Robert Smythe
Yasir Naqvi, the MP for Ottawa-Centre, has announced a downtown Ottawa revitalization task force: “Reimagining Downtown Ottawa for People.” Its membership includes business representatives, developers, a non-profit housing co-ordinator, and the two current downtown city councillors.
The task force’s goals encompass affordable housing, healthy local businesses, a sustainable environment, and Indigenous reconciliation. These would certainly be “nice-to-haves” but are probably unattainable if, at the same time, downtown Ottawa doesn’t regain its primacy as the region’s largest federal employment hub.
For two decades, the Government of Canada has been draining the central area of federal jobs, and should recommit to rebuilding its downtown workforce.
More than two years of a work-from-home regime has magnified that slow trickle to a full-blown exodus of federal workers. It won’t be enough to convert the heap of empty office towers left in their wake into condos, although more downtown residential development would be desirable.
A strong employment base (say 100,000+ jobs, which is the current capacity) would benefit private sector businesses and the related support services, and grow a more successful downtown. That would also put Ottawa’s multi-billion-dollar light rail system, which was designed as a commute-to-work network focused on getting people downtown, to good use.
The key Government of Canada departments who could deliver this – the Treasury Board and Public Services and Procurement Canada (the old Public Works) – are absent from Naqvi’s task force, but presumably he is in the right position to bring any employment-based recommendations to his government.
There is much that needs revitalization. The public realm? Much of the central area is an untended hellscape of narrow treeless sidewalks bordering one-way arterial roads. Long stretches of empty and forlorn street-level store frontages in aging, partially-deserted office towers are forlorn and empty.
Healthy local business? They need urgent care and assistance. Affordable housing? Good luck with that.
The task is certainly daunting. I wish them well and hope that they don’t join the trail of broken dreams that constitutes the work of task forces past.