Category: Ottawa development

Solid Waste Plan Focus Groups. Ottawa

Woke focus groups

April 1, 2022

Have you heard of the solid waste planning process in Ottawa? Probably not. But it is an extensive and expensive project to serve Ottawa for the next thirty years. It may cost upwards of a hundred million dollars and it will affect your daily activities. 

As a typical person, you want to get rid of your garbage at the least cost in an environmentally suitable manner (for example, do not throw your garbage onto the street).

Do you really care what technology the City uses? Is it aerobic or anaerobic? Do you know the difference?

Garbage collection and disposal are not like movies where you may like romantic, warlike, adventure, or science fiction movies. Your choices with garbage disposal shrink primarily to cost and the environment.

And the cost is a small part of your total living costs that includes property taxes, electricity, and utilities. I never thought much about garbage collection and disposal in my spare time. 

But the City is developing a long-range plan that will take three years to finish. A consultant did background work in identifying quantities of garbage the city accumulates annually by type: recyclable, organic, bulk garbage (construction materials), etc, and projected trends for thirty years.

To provide input for the plan, the city started a series of public consultations to find out what people think about the way garbage is collected and disposed of.

I took part in a zoom meeting organized by the city to discuss options for garbage reuse. There were thirty people in attendance, with five people from the city. If you broke the meeting down by time, city officials provided information most of the time, leaving precious little time for public input that was scant and needed prodding from the city officials. 

The city researched and developed the proposals, but the consultation process is difficult: if it is a highrise going up behind your house, it has a direct impact on you and you express your views strongly. Here, the consultation relates to something decades in the future, and people’s interest wanes. 

After the options were presented, they asked the audience to prioritize the various proposals. In one chart, “repair cafes”; “sharing libraries”; “community events” and “community strategies” were the options. These options propose venues exchanging or using goods surplus to you but usable to others.

Although the audience expressed their priorities in the ensuing discussion; I wondered if they had experience with them. I had never heard of “repair cafes” and “sharing libraries”. My surplus stuff that is still useful, ends up with charities or is sold. 

 I understood that the previous two zoom meetings had about fifteen people each in attendance. The population of the city is a million people. A few dozen people per consultation do not give you confidence that public opinion is fully collected.

The city arranged for seven zoom meetings on various aspects of the solid waste plan, and five focus groups for specific target populations. 

The focus groups are:

older people (not defined for age), young people (not defined for age), immigrants, BIPOC, and 2SLGBTQQIA+; do you know what the last two terms mean? I did not. I had to look them up on the internet.

Do young and old people have different ideas from middle-aged people regarding garbage? And immigrants? Could these people not join the other zoom meetings? By having focus groups concentrating on these people, do we assume their views on garbage collection and disposal differ from the rest of us? Is that likely? I have a sense of wokeness arranging these focus groups. 

I admire the amount of effort the city puts into the consultation process versus the payoff; the city’s intention to get public feedback and, ultimately, acceptance of its solid waste management plan is desirable. But the consultation should be more specific. For example, do not just ask if you would use the city depots for hazardous waste disposal but ask how far would you drive to drop off your paint cans. And do not separate special groups for the consultations. Just my opinion.

Ottawa City Builder Award

March 25, 2022

Do you remember the truck convoy occupying downtown Ottawa for a few weeks from the end of January 2022? The convoy that gained international attention and inspired copycats? Me neither. But it was a big deal, according to the papers. The papers said the convoy “tortured” the community with their constant honking, boisterous behavior, and the diesel fumes spewed by the trucks. They said Ottawa was under “siege”. The convoy triggered invocations of a “state of emergency” by the City of Ottawa, the Province of Ontario, and last, by the federal government. And a class-action lawsuit started against the organizers of the convoy.

From my perspective, life went on as usual. Like most in the City of Ottawa, I did not experience any inconvenience. I saw the activities taking place on TV; all limited to the small Parliamentary Precinct, downtown Ottawa. There were no break-ins, no damage to property. And the police peacefully moved the convoy out of the area on the weekend of February 18. A couple of people who complained about police brutality are being investigated (out of the 5 to 10,000 people who showed up on the weekends).

I had trouble hearing expressions like the city was under “siege” and the noise “tortured” people. If they referred to Ukraine or Syria, I would have understood. But in Ottawa? Surely those were flights of imagination.

The convoy started in Vancouver and gathered hundreds of followers along the way to Ottawa. The original purpose of the organizers was to demonstrate against covid mandates; spawned by federal regulations to have all truckers vaccinated when coming into Canada from the United States. By the time the convoy reached Ottawa, however, the purpose of the convoy was hijacked by right-wing activists who morphed the original purpose into much bigger unreasonable demands. My view is that the entire episode could have been avoided by the federal government talking with the convoy organizers before it grew into a kind of vaporous monster. But it did not happen.

