Buildings, free speech, and the Death of Dialogue

It is a funny observation to make in a town where half the people never shut up, but we are witnessing the Death of Dialogue on several fronts.

The relocation of The Ottawa Hospital and the future of LeBreton Flats are probably the two biggest pieces of city-build- ing we undertake in a generation. And yet we’re enduring all this babble, in different languages, from separate towers. Lord, hear our prayer.And this coincidence, too weird not to mention: when school board trustee Donna Blackburn — our new hero, by the way — decided to speak her mind in everyday language, she’s nearly handcuffed and carted away to reform school by her “chair.”

Imagine consulting a lawyer because someone said “whackjob” out loud?

Talk, Twitter and email is transmission, not communication. A “dialogue” means you say X, I say Y, and maybe the outcome of the discussion is X plus/minus Y or X squared. Whatever, but it’s not Z.

Can anyone figure out what The Ottawa Hospital is saying? In November 2014, local Tory kingpin John Baird and hospital president Jack Kitts announced the hospital was being given 60 acres of land across the street, at the Central Experimental Farm, for a new home.

It was not a proposal, nor an option. It was done.

Fast forward 18 months and it’s all under review. Dr. Kitts, meanwhile, let it be known the hospital is now also looking at Tunney’s Pasture, re-looking at the flattened Sir John Carling site on Carling Avenue, but not looking at LeBreton because everybody overlooked the giant empty hole downtown as the home for something useful.

And the crazy part is that the hospital did not publicly announce it was looking at alternative sites. I mean, why would you want to tell the public where the city’s biggest hospital might be going, right?

Instead, Citizen reporter Elizabeth Payne finds out, not from the hospital, but from a volunteer stakeholder group that received an email from Kitts. See, this is not a dialogue. This is not how you consult the city about where its main hospital is going, especially when public funds run the hospital, pay your $600,000-plus annual salary.

Neither is it encouraging that, months later, no discussion has started with Agriculture Canada about alternative farm sites, or with the lords of Tunney’s Pasture, who are working on a new master plan. This is not a dialogue.

It is growing increasingly clear that siting a hospital is not a planning exercise but a political negotiation. So, yes indeed, the people damned well better be involved, be spoken to, be heard.

As far as LeBreton Flats is concerned, I don’t view the current process as a dialogue with the public. We’ve been presented two plans, each containing an NHL-sized arena, other attractions and a whole lot of housing. After sitting empty for 50 years, we get two choices, and overlapping at that?

And they left two days for faceto-face consultation? This is not a dialogue. They may speak of their inscrutable process and fairness monitor, but lots of people in this town want a bigger menu, or would like to mix and match appetizers, or more daily specials.

(A hospital at LeBreton, by the way, is not an outrageous idea: there’s room, transit service, a central location and potential for associated housing. Why wasn’t this ever in the mix?)

As far as Blackburn is concerned, it is nothing short of outrageous that a sitting politician needs permission from anyone to speak her mind to a media outlet. Good for her for ignoring these meddling rule-worshippers. You don’t create an administrative policy that offends a basic human right in this country. That is not a dialogue.

The problem with school trustees today is not that they say too much. It’s that they say too little. Though they oversee fairly gargantuan operating budgets, nobody knows who they are. It must be the level of government we are least engaged with, particularly after our kids are out of the system. (Media’s fault? Probably.)

And what happens when we don’t pay attention, when we have no dialogue? We wake up one day to discover a four-yearold can’t go to his neighbourhood public school and get Englishonly instruction: half-French is now the norm.

This is not a terrible thing. But it sure is something worth talking about.

So, city-makers, talk, listen and hear.