LIGHT RAIL: Not sure where you stand? Ottawa Magazine offers up a tip sheet for when you’re chatting at the water cooler

An architectural rendering of the light rail station at Tunney's Pasture. Photo courtesy of Ottawa Light Rail.

There’s a skeptic in all of us. The City of Ottawa’s selection of the Rideau Transit Group to build Confederation Line, the new Light Rail Transit service, has raised the eyebrows of many concerned citizens. It is the largest infrastructure project ever undertaken in Ottawa, it will cost billions, and will take five years to become fully operational.

Meet imaginary Brian. He’s your typical water cooler conversation type, and a skeptic at heart. Like many, he’s unsure how he feels about the construction of a new Light Rail Transit (LRT) line being built around the Ottawa downtown core. Brian doesn’t like the idea of more construction on his way to and from work, nor does he think kindly of diverted bus traffic. He’s not certain about all the facts, but he sure does enjoy playing devil’s advocate – and he raises concerns that many locals have. Here, Ottawa Magazine offers up a basic tip sheet of sorts using info from the City of Ottawa and the Rideau Transit Group to give you – and Brian – a quick rundown of the info that’s out there, all in one easy place. (Think of it as an early Christmas present for when you’re making small talk this holiday.)

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POLITICS CHATTER: Blaming the G-8 for the Prime Minister’s delusions of grandeur

By Mark Bourrie 

We all make mistakes. That first cigarette. Wearing Speedos when we’re overweight and over 40. Sending 50,000 smutty e-mails from military laptops to married women whose computers are being monitored by the FBI and hoping our wives don’t find out.

But when the world powers make a mistake, it can be a dandy. Take, for instance, the decision by Britain, Germany, Italy, and Japan in 1976 to cave into American and French pressure to accept Canada as a member of what was then the G-6 group of economic powers. (It took another 21 years for the Russians to join the club and make it the G-8.)

Since then, the idea that Canadian prime ministers somehow rank with the president of the United States, the chancellor of Germany and the president of France has become a real problem in Ottawa.

We should face a few facts about Canada. It’s a great country to live in, mainly because we’re a small number of people sitting on a whole lot of gold, oil, natural gas, diamonds, silver, copper, trees and fresh water. Most of our country is rocks, swamps and arctic desert, but we still have enough farm land to pretty much support ourselves.

You’d have to be pretty thick not to be able to make a go as a nation with just 33 million people and half of a continent, even if it’s not the best half.

Our politicians like to take credit for our prosperity. The rest of us can live with that as long as they don’t screw things up too badly or get an over-developed sense of their own importance.

That’s where this G-8 silliness comes in.

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POLITICS CHATTER (U.S. election edition): You’d have to be crazy to want this job

By Mark Bourrie

I pity the fool who wins Tuesday’s presidential election.

Not only because I enjoy stealing Mr. T’s favorite line, but also because I think I understand the place that’s already been carved in history for either Barack Obama or Mitt Romney.

Because no one can get through the next four years and come out looking good unless they have the intellectual caliber of Franklin Roosevelt, the arm-twisting skills of Lyndon Johnson, and the focus of Abraham Lincoln. Unless I am very mistaken about Romney, neither candidate meets those qualifications.

The US is not only mired in an economic Depression, it has serious structural and systemic problems. The Great Depression of the 1930s was worse but, although the banks failed, the factories still existed. When the economy began to turn around, the factories re-opened. Small businesses saw an influx of cash from workers’ pay envelopes. And all this happened before World War II put the economy into over-drive.

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: How Somerset House transformed from the grande dame of Bank Street to a blight on the neighbourhood

Somerset House made CBC News Ottawa last week, with Cory O’Kelly reporting that residents and nearby business owners are getting restive about the lack of progress on the once-beautiful building.

This article originally appeared in the September 2011 issue of Ottawa Magazine.

Just 10 years ago, the Duke of Somerset and its downstairs neighbour, the Lockmaster Tavern, had the highest daily beer sales of any bar in the city. Today, the Bank Street landmark is an eyesore

The writing on the wall: Somerset House has sat empty for nearly six years as a convoluted battle between the building’s owner and the city winds its way through the courts. Photo by David Kawai.

