The McWetlog

Ottawa got snow this morning; from the caterwauling I’ve heard today, you’d think that people here have never seen snow before. It’s as though they’ve completely forgotten that winter comes once a year.

Maybe there’s something to that, at that:

Wednesday’s snow wasn’t deep enough to cover the toes of most people’s boots and it quickly began melting into slush.

Even so, there were over 40 crashes in Ontario east of Napanee by 9 a.m., and Highway 417 was particularly bad, reported provincial police Const. Kevin Davidson.

“We have vehicles driving too fast, going into ditches, off the shoulders, colliding with other ones at intersections, rear-enders — the whole gamut of people trying to rush and hurry when they should be taking their time,” he said.

“It always seems to be this way, that people have to rethink winter driving over again every start of every new year.”

(Emphasis mine.)

The Ottawa Citizen waxes indignant about a recent Reader’s Digest feature that ranked Ottawa the least polite city in Canada, a ranking that I myself would find hard to disagree with. Indeed, I heartily endorse the assessment: I’ve long felt that Ottawa is a cesspool of passive-aggressive public snottiness, derived, I suspect, from the critical mass of so much latent tension from so many unhappy public servants.

The comments on the Citizen piece are instructive, split between the people who’ve moved to Ottawa and, like myself, cannot get over how rude the people are here, and the lifelong Ottawans who blame the rudeness on all the provincials and immigrants who’ve moved here in the last 10-15 years.

You know which side I’m on: I’ve lived in too many places where people were nicer in public to random strangers, whereas in Ottawa I’ve been nearly run over a half-dozen times, physically assaulted on a bus, and even gotten into a road-rage incident while on a bicycle. The rudeness is most manifest on the roads and sidewalks, which is where I believe that repressed public-sector anger releases itself. Even people in Shawville notice it when they come — reluctantly — into the city.

Ottawa: big-city rudeness without any associated big-city appeal.

Previously: Welcome to Ottawa. Now fuck off.

The Champlain Bridge between Ottawa and Gatineau is a mile long and three lanes wide (not including bike lanes). The middle lane is a reversible lane that follows the flow of rush hour traffic: southbound from midnight to noon, northbound from noon to midnight. It’s also a high-capacity lane, limited only to buses (the STO runs two rush-hour buses across the bridge), taxis and cars with more than two occupants. (It’s also closed to commercial traffic.)

Even so, many single-occupant vehicles take the centre lane — my guess is around half the traffic in the lane is breaking the rules. But I wondered how the two-occupant rule could be enforced: how the hell do the cops pull over traffic in the centre lane in the middle of a bridge during rush hour? (Bridge traffic is normally insane: we frequently have to wait half an hour along Lucerne Boulevard just to get on the bridge.)

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Something’s happened in downtown Ottawa. When I lived there, from 1999 to 2003, its streets never struck me as particularly mean, but since I come from Winnipeg, where the streets are considerably meaner — I regularly parked outside crack houses when going to evening university classes — my perspective is, shall we say, jaded. But even I had to stop and wonder what the hell has gone wrong when I read this harrowing article in yesterday’s Globe and Mail: crack cocaine use has exploded in downtown Ottawa, with junkies begging like crazy to get the few dollars needed for their next hit. It’s to the point where even homeless advocates are advising people not to give money to panhandlers: it invariably gets spent on crack. (This takes me back to my time in Winnipeg, where I was hit up by panhandlers about half a dozen times a day, and I turned them down every time. Odds were, no matter how hungry or homeless they were, the money was going to be spent on solvents.) Crack is ugly shit.

Proof that health care in the Outaouais does indeed suck: Gatineau’s hospital scored the lowest in L’Actualité’s report on 86 Quebec hospitals, with a score of 32 per cent. Hull’s wasn’t much better, at 42 per cent.

Note, however, that the hospital in Shawville scored 87 per cent. We’re enough of a health-care bright spot in this region that our doctors and our hospital have their hands full with patients from the city — exactly the opposite of what you’d expect from a rural hospital. Of course, when you recall that a large number of Gatineau residents simply cross the river to Ontario for their medical care, you quickly realize just how dire the situation must be.

The hospital spokesman protests that the data are out of date and that the situation is different. This is the usual bureaucratic defence: our more recent, internal numbers are different and show we’ve improved. Of course, the public numbers usually run a year or two behind, so it’s a perfect defence: no matter how bad the numbers look, you can always say they’ve improved, so long as no one remembers what you said last year. Sir Humphrey would be pleased.

As it turns out, we did have an earthquake last night. Only 4.5 on the Richter scale, and it lasted for about a second. Actually, at the time I assumed it was the neighbour’s kids bouncing off or crashing into something. While the idea that it might have been an earthquake did occur to me at the time, it was only when I talked to someone at the Archives this morning who also felt it that I knew for certain. She lives nearly two hours away; my neighbour’s kids are simply not that loud.

When a double murder occurs literally across the street from where I used to live, yes, you could say that I’m a wee bit spooked.

A man arrested for speeding down the wrong side of the Queensway a little less than two weeks ago is in even more trouble: last Sunday, when he was being taken by police to a hospital for a psychiatric evaluation, he apparently stabbed one officer in the throat, and then, during the ensuing chaos, managed to free himself and drive off in the police cruiser, reverting to form as he raced down the wrong side of Autoroute 50 in Gatineau. In both instances he was forced off the road by police; both incidents resulted in a slough of charges. As Sheriff Buford T. Justice would say, “Woof.”

I’ve long believed that Ottawa, collectively, has an attitude problem: a surprising amount of unpleasantness and hostility for a city its size — Calgary is far friendlier, for example. I usually attribute it to pent-up aggression from a city full of miserable civil servants who then set the tone for the rest of the population. I can’t think of a better example than Lana’s experience in the Byward Market last week, where a vendor demanded she stop taking pictures in a public place. In a tourist area, no less. To be fair, it was an isolated (albeit mind-numbingly stupid) case: another vendor and the local business association had no problems at all with photography. But it can only take one unpleasant encounter to ruin your impression of a city; I, for one, had plenty of them during my four years in Ottawa.

If you’ve ever had to deal with the Ottawa River bridges during rush hour, you’ll agree wholeheartedly with Harry Gow’s suggestion that Ottawa extend the O-Train to Gatineau. The City of Gatineau doesn’t seem all that interested — they’ve got their own, busway-based solution. But both transit systems are spectacularly poor at getting people quickly across the river: essentially, each cross-border bus has to go through two downtown bottlenecks. A rail crossing would be eminently sensible.

Seen from Florence’s apartment this morning at 9:10 a.m., a motorized wheelchair being driven along the Transitway towards Hurdman station, blocking bus traffic along the way.

I’m fairly certain that it’s illegal to drive your motorized wheelchair on the Transitway (speed limit 80 km/h at that point). Especially when there are perfectly serviceable sidewalks along each side of that bridge. Definitely a WTF moment.