deachman: the part of jim watson i miss
4 minute read
former ottawa mayor jim watson
jean levac
/
postmedia
during the 2018 municipal election campaign, i spent a day shadowing incumbent mayor jim watson as he worked the voter trail. driving along the airport parkway to an event at the ey centre, he noticed that the recently paved road hadn’t yet had lines painted on it, and so he immediately took out his phone and called whoever at the city was responsible to get that done.
i remember at the time thinking how hokey that felt, like something out of a saccharine 1950s black-and-white film: mr. watson gets things done. i also wondered how much of it was performative — i was, after all, right there in the back seat, notepad in hand.
it also struck me as an odd use of a mayor’s time. shouldn’t a mayor be concerned with the bigger picture — budgets, housing, transit, economic development — and let someone else sweat over whether a road’s dividing line was painted on time?
i mentioned it later to a good friend who held a senior position at city hall. she assured me: “that wasn’t for your benefit. he does that all the time.”
if anything, she added, it annoyed watson’s staff — the constant calls, texts and emails — the sense that nothing was too small to warrant the mayor’s direct involvement. she often saw watson on the grounds outside city hall, picking up litter. what i had taken for theatre was, in fact, just jim being jim: excessive, perhaps, but also a little endearing in that crazy-grandfather kind of way.
in any case, it wasn’t the sort of thing that decided an election. cities the size of ottawa don’t run on the basis of one person noticing missing lines or uncut grass, nor should they.
and yet.
these days, as we brace for yet another municipal election, and as i drive these same roads, i find myself recalling that moment more often than i would have expected.
i think of it when i drive along bronson avenue over the rideau canal at night, when the lane markings have nearly vanished, making it nigh on impossible to tell where one lane ends and the other begins — never mind the potholes.
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i think of it when i can’t reach to press a pedestrian crossing button at an intersection because the accumulated snow and ice have made climbing to it too risky.
i think of it when i sit on a park bench with broken slats, beside an overflowing garbage receptacle.
i wonder, sometimes, if jim is still making those calls, and whether city staff are answering them. i hope he is, and that they are. i’m not advocating for his return — his legacy of our “on time and on budget” lrt would almost certainly preclude that, anyway — but sometimes i think i’d kill for a little more of that kind of micromanaging.
it’s easy to romanticize the past, to imagine things were always better back in the day. time and memory have a way of sanding down the rough edges.
but i don’t think this is what’s going on here. i’ve asked friends whether ottawa’s roads, for example, have gotten worse, or whether i’m just a cranky old man. they don’t necessarily discount the latter, but they all agree on the roads.
i wish i’d checked to see how soon after watson’s call the lines on the airport parkway got painted. i don’t know whether it happened in the next hour or a week or month later.
i’m not even convinced the incident represented model mayoral behaviour.
but it did tell me that someone in a position of authority thought that the small things mattered, and that someone was paying attention to them. that doesn’t mean the larger issues — transit, housing affordability, homelessness, public safety — don’t demand the bulk of a mayor’s attention. they do. but cities are lived in at the street level, and feeling that someone is paying attention to those details does matter.
municipal government (we’re repeatedly told) is the level of government that most impacts people’s lives. but residents don’t experience it so much through council motions and staff reports as they do by whether the buses and trains run on time, how quickly the snow gets cleared, whether parks are clean, the potholes get filled and the lines on the road are visible.
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when those don’t happen, when it seems as though standards are being lowered or ignored altogether, it’s easy to lose faith. eight years ago, the mayor’s phone call looked to me a bit like theatrical meddling. today, it looks like management.
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