By Neala Barton
You’ve been called the “Queen of Ward 14,” and you seem to have readily accepted the title. Why do you think you got it?
I don’t know, perhaps because I’ve been in office for some time. That may be. I thought it was sort of silly myself, but sort of fun as well.
Do you think it suits you then?
No. I don’t feel queen-like at all. No, I think it’s a cute name, but I don’t think it’s terribly appropriate. I work with many, many people so it’s not me, you know, deciding things and doing things on my own. Everything that happens in Centretown – the public has a lot to say about it.
This election brought a lot of issues out of the woodwork. Which ones emerged as most important to the people you represent?
I knocked on thousands of doors and got lots of comments from people. And certainly there was quite a bit of comment about the lack of cleanliness of Centretown. That is something that has been cut back on in the past as we try and balance the books and keep the taxes down, but obviously it’s something many people feel strongly about. Litter is – people feel strongly about litter, people feel strongly about graffiti. Those two things have been on my agenda over the last while, but I’ll be working on them in the next term as well, because that came through loud and clear…It was [a] stronger [message] this time than it has been in the past.
Of all the other candidates you faced in this election, who did you feel was your biggest threat?
I really didn’t feel that there was a big threat. I thought that there were some interesting challenges. But what surprises me, often, is that people will run with absolutely no experience of having worked in the area.
They haven’t joined a community association; they haven’t been involved in any of the zoning things that the community has been involved in, in any of the work to get better designed roads, or supporting the pedestrian bridge, or supporting any of the things that people in this area want. People run when they’ve had no grounding in the community. So they’re entirely unknown. And this time people ran with no platform. So they weren’t known, they hadn’t worked in the past in the area, and they didn’t have a platform for what they wanted to do. I mean, they attacked me, which was their sole platform. That’s not acceptable to most people who live [in Centretown].
If you ran against Diane Holmes in an election, how would you beat her?
I’d have to work three or four years in advance. Become involved in committees, become involved in the community, get to know the people. Have an idea of what I wanted to do, as an opponent. How do I want to change things? What is it about what’s happening now that I don’t agree with? I mean, you have to come up with a different agenda that you want to see. I work with many, many groups in the community, so somebody else would have to find other groups that don’t agree with the Centretown future [I support]. And they’d have to work and get known.
The opponent who came closest to beating you, Luc Lapointe, says he won’t run in the next election. Will you?
Four years is some time. But I certainly will be looking at running again. I don’t see why I wouldn’t.
At the end of it all, what legacy do you hope to leave for this city and this community?
Over many years, we’ve seen the population growth of Centretown increase. I mean, it decreased for years – from the 1960s when the city came in and widened all the roads, took down all the trees – people just fled. They fled to the suburbs. That really emptied Centretown of families.
So, in the 1970s a group of residents got together and really started working at reducing and removing all those threats to Centretown as a neighbourhood. So you know, we have stopped highways from being built, we have brought people back from the suburbs – people are now interested in coming and buying condos. We’ve seen a population increase over the last 10 years, which is fabulous…
So over the last 20 years, Centretown has become much more healthy and viable – both the commercial streets and the residential areas. So I think that’s a pretty good legacy.
Nineteen incumbent councillors ran again for city council. All of them were re-elected. Does that happen because there’s a lack of viable alternate candidates, or is it just that no one wants to step up and take on someone like you?
Well, I run the way Centretown wants to move. So someone would have to run on exactly the same platform as me if they want to be elected, because that’s what people want. You know, I’m running on how people who live in Centretown want to develop, want to change and move.
How will working with Larry O’Brien be different from working with Bob Chiarelli?
I don’t think it will be very different. I’ve worked with many mayors. I’ve worked with Jim Durrell, and Andy Haydon, and Peter Clark over the years. And I expect that we will be working together, and [O’Brien] will consider downtown to be as important as anywhere else. And we’ll be working together for the good of the residents in this area.
What do you think are the advantages to having new blood in the mayor’s office?
If he has good ideas, I think it’s great. If he has good contacts federally – because we certainly need more funding from the federal government. We’re the only country in the G8 that does not have a federal transit program, and does not have a federal affordable housing program. And we need stable annual funding. You know, light rail – because we had no money for any kind of transit for ten years – there’s one big project. But, in fact, if we have annual funding you can build a line, piece by piece, as we did the Transitway. You know, we had 75 per cent provincial funding in the days of building the Transitway. It took about a billion dollars to build the Transitway and it took about 20 years. And that’s the way a city should work.
