Tag: ottawa

How College Students Spend Summers – Then and Now

August 3, 2022

This is not a scientific poll by any stretch of the imagination. But I reflected on how three of my college-age grandchildren spent their summers this year and compared it to what I and my friends did for summers while attending college over sixty years ago.

We had one goal: to get a job to pay for tuition, room, and board for next year at the university. My grandchildren had loftier goals: do something interesting, educational, and even exciting, while making money. Big difference in aspirations! Is this true? You be the judge.

OK. So what did I and my friends do when we were at college? To pay for the cost of attending university the next year, we took the first job we could get. The emphasis was on getting a job, any job. We did not think about fun activities.

Looking for a job in my first year at university, I had a couple of false starts. One was strawberry picking on the lower mainland of British Columbia, where the stench of the accommodation and backbreaking work all day finished my enthusiasm in one week. The other false start was my unsuccessful career selling Collier’s encyclopedia in small towns along the Fraser Valley to poor people. After these attempts, I was successful in getting a sustaining job: I settled into a summer of dish-washing at the Essondale Mental Hospital. Boring as dickens but steady and paid well. The mental patients ribbed me about seeing me doing “women’s jobs”. But I lived at home and could save all my earnings.

Other jobs followed in subsequent years. I was happy to be hired by a survey crew where I did machete work in the wilderness of Vancouver Island’s interior, memorable for the cloud of deer flies and mosquitoes. When I complained, they assigned me to work inside, where I experienced the most boring job of my life: drawing cross-sections for a highway from survey data. Each drawing took a few minutes; plot seven dots on graph paper and connect the dots. I decided never to be a draftsman for a survey crew.

One highlight of this job was that I learned to like and drink beer (in retrospect, this may not have been a positive highlight). We drank beer in the hotel pub at night, having nothing else to do. I learned to gulp down a glass of beer by holding the glass with my teeth and knocking my head backward while opening my throat. Most nights ended with the natives joining us and getting into a rumble that I avoided at all costs.

I left the survey crew in a haste on my last day, after hearing the crew members talking about teaching the “college boy” about real life by stripping me and inserting my private parts into an anthill.

So what do college kids do today? My grandson Cedric showed up at the cottage in Elgin, ON, after a 3000-mile bicycle ride from Portland OR. He is an engineering student at Oregon State University (in Corvallis) and decided to cycle coast to coast before taking on a summer job. What a great physical and educational adventure! And potentially dangerous, too.

Among his many observations he related, he found the prairie people more friendly and curious than west coast people and discovered coffee at Tim Hortons in Canada much hotter than McDonald’s in the US. He avoided places where people looked at him with suspicion, but also met many friendly folks who let him camp overnight in their yard.

He used the “warm showers community” website in his travels, where people offer a welcoming hot shower and a place to bunk down, to cyclists. What first-hand experience learning about your country!

My thoughts circled back to Cedric and his financial situation and how he could afford to spend six weeks cycling and not working. I recalled that last summer he did fire-fighting in Idaho and saved money: accommodation and food were provided in tents in the wilds of Idaho. They were paid for sixteen-hour days and there was no place or time to spend money. They worked in fourteen-day stints, then were off for two days before another fourteen-day session started. For Cedric, it was another amazing educational and well-paying experience as well.

Here is another example of what students do for a summer job today. Not satisfied with repeating a job as a cashier in a grocery store, my granddaughter, MaryKate, created her summer job. With friends from Georgia Tech in Atlanta, where she is a student, they secured accommodation from the friend’s family to stay at their cottage in upstate New York. Then they took training in whitewater rafting and obtained a job with ARO, an adventure class white water outfit in Watertown NY. Another great experience! When MaryKate did not work at the white water center, she worked at the local grocery store. She created her job!

One final example is how another grandson, Alec, parlayed three seasons of fun-filled sailing camp experience in Ottawa, Canada, into teaching sailing to disadvantaged children on Lake Pontchartrain in New Orleans. All I heard from Alec during the summer sailing camps was the fun they had turtling (turning the sailing boat upside down), but obviously, they also learned to sail!

Alec negotiated his accommodation in New Orleans by sleeping on a boat belonging to a friend. It had never entered my mind that summer camps can provide skills making you able to get into the workforce.

Yes, three examples do not form a valid sample. Despite that, my cohort, over sixty years ago, had much more pedestrian jobs. Why? I can only speculate that the children today live more in the present and try to maximize their opportunities. As well, they have more confidence. What are your thoughts on this subject?

