Ottawa Sun
Published: Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Candidates face big questions

As of yesterday, 104 folks were vying for seats around the council table on Oct. 25: 14 candidates for mayor and 90 people seeking to become one of 23 councillors. By these numbers, local democracy seems to be alive and well.

However, a weekend review of the various council candidates’ websites, blogs, Twitter and Facebook feeds revealed a sad lack of focus on a big driver of Ottawa’s budget: Growth and growth management. And what I did find on the issue of smart growth was mostly dumb rhetoric.

Over the past decade on these pages I have — from time to time — railed against the simplistic arguments all-too-often proferred by our politicians and some staff that urban sprawl is bad and intensification is the holy grail of new urbanism.

Building a sustainable city, diversifying our economic base, responding to the housing choice demands of new Canadians and first-time home buyers while simultaneously addressing the realities of development and infrastructure costs, our aging population and meeting laudable mass transit modal shift objectives cannot be reduced to a facile choice between growth or sprawl.

No one likes urban sprawl, but what few sitting city councillors will actually admit is that there is one thing they despise even more than sprawl, and that’s intensification. Especially when intensification involves doubling or tripling neighbourhood densities or building a 15-storey highrise in their own ward.

And this brings us to the debate that should be occurring in key ward races and in the Mayoral race. Growth and growth management is critical to our city’s future and consequent budget pressures that will result … and it’s not just where we will grow, but how will we grow over the next 20 to 50 years.

To a point, I strongly agree with my friends on the political left that our development community — both commercial and residential — needs to do a better job of giving us innovative downtown and suburban housing and neighbourhood designs that include walking paths, bike trails, back alley parking, and incorporation/protection of existing watersheds, land slopes and other natural features.

And yes, we need to challenge the development community writ large to bring us innovative solutions on local wastewater treatment, district heating and other new technologies for power needs and consumption and, of course, reducing a community’s carbon and waste footprint.

On the other hand, I have worked professionally with the development sector and something of this scale of transformation cannot be achieved economically or in a long-term environmentally sustainable way with the odd 50-unit development or tiny brownfield reclamation project.

Larger tracts of land — within and outside our urban core — will need to be designated and/or rezoned if we want true commercial and residential innovation over time. This sort of thinking and frankly, a change in attitude, will also allow us to capitalize on and positively exploit our embryonic cluster of clean-energy and sustainable building companies that call Ottawa home.

Election 2010 is about what type of community we want and how we will pay for it. Most councillors and candidates will understandably redirect this question to an answer focused on programs, the transit tunnel or tax rates. But voters deserve, at a bare minimum, a cursory discussion of long-term growth: Where, when and how as well.