NCC takes departure from the past

That evening, they started to come. People we hardly knew – those who had previously introduced themselves and had a quick chat in the park at the end of the street – showed up at our door arms laden with homebaked bread, muffins, baby clothes, soap baskets for me. And between them, they provided enough suppers to last our little family for 10 days. I thought I’d stepped into a Leave it to Beaver episode – seriously.

And it didn’t stop there. At Halloween, they buy special candy kabobs from Laura Secord, or give the wee ones juice boxes and granola bars instead of sweets. At Christmas, they come with huge boxes and oversized stuffed toys and baked goods and wine normally reserved for the arms of grandparents. My neighbours are the family I don’t have in Ottawa.

My Manor Park family has been fighting a bridge at Kettle Island for three decades. In recent months, as tensions have increased at all political levels, between and among politicians and the people they are elected to represent, my neighbours and I have been labelled as an elitist bunch of Nimby-ists.

So I’m here to set the record straight – because I have a soap box on which to stand. And because the notion that anyone in Manor Park wishes to see any neighbourhood destroyed by a new bridge – or lack thereof, as is the case in Lowertown – is nonsense.

No matter what Ottawa city councillors pronounce from one day to the next, the NCC and the two provincial levels of government have finally come to realize what we’ve known all along: a bridge will not and should not ever be built at Kettle Island.

I recently joined a board of directors. The very first meeting taught me an important lesson about corporate governance: When a hasty decision must be made, boards of directors necessarily make poor decisions based on the poor decisions made by their predecessors.

Fortunately, in a remarked departure from the past last week, the National Capital Commission decided not to take the smooth – yet misguided – path laid out by its predecessors.

By commissioning an environmental assessment of three potential interprovincial bridge locations in Ottawa’s east end, the NCC has chosen a more difficult route. But it is the correct way forward.

The so-called apolitical environmental assessment that showed Kettle Island as the preferred location for a bridge was seriously flawed. (And not only because Mayor Larry O’Brien and his band of happy councillors made a loud and political statement on a boat in the middle of the Ottawa River while the assessment was taking place last summer.)

For anyone whose neighbourhoods may be subject to this type of assessment in future, thank the residents of Manor Park for bringing to light the following issues: that quality of human life and safety should be weighted more highly than the number of cars that will be diverted from the city centre; and that the protection of rare species, ecosystems and green space is our responsibility to future generations of this city.

The NCC made a difficult decision last week. Their 60-year-old Gerber plan shows there will be a bridge at Kettle Island. Even my own commercial road map of the City of Ottawa, printed in 2001, shows an interprovincial bridge at Kettle Island. But the NCC would have none of it. They are looking forward. They are taking their time. Who knows? By the time a bridge is actually built, perhaps we’ll get an interprovincial ring road and rapid transit across the river. Now that would be a serious departure from the past.