Ecology Ottawa

News Clippings

Finnish City of Oulu Shows How Winter Cycling Can Rule

By The Energy Mix

Though the blame for Canada’s dearth of winter cyclists is typically placed on weather, it is the lack of dedicated—and snow-cleared—bike routes that keeps people tethered to their cars and public transit, according to a video that profiles the 200,000-strong city of Oulu, Finland as Exhibit A for how to make winter cycling work.

... With a network of safe paths and frequent, reliable snow removal in place, Oulu proves that a jacket, mitts, and a toque are all it takes to have a blast on a bike in winter (though he neglects to mention how a toque can fit under a helmet, hmmm). He also advises Canadian car habitués to understand that it isn’t all that cold out—at least not if you dress for it.

https://theenergymix.com/2021/02/03/finnish-city-of-oulu-shows-how-winter-cycling-can-rule/

ANALYSIS: Reconciliation adds twist to city's strategy for growth in a shifted urban boundary

By Jon Willing, Ottawa Citizen

There was a moment during a joint committee meeting last week when Coun. Scott Moffatt questioned if public transit trumps agriculture in approving land development on the edge of an expanded urban boundary.

But minutes later there was another tricky dichotomy in play, one that many councillors didn’t see coming.

Does reconciliation with Indigenous peoples trump urban sprawl?

The overwhelming answer, if you go by the committee vote, was yes.

 

Go carbon neutral or get left behind, world's biggest money manager warns companies

By Thomson Reuters, CBC News, January 26, 2021

Larry Fink, chief executive of the world's biggest asset manager BlackRock , warned the companies it invests in on Tuesday they will need to show a game plan for surviving in a world aiming for net-zero carbon emissions by mid-century.

...To help investors prepare their portfolios for the transition to a net-zero economy, Fink flagged a number of fresh steps the asset manager would take, including, where possible, publishing scores for how its equity and bond funds are positioned to adapt to global temperature changes.

 

Pellerin: ByWard Market renewal is good for tourists, consumers and business

By Brigitte Pellerin, Ottawa Citizen

On Jan. 27 city council approved a $129-million proposal to revamp the ByWard Market, which, as you’ll know if you’ve set foot downtown in the last year, could sure use a little zip. It’s a good plan, too. Rideau-Vanier Coun. Mathieu Fleury called it “worthwhile,” which is high praise indeed in a government town. However, despite approval from council, it’s not entirely clear how committed we are to seeing it through. It’s driving me bonkers.

...At some point, we’re going to have to stop approving massive spending for roads and think about better ways to spend our shared money, for instance by providing real benefits to the largest number of people, very much including business owners, by making it more likely human beings will purchase goods and services from them. Because in case you hadn’t noticed, cars are terrible customers.

Recycling key to plastic crisis, says coalition behind new plastic ‘pact’ — but is it?

By Mark Fawcett-Atkinson, National Observer

Every year, Canadians create hundreds of thousands of tonnes of plastic waste, almost half of it from packaging. Despite Canadians' diligent efforts at curbside recycling, most of it ends up in landfills. That might be changing.

On Wednesday, a coalition of major businesses, environmental organizations, and the federal government announced a new initiative to eliminate plastic waste: the Canada Plastic Pact. The group aims to ensure that in the next five years, at least half the plastic packaging in Canada will be recycled or composted and contain at least 30 per cent recycled materials.

Air pollution linked to higher risk of irreversible vision loss

By Damian Carrington, National Observer

Small increases in air pollution are linked to an increased risk of irreversible sight loss from age-related macular degeneration (AMD), a large U.K. study has found.

The study is the first to assess the connection between air pollution and both diagnoses of AMD that the patients said they had been given, and measurements of harmful changes in the retina.

Denley: Ottawa city planners firmly stuck in the past

By Randall Denley, Ottawa Citizen, January 26, 2021

If there is one lesson Ottawa planners should have learned from the mistakes of the last 50 years, it is that a Greenbelt can’t stop the spread of development, even if you choose to call it a Gold Belt. And yet, surprisingly, yet another greenbelt is proposed as a key feature in the city’s plan to control growth for the next 25 years.

The new rural ring city staff have suddenly come up with would do even more, defining the limits of urban growth until the end of the century.  It’s quite a feat of foresight. Meanwhile back in 2021, new trends in the way we work and live make this new city official plan seem old before it’s even passed.

