A BALLOT ON THE FUTURE
There are big decisions looming on our horizon. Just what kind of city we want is the real issue for voters to decide come Monday, writes the Citizen’s David Reevely.
Ottawa’s election Monday doesn’t have one central animating issue that makes it easy to pick whom to vote for. And yet the future of the city is at stake on so many fronts.
After eight years in the mayor’s office, Jim Watson can rhyme off a list of projects that are done or well begun, many of them after years of stop-and-start work. The first phase of light rail — late, yes, but almost finished. A renewed Lansdowne Park. A new Ottawa Art Gallery and renovated Arts Court. The business centre at Bayview. A central library plan with a location, a funding deal and some early design work. New footbridges. An extensively improved rural road network. A vast tank for sewage being built downtown to stop overflows into the Ottawa River.
Watson’s soothing style was comforting in 2011. We’d just had four years of almost constant chaos under Larry O’Brien. Yes, Watson would quickly drop a tarp over a councillor who dared surprise him with a budget motion or something, but weren’t we tired of being taken by surprise all the time? Watson has taken a bunch of half-done jobs O’Brien left behind and squared them away.
Eight years later, the appeal of a council that always gets along, at least in public, might not be as strong.
Watson’s strongest challenger, former councillor Clive Doucet, openly disagrees with his own campaign team sometimes. Like when his advisers told him not to post an impromptu video he shot in storm-ravaged Arlington Woods a couple of weeks ago, linking the tornado damage there to climate change.
“I said, ‘OK, that’s not the way I feel about it. I feel people should actually face the devil right in the face. Because it’s right now, right here.’ We argued, they won, and we didn’t put it up,” Doucet says. “A few days afterwards, I said, ‘Screw this, let’s put it up,’ and I did it. But I did it myself — I didn’t consult with anybody. And I got roasted. I got roasted. They were right. I got roasted on Twitter and I got roasted by my team.”
Watson is the boss of his campaign, just as he’s been unquestionably the boss in his eight years as mayor, but he’d never decide to post a campaign video on his own — if he’d even know how — against the advice of everyone around him.
Are we still happy with Watson’s avuncular, sometimes patronizing style of mayoring? Or might we want someone who leads with his heart, even if that impulsiveness sometimes leads him astray?