming out of this NCC brouhaha is making my head spin! That said, if the western parkway-LRT issue is of interest to 'all Canadians', would someone care to do a search to see how many of this vast nation's newspapers are covering it?

Will we find it...

....on page 6 in the Halifax Chronicle-Herald?
Page 12 in the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix?
Will the Calgary Gazette be carrying the latest in this important saga?
The St. John's Telegram?
Prince George Citizen?
London Free Press?
Kingston Whig-Standard??!

Anyone??

Not likely, because - much like a lot of the stuff that happens on The Hill - this is a tempest in a teapot in the bubble that is Ottawa, and few people outside of its boundaries give a shit.

I would have to imagine that if anyone in Calgary/Edmonton/Toronto/Montreal/Vancouver was asked "Ottawa's getting LRT - how do you feel?", they'd reply something like "Oh yeah? About time - they're the capital, and all."

That said, I think Reevely's article describes the situation - and how we got to this point - the best.

Sue Sherring is a reactionary who is paid to react, and outrage over the NCC's hyper-anal ways goes over well with readers of all stripes in this city. There isn't huge love for Watson in those pages, but when thePhase 1 plan was approved and rolled out on budget, the Sun gave it quite favourable press (never mind the commenters)

As for Chianello, I've never, ever been able to figure her out. I've tried, but I have no idea what her 'deal' is. I'm loathe to call anyone a hack, and in this case I can't simply because I don't understand where she's coming from. On every topic she writes about, I can barely get through an article. Is she playing Devil's Advocate? Half the time she seems to be.

[Buggys]

Lol. Taking the long view does not mean they (the NCC) should sit on their hands!

[Dado]

I don't find Chianello all that difficult to figure out.

Things like democratic accountability and transparency are important to her.

That's why she doesn't like it when Watson walks things on to the agenda at the last minute. That's why she doesn't like staff obfuscation. It's why (I think) she doesn't think much of the OMB.

And it explains why she supports adding municipal representation to the NCC.

[harls]

John Baird is going to "make an announcement" this morning around 10:30 regarding the NCC.

[Abe Simpson]

Originally Posted by harls

John Baird is going to "make an announcement" this morning around 10:30 regarding the NCC.

Well this should be interesting!

[Capital Shaun]

Originally Posted by Dado

I don't find Chianello all that difficult to figure out.

Things like democratic accountability and transparency are important to her.

That's why she doesn't like it when Watson walks things on to the agenda at the last minute. That's why she doesn't like staff obfuscation. It's why (I think) she doesn't think much of the OMB.

And it explains why she supports adding municipal representation to the NCC.

True but it doesn't explain her fluff peice about the NCC's good work. I don't recall the mayors trashing the NCC's contributions to festivals. Her coming to the NCC's defence wasn't necessary and in a way redundant since the festivals now fall under Heritage Canada.

[Dado]

Originally Posted by Capital Shaun

True but it doesn't explain her fluff peice about the NCC's good work. I don't recall the mayors trashing the NCC's contributions to festivals. Her coming to the NCC's defence wasn't necessary and in a way redundant since the festivals now fall under Heritage Canada.

Well S-Man was making a general complaint about Chianello, not an article-specific one. I don't think his general complaint about her has much merit because, for the most part, she isn't that hard to figure out.

On the specific case of her article on the NCC's good works, she was urging caution regarding the mayors' desire to have a majority of the board being from the local area. But yes, much of the rest of that piece was a bit odd given that about half of what she was writing about is no longer done by the NCC.

[Fatty McButterpants]

When the NCC brings forward municipal infrastructure related requirements that reflect the interest of all taxpaying Canadians, do they also bring with them a bag full of federal tax money to pay for those requirements that are deemed to be of interest to all Canadians?

As I recall, the Federal position on funding for Phase 2 of the rail transit plan was lukewarm and non-committal. It seems the NCC sees Ottawa's transit as "our transit" while the treasury board sees Ottawa's transit as "your transit".