You Can't Fight City Hall

But you can write cranky op-eds about various Canadian municipal governments!

The Ottawa Citizen editorial board is angry at how badly the city has bungled the development of a historic piece of land on the former site of the Les Soeurs de la Visitation Convent. First City Hall failed to declare it a historic site, and then didn’t bid on purchasing it, allowing it to be gobbled up by a housing developer. The city now proposes collecting money from the local residents to buy back the site, whose value has skyrocketed to $11.5 million for a measly 0.6 acres of land. The Citizen says doing so would be completely unacceptable because it would force residents to pay for the City’s ineptitude and instead the proposed housing development should go ahead. The residential complex “will stand as a monument to city ineptitude and lost heritage from which future generations can learn,” says the Citizen. That’s what the kids call an "epic fail."

In Montreal, municipal politics edge ever closer to utter farce. The Gazette’s exasperated editors report that “the powers that be were too swept up in the latest ethical storm rocking Mayor Gérald Tremblay's scandal-plagued administration to notice that the mandate of the city council's ethics adviser had expired” at the end of last year. What’s perhaps even worse is that while he did have a mandate, the ethics commissioner had virtually no power, and was left hoping the position’s mere existence would compel councillors to behave.

The Toronto Star’s editors are confounded by the Toronto Community Housing Corp board's demand that Mayor Rob Ford “document” why he wanted them to resign (they have since stepped down). “It’s an odd request,” says the Star, considering the city’s auditor found the corporation’s board spent thousands of dollars on spas and treats. The Globe and Mail’s Marcus Gee says the TCHC scandal is a gift for Ford, who campaigned on “stopping the gravy train” at City Hall, but will distract from the real issues. “The city’s money problems don’t come from luxury-loving bureaucrats,” he writes. “The real sources – like strong unions, arbitrated wage settlements, a strapped provincial government, a costly big-city transit system – are more complicated and harder to change.”