What is a city councilor from Ottawa doing going to the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil? Doesn't he have better things to do with his time? Like fight with the province over the lack of funding for public transit? Or fight with the province over the $25-million they can find to expand Ottawa's conference center when the public school board is $26-million short for paying teachers? Or making sure my own ward's projects don't go down in the city's $50-million budget shortfall?
I'm going because when I look out of the window, I can see water on the Rideau Canal, not ice. It is bizarre. Last week, I did a television interview in my shirt sleeves and street shoes on bare pavement in front of Ottawa City Hall. All of our outdoor rinks are pools of water. Global warming has arrived and I'm more convinced than ever that the solutions to the problems in my city can't be found only here.
Public transit is not just a city issue. It's a world issue. We have holes in the ozone layer because we have national and regional governments that will not admit they have a responsibility for the emissions that pump out of tail pipes and factories, or for a fair sharing of the tax revenue.
President Harry Truman was famous for a small sign on his desk, "The buck stops here." Now the buck slides all the way down to city councils, and it has created many strange pressures.
In our city budget, there is an increase budgeted in the cost of transit tickets because city managers feel that this is only way they can keep the system financially stable. Yet it is crystal clear that as ticket prices go up, ridership goes down and vice versa. When we made our new O-Train free in Ottawa for two months, families used it for weekend outings. This stopped once there was a charge per rider.
Nor does the bigger financial picture make any sense. Car transportation costs the city eight times more than public transit. The equation is simple. Cars require eight times more asphalt than buses and 18 times more pavement than trains. Road construction and maintenance are the city's principal capital and operating costs. Two lanes of suburban road widening over ll kilometers will cost us $60-million. We have approved $120-million in new road construction in the past two months.
Fifteen years ago, Ken Livingston, the mayor of London, created a transit revolution by lowering the cost of London Public Transit until the whole system began to crack under the strain of its popularity. This popularity put enormous pressure on Margaret Thatcher's government to find money for new trains, new track, new stations, new buses. Not interested in making Mr. Livingston look good, the Iron Lady got rid of London's Greater City Council (Metro), and sold London's City Hall to Japanese interests.
Public transit is fine as long as it hovers on the edge of a welfare service, just enough to keep the poor, the young and the aged off the government's back. Public transit that serves weekend family outings, the day care connection and the commute connection, is a threat to the way we build cities, do business -- and sell cars.
Are the winds of change beginning to blow? Ken Livingston is Mayor of London once again and he's repairing and restoring London's public transit system. In Mexico, President Vicente Fox has appointed Carlos Gadsden Carrasco to oversee the decentralization of Mexico's federal system so that power and authority devolves downward to 400 Mexican cities. Mexico is looking at creating assemblies to connect city, state and federal governments and set the stage for useful discussion and consensus across the three levels.
And in the city of Porto Alegre, where the World Social Forum is being held, the city government has created a people's budget process. In Ottawa, our budget will be made available to city council on Feb. 13 with two weeks of "public consultation" and then a final vote at council on March 27. It's a slam dunk. You can't do more than tinker with a $1.9-billion budget in six weeks.
In Porto Alegre, the people's budget process begins in March and finishes in December. Over eight months of public meetings, more than 20,000 people participate. They decide on spending priorities, which are the key decisions on every budget -- the rest is just accounting. In Porto Alegre, three years of citizen-driven budgets resulted in the city day-care system growing from two daycare facilities to 120.
There are lights at the end of the tunnel out there. We have to find ways of connecting them. I'm convinced those connections won't happen via national governments. They are too plugged into the status quo, too dependent on versions of the Enron money line. I'm going to Porto Alegre to invite the mayor to visit Canada to explain what he and his city council have achieved, and look for ways to connect those points of light.
Clive Doucet is a poet and the city councilor for Capital Ward, Ottawa.
© 2002 Bell Globemedia Interactive Inc
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