DOUCET’S MARVELLOUS IDEAS SHOULD COME WITH A PLAN
If he were mayor, Clive Doucet says he would get the new Civic hospital campus moved to Tunney’s Pasture with a call to federal minister Catherine McKenna.
“Catherine and I get along really well. We’ll just have a little chat and it will all be resolved,” Doucet said, meeting with this newspaper’s editorial board on Wednesday morning to talk about his campaign for mayor.
Mayors have influence far beyond their powers on paper, Doucet said, and if he should defeat the incumbent Jim Watson in the Oct. 22 election, he would use that power.
Construction work hasn’t started on the $2.5-billion project, now planned for the northeast corner of the Central Experimental Farm near Dow’s Lake, he said, so the lease the federal government and the hospital have signed could be torn up and the rezoning city council has approved undone. The Ottawa Hospital’s insistence that Tunney’s Pasture isn’t a good spot for a major new health centre would be of no moment.
Nobody who’s spent any time with the former Capital councillor can question his love for Ottawa or his deep belief that we could and should be making better choices about what Ottawa could be.
He’s also right about Watson’s flaws as mayor. Watson’s an incrementalist, a status quo guy. His superhuman schedule of community events outside city hall conceals the heavy he can be with councillors who cross him inside it. His self-imposed cap on property tax increases has squeezed city services hard, to the point where even the streets and sidewalks are crumbling.
But Doucet’s flaws are still what they were during his 13 years as a regional and city councillor. He’s an ideas guy and practicalities don’t detain him. Now he’s eight years out of office, eight years out of daily contact with the boring minutiae you have to master to get things done.
For instance, Doucet promises to adopt the “Butterfly Model” for dementia care in the city’s four municipal nursing homes. It’s a set of principles and practices from Britain, used widely now in Europe, meant to counteract the drift to just warehouse and overmedicate people. Peel Region has experimented with it in Ontario and is very happy with the results.
But it’s more expensive than what we’re used to doing because it means more personal contact between staff and the residents they care for: Peel’s director of long-term care told her regional council that the Butterfly Model costs $400,000 extra each year in one unit of one home, after $160,000 in renovations.
Doucet just dismisses Peel’s number: “I don’t think it’s that much,” he said. Oh.
Besides, the city budget is $500 million more now than it was when he left city council in 2010, he said.
“Half a billion dollars is a lot of change. You can improve a lot of long-term care for a tiny fraction of half-a-billion. Where did that half-a-billion go?”
City budgets are complex, but Doucet can understand one if he chooses to read it. It’s a dangerous fallacy to think that your own ignorance must be somebody else’s fault.
Anyway, Doucet said, in any city budget, about 15 per cent of the spending is “disposable” (he seemed to mean “discretionary”). In Ottawa’s case, coincidentally, we’d be talking about roughly $500 million. Tons of room in there to set new priorities, he said.
So then, what should we do less of, so we can do more of other things, like improve nursing homes and fund community gardens and fix up the Prince of Wales Bridge?
Doucet looked off into the distance for a full 15 seconds.
“That’s a very sensitive question,” he eventually said. “I would want to look at services very carefully. I’m not happy with the way we’re running the police force. Somehow we’ve abandoned the proactive community policing and it’s absolutely parallel to the increase in violence in our communities. So that’s got to come back. I’m not sure we need every policeman trained to do SWAT takedowns. I mean, why do we have a policeman directing traffic, carrying a Glock? Why do we have — you know, working in a community park? Does he need a Glock to do that? And it’s a very sensitive thing because you’re up against unions, you’re up against the tried and true — you’re up against salaries.”
These are fair questions. There’s a live debate over whether we need sworn constables doing everything we have them doing, at pay rates that are approaching the $100,000 mark. But this isn’t an easy fix, not “disposable” spending the mayor can just order stopped.
Doucet’s “a consensus-driven person,” he said, and he would name expert committees to study the practicalities of his plans.
“The difference is, say, between today’s administration and me is I will have the political will to deliver what those committees say we need to do,” Doucet said.
In one way, this is becoming modesty from a politician. In another, it’s a gentler version of what we heard last spring from Doug Ford’s campaign for premier, when he would answer questions about how he’d close the provincial deficit by saying everyone knows there’s four cents of waste in every dollar the Ontario government spends.
Or Larry O’Brien’s campaign for mayor in 2006, when he asserted that the only reason Ottawa didn’t have tax freezes was that politicians lacked the nerve.
Or especially Andy Haydon’s campaign in 2010, when he coasted on memories from his stints as mayor of Nepean and then regional chairman, salted with things he’d read here and there that had taken his fancy.
These guys all campaigned on magical thinking, and for two of them it worked.
You might prefer Doucet’s vision to Watson’s plodding. Realism can slide so easily into mediocrity, it’s true.
Just don’t expect that Doucet’s vision is paired with means of achieving it.
He’s offering ideals, and ideals are important, but ideals are not a plan.
The difference is, say, between today’s administration and me is
I will have the political will to deliver what those committees say we need to do.