Interactions with the City of Ottawa

July 17, 2022

I witnessed a bylaw officer exercising his power by writing a ticket for a car pulling away from the curb, occupied by a hurried mother dropping off her child at day camp. On the same day, I also experienced an unbelievably friendly outreach by OC Transpo. Let me describe my day.

Although bylaws are necessary, and I support them, sometimes I find them heavy-handed when enforced to the letter of the law. A case in point is a situation I witnessed yesterday dropping off my granddaughter at a soccer camp by the University of Ottawa, which upset me to such an extent that I wrote to the Mayor of the City, Jum Watson, about it.

“Jim, I witnessed an outrageous incident this morning. Dropped off my granddaughter for soccer camp at the University of Ottawa Minto field on Templeton this morning when one of your meanest and nastiest bylaw officers wrote down the license plate of an unfortunate parent, going to work after dropping off her child. Yes, she was in a no-stopping zone and yes, the officer did what they pay him for. But…

Parents have to walk onto Minto field with the child to register, so one has to park and walk the child to the field, which takes a few minutes. Now I have the time to park a block away and walk back to register my granddaughter, but many parents work and try to drop off the child by putting on the flashers. This poor woman I saw running back to her car and getting in while the bylaw officer wrote the ticket. She drove away, and the officer was still writing the ticket. What a mean-spirited attitude!

I wrote this in the heat of my anger but received the following reply:

Thank you for your correspondence. Your feedback and concerns are always appreciated. I have shared your feedback with the Mayor and his staff for their review and consideration.

There you have it. Courteous and brief but will go nowhere. Perhaps they will copy their human resources group to train bylaw officers to use their power judiciously, considering the individual situation.

The same day, my granddaughter discovered double-decker buses in the city when we drove to her soccer camp. She wanted to ride one. Not knowing which routes these buses run and at what time, my wife contacted our local councilor, who referred our request to OC Transpo, the agency running the bus service. In a couple of hours, we received an email:

 “Hello, Katherine. Thanks for reaching out. We have an idea that might be the most flexible in your needs to get your granddaughter on a double-decker bus. I understand why she likes them. They are very different and fun to ride. It would be much easier to talk a plan through by phone. Please give me a call at your nearest convenience and we can discuss it. “

The upshot of the phone conversation was that a transit supervisor met us at 5 pm at Baseline station and flagged a double-decker bus for us, shepherded us into the bus, and recommended that we take the bus to the end station and wait and come back on the same bus, which took a different route to where we parked our car. The supervisor suggested we sit on the top deck, on the left, so that we can enjoy the view of the Ottawa River. We had a scenic ride that the supervisor recommended, almost a tour of a part of the city. My granddaughter was beside herself.

This was much more than we expected; all we wanted to know was where and when the double-decker buses run so we could take a ride on one. OC Transpo went beyond our expectations to assist us.

Lessons learned? The city provides numerous services; do not judge its performance by any individual activity. In one case, the city was client-oriented, while in the other, it was not.

Are Public Consultations Useful?

June 11, 2022

Are Public Consultations Useful?

Responding to an ad in the local community newsletter, I registered for a virtual meeting to discuss the future of Confederation Heights, an Ottawa employment hub for the federal government. The ad caught my attention, having been a city planner. Reading the ad, I realized this was the second meeting on this, aimed at getting public feedback.

The Canada Lands Company (CLC) was the lead on this project and hired consultants to carry out the work.

Before joining the second meeting, I read a detailed report: the consultants prepared a summary of the discussion at the first zoom meeting entitled “Realize the potential”. I describe the “key themes” gleaned from the meeting further down.

I looked forward to the zoom meeting with interest: they built Confederation Heights in the 1950s and it is time to reevaluate the aging buildings and sprawling parklands with an eye for improvements and future development (the Greber plan of 1949 recommended the idea of an employment hub). Several of the original buildings, built in the 1950s, have received heritage designations, on this 640-acre site.

The site today includes two extensive parks managed by the National Capital Commission, a recreation complex run by federal employees, the Headquarters for Canada Post, and several federal office buildings, some empty. Three four-lane thoroughfares cross the site, as well as a CN railway line.

The meeting started with the speaker acknowledging the Algonquin Anishinabe people, for having lived in the area for a millennium, and for their cultural and other contributions to the Ottawa area. I’ll have to do some research to find out what these contributions are. I am not aware of any.

Government agencies in Ottawa start public meetings with this introduction. I have experienced this in the past few months. In my opinion, it is a cruel hoax that raises expectations but is unlikely to result in anything material for the natives. But the artificiality of this hollow gesture pains me.

