Better Lebreton Flats vital: Baird
But no plan to scrap ‘phenomenal’ NCC despite dismemberment in budget, minister says
The first new buildings on LeBreton Flats are a serious disappointment and making the rest of the longawaited redevelopment there more “dynamic” is essential to Ottawa’s downtown, says the capital’s senior federal minister John Baird.
Despite his Conservative government’s decision to carve off the piece of the National Capital Commission that organizes festivals and celebrations and move that to the Department of Canadian Heritage, Baird said in a Friday interview that he believes in the NCC as the steward of federal land in Ottawa and Gatineau. He just wants the commission to do better with its most prominent project.
“We’ve got to dream a little bigger than just having a bunch of condos in the last big part of undeveloped land in downtown Ottawa,” Baird said.
“With due respect to the people who live there, the two condos that were built are not the most inspiring.”
The Flats sat vacant for decades after the commission’s predecessor expropriated them and evicted residents and businesses for a major government complex that was never built.
They now hold the national war museum while most of the rest of the land is being transferred, very slowly, to private developers to build a new neighbourhood connecting the downtown core with Mechanicsville and Hintonburg.
The first chunk went to developer Claridge even though it had a proposal the NCC scored third-best of three, after the two higher-scoring builders bailed out of the competition.
“I would say the NCC has done a lot of phenomenal things. Those two condos on LeBreton Flats would not be among their best works,” Baird said. But he’s not sure what exactly could be done better. “If I could tell you that, we’d be doing it.”
A third “phase” of Claridge’s project is still to come, though the bulk of the LeBreton land isn’t yet spoken for.
Vice-president at Claridge, Neil Malhotra, declined to comment Friday night.
The foreign minister and trusted lieutenant of Prime Minister Stephen Harper rejected criticism that downtown Ottawa is dull, or at least any duller than any other city. The federal government is unfairly criticized for favouring cheap architecture over gorgeous, Baird said.
“I think Ottawa’s the same as any other city of over a million people in Canada,” Baird said. “I suspect at least in my travels, I haven’t done a study, but from my travels in Toronto or Vancouver, [buildings in Ottawa] look very similar to the type of any new buildings that are being constructed.
“Would we love every building to be an architectural jewel? Absolutely. At the same time, we do have to be realistic about what taxpayers can afford.”
Although there’s no grand plan for Wellington Street — the national avenue in front of Parliament Hill, dominated by federal offices — Baird said the government is investing in it. “We’ve got netting around large parts of Parliament Hill to stop masonry from falling down and damaging cars and hurting people,” Baird said, but the government’s working on it.
More money is being spent on other “dilapidated” buildings on Wellington that were neglected for years, he said. “There’s a lot of regeneration being done there to fix up some of these national treasures and put them to use.
Sure, Baird said, some things could be better. There’s no new tenant for the former tourist information centre right across from Parliament recently vacated by the NCC because it couldn’t afford the place, and no decision about the future of the former U.S. Embassy on the same block.
“Sparks Street is so vibrant at lunch hour, you’d love to see it be the same way at other times of the day. There’s certainly work that can be done on that.” But police have done a good job making the ByWard Market safer and more pleasant and that’s a fine start for downtown generally, Baird said.
Whatever the National Capital Commission can do about it, Baird said, it’ll be able to focus its attention and resources. Moving responsibility for the Canada Day party on Parliament Hill and events like Winterlude to Canadian Heritage — along with the people who do the work and the money devoted to it, Baird promised — is the only big change for the NCC the government has in store. There’s no plan to divide up the commission’s other tasks and shut the rest of the operation down, Baird said.
“We gave some thought to that and this is what we decided,” he said, and if the idea were to scrap the NCC, they’d have done it all at once. That would have been over his objections, Baird added, because he’s always wanted to be the minister in charge of the commission.
That means that now the search can begin for a new chief executive for the commission, someone to replace Marie Lemay, who left in August. The government held off on hiring her successor because it hadn’t decided quite what the job would involve, Baird said, though he said chairman Russell Mills and acting chief executive Jean-François Trépanier “have done a phenomenal job” in the meantime.