Do you expect there to be any challenges working with O’Brien?
I think he’ll learn fast, and I think he’ll learn that [the city has] a very different way of operating. You know, everything is in the public eye. All the meetings are – the media is there watching, all the discussions are public. All the planning is public, so that will be different for him, but I’m sure he can cope.
Will we see the same services in the city if Larry O’Brien follows through on his election promise not to raise taxes?
No. I think it’s really very difficult to do. I think he may think there’s extra fat at the city but no, there’s been a four year period with no tax [increases], which means that was about a 12 per cent cut. During some of those years we lost some of our property standards inspectors, our restaurant inspectors, various by-law inspectors. And this part of town needs inspectors…It was a cut to snow removal, it was a cut to sidewalk plowing in those years of no tax increases. I think for a downtown area, the effect is worse than in suburbia. So, I think it’s very difficult to hold the line without getting new income.
I’m very much in support of new income. I know that the mayor of Toronto is trying to get one per cent of sales tax. And there are American cities and European cities that have a sales tax percentage. The gas tax is very helpful, now that we have a percentage of gas tax. But we need a hotel room tax to pay for our festivals. We need a retail sales tax, we need a surcharge on vehicle licenses – which some American cities have – to put into transit. I mean, provinces cannot download responsibilities and not provide funding mechanisms. So I think that Mr. O’Brien, I’m certainly hoping, will be interested in going after new funding mechanisms.
Light rail: it was the big issue this election. Now that it’s over, what do you expect will happen to Ottawa’s transit plans?
I’m hoping that Siemens will be able to accept a change to the plan. In particular, the downtown. It would be terrific if we could do light rail through downtown and get the buses off Albert and Slater. That means that we then have to make Hurdman and Bayview enormous big turnaround stations – so hundreds of commuter buses have to have room to turn around.
And then, the train has to be really fast. People are not going to take the bus if they then have to sit 15 minutes outside in the freezing cold waiting for a train. It has to be very fast, very efficient, very clean, to make it acceptable to people.
I don’t know whether that’s possible, I don’t know whether we have the land there – there’s some NCC land so we’d have to negotiate with them. It’s a big change to the way things were planned. I don’t know how much time that would take, whether we’d have to do a whole new environmental assessment because that’s such a major change. So, time will tell about that, and Siemens will be playing a very important role in whether they’ll allow a change to their contract or whether they’ll take us to court. And it will cost us a fortune to get out of that contract. If they take us to court, we can’t use the transit money to pay for that.
Everybody agrees, we’d all rather do a large tunnel downtown, but we don’t have the money. That’s about $600 million to do the tunnel. And the federal government and provincial government base their money on ridership growth: they will give us money for transit but we have to increase ridership. We have to do something for the environment and get people out of cars. So, doing the tunnel downtown would be great estheticallly, and from an air quality, from just a viable-downtown point of view – much better for retail not to have those streets swamped in buses.
Where do you see this ward in four years?
We have a whole new zoning bylaw coming along that we’re going to have to watch closely. And I’m going to get a meeting organized with community associations. And we’re going to have to sit down with staff to find out what detailed changes there are planned in that zoning by-law. Because as developments come along, the zoning by-law is really what people feel protects them …that’s why they buy their houses, because they know what’s next door or what’s behind them. So they don’t want to see some massive change coming along that they had not been expecting when they purchased their residence. So that’s a big piece of work over the next little while…
I’m hoping for a new park. We have two recreation studies going on, so there’s the study that’s involving St. Luke’s park and Jack Purcell park…There’s also the park down at the old technical high school between Albert and Laurier, the city owns a piece of land there, but mainly it’s school board land. So we have been working with the school board to try and prepare should they ever sell that land, so that the city will have access to that green space.
On the matter of safety, the federal government has not been successful at keeping illegal drugs out of Canada . . . The police tell me there is more illegal drug on the street now, it’s cheaper, it’s more addictive, and so people are committing crimes in order to get the money to pay for their drug habit, which leads to more theft from cars, for example. So we need to be forming more community safety groups…So safer, greener, cleaner, and with development that fits in.