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© Clive Doucet 2007
March 2008
SPRING SCENT
Ottawans stoop towards spring
like starving hawks
towards slow, soft bellied prey.from Canal Seasons
Capital Ward Cup
Capital Ward has more than 15 outdoor rinks and all are very well used. Every evening and weekend, the rinks are animated by one long, game of shinny. The players change but the game goes on, sometimes teenagers, sometimes older men and women. The games can be fast and furious or slower and more graceful, with just the soft sound of the puck passing from stick to stick. It has long been my ambition to have a winter, shinny tournament to celebrate this informal and very happy Canadian activity. This winter , Tara Pearman in my office pulled it together for the community.
We recruited teams from each of the Ward’s principal communities - ‘The Heron Park Hackers’ teed off against the ‘Old Ottawa South Moose’ and the ‘Glebe Goal Getters’ against the ‘Old Ottawa East Hosers’.
It was a perfect Saturday afternoon in Heron Park, sunshine and just a few degrees below zero. True to the ‘shinny’ traditions, there was no goalie, no raising the puck and no checking. The result was a fast paced, pure skills games of skating, stick handling and passing.
Tara found the team shirts and I commissioned a sculpture from an artist who’s work I have admired Jean-H Guillmette. He created the Capital Ward Cup sculpting two players in bronze one with a pen and one with hockey stick and set them on a wooden plinth to symbolize the struggles that we see around the council table and on the hockey rink.
The games were all close and terrific fun to watch. The players from Old Ottawa South carried the day in a fast and furious final game against Old Ottawa East. For its first year, the trophy will reside in the Old Ottawa South Firehall until next winter when the teams will go at it again.
Metered Parking
During the budget, Council passed a motion extending metered parking in the old city of Ottawa to Saturdays, Sundays and evenings and to Old Ottawa South, Richmond Road (Westboro) and New Edinburgh. The city centre councillors voted against it. We saw it as destructive and exploitative for many reasons. Street parking is supposed to be a service to business to ensure turn-over on high demand streets where there is little off-street parking. This was clearly not a service to business but a new and expensive tax imposed without any public consultation. Further it is an inefficient tax. It is costly to administer – somewhere between 26 per cent and 62 per cent of the revenue collected goes into collecting it. So we’re taxing people so they can be taxed. It is also unfair – 25 city streets pay already 27 million dollars into the city treasury that other streets and mall parking lots are exempt from, 16 million of that 27 million is paid in fines. So when business people talk about the ‘fine chill’, they’re not kidding.
The good news is I was successful in convincing the Chair of the Transportation Committee to hold a special meeting of that committee to hear public delegations on the imposition of this new tax. The community response was unprecedented. We received thousands of petitions. Members of churches came out to protest as did every BIA in the old city of Ottawa as did all of our community associations, there never has been such a universal, coherent and vigorous outcry. It didn’t carry the day at Transportation Committee with only the Sunday and evening charges being lifted. The good news is at Council we were successful in getting everything but the increased fees from $2.50 to $3.00 deferred until March 26, with instructions to staff to see if it is possible to find the 2 million dollars required from some other line item.
One of the many strange twists in this long and difficult debate is that a .2 per cent increase in our property taxes, the equivalent of 5 dollars per household did not carry. Yet, Council was prepared to carry such a targeted, destructive, inefficient parking tax.
About Transit
Read my recent report to the Transportation Committee on my findings on transit in Vancouver and Seattle. It may be found here on this site.
