No integrated transportation plan a testament to NCC’s failure
University of Ottawa professor Gilles Paquet, the former head of the panel that gave the NCC a strong vote of confidence 5 years ago, is now openly criticizing the organization and its actions.
Here are a few excerpts from today’s Ottawa Citizen article:
‘Timid’ NCC could become irrelevant, former review panel head says
“What we need at the NCC is leadership that is going to take the advantage of all the precedents that exist to be a champion for the federal capital region, rather than the timid operator they are now,” said Paquet, senior fellow at the university’s Centre on Governance.
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“The fact that they are invisible or they indulge in evasive thinking is condemning them to become more and more irrelevant. To my mind this is the kiss of death.”
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Paquet points to numerous proposals, including rail links to the Ottawa and Gatineau airports and loops around the capital, that have gone nowhere. Waterfront development has been talked to death but nothing has happened. He says the fact the nation’s capital hasn’t been able to create a modern, integrated transportation system is a testament to the NCC’s failure.
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“Transportation is the key element in this region. If you were able to deal with the transportation issue — not just railroads and bridges but the river as well — this would be a different place,” he said.
Paquet has co-edited a new book: The Unimagined Canadian Capital.
Challenges for the Federal Capital Region
Too many stakeholders have neglected their duty of imagining an inspiring federal capital region for Canada. Under the auspices of the Forum of Federations, a number of persons interested in the fate of Canada’s federal capital region came together to examine the challenges facing the region and to put forward suggestions to deal with them.
In this report on the brainstorming exercise conducted in January 2011, professionals, academics and elected officials take stock of the vast array of assets on which the federal capital region can build; probe the many sources of failures in coping as effectively and creatively as one would expect with the diversity, trans-border, financial and governance challenges; and make suggestions to ensure that the federal capital region does not remain “unimagined” in the future.
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January 11th, 2012 at 12:47 pm
Sorry to go off topic (from “No integrated transportation plan…”) but I saw something in yesterday’s “La Presse” (Montreal)that left me puzzled.
In the A section of the paper on January 10, the CCN published a request for proposals for a “vérifcateur de l’équité du processus d’évaluation” (Evaluation Process Fairness Auditor) for the Interprovincial Crossings study.
Does anyone know what that is all about?
I could’t find the advertisement in the Citizen, but perhaps I just didn’t look in the right place. The RFP is on MERX (ref.no. TH01).
January 11th, 2012 at 5:46 pm
Looks to me as though the NCC is building its arsenal to defend what’s sure to be a very controversial decision.
According to the MERX posting, here’s what the NCC is looking for with this RFP:
“An experienced and highly skilled bilingual (English and French) Fairness Auditor will be engaged by the NCC to provide evaluation process Fairness Auditor Services. The primary skills needed from the Fairness Auditor are: an established credibility in adjudicating broad questions of fairness; and experience in decision support systems and in the selection of transportation alternatives.”