 

Algonquins come out sudden winners in urban boundary vote

By Kate Porter, CBC News Ottawa, January 27, 2021

One day after it appeared the Algonquins of Ontario would be left out entirely from the City of Ottawa's plans to expand its urban areas, city councillors voted to allot 445 hectares to the group.

The move would effectively launch a whole new outlying community of 45,000 near the Amazon warehouse, which the Algonquin and their developer partner, Taggart Group of Companies, call "Tewin."

City staff had determined the parcel was far away and scored so poorly it shouldn't even be considered for bringing inside the urban boundary. Staff had produced a map that would grow the city by way of small parcels at the fringes of existing suburbs and services.

Councillors on the planning and agricultural affairs committees were attracted to the idea of creating an entirely new, sustainable community from scratch — an area twice the size of Blackburn Hamlet, to start.

Even more important, they said, was to show their commitment to reconciliation with the Algonquin.

(...)Several councillors expressed concerns about the site, and Catherine McKenney didn't see how councillors had the information they needed to make such a big decision.

Staff had advised marine clay soil conditions might prevent building anything higher than four storeys, which could make construction at Tewin costly and could prevent dense neighbourhoods the city wants.

Tewin received a score of zero for servicing because no water pipes are nearby.

(...)In a separate decision, city councillors also approved letting in a large farm parcel near Riverside South, despite having voted last May to not allow future development on any agricultural land.

The area's councillor, Carol Anne Meehan, succeeded in swapping a piece of land further south for the Urbandale property north of Rideau River Road.

Not developing that Urbandale property would leave a big field between two new O-Train stations where the city wants people living close to transit, she argued.

Coun. Scott Moffatt countered that transit should not trump agriculture, and nothing in the area had changed since council gave its word last spring to protect farmland.

Developers stunned by recommendation to remove lands from boundary expansion to help Algonquins project

By Jon Willing, Ottawa Citizen, January 27, 2021

Councillors blindsided four development companies on Tuesday by recommending the removal of high-scoring development land from inside a proposed urban boundary in the Kanata area so the Algonquins of Ontario can build a major residential community on low-scoring development land in the rural east.

A joint meeting of the planning and agriculture and rural affairs committee established which additional lands should be included in a shifted urban boundary to satisfy growth projections in a new official plan.

(...)It is incredibly surprising that in an unprecedented move that politics has taken over a prescribed scoring process and months of work by city staff and included a parcel of land with a zero score on servicing over lands which have some of highest scores and support the growth and maturation of an existing complete community where jobs, services and houses co-exist,” Claridge, Multivesco, Uniform and EQ Homes said in a statement.

“The joint committee has taken a step backwards in their supposed step into the future with a new official plan. It has taken one of the biggest employment nodes and one of the only true 15-minute communities out of the equation that these same politicians drew up to start the process.”

Instead, councillors took the roughly 175 hectares of land and packaged it with 270 hectares that still needed to be slotted into the urban boundary, ultimately assigning the 445 hectares of land to the “Tewin” project pursued by the Algonquins of Ontario and Taggart Investments west of Carlsbad Springs.

(...)Then Coun. Tim Tierney shifted his colleagues’ attention with a motion to include the Algonquin lands inside the urban boundary. He said the city should seize the chance to acknowledge reconciliation.

(...)It wasn’t the only controversy.

Coun. Carol Anne Meehan won support to swap out staff-recommended land in Riverside South with nearby agricultural land to allow residential development closer to the new Trillium Line extension.

Today's letters: Intensification should respect community context

By Alex Cullen, Ottawa Citizen Letter to the Editor, January 26, 2021

The good, the bad and the ugly (intensification)

Recently, there was a re-zoning issue at planning committee for 33 Maple Grove Road in Kanata, where a single-family home on a corner lot was to be replaced by two low-rise apartment buildings of six units each The local community was vigorously opposed but planning committee approved the proposal 8-1. The issue was posed as a test of the city’s commitment to intensification.

This is a false dichotomy: there is a difference between “good” intensification and “bad” intensification.

There is a lot of “good” intensification going on. This is intensification that fits the fabric of neighbourhoods, that doesn’t provoke community opposition. It has been occurring for decades in Ottawa. Look around you. It is “bad” intensification that grabs the headlines, is objected to by community groups, and appears to set the narrative “communities oppose intensification.”

This is unfair and misleading. Not all intensification is “bad” or opposed by community groups. And not all community groups are wrong to oppose “bad” intensification.

