By Meghan Wubs
After nine years of fighting for her community’s underdogs and against its business leaders, Elisabeth Arnold will bid her Somerset Ward councillor’s job farewell at the end of this month. But her legacy will linger.
Rebuilding the historic Plant Pool was one of Arnold’s key projects while on council. The pool, located at Somerset and Preston streets, was condemned in 1996. Arnold championed a $8.7-million plan to rebuild the pool, a project that’s now underway.
Sally Rutherford, chair of the Plant Pool Recreation Association, remembers Arnold’s dedication to rebuilding the Plant Pool.
“Elisabeth has been incredibly supportive on the Plant Pool side right from the outset and she certainly provided us with an enormous amount of support and advice and encouragement when it was in the dark stages,” she says, adding that without Arnold’s encouragement and tireless effort, it would have been easy to walk away from the project.
“She’s been so incredibly supportive of community efforts all the way through,” Rutherford says. “It helped us turn the corner. It made everybody on city council and city staff realize that Elisabeth wasn’t going to give up and we weren’t going away. We were going to have a pool come hell or high water.”
Arnold also worked on finding a place for women’s concerns at city council.
Valerie Collicott, from the Women’s Initiatives For Safer Environments worked with Arnold. Formerly the Women’s Action Against Violence, WISE works on creating safe communities for women through education, training and safety policies.
Collicott often went to Arnold for advice on developing these policies.
“I’ve always found her a staunch defender of women’s participation in municipal politics and doing what she can to improve the situation for women in the city of Ottawa,” says Collicott.
Arnold played an instrumental role in a working group formed in November 1999 to figure out how the municipal government could make its services and jobs more available to women.
The working group, which brought together city councillors, female activists, and faculty from Carleton University and the University of Ottawa, presented its 22-page list of recommendations to council in September 2002.
“She was probably the strongest voice on the city council with respect to making sure women’s concerns were noted,” says Collicott.
Doing that type of “social work” is fine, says Peter Harris, the former executive director of the Preston Street Business Improvement Area.
But for Somerset Ward business leaders working with Arnold was a constant battle, he says.
“As far as her interaction with the small businesses, the Preston Street BIA had requested that she be removed from that board and the reason was that she just would not co-operate with small businesses,” says Harris.
“She’s not a politician by any stretch of the imagination.”
Harris may not have been impressed by Arnold’s political skills, but Knoxdale-Merivale Coun. Gord Hunter was. He served with Arnold on the council’s planning and development committee.
Hunter says Arnold was an impressive representative and “not one to go grandstanding.”
Hunter says Arnold knew the issues, especially when it came to her community.
“On every planning application that came forward to the city, that involved her ward, she was absolutely top of it,” says Hunter.