Because of the lack of action by all levels of government to deal with the convoy, a young woman, Zexi Li, twenty-one years old, fed up with the noise in her downtown neighborhood, called residents in her building together with a community police officer to discuss the situation and ask the police to do something about it. At the meeting, she discovered that lawyer Paul Champ was preparing a class action suit against the convoy organizers and was looking for a lead plaintiff. She volunteered to become the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit. The first action of the lawsuit was a successful injunction to stop the honking. The rest of the class-action suit is ongoing.

Being the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit made her suddenly newsworthy in Ottawa and, for her initiative and determination to reduce the bothersome activities of convoy members in her community, she received the Mayor’s City Builder Award this week.

Did the Mayor choose wisely? I looked up previous recipients of the award and what I found striking was that all of them have worked on worthy causes for years, many for decades, raising thousands of dollars for good causes; providing educational and other services over long periods.

This is what the Mayor’s award is:

“The Mayor’s City Builder Award is a civic honor created to recognize an individual, group, or organization that has, through their outstanding volunteerism or exemplary action, demonstrated an extraordinary commitment to making our city a better place today and for the future. This may include lifelong service, outstanding acts of kindness, inspiring charitable work, community building, or any other exemplary achievements.”

I congratulate Ms. Li for her leadership, initiative, and guts. She assumed responsibility when others did not. But her leadership had one concrete event resolved: she triggered an injunction to stop honking. A one-time affair, not a sustaining multi-year effort, making the community a better place for the future. She brought back the community to its normal quiet existence, having been inconvenienced for a few weeks. There is no sustained effort required to keep the current status quo. The “event” is over. Her determination certainly deserved recognition by our city government. Perhaps a formal thank you? But, a City Builder Award? The class-action suit is ongoing. But I wonder if she did not rise to the occasion, someone else would have volunteered to become a “lead plaintiff”. Just my opinion.

The tremendous push in Ottawa for bicycling. Is it reasonable?

January 26, 2022

A week ago, the National Capital Commission in Ottawa announced the sale of a part of their lands for the construction of 601 residential rental units. Half of these will be “affordable”, or below-market rent units. What caught my attention was the proposal will provide 600 indoor parking spots for bicycles and 200 underground parking spots for cars. I read it twice: there will be 600 indoor parking spots for bicycles! And obviously, the NCC agreed with the proposal since they picked it from among three competing finalists.

So what is going on here? Clearly, there is a tremendous push for cycling, a push for encouraging people to use the public transit system, and a sideways nod to those people who still want to drive.

Now, Ottawa has a cold climate and most people get on their bikes for four to six months of the year. I would say that three to four months are desirable for biking when one does not need gloves to ride. During the winter months, the snow cover is treacherous for biking, coupled with cars that often lose control on ice-covered roads.

I am not against biking in Ottawa, and I enjoy riding during the summer months. But riding is most popular in the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, Sweden…. where the climate is much more suitable for riding, where the cities are dense and distances are small, where the cost of gas for cars is much higher than here in Canada and therefore cycling makes sense.

The Lonely Planet developed a map of how the climate of different countries would match the provinces and states in North America. As shown below, the climate of Germany and Scandinavia approximates the West coast of the continent where the ocean provides a warming influence. Most of Canada’s climate approximates that of Russia. And Russia, like Canada, is not among the top cycling countries in the world. I would think climate plays a major role; both countries are cold most of the year for comfortable riding. Not that we should not cycle more, especially in urban areas like Ottawa, but our climate limits the seasons for cycling here. Bicycling is a good mode of transportation sometimes, but cannot be relied on all the time in Ottawa.

The other aspect of this proposal is that almost half of the rental units, the affordable units, target women and children, veterans, Algonquins, and indigenous people, and recent immigrants. These people would not be high-income people, therefore needing subsidized housing. But I read in the cycling literature that education and income positively relate to bicycling! I am not sure the proponents of this scheme considered who will be the cyclists in this development. The target group for subsidized housing is not likely in the high education and income groups.

The assumption is that if you have no car (there are only 200 parking spots for 601 units); you walk or bicycle or take public transit. Unfortunately, there is not a plethora of needed services in the vicinity; for example, there is no grocery store nearby. So do you go shopping on your bike with a couple of saddlebags? I do not think so: I just looked out the window and the thermostat registers minus 23 celsius.

The developers may take comfort in that Ottawa, with its hundreds of kilometers of cycling paths, is the number one cycling city in Canada, according to one survey. But providing 600 bicycle parking spots for 601 rental units may be overkill. Unrealistic or overly optimistic. Just my opinion.