The narrative “communities oppose intensification” is often used to undermine the city’s targets to handle a significant part of projected growth via intensification, leading to the alternative: more urban sprawl.

The Federation of Citizens Associations, in the debate about expanding Ottawa’s urban boundaries to accommodate growth, opposed urban sprawl – bad for the environment, requires costly infrastructure, bad for taxpayers. But that does not constitute giving a blank cheque to intensification. Intensification that respects the community context, that doesn’t overload infrastructure, that involves the community in design and planning, will be far more successful in building the city we all want.

Buckles: An embassy row along the Ottawa River is a very bad idea

By Daniel Buckles, Ottawa Citizen, January 25, 2021

is faced with a serious decision regarding housing for its urbanizing population. Having declared a “Housing and Homelessness Emergency” on Jan. 22, 2020, as a city we have continued to build mostly condos and single-family dwellings. Clearly these are the most profitable building forms, representing the traditional aspirations of relatively wealthy families and aging couples. They are also the easiest for builders, repeatable in virtually any location with architectural details added here and there to mimic art.

(...)It involves an application by the NCC to the City of Ottawa calling for an amendment to the current Official Plan to allow the development of embassies along the Ottawa River near the north end of Parkdale Avenue in Kitchissippi Ward. The 3.7-hectare site is literally a stone’s throw from the Ottawa River’s Lazy Bay and the Lemieux Water Treatment Plant.

The plan is bad for two reasons. First, it is tone-deaf to the desperate need for progressive and aggressive housing action in Ottawa. It was only in November, 2019 that the NCC and the city forced the eviction near the Bayview LRT station of 20 people made homeless months earlier by a rooming house fire. Meanwhile, plans to redevelop the federal government’s Tunney’s Pasture and city-owned industrial lands around Bayview Yards are barely crawling along. By contrast, approvals for new 31-story condo towers on private property along Parkdale, and near to the proposed Embassy Road, are quickly moving forward.

As Kitchissippi Ward Coun. Jeff Leiper noted in a recent newsletter, “While the City and NCC’s plans have for several years anticipated the kind of development now being proposed, we have an opportunity to take a pause and consider whether this is the right use for this valuable parcel so close to the best transportation infrastructure in the city.”

Second, the land is an important fragment of the Ottawa River’s ecological services offered to people free and potentially in perpetuity by nature. Local residents have documented approximately 130 trees on the property, including several large, healthy middle-aged examples of Red Oak and Tamarack. Some 63 bird species have been documented there, a sign of why the NCC partnered with Birds International to declare the broader riverside lands an internationally significant bird migratory route. Last spring, the NCC roped off part of the area to keep people from harassing a rare nesting owl. A Peregrine Falcon nesting in one of Tunney’s towers also frequents the site.

Rural landowners ask city for right to develop properties

By Kate Porter, CBC News Ottawa, January 25, 2021

Property owners and developers whose lands didn't make the City of Ottawa's cut for being included inside a new urban boundary tried to make the case Monday for why they should be let in.

City staff released a map of which 1,011 hectares should be urbanized to meet the needs of a growing population, and nearly 50 people weighed in during a joint meeting of the planning and agricultural affairs committees.

(...)The Algonquins of Ontario were the first to address councillors, and argued they should be allowed to develop a vast parcel of some 2,000 hectares in the rural south-east now, instead of waiting years longer.

They have been working with developers Taggart on a sustainable community of up to 45,000 residents they call Tewin, and have held several meetings with the city.

(...)Coun. Eli El-Chantiry praised the idea as a way to protect food production and keep urban areas from encroaching on rural villages through to the end of the century.

But many delegations said the "Gold Belt" came as a surprise that could cause home owners to move beyond Ottawa's city limits.

"Are we setting ourselves up for leapfrogging yet again? Are Carleton Place and Rockland going to send us a thank you card because now they can have that many more residents interested in coming?" asked Kevin Yemm, vice-president of land development for Richcraft.

Others welcomed the idea, but worried the Gold Belt left large gaps where tens of thousands more homes could be built. 

"It's more like a very loosely fitted sash. This worries me," said Daniel Buckles of A People's Official Plan for Ottawa's Climate Emergency.

Councillors will reconvene Tuesday to ask questions of staff and vote on recommendations.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/urban-boundary-part-two-committees-delegations-1.5886595?ref=mobilerss&cmp=newsletter_CBC%20Ottawa_1643_235961