What amalgamation did

A former city councillor reflects

By Clive Doucet

(Excerpt from the author’s The Watsonics. For the full text, go to Unpublished.ca. For an excerpt on Lansdowne Park’s “Cattle Caste,” see the Glebe Report, January/February 2023.)

When two-tier local government was blended into one across Ontario, the greatest strength of local government, local participatory democracy, was squashed. Under the Ontario Planning Act, people who live closest to city planning, housing, park projects, etc., are supposed to carry the most weight at City Hall, not those furthest away, which makes sense because it is the residents close by who will benefit the most or suffer the most from these developments. After amalgamation, the local voice would not just be reduced, it would disappear. People living beyond the Greenbelt, an hour’s drive from Lansdowne Park, east, south and west would decide that a mall was an appropriate use of the city’s oldest, most important park because in the new, amalgamated city, the local reps at City Hall would become stick figures with a voice but no authority.

I’d love to say I had all this figured out at the time, but I didn’t. Nonetheless, I did understand at a most profound level that the fight to save Lansdowne Park was a fight to save the city’s soul. If developer interests could privatize this historic city landmark, then they could do anything. Nothing would be sacred in the suburbs or the city centre. Happily, I was not alone. The community put up a terrific fight. Led by June Creelman, the community took the city all the way to the appellate court in Toronto. They protested, sang songs, marched on city hall, donated money, hired lawyers. They gave it everything they had.

But we had no chance, for the Lansdowne story was intertwined with this larger story of killing the political voice of the old communities across Ontario. On January 1, 2001, every single municipality in the old County of Carleton was blended into one. The new City of Ottawa would now be bigger than many countries, have a larger budget than several provinces, and it would force together communities that had nothing in common except the profits and problems of sprawl. It would take a couple of years to accomplish the amalgamation but by my second term, I was now part of a single-tier, one-stop, political shopping centre. The old city was gone.

Nothing in the province’s inquiry into the mismanagement of the city’s LRT system has surprised me. The back-door decision making, the hiding of information, the manipulation of the facts – we saw exactly the same behaviour during the struggle to save Lansdowne. I remember the Ottawa Sun ran a picture of the people’s plan for Lansdowne. Readers loved it, but it was described as the developer’s plan, not the people’s. Misrepresentation had become as common as grass, but this time I felt obliged to bring a motion to council to stop the proponents from running misleading pictures of their plans. Nothing changed. As with the LRT, Council was treated without the slightest respect. Council was a problem to be overcome, not a participant in city decision-making.

Amalgamation made all this possible. Democracy depends on community, and amalgamation disconnected Ottawa communities geographically and politically from the people they elected. Initially, I had supported the amalgamation. Why not have one police force, one fire service, one set of parks and so on? Why have the duplication? It was time to move on. The old city was too small.

The new amalgamated cities of Ontario would be based on freeways, malls and multi-story downtown condos. The old cities would become servants of this new urban vision of the future, which is called Texas High Hat. A Texas High Hat city from above or the side looks like a sombrero with a narrow but tall city centre spike surrounded by a vast brim of low-rise development. In a frenzy of city-centre development, Ottawa would rip apart its old neighbourhoods and re-seed them with high rises while the size of the brim would explode.

The speed of the change has been amazing. It has all been done in the name of densification, which is supposed to be good for the environment. I don’t believe it is. I believe images of busy, friendly, denser streets, often with streetcars running on them and little cafés beside them, have been used to justify ignoring community wishes and turning streets into parking lots with toaster-like boxes.

Over-development now sits like a canker on the old city, reducing the city’s quality of life and exploding under development in the brim. Sprawl is now at levels never anticipated by anyone. Ground water pollution is dealt with by just extending city pipes. The village of Russell is now “on city water.” Densification, like the promise of football at Lansdowne, has been used by politicians and developers as a sound bite to make greater profits possible, not to serve the needs of communities or the environment.

During my tenure as a city councillor, I did not allow a single new building to be constructed that contravened the city’s zoning for height or density. My approach was simplistic. If the zoning law called for four or six storeys on a busy street, it should be four or six, not 10 or 20, 40 or 50. I was happy to help a developer achieve this and did, but his plans had to conform to the city’s zoning. Either the law was the law, or it wasn’t. Turned out, it wasn’t. During the Watsonic years (Jim Watson was mayor from 1997 to 2000 and 2010 to 2022), city zoning has had about as much meaning as fish wrap. Even winning at the province’s appeal board doesn’t mean anything.

Diane McIntyre’s cottage-house on a narrow triangle of land next to Central Park was torn down for a massive, lot-line-to-lot-line building that looks like a toaster with windows. Side lot, back lot and front lot trees have come down everywhere to make way for these “infill” toaster buildings and condo high rises. Diane moved out of the community. The matriarchs were shunted aside.

Clive Doucet served as Capital Ward’s City Councillor from 1997 to 2010. He ran for mayor twice, in 2010 and 2018. His last book is Grandfather’s House, Returning to Cape Breton. The Watsonic Years is a political memoir being published in instalments on Unpublished Media.

The “people’s plan” for Lansdowne, labelled in the Ottawa Sun as the developer’s plan    Photo: Courtesy of Clive Doucet

The new City of Ottawa would now be bigger than many countries, have a larger budget than several provinces, and it would force together communities that had nothing in common except the profits and problems of sprawl.