A third term for Watson could be his most difficult
Watson looking for third term, and maybe some legacy projects to be remembered by
As soon as he announced his plans to run for re-election Thursday morning, Mayor Jim Watson became the favourite to win in fall 2018. His third term could be a lot more difficult than his first two.
The sparse public polls put Watson’s approval ratings sky high. We like him better than Montrealers like Denis Coderre, Torontonians like John Tory, or even Calgarians like Naheed Nenshi. Nobody is obviously gunning for his job. Who’s going to take him down?
Mind you, just about everybody, including me, would have said the same thing about Bob Chiarelli at this point in 2005.
His 2006 campaign brought challenges from the left (Alex Munter) and the right (Larry O’Brien) and sabotage from the federal government (in the person of John Baird) that turned out to be lethal. There are no sure things.
By 2018, Watson will have been mayor for eight years, longer than he’s held any job before. He was a pre-amalgamation Ottawa councillor for six years, mayor for less than three, head of the Canadian Tourism Commission for three, a TV person and columnist for a few months, a provincial politician for six years and change. His feet start to itch.
All that moving around has denied him one of the chief seductions of power: seeing something big from conception to conclusion. Although he’s been a fixture in Ottawa’s public life for 25 years, this is the first time Jim Watson has been in any particular office long enough to start anything of real consequence.
He’s been a decent manager and a finisher of other people’s ideas, but the knock on him has always been that he has no vision of his own.
Maybe he still doesn’t — it’s hard to articulate exactly what kind of Ottawa Watson would want if he had absolute power — but he’s got a list of projects that’ll serve as a substitute.
The massive expansion of light rail city council just approved is the big one, with a new central library right behind it. Redeveloping LeBreton Flats isn’t his project, or even the city’s, but as mayor he’ll have a say in guiding it and, for better or worse, it’ll change Ottawa forever. You can see why he’d want to stick around.
Watson is a gifted retail politician. He deploys himself strategically, making sure to be places where people are happy (like church bazaars and book launches and seniors’ teas) and rarely showing up where they’re angry or sad (like public meetings on difficult issues). That goes a long way.
He doesn’t like being crossed, can be prickly when he’s criticized and does have blind spots.
Remember the slow-rolling casino fiasco, when he completely misread the public mood and found himself asking the provincial government for two casinos when the number most people wanted was zero. But he’s saved from most of them by a disciplined office.
It’s led by his supremely capable chief of staff, Serge Arpin, who’ll also have to decide whether he’s willing to go a third term. When Chiarelli lost his righthand man Brendan McGuinty, things started to go bad. Same for O’Brien when his chief of staff Walter Robinson quit.
McGuinty stayed with Chiarelli for six years; Robinson stayed with O’Brien for six months and the revolving door behind him never stopped whirling. Arpin is in his seventh year with Watson now, a long time in a burnout job.
More challenges: Watson’s encountering more resistance on city council, mainly from a handful of downtown councillors who think of themselves as an “urban caucus.”
They’re not a majority and not often enough at odds with the mayor to call them an opposition, but they are increasingly confident together, and vocal when they think the core is being mistreated. In 2010, Watson led a council stuffed with an unusual number of rookies. Now those people are veterans with more independence.
The police department’s a mess. Officers have openly criticized Chief Charles Bordeleau. A bunch of them have been caught fudging traffic warnings. One’s just been charged with manslaughter in the death of Abdirahman Abdi, a black man with mental health problems. Others took a teenage boy who’d escaped imprisonment and torture by his police-officer father and returned him to his abuser.
Meanwhile, the screws have been turned on the city budget about as tightly as they can go.
The province has taken on a bunch of costs for things like health and housing and certain parts of policing — initiated by Watson himself when he was the minister for municipal governments — but that process has just about run its course.
The mayor has benefited from friendly premiers and ministers at Queen’s Park, people he knows well whose agendas he shares.
There’s a pretty good chance Progressive Conservatives will be in power after a provincial election due a few months before the next municipal one. Watson got along OK with the federal Conservatives but the relationship between city and province is much more intimate, much more dependent on mutual goodwill. Watson’s a pretty conservative Liberal but he’s still a Liberal.
The worst of any of this stuff will hit well after 2018, though.
Right now, to bet against Watson’s re-election, you’d want really good odds.
He deploys himself strategically, making sure to be places where people are happy and rarely showing up where they’re angry.