Graffiti lines the south side of Slater Street.
Critics of Ottawa’s year-old graffiti bylaw say the onus should not be on business owners to clean or pay for graffiti removal without the opportunity to appeal and has led one Centretown restaurant owner to challenge the bylaw in court.
Luc Lapointe says he is appealing to the Ontario Superior Court to review the graffiti bylaw because it discriminates by not applying to all buildings in Ottawa.
“There’s no due process, so I’m actually being victimized twice,” he says.
When Lapointe returned from a trip to Mexico, he discovered that graffiti had been cleaned off the side of his restaurant, Hot Peppers. Two months later, he received a bill for the removal. He says the city claims it sent a letter indicating he was required to remove the graffiti, but he never received it because he was out of town.
Lapointe says the city needs a mechanism for people to appeal bylaw officers’ judgment on whether something is graffiti or art.
“What’s their background in art?” he says.
The bylaw defines graffiti as “one or more letters, symbols, etchings, figures, inscriptions, stains howsoever made or otherwise affixed to a property or other markings that disfigure or deface a property.”
“That’s a very subjective decision because it’s up to that bylaw officer to look at something on a wall and say ‘Okay, does that deface the wall?’ ” says Mike Young, who promotes graffiti as an urban art form and as a tool to get youth involved in art and the community.
He questions whether painted bunnies and flowers deface a wall.
“If it meets that definition, that’s graffiti. If it doesn’t, it’s not,” says Christine Hartig, a project and policy officer with Ottawa’s bylaw and regulatory services. She says she saw photos of the graffiti on Lapointe’s restaurant.
“It was bubble letters,” she says. “It’s clearly not art. It met the definition of the bylaw.”
Hartig says it is in business owners’ interest to keep their properties graffiti-free.
“We’re a business that wants to attract people,” says Lapointe. “If the building itself doesn’t look good, then nobody will come to our restaurant.”
The bylaw is part of the city’s larger graffiti management program that focuses on eradication. It states that property owners must remove graffiti within a minimum of seven days of notification. If they don’t, they will be charged for the removal.
“It’s really important for people to remove it as soon as possible because the longer the graffiti stays up, the more interested the vandals are in continuing on with it,” says Hartig.
The problem isn’t swift removal, says Lapointe.
“It’s finding a way to deal with people that are doing it.”
Ottawa currently has three legal graffiti walls, but the city’s website suggests legal walls can send a contradictory message about the acceptance of graffiti.
“The legal walls are helpful in that they give the youth a place to show their art off to each other and to the public,” says Young.
He says Ottawa should adopt an appeals process or change the definition to unwanted graffiti, as other cities such as Vancouver have done.
He says he’d like to see a program that links young artists with home and business owners who want murals. He says graffiti murals prevent further tagging.