There is a piece of graffiti on Somerset House that shows a waif of a girl beneath a headline reading Unwanted. Whoever made the drawing certainly picked the right building. Located at the corner of Somerset and Bank streets, Somerset House was once home to such Ottawa landmarks as the Ritz Hotel and The Duke of Somerset, although the glory days of the building are rapidly becoming a dim memory.

Somerset House has now sat empty for nearly six years. For four of those years, it has been sheathed with metal scaffolding and exterior support beams, an ugly eyesore at one of the major intersections in the nation’s capital. “It is a shame what has happened to Somerset House,” says David Flemming, past president of Heritage Ottawa. “I can’t think of many cities that would allow a building to sit in such a state — just rotting away, really — at such a prominent location.”

How Somerset House was transformed from the grande dame of Bank Street to black-sheep blight on the neighbourhood is a convoluted tale of mishap and red tape, litigation and public policy, although a central character in the story — the noun that agrees with the active verb, if you will — has been the City of Ottawa. “The city bears most of the responsibility for what has happened to Somerset House,” says Derek Crain, president of the Somerset Village Business Improvement Area, as well as an architect who has been trying to restore the historic building. “The story of what has happened to Somerset House in the past four years,” says Crain, “the way the owner has been treated, what this community has gone through — it is unlike anything I have seen in the nearly 37 years I have been working in this city.”

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POLITICS CHATTER: Time to stop messing around and give the NCC a firm mandate

“Why do you hate the NCC?” a radio host once asked me.

I was taken aback. Hate the NCC? It seemed like such a bizarre question. (The rest of the interview was just as strange. By the end of it, I was carefully examining the radio host’s hairline, marveling at how well the surgeons hid the lobotomy scar.)

Why would anyone hate the NCC?  It’s sort of like a local Santa, bringing us canal skating and beaches at Meech Lake, Lac Philippe and Lac La Pêche. It makes us snow slides and provides a venue for every drunk in eastern Ontario and west Quebec to show their stuff on Canada Day.

I don’t hate it. But I think the NCC needs work, or could be radically pruned without any harm at all to the National Capital region and the country.

Let me count the reasons.

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POLITICS CHATTER: He can’t win. The real risk for Justin Trudeau is being constantly measured against his father’s legend

Photography by Jean-Marc Carisse

By Mark Bourrie

So Justin Trudeau didn’t take my advice. This makes me very sad. I gave him the best possible reasons not to run for the Liberal leadership, and now he’s about to toss it in the trash.

I say with renewed vigor and enthusiasm that Justin Trudeau is making a terrible mistake. He’s being goaded on by media people who lust at celebrity, who were brought up in a celebrity-obsessed world and who, quite often, are as one-dimensional and superficial as most celebrities.

And he’s being pushed by a party and its operatives who are looking for a ticket back to power. Many of them would run Satan himself if they thought he could get them 40 seats in Quebec, win back Toronto, Vancouver, southwestern Ontario, and some Prairie seats.

But this is such a bad idea.

Not for Canada. Our government is still run by skilled public servants, and our federation is so decentralized that it will survive pretty much anything. It’s not like we need to worry about our leader launching missiles against China. And the country has nothing to worry about at all if voters choose to leave the Liberals as an opposition party.

Where the risk is — and what no one hyping Trudeau even seems to consider — is the threat to the man himself. It had always been wrong for him to go into politics. There’s simply no way for him to come out ahead.

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THE EX FILES: Journalist Mark Bourrie’s behind-the-scenes account of his two years in the employ of Xinhua

When journalist Mark Bourrie began working for the local bureau of the Chinese news agency Xinhua, he was excited by the prospect of informing China about Canadian politics. But a questionable request during the Dalai Lama’s visit in April was too much for his journalistic conscience. He quit. Now Bourrie gives a behind-the-scenes account of his two years in the employ of Xinhua

Illustration by Anthony Tremmaglia.

IT ALL BEGAN  at a Parliament Hill Christmas party in 2009. My wife, kids, and I sat with a nice Chinese family who were just a few weeks away from moving back to Beijing after a four-year stint in Canada. Yang Shilong was bureau chief for the Chinese news agency Xinhua. We got to chatting. The agency, which until then had been staffed by Chinese nationals, was looking to go mainstream, he told me, and planning to hire Canadian journalists to write about national politics and finance for Xinhua’s rapidly expanding audiences in China, the West, and the Third World. The job sounded interesting and the prospect of a steady gig was happy news, given that I’d just recently finished two years of teaching in the journalism department at Concordia University, returning to freelance writing just as the recession started to bite hard and magazine work dried up.

