Let’s embrace the cold and make Ottawa a great ‘winter city’
We can take our cue from Edmonton, which seeks to enhance outdoor activities
This is a tough sell when the health unit is warning about losing fingers to frostbite, but Ottawa can and should do more to embrace winter rather than resisting it.
We do a lot already. We piled into the Crashed Ice downhill-skating competition last March in such numbers that crowdcontrol was a problem. We packed the outdoor stands at Lansdowne for a snowy Grey Cup and again a couple of weeks later for a frigid Sens-Habs outdoor hockey game. Last New Year’s Eve, thousands of people stood in blowing snow to see fireworks shooting off from behind Parliament.
This Sunday is forecast to one of the chilliest parts of this freeze-your-truffles-off cold snap, but I’ll bet you it doesn’t make that much difference to interest in the New Year’s Eve dance party on the Hill.
The Rideau Canal Skateway is Ottawa’s prime winter attraction. As I wrote yesterday, for as long as the National Capital Commission has been keeping stats, its counters have recorded a pretty consistent average of 20,000 skaters a day when it’s open — as many as 30,000 in really good years, but no fewer than 15,000, even when the weather’s been borderline and conditions have been poor. Even in long seasons, interest doesn’t wane.
City hall’s ice rink is crowded on any half-decent skating day. The free tickets for the temporary Parliament Hill rink get claimed fast when they get released at noon, for slots two days later. The SJAM Winter Trail, for skiing and snow-biking and whatnot along the Ottawa River all the way from Westboro to LeBreton Flats, has turned in a couple of years from a little-volunteer-effort-that-could into an institution.
Edmonton has a “Winter City” strategy, to “reclaim the joy of winter and embrace the season.” Yes, winter is cold and dark, Edmonton says, but we live here anyway. So bring it. Some of it has aspirational guff, like “Develop a strategy that will identify, promote and encourage various winter businesses.” To Ottawa eyes, Edmonton’s strategy devotes a flabbergasting amount of attention to clearing the snow off sidewalks, which in Edmonton is generally a private duty rather than one the city government handles (turns out that if you can’t count on a clear path to work or fun, you tend to go outside less). But it also includes plenty of specific ideas we could just rip off.
“Create opportunities and develop parameters for the use of fire in outdoor public spaces (e.g. fire pits, fireplaces, bonfires, heaters and other fire amenities),” for instance. You basically can’t burn wood outside in urban Ottawa, though they’re always popular for huddling around when they go in on the canal. Cauldrons and fire pits are major features in the winning concepts for both LeBreton Flats and Nepean Point — if we actually want to have them, we should probably make them easy to install and use.
To make outdoor activities more appealing, Edmonton wants to allow a little more commercial development in its parks and central river valley, to “offer people a place to linger, warm up and enjoy.” Any place like this we ever build on our generally sterile river and canal banks is typically overrun; witness the success of the hotdog lounge in Major’s Hill Park last summer. Dow’s Lake, the Ottawa Locks and the parking lots along the river ski trail are obvious spots to add crêperies, coffee shops, poutine bars. Strive to make these places like the Beaver-Tail and hot-chocolate stands on the canal skateway, such that you can get to them without stripping off all your gear.
Edmonton also wants to promote a year-round patio scene, an idea that flows from the previous two. Maybe not when it’s -30 C, but with heat, light and some protection from wind, a hot cider or boozy coffee can be pretty great outdoors in January. Some of these features can
Maybe not when it’s -30 C, but with heat, light and some protection from wind, a hot cider or boozy coffee can be pretty great outdoors in January.
be retrofitted, but to really work they have to be designed into new buildings — maximizing shelter and southern exposures, constructing roofs that don’t shed ice straight down, and so on.
Install outdoor lights against the creeping winter dark (the NCC is working on its own plan for this here).
Plant evergreens, not just deciduous trees. Build crosswalks that don’t routinely flood with slush at the corners. Shovel the stairs.
Edmonton has the advantage of more consistent and predictable winter conditions — less slush and wet, more cold and clear.
The variability of our weather is a challenge for outdoor fun, for sure.
But the evidence is right in front of us, and in 2017 it’s been stronger than ever: Ottawans will go outside and play in the cold, given half a chance. Let’s make more chances.