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In Ottawa Centre, something sharp and bright materialized in Wednesday morning’s drizzle: a defining local issue in an aimless national election campaign.
Things are crystallizing on this one big issue in Ottawa Centre.
In Ottawa Centre, something sharp and bright materialized in Wednesday morning’s drizzle: a defining local issue in an aimless national election campaign.
There was NDP candidate Angella MacEwen, in pink running shoes tucked beneath an instant podium, at Queen Juliana Park on the eastern end of the Central Experimental Farm, backdrop sumacs wearing their September reds.
MacEwen, a labour economist, is calling for a public inquiry into how this rolling green land near Dow’s Lake was chosen as the site of the new Civic campus of The Ottawa Hospital.
“Why was this decision made and how did we get here?” she asked, mostly addressing a Facebook audience at a “press” conference. (There was one reporter present, one television camera operator, a few civilians literally running by, the odd dog.)
What to do about the future Civic, however, is the kind of instant referendum every riding needs at election time — a yes-or-no question that cuts through the campaign fog.
First of all, it matters, obviously, where we put this $2.8-billion showpiece of health care. Secondly, the issue is easy for people to understand, unlike a binder of fairy-tale policies dropped from on high. Thirdly, the timing is fairly urgent.
And now we have two main candidates with different positions.
MacEwen briefly referenced the process by which the National Capital Commission evaluated more than a dozen sites in 2016, settling on the western side of Tunney’s Pasture, the 120-acre federal complex along the Ottawa River.
The hospital, among many, took one look and said, “No way,” and the Dow’s Lake site was taken as a compromise.
Fighting to regain the seat once held by Paul Dewar, MacEwen said there had been no proper consultation with Indigenous Peoples and no justification as to why 50 or so acres of green space, perhaps 600 trees, needed to be bulldozed for a complex of concrete buildings.
“The best time to preserve our green space, as the saying goes, was 100 years ago. The second best time is now.”
Both she and MPP Joel Harden questioned why the plan does not have better transit integration and why it requires a 2,500-car parking garage — a “relic,” he called it — that would rise four storeys.
“I continue to hear from hundreds of residents, on the phone, on email, who are asking why would we do this in the middle of a climate emergency,” said Harden, who arrived on scene in his trademark cargo bike.
Harden said it is not too late to pause the process. He said there are three elections (federal, municipal, provincial) scheduled before the main construction starts in 2024.
“That is straight-up fear-mongering,” he said of the “can’t-afford-to-delay” arguments.
Nor does he get very far at Queen’s Park or with federal colleagues, he added. “I hear the sound of one hand clapping when I raise this with decision-makers at all levels, and it’s unacceptable.”
MacEwen’s position to urgently apply the brakes (the start of the parking garage construction is roughly six months away) is in contrast to that of her main opponent, Liberal Yasir Naqvi.
He is calling for better consultation and public input on design, protection for the remainder of the farm and reinstatement of lost green space, but doesn’t support a review of the current location.
(Realistically, how could he? He was part of the establishment that allowed TOH to reach this point: almost halfway through a five-stage process to have the campus completed by 2028.)
“No downtown site is perfect,” he writes, “and we cannot afford to relaunch a review process that will result in a decade of delays before we get this new hospital to serve the people of Ottawa.”
Neither has the Conservative candidate, Carol Clemenhagen, signalled that she would try to derail the current plan.
So things are crystallizing on this one big issue in Ottawa Centre. Voters can choose a candidate who wants to pause, explore and contemplate other locations or from a couple who want to proceed, but build better.
The location, and why not be real for a moment, probably isn’t changing. The point, though, is that voters now have choices about something important in their own backyard.
The writing, in big letters, is right there: The process has been horribly political since it started. First the Tories handed the Civic an empty farm field, then the Liberals took it away, then a neutral process gave us Tunney’s, then it was swapped for the Farm-east, minus the crops.
So there’s your “public inquiry,” with a side-dish of “smite your enemies.” And, on a rain-washed morning when almost no one is listening, the hopeful sound of the old refrain: Politicians are the problem, politicians the only answer.
To contact Kelly Egan, please call 613-291-6265 or email kegan@postmedia.com
Twitter.com/kellyegancolumn
The race for mayor and city council will not cross the finish line until October of next year but the first big step is now
The man insists upon a point to be made.
“This is not a takeover by the UCP of municipal elections and it’s not a takeover by the NDP of municipal elections. It won’t be allowed to be. It will be an overt prohibition. Nobody is taking over anything.”
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The man quoted is Ric McIver.
In a previous life McIver was a long-serving fiscal hawk on Calgary city council, nicknamed Dr. No by this scribbler because he was no fan of big spending.
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McIver is now Premier Danielle Smith’s point man on cities and he’s delivering news that could pave the way for a real shakeup at Calgary city council where lefties rule the roost.
Read on.