When I expressed interest, Yang immediately offered me some freelance work. A few months later Xinhua dangled the prospect of a full-time job as head of the agency’s English-language bureau in Ottawa. The cynic in me wondered if the offer might be too good to be true. Indeed, when I mentioned Xinhua to friends, their first reaction was often to ask whether this meant I would be a spy.

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MAKING TOUGH CHOICES: Politics Chatter takes a Swiftian approach to the economy

Not amused: This cat shows off his tags, noting that he is not a freeloader. But reading on he agrees that Bourrie’s squirrel idea might have some merit…

These are hard times for many Canadians. And parliamentarians, I believe, are willing to share in the tough choices that Canadians must make until Our Leader and Canada’s New Government are able to steer the economy back to calmer waters.

I suggest one place where they might start is at Parliament Hill itself. For too long, a coven of cats has been freeloading on the taxpayers’ dime in subsidized housing at the edge of the Hill.

The Internet has a solution we can all live with, one that draws on both the plump and juicy cats and the skills of the chefs of the Parliamentary Restaurant. Let’s cook the buggers up:

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POLITICS CHATTER: Don’t do it, Justin! Why Justin Trudeau would be wise to wait one more leadership cycle

He's got charisma and he works hard. But, says Mark Bourrie, Justin Trudeau needs to work on his "intellectual heft" before taking on Stephen Harper. Photography by Jean-Marc Carisse

By Mark Bourrie

There are hundreds of Liberal fixers and lobbyists who think the clock can be turned back to that winter day in 1980 when Pierre Trudeau crushed Joe Clark and returned Ottawa to Liberal normalcy. It was a moment captured in one of Toronto Star cartoonist Duncan MacPherson’s greatest pieces, showing Trudeau walking into 24 Sussex, glancing at Clark and telling one of his staffers to “pay the babysitter.”

The Liberals need a leader. They still haven’t got past the idea that they can find a star who will give the party an instant brand. The idea of electing a bright unknown with great organizational skills — like, say, a Stephen Harper — is repellant to them. “Rebuilding,” it seems, means recruiting someone with name recognition and good looks.

Astronauts, smart women lawyers and other upstarts need not apply.

At least one pundit, John Ivison of the National Post, is saying with certainty that Justin’s going for it.

Here are Justin’s plusses:

He’s supposed to be a really nice guy. He puts a lot of energy into raising his young kids in as normal a home as possible, given the circumstances. He appears to lack the cruelty of his father.

He works hard. Justin Trudeau busts his ass to raise money for his party and to pull in crowds at rallies for lesser lights. His father was always quite lazy in this regard. Once Pierre got control of the Liberal party in 1968, he left the nitty-gritty of fundraising and organizing to pros like Keith Davey. It was the professionalization of the Liberals that smothered its grass roots, leaving it with the problems it has today.

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POLITICS CHATTER: On Joyce Fairbairn, Alzheimer’s, and the human condition

Years ago, my grandfather would fly from Toronto to Thunder Bay once a year to visit my mom and to take his driver’s test. He was over 80 and knew that he couldn’t pass the test if he did it at home. None of us ever thought to tell him he was a menace on the roads. When he became so poorly co-ordinated that the Thunder Bay testers would no longer pass him, my grandfather — then pushing 90 — finally stopped driving.

His quality of life tumbled, he became more dependent on friends and relatives, and his health finally failed. The loss of independence was almost impossible for him to bear.

One of my elderly great-uncles faced similar troubles. He could almost look after himself in his early 80s. Almost. But sometimes he’d forget he had pots on the stove. He’d fall asleep in a chair while smoking. And he’d forget to do basic things like pay bills.

So what did the rest of the family do? Well, we did what millions of other Canadians do in similar circumstances: we tried to make it possible for him to live independently, then, when thing got worse, we suggested he go into a nursing home. But he didn’t want to go until we suggested he do it for the winter, then see what happened.

I knew for a couple of years that Senator Joyce Fairbairn was having problems. I interviewed her in the summer of 2009 for my book on wartime press censorship. She had been close to Tommy Shoyama, the federal mandarin who had been a young Japanese-Canadian newspaper editor during the Second World War. She gave me a few good anecdotes and was generous with her time.

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