Tag: ottawa

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.

Free Bus Passes for Refugees in Ottawa

May 4, 2022

Ukrainian refugees arriving in Ottawa provided moving stories in the local newspaper, and discussions with friends centered on the ongoing war in Ukraine.

These discussions moved on from the war and focussed on how to help the refugees arriving in Ottawa. It was encouraging to learn the City councillor from Kanata suggested that free transit passes be provided to the refugees for six months upon arrival. Another Councillor expanded the motion to include all refugees, to be fair. The City Council passed the motion.

A friend of mine suggested that with the free passes, the refugees may get to know the city. I asked, “are you saying that they should sight-see?” And I immediately followed up by: “come on! Refugees try to establish themselves and their lives in a new country and new city, and sightseeing is the last thing they are interested in.”

I was a refugee and my first task, beyond feeding myself and finding a place to sleep, was to learn the English language. Being a refugee is a traumatic experience and just getting used to the local scene compared to the old country: the architecture, the people, the way people dress, the food, and the smell of the ocean gave me more than enough to absorb. Sightseeing was a concept perhaps in my dreams in the long run, but certainly not in my first few months upon arrival.

Here is my story: my hostess, a nurse, who had an old, big house in the Kitsilano area of Vancouver, found out that volunteers gave English lessons to Hungarians at the YMCA in downtown Vancouver. My brother and I hustled down there to learn the language a few days after our arrival. Our host gave us some bus tickets to get to the YMCA. We learned English during the day and practiced grammar at night. We did not take or have time to sightsee. It took us a few months to converse in English sufficiently well to give us the confidence to look for a job, which was our next priority.

A few blocks from where we lived was Dueck on Broadway, a large car dealership, and cars intrigued my brother, coming from Hungary where there were few. He approached Dueck and offered to wash cars. They said that would be fine, but he also had to jockey the cars for the wash. So my brother walked to the licensing bureau and in forty-eight hours got his driver’s license. He was happy with his first job in Canada and felt like he was on top of the world.

I followed the job ads in the local paper, the Vancouver Sun, every day. In a week, I found a job with a furrier dragging animal skins to show buyers for their appraisal, hundreds of skins each day. My first huge cultural learning curve was when the appraiser gave me a huge cash tip at the end of his work, which I refused to accept, saying I was just doing my job.

In Hungary, there was no tipping, all people worked for the government (under the communist system), and there was no incentive to work hard for the possibility of additional income. The appraiser looked at me with a questioning eye, but perhaps figured me out by listening to my strange accent and probably improper English. I thought I just did what they hired me for. And this experience was an initial step in my acculturation in Canada.

I worked there until it was time to think about going back to further my education. My brother did the same and eight months after arriving in Canada, we both enrolled at the University of British Columbia.

I remembered my refugee experience when talking with my friend, and it shocked me people have so little understanding of, or empathy for, what refugees go through when they arrive in a country new to them. But why should they? It is totally outside their frame of reference.

Even if sightseeing is an option with free bus tickets, where would you go in Ottawa on a bus? Would you go to the east or west of the city, get off, and walk around? The endpoints of bus routes are not tourist spots. And the bus stops in Ottawa are not within reasonable walking distance of many homes. It could be a tough slog in the middle of a cold winter to walk to a bus stop for people arriving from tropical climates.

And the local people who host refugees have cars and take the refugees to get their health and social insurance cards and take them to medical facilities if needed. Would the refugees ever use the free bus passes?

The provision of free bus passes to recent refugee arrivals made a nice headline in the newspaper and surely, some refugees would use them. But the priority for recent refugee arrivals is to find a place to live; learn the language; get a job and gain a career via schooling or retraining.

Perhaps free bus passes for all the poor would be a better option?

From Real to Unreal in One Day

April 29, 2022

My car dealership does not have a van to take clients home when they leave their cars for the day. Instead, they call Uber. I left my car yesterday for maintenance at the dealership and they called Uber. My Uber driver was Syrian. He came to Canada as a refugee escaping Assad’s regime. He has a family and told me he works twelve-hour days. His Hyundai was spotless but explained to me that his next car will be an electric one to save on fuel. His biggest cost today is gas.

When I got home and opened my computer, there was an invitation for me to fill out a survey on “mobility justice”; a concept that transportation services should be equally available in all communities. This was a follow-up to a webinar that I signed up for previously.

The invite said: “We are continuing to explore what mobility justice means for community members on the unceded and unsurrendered territory of the Algonquin Anishinabe People (so-called Ottawa)”. OK. So if people ask me where I am from, what do I say? Am I from Ottawa or am I from the unceded and unsurrendered territory of the Algonquin Anishinabe People?

Come on now! Ottawa, Canada, is known around the world as the capital city of Canada. Who heard of the unceded and unsurrendered territory of the Algonquin Anishinabe People?

Before completing the survey, I listened to the transcript of the webinar

The first speaker at the webinar spoke on behalf of the City for all Women Initiative, a volunteer group working with the City of Ottawa. She explained that “marginalized” communities, typically occupied by low-income and racialized people, lack sidewalks, cycling paths, and bus service. For example, the LRT (Light Rail Transit) in Ottawa does not serve the communities at Heron Gate, Dynes Road, Overbrook, Vanier, and Carlington, implying that these communities are low-income and racialized. She did not produce hard data to support her comments. The LRT serves a tiny portion of Ottawa: it is being built currently, so her comments apply to most of Ottawa.

