Mayor pushed Ottawa Markets to slash new ‘red tape’

Ottawa Markets, the arm’s-length organization that oversees the ByWard Market, changed its mind about making buskers have insurance on the same day a council committee endorsed a program to promote Ottawa as a global music city.

Maybe it was Mayor Jim Watson’s self-described “moral suasion” on Tuesday that convinced markets management to kill the insurance requirement.

“I was not happy when I saw we’re putting more red tape around creativity of street musicians and buskers, particularly when we just adopted a music strategy,” Watson said after a finance and economic development committee meeting, which approved an Ottawa music strategy. “I think this a good case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand was doing.”

Watson had his staff contact the markets organization to say how “ridiculous (it was) to have lots of rules for buskers,” especially when one of the goals behind creating Ottawa Markets was to reduce the bureaucracy in the operations of the ByWard and Parkdale markets.

Ottawa Markets launched at the beginning of the year with an independent board of directors chaired by former councillor Peter Hume.

After CBC Radio ran a story on Tuesday morning about the insurance requirement for buskers, which could be about $200 a year on top of permit fees, Ottawa Markets heard from the mayor’s office and other residents.

The non-profit markets organization dropped the insurance requirement by noon.

Jeff Darwin, executive director of Ottawa Markets, said Ottawa Markets has been consulting with buskers since the beginning of the year, but the sudden heat on the organization Tuesday forced management to drop the insurance requirement.