Downtown Ottawa in June, 2023. While recent projects from the National Capital Commission will help, fixing the city's core requires more than cosmetic changes.Justin Tang/The Canadian Press
Recent visitors to Ottawa have been met by an unfamiliar sight: swimmers in the Rideau Canal. Thanks to the federal National Capital Commission, which manages bike paths, parkways, official residences, green spaces and the waterway, people can now plunge into a cordoned section at Dow’s Lake or sit in one of many red Muskoka chairs scattered along its parkways.
Other recent well-received efforts by the NCC, tasked with keeping the capital scenic and stately, include building a new pavilion at an Ottawa River beach and revitalizing a Parliament-facing lookout. LeBreton Flats, once a working-class, downtown-adjacent neighbourhood that the NCC expropriated and razed in the 1960s, then shamefully sat on for decades, is finally set to fill up with buildings, including an NHL arena.
But improving Ottawa requires more than cosmetic changes. The biggest problem is the downtown, which, owing to federal inaction, indifference and circumstance, is a bleak disaster.
The government can and should help. The core of Canada’s capital, a 1.7-million-person metropolis straddling the Ontario-Quebec boundary, should reflect the nation’s G7 status.
Even prepandemic, Ottawa’s downtown was underpopulated. Half of all federal office space (most of which is in Ottawa) was unused as of 2017. Then came COVID-19 and a shift to remote work that left the public-sector-dependent downtown shabby and empty. The federal government today requires three days a week at the office but adherence is spotty and unions are resisting the return-to-office mandate. Downtown businesses have suffered.
Opinion: The city of Ottawa risks being hollowed out by the federal government
After starting efforts in 2019 to halve its office space nationally, the government has only shed 1.6 per cent. Departments have dragged their feet on relocation, Auditor-General Karen Hogan reported in June. Public Services and Procurement takes three years to market surplus properties. That’s down from eight years but still too long, particularly given the priority to convert unused space into housing. As well, the region will be hard hit by looming public-sector cuts.
Some issues facing Ottawa are common to other cities, such as homelessness, opioid addiction and mental health, all sadly evident in the downtown ByWard Market.
Some blame falls on the city and the province. Ottawa is too big and should be broken up into urban and rural municipalities. Meanwhile, efforts to bring new attractions, such as an aquarium, have largely failed. The LRT system has encountered delays and operating challenges. Municipally managed infrastructure requires billions of dollars of investment.
But there are a few things the federal government should do to help, all within its control. It must accelerate efforts to rationalize its office space and move as many jobs as possible from the surrounding region to its downtown Ottawa and Gatineau buildings, as soon as possible.
That would revitalize downtown, bringing more workers as well as new residents who move into converted properties. That would also increase the city’s tax base, as the federal government pays no property taxes, instead providing arbitrary in-lieu payments. The government should also set out a clear work-force strategy that mandates more time in office for employees – and ensures those rules are followed.
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The government is also sitting on vast surplus property in Ottawa, including three sprawling areas – Tunney’s Pasture, Confederation Heights and riverside lands near the train station – located near rapid transit stations that could host tens of thousands of inhabitants. They are minutes from downtown and should be prioritized in mixed-use development plans to densify the core. Plans are afoot, but processes have dragged on for years and must be sped up.
The government could also take up a proposal from local economic agencies to establish Ottawa as a defence innovation hub. There are 190 defence companies and 10,000 workers locally, along with 65 federal labs and four sites that participate in NATO’s Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic. The government could live up to its NATO spending commitments in part by helping expand the capital’s existing sector. That could offset federal job losses.
The city of Ottawa was largely forged by politicians and mandarins whose grand plans sometimes did as much harm as good. Today, for Ottawa to look like a proper, thriving G7 capital, the federal government should act again – hopefully with better results.