In addition, she talked about other barriers affecting the ability of these communities to access public transit – the lack of safety on buses and bus shelters in need of cleaning. She said bus service should be frequent, affordable, and reliable in marginalized areas.

I agree with everything she said except that bus service should be available in all communities, not only in marginalized areas.

But what does “mobility justice” mean in practical terms? Could it be the same number of buses in each community regardless of population density? A bus stop within walking distance from all people in the community? And if so, with what frequency and cost? My head was spinning with questions on what is equal access to transportation or “mobility justice”.

The next speaker was a member of the Criminalization and Punishment Education Project (CPEP was established by professors and students at Carleton University and the University of Ottawa). The key message of CPEP is to change our minds about resolving social conflict by focusing on mutual help instead of criminalization and punishment. He made a pitch for defunding the police and using the money instead for community building. He introduced himself as a highly privileged, white, cisgender person; I am not sure what the point was in doing so. He said that he is not an expert on “mobility justice” and listening to his comments, I wondered why he was at the webinar.

He described one key objective of his group: “Challenge inequality, privilege and dominant social structures (e.g. capitalism, colonialism, racism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, and ableism) that have a particularly negative impact on marginalized persons and groups.”

By now my mind was going gradually numb with all this social jargon until another speaker spoke of looking at the Transportation Master Plan under preparation by the City of Ottawa through an “equity lens”. Aha! This may be the nub of mobility justice: look at transportation planning via an “equity lens”. But equity was not defined, and neither was the lens. I was not sure how to quantify the equity needed to correct the situation, discovered through the lens.

Before I could finish listening to the entire transcript of the webinar and respond to the survey, the car dealership called my car was ready, and sent an Uber taxi to pick me up. During our ride, the driver mentioned that he hardly makes ten dollars an hour with increased gas prices and needs to work two jobs to make a living wage. The reality of trying to make a living today brought me back to the genuine issues facing people.

I appreciate the work of all those people advocating for “mobility justice”, for low-income and racialized people, whatever that entails. But I wonder if we should talk about creating better-paying jobs for those people, instead of demolishing their homes for the right-of-way of the LRT?

Public Engagement Goes Off the Rails, My Rant for the Day

April 23, 2022

Four City Councillors, four staff members, and two councillor staff held a zoom meeting last night where eight people hooked up to discuss the preparation of the City of Ottawa’s Solid Waste Master Plan for the next thirty years. I was one of the eight people. I am sure that all the Councillors informed their voters of the upcoming consultation in their recent newsletters; that is how I learned about the meeting.

We spent a couple of hours listening to a presentation by city staff followed by an open discussion, but only eight people were interested enough to hook up in a city of a million people! That is a shame.

One reason for the lack of interest may be that the city has a habit of consulting but not listening. That is what most people think. Public reviews for proposed high-rise buildings in settled residential neighborhoods often trigger huge local opposition by area residents, but they have very limited success with their objections. The developers usually get what they want in terms of height limits and other requirements beyond what the zoning code allows. People had gotten frustrated and lost faith in the city’s consultation process.

Another reason could be the subject. You know people get riled up and show up in huge numbers to oppose a highway going thru their neighborhood arguing that it will destroy their property values and the cohesiveness of the neighborhood. Perhaps planning for solid waste management is not a subject people are concerned about. So was this high-level zoom meeting with councillors necessary?

Was city staff aware of the scant interest the public has in preparing the Solid Waste Master Plan? They had organized half a dozen zoom meetings (and planned for special target group meetings as well) about various aspects of the plan, such as technology, changing behavior to reduce solid waste, and so on.

I had signed up for some of these zoom meetings and had found participation low, with only dozens of people attending. City officials had reported on the status of the plan at these sessions. The public attendees asked for clarifications and often the response was that “it is a good question” or “working on this and get back to you”.

In response to my question at one of these meetings, the program manager said that the cost per family for solid waste removal is $150 in Ottawa while in other Canadian municipalities, the cost ranges up to hundreds of dollars. But she did not explain how the delivery of the services compares to having such a wide divergence in cost.

One consultation subject was to make high-rise buildings separate organic from other waste; there is typically one chute for high-rise residents to dump waste. I asked how come the City Council just considered that exact policy for approval when we are supposed to be debating the subject? The answer was that some elements of the plan that enjoy wide consensus will be approved during this consultation process. I asked myself: why are we here then?

Then I signed up for one of the focus group sessions to which immigrants and BIPOC people (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) were invited. City officials planned two zoom sessions, one for immigrants and another one for BIPOC people, only to merge the two groups the day before the planned date. Obviously, they did not generate enough interest from those target groups to have two sessions. And, as it turned out, I was the only one who signed on.

The coordinator addressed me when the meeting started via the zoom audio channel, asking if I wanted to carry on alone since I had heard the standard presentation a few times. I was interested in listening to what other people had to say about the plan and with me as the only participant; I declined to carry on with the meeting.

Maybe it is the wrong time to engage people at this early stage of the planning process. At a more advanced stage, there may be issues that impact people directly. Such as the cost of acquiring new technology. Or buying land to expand the Trail Road dumpsite. Such initiatives could call for additional debt to the city that the city would pass on to the residents. That would hit people’s pockets books and they might show up to express their displeasure or support such additional expenditures.

I think some people are tired of consultations, some are complacent and some may not be interested in solid waste management. For now, though, I would recommend the City save money on their professional public engagement bureaucracy, pay overtime for night work, and fancy presentations and fix potholes on our major roads. Just my opinion.