Ottawa Citizen - April 1, 1997
By Senator Colin Kenny
Spring is here, And though the grass is real faint, our thoughts now turn to where the Daly Building ain't.
Even armed, as I clearly am, with such a fine poem, one hesitates to approach the editorial page of the Ottawa Citizen with this plea: that we stop dithering and get on with the glorious task of turning the site of the former Daly Building into a park.
The Citizen, of course, is now avowedly, even proudly, right-wing. Right-wingers, in my experience, are, by their very natures, adverse to parks.
Parks are place for lingerers and day-dreamers. Right-wingers hate the thought of ordinary people lingering and day-dreaming, especially in full view of one another.
Ordinary people are expected to bustle. Once they stop bustling they lose their flexibility, and everyone knows that flexibility is the key to modern low-cost production.
(Not that rich people don't do a lot of lingering of their own, but they prefer to do it indoors, over port. One of the Citizen's new columnists was actually once the editor of a magazine called The Idler, which lingered itself into languish and then did almost unnoticeably die in its sleep.)
I am vulnerable here. The cruel among you will charge that we do not need another lingering place anywhere near Parliament Hill, because we have the Senate. This is patently unfair; I can attest that the Senate is full of zest and vigor. Besides, it is indoors.
I am sick of looking at the dreary boarding that surrounds the rubble that used to be the ugliest building in Ottawa. I am even sicker at the thought of turning that rubble into another tourist trap.
The last thing we need is one more hotel. No, that's the second last thing we need. The last thing is some mishmash of shopping and entertainment and virtual reality, as one developer suggested. This city should be selling itself as a distinguished act, not one more version of Disney North.
At the heart of all great cities is a park. New York City has Central Park, Brussels has Parc du Bruxelles, Paris has Jardin des Tuileries, Rome has Villa Borghese, Madrid has Campo del Moro, Sydney has Hyde Park and Royal Botanic Gardens, Washington has West Potomac Park, Johannesburg has Joubert Park, even squished-in Hong Kong has Zoological and Botanical Gardens, Kowloon Park and Hong Kong Park.
This Daly Building spot is the heart of our city. A 1.1 acre park would be the perfect link between Parliament Hill and the Byward Market. Think of all the book stores in the area - what a perfect spot to sit and read, and luxuriate in the modicum of sunlight that God has allotted us northerners.
Given the Citizen's proud right-wing bent, there is bound to be lingering terror out there on Baxter Road that people who drink very cheap port from bottles tucked in paper bags will take over the park, or that the poor will see it as an ideal location to beg for spare change.
This need not be! Let us have a kiosk in the park, from which one male and one female member of the RCMP can operate, with a horse or two at the ready and a shovel nearby. Tourists love scarlet-jacketed RCMP officers! Vagrants, not so much. Would there be room for a bandstand? We could sort that out.
I know the clipping files from the old, bad, envious Citizen have probably been burned, but if they are not, the new proprietors will discover that in 1991, a Citizen survey showed that 81% of Ottawans want a park on this spot. The people have spoken.
We need a nice, classy place to sit down at the hub of our city, a place to savour one of the finest urban settings in the finest country in the world. Please, clear the rubble. In the midst of our nation's history, let us hug trees.