Nasrallah: Subsequent Ottawa council should have a imaginative and prescient for town

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I’ve been residing within the metropolis of Ottawa for greater than 40 years. It actually has modified lots, however not sufficient to grow to be a vibrant, engaging and alluring dream vacation spot. Ottawa has all the time had the issue of being “simply Ottawa.”

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Irrespective of the way you slice it, the municipal election and the following mayoral choice on Oct. 24 will likely be decisive for Ottawa’s future. The issue is: The place are the standard candidates that Ottawa wants, deserves and desperately starves for these days? The checklist of candidates illustrates the depth of our predicament.

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Ottawa is going through a number of problems with pressing administration by the following metropolis council and its mayor. Chief amongst them are:

• A strategic imaginative and prescient for the long run. Imaginative and prescient is just not merely a slogan. Imaginative and prescient is just not an empty phrase. Visionary leaders have the power and zeal to mobilize groups and followers to work towards particular objectives, agendas and strategic paths with structural and sensible motion plans. Imaginative and prescient needn’t be a dreamy pie-in-the-sky factor. Wrote former U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger: “The duty of the chief is to get his folks from the place they’re to the place they haven’t been.”

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Ottawa must shake itself unfastened from complacency, boredom and its inferiority advanced. All candidates for the mayor’s job ought to be requested this straightforward query: What’s your imaginative and prescient of town of Ottawa?

• Second, infrastructure points. Ottawa is rising sooner than its infrastructure can handle its growing inhabitants and depleted sources. The sunshine-rail system calamity has been a comic book opera in Canada’s capital. A disgrace of untold impotence by town council and metropolis management.

Housing is an important want, and inexpensive housing has been a catastrophe for the previous few years. All candidates ought to be grilled on this subject.

Roads are in dangerous form and expansions and repairs are sluggish and taking a toll on metropolis inhabitants.

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Range is right here to remain. Ottawa is going through a flood of latest Canadians from all corners of the globe. My neighbourhood in Stittsville is a testomony to that truth. Our road incorporates people from all continents residing aspect by aspect. The problem is to search out insurance policies and applications to make all of them work collectively within the metropolis slightly than residing as separate elements of an incoherent complete. What insurance policies are the candidates advocating to deal with range and integration significantly?

• Third, Ottawa lacks sexiness and jazz. The capital’s fame overseas is just not significantly good. It’s considered as a boring metropolis. Stale authorities buildings, lack of enjoyable locations, a metropolis core that’s embarrassing — for instance Financial institution Road, which wants a significant facelift or a drastic redesign. Ottawa must be attractive sufficient to draw vacationers like Rome, Paris and London do.

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The subsequent technology of leaders should change this picture of a metropolis that’s with out id, mission, sexiness, presence, enjoyable or playfulness. It should transcend simply being “good.” A complete overhaul of this complacency is demanded and wanted from the brand new council and its chief.

Each candidate ought to be questioned continuous about these important points and issues. The trucker protest in February brought on Ottawa to lose its innocence. Allow us to not lose the long run with it. The voters have a golden likelihood this fall to make Ottawa a really attractive metropolis by electing a brand new crop of leaders ready and prepared to make Ottawa the envy of the world, not a laughingstock.

Ottawa’s Elie Mikhael Nasrallah is creator of the forthcoming e-book “Gates and Partitions: Tales of Migration in Trendy Instances.” www.eliemnasrallah.com