Ontario Community Services Minister Madeleine Meilleur says a new interprovincial bridge can only be built if the two provincial governments agree on a location.
The Ottawa-Vanier MPP told the Citizen Monday that the Ontario and Quebec governments have had discussions on the volatile issue, and she is confident an agreement can be reached. But all the issues have to be thrashed out properly in a formal environmental assessment, which Ontario supports and is willing to contribute to, she said.
Her declaration, the most pointed yet on the future of a new bridge, suggests Ottawa and Gatineau may not be as important to the decision-making process as they think.
It reinforces NCC chair Russell Mills’s view last week that the key players are Ontario and Quebec, who, together with the federal government, will pay for the bridge.
An NCC consultant has found that the best place for a new bridge across the Ottawa River is at Kettle Island, connecting the Aviation Parkway in Ottawa to Montée Paiement in Gatineau. Both the Ottawa and Gatineau councils have voted in support of that location. But at a meeting last week, the commission’s board decided to follow a joint request from the Ontario and Quebec governments to do a detailed assessment of three corridors — the one at Kettle Island, plus two that cross the river at Lower Duck Island farther east.
“What it would take to have a bridge is an agreement between the two provinces on where the bridge should be,” Ms. Meilleur said in an interview. “Right now there is no agreement to build it at Kettle Island … If there is no agreement between the two governments, there will be no bridge.”
Ms. Meilleur said the NCC consultant’s recommendation to build the bridge at Kettle Island, is part of a 1950s attitude that has no place in the 21st-century concept of building a city. She said when French planner Jacques Gréber made a plan for the city at the request of prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, it included a bridge at Kettle Island because the area south of the bridge was unpopulated. Today, it has several communities and thriving institutions, and you don’t ravage a built-up community for a bridge.
“Kettle Island is a 1950s decision. It was in the Gréber plan when there was nothing built after St. Laurent Boulevard, but now you have a lot of communities there and we feel that the community should come first — not a bridge,” Ms. Meilleur said.
Ms. Meilleur said the truck traffic on King Edward Avenue and Rideau Street is an ugly scar on the face of the capital, and it is inconceivable that any new bridge would not remove that longstanding irritant. But a bridge at Kettle Island would not only fail to do that, she said, but would make things worse by exporting the problem to another community.
“We know what building a truck route in the middle of a community has done and we need to remove the trucks from downtown,” she said. “But Kettle Island doesn’t remove the trucks from downtown. You take the problem and divide it into two. You don’t solve the problem in one community and you bring it to another community. That doesn’t make sense.”
The nation’s capital has wrestled with the question of a new bridge since the 1980s, and even though there is no argument that one is needed, the location has always defied a solution. Residents and politicians on both sides of the Ottawa River want a bridge as long as it is in someone else’s backyard, and without firm direction from the provinces, nothing has been done.
Even though the NCC’s most recent consultant has recommended the bridge cross at Kettle Island, the study found that route would only remove about 40 per cent of the truck traffic from King Edward.
The consultant’s choice immediately ran into a wall of protest from residents in Manor Park and parts of Vanier who feared a bridge would bring unwanted truck traffic and its attendant dangers to their doorsteps. Some Lowertown residents were not pleased either, because they would still be stuck with most of the truck traffic for the foreseeable future.
Ms. Meilleur says the best compromise is Lower Duck Island because the bridge and its approach would go through a largely undeveloped area.
She says the Ontario government will participate in the second phase of the environmental study, but wants the impact on the community to be paramount in the assessment. Public transit and economic development would be next in the order of priority, she said.
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