Mayor can blame self in tiff with province
Mayor Jim Watson would like the provincial government to pay for an extension of light rail to Trim Road, which would cost about $150 million more than the city is already planning to spend to run an easterly leg to Place d’Orléans.
The arguments he puts forth are spectacular. One, it would be cheaper for the province than taking back Highway 174, a former provincial highway that Progressive Conservative governments dropped on the city in the late 1990s — with no real justification other than that doing so meant the provincial government wouldn’t have to pay for it any more.
The city has asked the province to take the road back over a couple of times. No, we’ve already undone enough Harris-era downloading, has been the general tone of the response.
Second, and this is the really good one, Watson complains that the city is owed, because the province didn’t pay its usual onethird share of the cost of the first phase of light rail, so it’s reasonable that it would kick in extra for the second phase. Ottawa’s seeking a billion provincial dollars for the $3-billion “Stage 2.” The city won’t kick in more to go all the way east to Trim Road, but Watson wants another $150 million from the province to cover the whole bill for doing it.
Who’s responsible for the province’s not paying its fair share of the first phase? Perhaps we should look to the guy who was the regional minister for Ottawa when the Ontario government pledged $600 million in 2009 for a project that was already expected to cost $2.1 billion. That would be Jim Watson, then the MPP for Ottawa West-Nepean and the minister of municipal affairs and housing.
In a big news conference at the RA Centre in December that year, all the local provincial Liberals excitedly pledged the money, which everybody knew at the time was a lot and yet not enough. Watson was among them. Within a couple of weeks, Watson had resigned from the cabinet, declared he was running for mayor, and begun very loudly worrying about whether there was enough money to carry off the light-rail project the city was planning.
Why, anybody would think that announcing too little money was a devious way of trying to sabotage Larry O’Brien, whom Watson was challenging for the mayoralty. As it turned out, voters weren’t thrilled with the idea of killing yet another rail plan and Watson fairly quickly changed his tune. Impressively and to his credit, Jim Watson 2012 managed to solve the problem that Jim Watson 2009 helped create and is getting the first rail phase built.
But for Jim Watson 2016 to say the province now needs to make up for the actions of Jim Watson 2009 ... well, that’s some nextlevel politics. That’s not to say the position is wrong. The provincial government has shovelled money into rail projects around the Golden Horseshoe, in particular, paying vastly more than the standard one-third with no explanation for why those projects are different from Ottawa’s. The province did screw Ottawa in 2009.
But Jim Watson 2016 is just about the worst person on Earth to make the point.