Thank you, Chair, members, for inviting me to speak with you today.
As you may know, I am the city councillor for Somerset ward in the City of Ottawa, and I am currently serving my second term. Prior to being elected, I was the direct strategic adviser to the deputy city manager at the city, giving me perspective on the administration of city policy and operations.
I've actually also worked on Parliament Hill. I was an assistant to two of your former colleagues, the Honourable Ed Broadbent and Paul Dewar, both of whom represented the area where I now serve. That area, Somerset ward, extends from the Rideau Canal west to the light rail tracks that separate Little Italy and Chinatown from Hintonburg, and from the Ottawa River south to the Queensway. It is the heart of Ottawa and includes Parliament Hill and many federal buildings as well.
I’m guessing many of the restaurants and other businesses that many of you often patronize while in Ottawa serve those residents. These residents I represent are also your neighbours. They’re your shopkeepers, your servers, your store clerks and much more. During the recent occupation of our downtown, they suffered.
Let me take a minute to expand on that. I'm sure you may have seen the extreme disorder that occurred on Wellington Street, but unless you took a walk a few blocks further south, you may not have seen the rest. It was pure chaos. The compounded result of multiple daily acts of aggression in our downtown neighbourhoods made life unbearable for most residents of Centretown.
Many residents left their homes. Some families sent their children to stay with relatives. My teenage daughter was forced to stay with friends after I received direct threats to my safety that identified our home.
You may ask, where were our police? They were protecting Parliament Hill. The City of Ottawa simply does not have the capacity to protect federal properties during major national events and also patrol our neighbourhoods.
That’s why I wrote to the Prime Minister and the commissioner of the RCMP during the occupation, asking them to take over the parliamentary precinct. Doing so would have allowed the Ottawa Police Service to enforce laws throughout downtown.
We know there have been other times when the federal government has indicated an interest in taking over the full parliamentary precinct area, both for administration and policing. In 1989, many will remember, an assailant commandeered a bus and forced it to be driven onto Parliament Hill. That eight-hour standoff resulted in new security protocols for the precinct. Of course, more security was added after the 9/11 in 2001.
In 2012, the Auditor General of Canada published a report, received by the House of Commons, on parliamentary precinct security. It included several recommendations, including a unified security force to replace the RCMP, the House and Senate security, and the Ottawa Police Service, which were responsible for policing at the time. The Auditor General’s main concern was jurisdictional confusion, which we certainly saw during the recent occupation.
Of course, that was also a question raised after the 2014 murder of Corporal Nathan Cirillo. One of the issues was that, as you know, he was attacked on Elgin Street, but the shooter moved quickly to Parliament Hill. This created a serious communications issue among the various security forces responsible for your safety.
In February 2022, the City of Ottawa adopted a motion, which I believe you all have, that says that the City of Ottawa work with its partners in the Government of Canada and the Ottawa Police Service to permanently transfer security responsibility for the Parliamentary Precinct, including the identified section of Wellington Street, to federal security forces.
This is significant, as the City of Ottawa's hesitancy to relinquish responsibility for the parliamentary precinct was one of the reasons that no serious action has been taken.
I'd like to close by commenting also on the closure of Wellington Street. We're the capital of Canada, and we see many protests in front of Parliament Hill. We welcome protests. We see many visitors to the area, whom we also welcome. By closing the blocks between Elgin Street and Bank Street, we will be able to increase that public realm for all Canadians to walk, cycle, take photos and show their pride in their nation. Our downtown has ample capacity to absorb any vehicular traffic that has been routed away from this section of Wellington Street.