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Three giant, unpopular, best-kept-swept-under-the-carpet issues came together late last week at Rideau Street and King Edward Avenue.
A burst water pipe at this critical intersection broke, causing traffic chaos on the roads leading to and from the Macdonald-Cartier interprovincial bridge. As a rule, these sorts of things never cross people’s minds until they don’t work. The city has about 320 watermain breaks a year but usually they are in places where they cause minimal inconvenience.
Not so last week. The Rideau-King Edward break stopped the aforementioned traffic including halting the major truck route between Gatineau and Ottawa. Another break on Elgin Street near police headquarters on the same day gave us another high-profile interruption. The Elgin Street pipe dates back to 1964 while the Rideau-King Edward example was installed 123 years ago without problems. They sure don’t make water pipes like they used to. Ottawa got its money’s worth on that one.
That brings us to the first issue illustrated by the breaks – infrastructure. The city estimates it is about $1-billion short on infrastructure. Just to put that in perspective, the city’s annual budget, capital and operating, is just north of $2 billion. And as we know from the seemingly perpetual budget debates, the city is horribly strapped for cash.
Ottawa is not alone in this problem. With 80 per cent of Canadians living in urban areas, people think of this country as lakes, woods, mountains and trees but, in reality, it is a nation of city dwellers. If you love this country, you must embrace its cities.
Cities are the economic engines of this country. The wealth of this country is generated in its municipalities. So too much of its innovation. The federal government, without an urban strategy, fails to recognize this when it comes to funding. It does so at the country’s peril.
The second issue is what the city does with infrastructure money when it gets it. The province sent it $14.6 million for infrastructure whereupon its callous councillors promptly dispatched it to the operating budget to hold down this year’s already high property-tax increase and to save their collective political hides. That can’t inspire the province to repeat such infrastructure largesse.
And finally, the Rideau-King Edward break shows the folly of having the city’s major truck route through downtown. That jams traffic. As well, one worries what happens when one of those trucks carrying toxic substances tips. An east-end bridge to force those trucks out of downtown can’t come soon enough.
Perhaps the Rideau-King Edward incident will help provincial and civic politicians explore the $20 million Environment Minister John Baird offered recently to help stop the city from dumping raw sewage into the Ottawa River. So maybe this mishap will help focus politicians and residents on civic infrastructure.
© ‘The Ottawa Citizen 2008”:http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/editorials/story.html?id=99ad60b1-4d17-44b1-99ec-da42a7272fb1