Since this was a presentation by federal government officials, the meeting had to be bilingual. I knew that from my previous work in the federal bureaucracy. But the interpretation services failed occasionally, and we had to listen to the English and then to the French speeches covering the same subjects.

The consultants began by describing the multi-year process to develop a plan for the next thirty years. I have trouble with long-range plans, which seldom produce the results desired. Many unanticipated events may interfere. Long-range plans should provide broad options, adaptable to future changes. I look forward to seeing the final product in a year.

The consultants also explained the site has many uses that will not change. The parks will stay and the RA Center and its playing fields are likely to stay along with the designated heritage buildings, which may be renovated for new uses.

Major city roads occupying extensive areas, crisscrossing the site with many access ramps, will have to remain. They will also preserve woodlots. Potential new buildings will have to blend into the roadwork, the woodlots, and the heritage buildings, a creative challenge for architects.

So what were the “key themes” derived from the first public engagement exercise that will guide the future development? The first theme was “mix of use, i.e.., shopping, housing, open spaces/parks, community amenities”. But is not mixed-use what you have in all cities, excluding suburbs? This is the reality of most large-scale urban development today.

The second highest priority theme was “sustainability”. What does that mean? Is it related to the woodlots that may house wildlife? Is there more to “sustainability”?

The next theme was “housing affordability and active mobility”. Would you define housing affordability? My interpretation of affordability is that housing prices are too high for the average income earner. But I am not sure urban planning is as suitable to deal with housing affordability, whatever it is, as government subsidy programs. And active mobility refers to bicycle and walking paths; most communities wish to have those.

The next two “themes” were “making public transit a priority” and “high-quality urban design”. Are these unique objectives or are these, really, objectives that should be taken for granted? Some people with cars may not consider public transit a priority. And others may not have an esthetic eye for urban design. But if you asked people and were given the choice, who would want poor public transit and low-quality urban design?

Are these “themes” anything more than motherhood statements? The same ideas propped up at the second meeting in which I took part, hoping to learn more useful information. Instead, I heard more jargon about “vibrant and diverse” communities with “tree-lined streets”, walking/cycling paths, and underground shopping malls to deal with winters in Ottawa (similar to what is in Montreal).

I wondered about the usefulness of these consultations. Have the consultants learned anything that would be useful in their design of the land beyond dreamy visions? But, perhaps, that was the purpose of these public engagements: to hear the public out on their dreams for the development of this site. The concepts which emerged from the public feedback could apply to any large-scale urban development in any city in North America. I cannot recall any comments that specifically relate to Confederation Heights.

The future of this property will depend on economic and population trends, and the resulting demand for commercial and residential properties. Nobody can foresee these trends with any clarity thirty years ahead.

I think the consultants will identify usable development parcels on the site and propose land uses and building envelopes by zoning regulations (highrise, lowrise, commercial, etc.). When economic conditions are ripe, developers will bid on parcels of developable land at Confederation Heights to do what they do best: propose workable projects with public appeal. Was this exercise anything more than checking the box on: “public engagement”? Just my opinion.

A New Divide: People Who Work From Home vs. Others. Wonking Out

May, 10, 2022

The pandemic has accelerated the trend in “teleworking”, or what is called today “work from home”. Governments and companies encouraged workers who could work from home to do so to reduce potential infections in the office. But who are these workers and what impacts has this movement had on our daily life?

According to Statistics Canada, over thirty percent of workers worked from home, between April 2020 and June 2021. In 2016, only 4 percent of people did so. A massive change in the work environment, mostly triggered by Covid, I think.

The composition of this home-based workforce is interesting. According to Statistics Canada, seventy percent of people who worked from home were in the “professional, scientific and technical services” industry category.

By income, eight percent of people in the bottom ten percent and over sixty percent of people in the top ten percent of wage earners worked from home.

So better educated and higher-income people seem to have been given a greater opportunity to work from home than others (education and income are usually positively related).

But, there are other consequences resulting from this trend. A recent article by a city planner in Vancouver envisioned that the work-from-home movement could result in larger homes because of the need for a home office. And larger homes need vacant terrain to be subdivided, gobbling up choice agricultural lands around major cities in Canada. The article also envisioned a home with more outdoor space than the norm today, considering people will avoid public spaces and parks for fear of infection.

The article surprised me since current city plans, including Ottawa’s, strongly encourage “densification”, to save on infrastructure and minimize carbon emissions by reducing the daily commute. Perhaps the need to build larger homes for work at home will decrease in time, paralleling the elimination of Covid, if that is possible. Not a likely event in the short term.