The race for mayor and city council will not cross the finish line until October of next year but the first big step is now.
It is Thursday and later this day the UCP government led by Premier Smith will roll out its plan to allow local political parties to contest the next city election in Calgary and Edmonton “where political affiliations are most obvious.”
The move is already opposed by Calgary Mayor Jyoti Gondek who says she is not a fan.
The Smith government is pushing forward.
They intend to create rules city political parties will operate by.
With city political parties, a candidate’s political party will appear on the ballot.
Candidates can still run as independent candidates.
These city political parties will only be in Calgary and Edmonton, at least for now.
These parties will not have any formal affiliation with federal or provincial parties. There will be no city UCP or NDP or Liberal party.
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There will be no sharing of funds or voter lists between federal or provincial parties and these city parties.
The Smith government will discuss all the ins and outs with local governments in Alberta and regulations governing the parties will be on the books by the end of the year, or at least more than six months before the fall 2025 city election.
This will give the cities and the political players in those cities time to prepare for the vote.
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For years, city conservatives, especially in Calgary, have been champing at the bit for the chance to do battle as a local political party.
The belief is, and there is evidence to back it up, if city conservatives could get their act together and agree to one candidate for mayor and 14 candidates for the 14 council seats they’d have a good chance of being the city council majority.
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Why?
Because if Calgarians knew exactly who they were voting for and if it was crystal clear what each of the candidates stood for then you would see more conservatives win instead of the election being a game of who has the most name recognition.
There will be those who will attack the Smith government and say this is about partisanship at the local level, folks picking sides.
Get real.
“There’s a lot of partisan behaviour and people in municipal politics now,” says McIver.
“There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s actually part of free speech, part of the freedom of association, part of what we’re guaranteed in this country.
“Those who say partisanship doesn’t exist are wrong. My guess is people who say that probably haven’t sat through a lot of council meetings. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck it’s a duck.”
And let us not forget in the last city election city unions bankrolled a campaign involving the endorsement of candidates, many of them winning council seats.
McIver says having city parties is an opportunity to hold politicians somewhat accountable.
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The cities boss says right now there are candidates at the doors with no party handle who can tell people they believe are conservative that they themselves are conservative and tell people they believe are liberal that they themselves are liberal.
With city parties, it will make it easier for those who want to vote one way or the other to find their candidate.
The candidate’s affiliation will be spelled out and if the candidate is elected and votes in a different way the voters can more easily call that politician out.
But people like Calgary Mayor Gondek don’t like the idea of city political parties.
What is McIver’s reaction?
“We heard that and we disagree. We think this is a positive thing,” says the man riding herd on the cities file for the UCP.
“It should increase accountability. It should increase the ability of voters to look at candidates and say this is my candidate, this is not my candidate.”
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OTTAWA – Conservative member of Parliament Colin Carrie, who represents Oshawa, Ont., says he will not run in the next election.
Carrie was first elected in 2004 and re-elected six times.
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In Israel, the far right is increasingly influential in politics, with a government reliant for its existence on a settler movement driving an ever-more extreme agenda.
Analysts point out that settler and ultra-right-wing voices have come to dominate the cabinet, providing legal and political cover for even more expansion into internationally recognised Palestinian territory, and underpinning much of the ferocity of Israel’s war on Gaza.
And yet, despite that, and irrespective of the international criticism of Israel that continues to grow, the United States continues to fund it.
US lawmakers in the Senate voted on Tuesday, by an overwhelming majority, to transfer $17bn in military aid to Israel.
Celebrating the passage of the bill, House House Majority leader Chuck Schumer told the Senate: “Tonight we tell our allies: ‘We stand with you.’
“We tell our adversaries: ‘Don’t mess with us.’ We tell the world: ‘The United States will do everything to safeguard democracy and our way of life.’”
But in Israel, “democracy” and the system that Schumer and other US politicians back involves the illegal settlement of occupied Palestinian land, displacing the native population, and creating a dual system of governance, with Jews ruled under Israeli civil law, and occupied Palestinians under military law.
These settlements now dot much of the occupied West Bank, either gathering in established clusters, or in outposts that even the Israeli state deems illegal, but does little about.
As their numbers and political support have grown, settlers have become more confident, attacking Palestinian villages in well-armed and coordinated raids, occasionally with military support, and evicting Palestinian villagers.
In tandem with the expansion of the settlements has been a wider rightward drift across Israeli society, which saw the country elect its most right-wing parliament or Knesset in its history in November 2022.
Among its members are extreme-right provocateur Itamar Ben-Gvir – convicted of incitement in 2007 – who acts as national security minister, and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, whose claims to Palestinian territory in the occupied West Bank run counter to international law.
“The settler and far-right movements have been growing rapidly within Israel for years, to the point where forming a government is impossible without participation from right-wing parties opposed to territorial compromise with Palestinians,” Omar H Rahman of the Middle East Council on Global Affairs said.
Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, members of the right-wing coalition cabinet of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, speak to a growing constituency characterised as “messianic” in its approach to Palestinians and their land, according to analysts.
Settlers’ ideologies – which claim, among other things, a religious justification for their taking of Palestinian land – have been a growing political presence since the 1967 war, which resulted in Israel occupying the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem.
“The US has played a significant role in this rightward shift by ensuring Israel’s impunity for relentless illegal settlement building, thereby undercutting those within Israeli politics who warned of the consequences of unfettered expansionism,” Rahman said. “This demonstrated to the Israeli public there would be no penalty for supporting those in Israel who want all the land ‘between the river and the sea’.”
Israel has seemingly run a violent campaign in the occupied West Bank in parallel to its war on Gaza, which followed a Hamas-led attack into Israel in which 1,139 people were killed and some 200 taken into Gaza.
As of March of this year, 7,350 Palestinians had been arrested by Israeli forces across the West Bank, many without charge and with no hope of due process.
In the last few days, rights group Amnesty International has sharply criticised settler attacks on Palestinians and what it calls the established system of apartheid that reigns in the occupied West Bank.
In the days following the discovery of the body of 14-year-old Binyamin Ahimeir, himself from an illegal Israeli West Bank settlement, hundreds of settlers went on a deadly rampage between April 12 and 16, torching homes, fruit trees and vehicles.
By the end of their attack, four Palestinians lay dead, killed by either settlers or Israeli military forces, Amnesty said, including Omar Hamed, a 17-year-old boy from near Ramallah.
An estimated 487 Palestinians have been killed in the occupied West Bank in attacks by armed settlers, often supported by security forces according to witnesses, or by security forces in near-nightly raids on towns and refugee camps and in other incidents.
Israel’s war on Gaza has killed at least 34,262 people. The true figure is likely far higher.
While Netanyahu has officially rejected settler ambitions for Gaza, he does have two settler ministers in his cabinet and the movement is continuing to grow.
Expectations that prime minister Netanyahu might act as a check on settler ambitions have also proven ill founded. Since at least 2015, both he and his Likud party have been joining with the extreme elements of the right by running campaigns noted for their dog whistle racism, Eyal Lurie-Paredes of the Middle East Institute said.
“It’s not just about the present,” Lurie-Paredes added, “It’s about the future.
“Most political party, not just Likud, has ever really opposed the settlements. They’re a winning card. The main two sectors of the population of settlers – national orthodox and ultra-orthodox – have the highest birth-rate among Israeli Jews high birth-rates. Out of Jewish first graders, more than 40 percent belong to these groups.
Additionally, Israeli governments have created a more enhanced welfare state in the West Bank for Jews, offering them better infrastructure and cheaper housing – which or drive people to move there and increase their belonging to the settler movement” he added.
Referring to the years leading up to Israel’s founding in 1948, Tel Aviv-based analyst Dahlia Scheindlin said “Settler politics have always been there.”
“However,” she noted, “it had never really been especially religious. That element only really entered the political mainstream after the 1967 war. From that point, the idea developed that territorial expansion was part of messianic redemption took hold as a specific theology among certain religious Jews.
“In tandem to this was a state that was ready to facilitate settlements covertly. However, more recently, Likud’s own populist mandate has become indistinguishable from that of Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, and now we have a government openly embracing settlers, the extreme right and their politics.”
The US says it opposes the creation of settlements and has recently sanctioned bodies involved with the movement, some known to be close to Ben-Gvir and said to be actively fundraising for the settler movement within the US.
The US government has also said it is considering sanctions against the Netzah Yehuda battalion, which operates within the occupied West Bank and draws its recruits from Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jews, on repeated allegations of rights abuses.
Nevertheless, while the US may oppose settlements on paper, the Israeli government publicly embraced the settler mission of Ben-Gvir and Smotrich in June of last year, overturning legislation that had stood for 27 years, and giving Smotrich effective control of the expanded and accelerated settlement-building process. Netanyahu himself has repeatedly rejected the idea of a Palestinian state, and has presented himself as a bulwark against Palestinian self-determination.
Other than a brief period under former President Donald Trump, when the United States supported the notion of settlements, Washington has regarded them as illegal since 1978. In 1983, the census showed that the settler population of the West Bank was 22,800. It is currently estimated at 490,493.
And now, that dominance of the settler ultranationalist trend in Israeli politics threatens Gaza.
At a “Settlement Brings Security” conference in Jerusalem in January, around a third of Netanyahu’s cabinet ministers, as well as up to 15 additional Knesset members, including members of his own nationalist Likud Party, walked past a large map of Gaza with a bold star of David emblazoned above it.
For Palestinians in Gaza, the threat of a new wave of displacement to make way for any such illegal settlement is real – championed by figures at the very top of Israeli politics.
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