NCC board acquiescence to political masters could ruin the Hill
Joanne Chianello, Ottawa Citizen
Published on: January 21, 2015, Last Updated: January 21, 2015 6:55 PM EST
We are a little past the halfway point in Mayor Jim Watson and Foreign Minister John Baird’s 100-day truce on the very public disagreement the city and the federal government’s National Capital Commission have been waging over a tiny part of the proposed route for the western LRT expansion.
So far, so good.
“We’ve agreed during the 100 days to not comment on the progress of our discussions, but I think I can go as far to say that we have a positive feeling that we’re working well with the city, and vice versa,” the NCC’s chief executive, Mark Kristmanson, told reporters after Tuesday’s board meeting.
Who knows what will come of all this behind-the-scenes goodwill, if anything? The 100 days isn’t up until March. But it’s gratifying to think that officials are working hard to solve their differences, especially as both sides have legitimate arguments.
The city aims to build this light-rail route as affordably as possible and argues that doing it the NCC’s way will cost hundreds of millions more. The NCC is concerned about preserving federal land and green space for all Canadians.
Which is as it should be. You don’t have to agree with the NCC to appreciate that it must take its role in planning the capital region seriously.
If only the NCC board dealt with all its land-use duties so responsibly.
At the same time it’s rightly squaring off with the city over what amounts to running a train for 500 metres along the southern side of the Sir John A. Macdonald Parkway, the NCC has acquiesced to pressure from within the federal government over a highly dubious plan for a prominent, 5,000-square-metre property on Wellington Street, next to the Supreme Court of Canada.
The site is to be the new home of the increasingly controversial Memorial to the Victims of Communism. Since the 1920s, the property has been designated in government documents as the future location of a new building for the Federal Court of Canada. Until, that is, Public Works simply allocated the current site to Tribute to Liberty, the private charity behind the proposed the memorial.
The NCC board of directors unanimously approved the change in November 2013 without officially conferring with the NCC’s own advisory committee on planning, design and realty, which had reservations about the use of the site. When the committee did officially pronounce on the project in mid-2014, it judged the location totally inappropriate for the memorial, and it didn’t think much of the winning design by Toronto-based ABSTRACT Studio Architecture.
The NCC’s planning committee is chaired by the renowned Canadian urban planner Larry Beasley, who told Maclean’s magazine earlier this month that his committee told the government that “the chosen site was not a good site, and that it was needed for a higher priority government purpose over the next few years.”
So what did everyone do with this expert planning advice? Ignored it, evidently. The NCC board, which is expressly mandated to oversee the planning of the capital, failed to solicit, and later heed, its own planning and design committee. Instead, it voted with the government.
And thus we come back to our age-old question: Why do we have the NCC if its politically appointed board members are just going to do the bidding of the government of the day?
Making all this even worse is the fact that the NCC had already reserved a much more suitable site for the proposed Memorial to Victims of Communism on Wellington Street just west of Bay Street. But that location was apparently not prominent enough for the Tribute to Liberty charity.
The Department of Canadian Heritage, which is in overseeing the monument project, previously told the Citizen that the current site “was deemed more favourable” by Tribute to Liberty because of its proximity and “thematic links” to the Supreme Court of Canada, the Peace Tower, Parliament Hill and Library and Archives Canada.
So we’re going to plan the capital based on what a private charity wants, as opposed to respecting the opinions of professional planners we’ve recruited from across the country for the express purpose of bringing design sensitivity to the capital region?
The decision to put the memorial on such a prominent parliamentary location is unconscionable. Yet hardly a murmur in this much-too-polite town has been raised.
Some have tried, including architect Barry Padolsky in his letter of protest that first sounded the alarm on this file. And the Citizen’s Don Butler reported that even one of the judges for the memorial’s design competition has a “massive problem” with the chosen site.
Shirley Blumberg, a founding partner of KPMB Architects of Toronto who was part of the jury, told Butler that the site is “inappropriate” and “is so centrally placed that it would seem to quite overshadow Canada’s true history.”
We’ve completely lost our perspective, waging a battle royale with the NCC for what amounts to minor LRT route change while the permanent ruination of a superb 5,000-square-metre public space near Parliament Hill is going mostly unmentioned.
jchianello@ottawacitizen.com
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