I provide all of this context to introduce the nub of a potential issue: people love working from home and the trend toward it may create a new divide. The lucky ones may continue the work-from-home routine while others may never get to enjoy it. Now I have not done a professional survey but have anecdotal evidence from talking with many people who love to work at home and never want to go back to the office.

People I talked with gave me many reasons why working from home is advantageous: you can choose your hours of work; you save time by not having to dress up to go to work; you save money by not buying coffee or lunch and commuting (save on gas, parking or transit costs); and you can take care of daily activities like shopping, taking children to school; or go on a bike ride or run when times are nice.

But, there may be downsides as well. You may miss the watercooler talks catching up on what is going on in the office; miss meetings in person where you may find out more about projects through the body language of others (zoom meetings provide less communication than in-person meetings). You may miss opportunities to show your skills and knowledge to your boss in ad hoc situations that could lead to promotions. Recruits may find it difficult to learn the culture of the organization being away from the office. And some people may find it intrusive that some bosses may call you on a 24/7 basis.

Another unanticipated consequence of working from home may be that office buildings stay empty, taking away the livelihood of many businesses serving office workers. But, of course, companies and governments save money on reduced office space demand.

I remember people blamed the recent convoy in Ottawa for destroying the restaurant industry downtown. But have you considered that the government in Ottawa, ordering employees to work from home for the last two years, may have been a key factor that killed the restaurants downtown?

It may take a few years before we see the light on whether the work-from-home trend will continue. But, to date, this movement has created a divide between those who can avail themselves of this attractive way of working versus others who just cannot do it. And it has created incentives toward low-density urban development conflicting with current city planning objectives to densify to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and save good agricultural lands. Just my opinion.

The Curse of Oak Leaves

May 7, 2022

The Curse of Oak Leaves

It is a beautiful May afternoon. The wind is blowing the oak leaves in my backyard and I am sipping coffee and thinking about how much more raking I need to collect the leaves. The piles of oak leaves cover up my plants. Oak trees lose their leaves slowly through the Fall and Winter. I try to get the leaves collected before the snow covers the plants in the Fall. But, of course, cannot collect the oak leaves which fall over the Winter until snowmelt in the Spring.

Oak leaves come from the neighbor; we do not have any oak trees. We have other trees, the leaves of which had already fallen and been collected before snowfall.

Mind you, the leaves are large and beautiful in attractive hues but feel like leather. And that is why they do not crumple, even in time. They survive as whole leaves and cover the ground, killing the plants and vegetation under. So collecting them is a must if you want to keep your garden.

Now it is May again and lo-and-behold, there are still oak leaves in my yard.

When the neighbor moved in decades ago, they planted some sample trees, many oaks, along the perimeter of their yard. It sounded like a good idea. But trees grow and in decades the trees became mammoth.

For example, the ironwood in the corner next to us is over eighty feet tall. The lower branches were scraping and making a hole in my roof, so I had to hire people to take some branches off, which cost hundreds of dollars.

Before the contractor could prune the ironwood, he had to have the approval of the neighbor. So we marched over to the owner of the house next door and I talked with the woman whom we had known for a long time but never socialized with. Her husband died of cancer a couple of decades ago and she has not maintained her yard, nor pruned the trees. But she agreed to have her tree pruned, seeing the professional-looking t-shirt with a company logo, worn by the tree cutter. At any rate, I paid for the branch removal.

Another year, another cleanup of the oak leaves. Another few dozen bags later, I was getting mad: why do I have to clean up after the neighbor? The wind blows HER leaves into my yard. She should clean up. But she does not even clean up her yard except for a day in the Fall and a day in the Spring, hiring a contractor for the cleanup. Is there some bylaw that would require people to clean up their yard? And could such a bylaw be enforced? Or could there be a bylaw prohibiting the planting of oak trees on regular-sized, quarter-acre city lots?

Now I thought of talking with my neighbor when in a good mood and not upset with raking her leaves and perhaps trying to convince her to get her cleanup earlier and more thoroughly in the Fall and the Spring to minimize her oak leaves arriving in my yard. But I decided that would be useless; I chatted once with her before replacing an aging and ugly cedar hedge between us comprising tall poles denuded of green parts and even offered to pay for it, but she refused.

Another idea I thought of was to just dump the leaves back in her yard; they are her leaves. I thought about it and declined to act. She lives by herself and probably needs help. Who am I to give her more grief?

So I keep raking, bagging, and hoping that gypsy moths will enjoy the oak leaves this Spring and take care of my continuing frustration this year.