By Jon Willing, Ottawa Citizen, December 1, 2016
Instead of a kick in the pants, the city largely received a pat on the back from the city’s auditor general Thursday.
Ken Hughes didn’t offer many suggestions for big-time savings in the results of six audits.
While Hughes recommended better management techniques in some areas, his office lauded the city’s efforts in planning the switch to LRT in 2018.
By Vito Pilieci, Ottawa Citizen, December 1, 2016
The city will begin issuing warnings starting Thursday to highlight its new ban on all water pipes, including hookah pipes, in public places.
The ban, which takes effect Thursday, builds on existing city bylaws, which came into effect in 2012. Those bylaws prohibited the use of water pipes on outdoor, municipally-owned property including parks, beaches and recreational playing fields.
By Susan Sherring, Ottawa Citizen, December 1, 2016
It’s hard to know what to make of Thursday’s audit committee meeting, where Gloucester-Southgate Coun. Diane Deans had the audacity to ask — yet again — for an audit of the spending on the first phase of the city’s light rail transit system.
How dare she? She wants to know how much money has been spent?
Blasphemy!
Deans made the same request last year and was told that just wasn’t possible. Let’s revisit that in 2016, she was told.
By Jennifer McIntosh, Ottawa Metro News, November 30, 2016
Bay Ward Coun. Mark Taylor said until shovels are in the ground, there’s time to find solutions for residents who don’t want to see an LRT flyover through the green space of Connaught Park.
While the route has been pretty much determined since a council decision in 2011, there's room for improvement, Taylor said.
Dave Sharpe, who has lived on Hanlon Avenue for 35 years and is now on the executive for the Queensway Terrace North Community Association, said there hasn’t been enough substantive community consultation on the idea.
By CTV News Ottawa, November 30, 2016
At an announcement on Wednesday, city officials said they had completed work expected to put an end to flooding in Ottawa’s west-end. In both 2002 and 2009 hundreds of homes were destroyed in Kanata North, Carp and Stittsville by water and sewage as a result of severe storms.
Councillor Allan Hubley revealed a new pond located near the intersection of Castlefrank Rd. at Winchester Dr. as the final piece of a $35 million solution to the flooding.
“Now what happens, is that there are different catch basins at the top, that the water will flow down through that pipe… and it will be stored here in the pond,” Hubley said.
By Alan Kors, Ottawa Sun, November 30, 2016
British vegetarians were driven into a polite, well-mannered frenzy Tuesday after news that the Bank of England uses tallow — lard, really — in the process of making their five-pound notes.
Not very sporting, wot! was the white-hot reaction from the British vegan community, who already suffer under the daily mixed blessing of having to eat British food, but with fewer choices. (As a plus, no toad in the hole! But as a minus, more bubble and squeak.)
By Madeline Ashby, Ottawa Citizen, November 29, 2016
As Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his team face the fallout from the decisions they have just announced with regard to the Trans Mountain Pipeline and Line 3, they should keep the protests at Standing Rock in mind.
Since April of this year, the Standing Rock Sioux have peacefully protested the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline through burial grounds sacred to their tribe. Further, the pipeline as projected will cross under the Missouri River – a major water source for numerous communities in the area. The Standing Rock Sioux, whose reservation and burial grounds the pipeline would parallel, have serious concerns about the integrity of the pipeline, have pointed out that a rupture or leak in the pipeline could poison the water supply of millions of people.
By Kelly Egan, Ottawa Citizen, November 30, 2016
There’s much to admire about the “complete street” concept adopted by the City of Ottawa.Wider, spiffy sidewalks, new high-end benches, semi-protected bicycle lanes, slower traffic, sculpted intersections. So, why do some hate the latest in urban thinking?
In the last little while, readers have reached out to complain about both Churchill Avenue and Main Street, each redone following “complete street” principles. Their reaction? Completely wrong.
By Allison Jones, Ottawa Citizen, November 30, 2016
TORONTO — Ontario’s cap-and-trade program will cost the province’s consumers and businesses $8 billion dollars in its first years of operation to get minimal greenhouse gas reductions, the auditor general said Wednesday.
In her annual report, Bonnie Lysyk said households will pay an average of $156 next year in added costs on gasoline and natural gas, rising to $210 in 2019 plus another $75 that year in indirect costs on goods and services.
By Andrew Duffy, Ottawa Citizen, November 30, 2016
A 12-acre parcel of land on the Central Experimental Farm has been contaminated by road salt from nearby Carling Avenue and cannot be used for research, the Citizen has learned.
The contaminated land is located directly across from The Ottawa Hospital and comprises about one-fifth of the hospital’s preferred building site for a new Civic campus.
By Phil Jenkins, Ottawa Citizen, November 27, 2016
It would be pleasant, as Salvador Dali claimed he could, to be able to remember everything you saw and heard from the moment of birth. Were that so, I would now be able to conjure the arrival at the Union train station (soon to be the temporary Senate den house) of myself as a one-year-old with a mother in tow. Father had gone ahead and found an apartment in a six unit on Electric Street in New Edinburgh, which is still there. Nine years and a couple of moves later, including a Robert Campeau suburban idle in Elmvale Acres, and a witnessing of the last streetcar, we were on a boat bound for Liverpool.
(...)
But, but, meanwhile the membership of the green resistance has grown (kudos, Ecology Ottawa), as have the champions of compassion, those who wish the city’s elected officials to administer compassion and govern greed, and not do it the other way ’round. The pedestrians and bicyclists have begun to reclaim territory lost to the car, though not without casualties.
By Travis Holum, Fox Business, November 29, 2016
Rooftop solar energy is becoming a financially viable way for millions of U.S. consumers to generate their own electricity -- and utilities are doing everything to kill the solar boom before it gains too much traction. Utilities in states such as Florida, Wisconsin, and Nevada have tried to undermine rooftop solar at the regulatory level and in ballot measures. As a reaction, voters have fought back and beaten the efforts to squash solar energy.