The NCC, Parks Canada and the town every have some duty for the waterway, which is why little has been achieved to use its potential.
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The Metropolis of Ottawa, the Nationwide Capital Fee and Parks Canada are launching a session on the Rideau Canal, they usually need our opinions.
What they hope we do is full a survey, attend a digital assembly, go to a pop-up kiosk at Landsowne Christmas Market on Nov. 25 and ship our feedback. I’m going to skip proper to the final step.
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What does the Rideau Canada imply to me? Oh, so many issues that collectively spell O-t-t-a-w-a: it’s stunning and stuffed with potential we’re not doing almost sufficient with.
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The canal could be very outdated, but in addition very cool. The waterway boasts 47 locks over 202 kilometres between the Ottawa River beneath Parliament Hill and Kingston on the fringe of Lake Ontario on the St. Lawrence River. Hundreds of Irish, Scottish and French-Canadian labourers, underneath the supervision of Col. John By, constructed it over 5 and a half years, give or take, between 1826 and 1832.
It was a grandiose concept, like so many we have now round right here — and in contrast to too many trendy infrastructure initiatives (whats up, LRT), this one was constructed proper. However there have been value overruns, so at the least that half nonetheless resonates, given in the present day’s procurement processes.
In accordance with Wikipedia, the primary steamboat to do your entire Kingston-to-Ottawa journey, on Could 22, 1832, was referred to as Rideau, however since that was a contact on the predictable aspect we additionally comprehend it by its nickname, “Pumper.” Col. By and his household had been on board for the journey, which took seven days.
The factor that’s extraordinarily Ottawa-esque in regards to the Rideau Canal is what number of completely different ranges of presidency are answerable for it. The NCC, Parks Canada and the town every have their share of duty for ensuring nothing will get achieved proper. No, I imply, every is accountable for pointing fingers on the different two when one thing goes fallacious.
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(If Canada dies in the future, its tombstone shall be engraved with a heartfelt “Canada: Executed In By 10,000 Jurisdictional Skirmishes, Could You Relaxation in Constitutional Items.”)
Because the introduction to the present multi-jurisdictional survey affirms, Ottawa residents and guests alike “cherish the wonder and leisure alternatives this historic waterway brings to the town.”
And therein, expensive reader, lies the rub.
On this city, we by no means consider walkways or waterways as something apart from leisure. We don’t consider them as commuter pathways for folks to get to work and again — year-round, too, I say with an indignant eye directed on the winter closure of the Chief William Commanda Bridge over the Ottawa River.
Round right here, we solely consider roads for commuting. All the pieces else — even a beautiful gem just like the Canal — is for leisure functions. It’s a failure of creativeness that deprives everybody, residents and guests alike, of really magnificent public areas within the nation’s capital.
Even within the winter, once we do get the Rideau Skateway open, we consider the canal as a leisure factor, not as a approach for folks alongside the path to commute downtown and again. The place is stuffed with BeaverTails however valuable little is completed to encourage locals to make use of it as a technique to the workplace (although some do).
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The Rideau Canal is an undervalued and underutilized useful resource that — at the least inside the limits of the Metropolis of Ottawa — we should always flip right into a linear park like what was achieved in Portland, Oregon after they eliminated the Harbor Drive parkway alongside Willamette River and turned it into the improbable Tom McCall Waterfront Park. It’s value googling, I promise.
We might have good issues in Ottawa if we set our minds to it. Now we have good, certified folks, and loads of cash to go round — at the least judging by how a lot we spend on roads.
The Rideau Canal is a beautiful useful resource stuffed with unrealized potential as a result of timid leaders can’t see past the windshields of their vehicles.
I want we had half the imaginative and prescient that Col. By needed to make Ottawa what it may be.
Brigitte Pellerin (they/them) is an Ottawa author.
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