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•  What Ottawa is Talking About
•  Events
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What’s going on at City Hall.
 

Transit Commission
Tuesday, November 14 at 9:30 am

• Presentation - OC Transpo update – Rail, bus, and Para Transpo
• OC Transpo bus route review
• 2024 Draft operating and capital Budget – Transit Commission
• Delegation of authority – Contracts awarded for the period January 1 to June 30, 2023 for Transit Commission
• Status update – Transit Commission inquiries and motions for the period ending November 2, 2023

📋 Agenda

✡️ Ottawa Hospital

•  Gasoline and antisemetic messages were strewn about a clinical area of the Ottawa Hospital General Campus. Gasoline had been poured but the content or method of the messages was not disclosed. The hospital describes the messages as ‘an escalation of the level of hate and the level of antisemitism in the community’ but Ottawa Police said ‘there is no evidence to indicate that this is a hate-motivated incident’. No one was injured but some appointments needed to be reschedlued. (Josh Pringle at CTV)

🚌 OC Transpo

•  OC Transpo deep cleaned three buses for bedbugs but didn’t notify riders. A resident noticed in October that OC Transpo was spraying for bedbugs and asked CBC to look into it. OC Transpo admitted to the bedbugs but won’t say which buses, routes, or dates other than the buses were removed from service immediately. (Priscilla Ki Sun Hwang at CBC)
  
  ➕ Related Entomologist Yasmin Akhtar on how to spot bedbugs, the buggiest cities – Ottawa is number 5 in Canada – and how bad the problem really is. Spoiler: it's kind of bad.

🏗️ Lansdowne 2.0

•  Ottawa Bulldog has a few useful questions to ask City Council over both the now-approved Lansdowne 2.0 plan and the ongoing O Train problems. 

1. Is there a provision in any contract between the City of Ottawa and Ottawa Sports and Entertainment Group which says that should either of the two parties pull out of a Lansdowne agreement that the city must reimburse OSEG for some or all the money the company has poured into the project and any losses that OSEG might or might not have incurred during the course of that contract or contracts?
2. Is OC Transpo running single-car trains because of the lack of riders or it is concerned about not finding replacement parts due to availability issues because of the trains’ propensity for incurring damage to axels, hub assemblies and bearings?
3. If the design fix by Alstom of its hub, bearing and axel assemblies on Ottawa’s light-rail trains fails, will the City of Ottawa and OC Transpo be forced to replace the rolling stock, its related infrastructure and the current tracks? And will municipal taxpayers alone be forced to foot the bill to replace these hundreds of millions of dollars of items?
4. What contingencies is city staff preparing if the aforementioned Alstom redeslgn doesn’t work?
5. Are the people who have been lobbying at city hall for Lansdowne 2.0 registered lobbyists? (Ken Gray in Ottawa Bulldog)

🗳️ Matt Luloff

•  Now that the Lansdowne 2.0 vote is over, Orléans East-Cumberland ward councillor Matt Luloff is running for a federal seat. The Conservative Party announced Luloff as its candidate for Orléans in the next federal election. After voting ‘yes’ to Lansdowne 2.0, Luloff says that he is looking forward to ‘reining in wasteful spending’ federally. Unless he wins a federal election, he will retain his council seat. (CBC)

🚨 Ottawa Police Services

•  An appeal court has overturned the Ottawa police union's demand to be paid for symbolic holidays. The Ottawa Police Association had previously convinced an arbitrator that the day of mourning for Queen Elizabeth’s death counted as a holiday for overtime pay purposes. The Police Board appealed, arguing that it was absurd that every time the Federal governent declared a symbolic day, it would count as a statutory holiday. The appeal court agreed, and charged the Association $10,000 in costs. (Arthur White-Crummey)

🏘️ House Prices

•  Nine houses that you can buy for Ottawa’s average price of $721,600. This feature is always a hit for CTV. (Josh Pringle at CTV)

🛻 Convoy News

•  Tamara Lich spoke at a summit last week identified as ‘Leader of the Freedom Convoy Movement in 2022’. The World Freedom Initiative Summit was held in Paris and featured a hodge podge of US Republicans, far right European politicians, think tanks that fund these folk, and Lich. Lich gave her speech virtually as she is currently defending herself in a trial in Ottawa as not leading the Freedom Convoy. (Luke LeBrun in Press Progress)

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Ashley Newall at Apt 613 has a great history of Ottawa’s hockey arenas from the 1880s to the present: the Royal Rink on Slater, the first Dey brothers’ rink at the north-east corner of Laurier Avenue and the Rideau Canal, the Rideau Rink on Laurier Avenue, the second Dey’s rink at Gladstone Avenue and Bay Street, Dey’s Arena at Conferation Park, the final Dey’s arena on Argyle Avenue at O’Connor Street, TD Place Arena, and Canadian Tire Centre. It’s much heavier on the past than the present.

the ottawan is written and edited every work day by Martha and Darren.

Is there something that Ottawa should know about? Email to us at hello@theottawan.com. We read every single comment. 

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