Ottawa's New Revanchist Mayor

This November Ottawa voters chose political neophyte Larry O’Brien as new Mayor of the Nation’s Capital. To the surprise of everyone, in a stunning mi-election turaround, O’Brian emerged from relative obscurity to defeat both long-time Councilor Alex Munter as well as the incumbent Mayor Bob Chiarelli. The narrative of his dramatic victory holds that O’Brien’s amiable smile and personable demeanor endeared him the public. O’Brien’s sudden accession to the Mayor’s Chair demands asking what made him so attractive to the general electorate, and more specifically to the sub-urban, ex-urban and rural voters who made up the majority of his support?

O’Brien popularity can in large part due to his strength in promoting himself as an populist outsider and a self-built entrepreneur. Throughout the campaign Ottawa’s new mayor continuously boasted that he turned a small 35$ investment into a billion dollar global company. O’Brien rode this success all the way to city hall by extending his entrepreneurial stance to his mayoral bid. With a confident swagger O’Brien oozed a populist style and promised to provide the necessary shake-up to establishment politics and to bring a common sense approach to civic politics. The everyday-citizen was convinced by his glad-handing circus. As one elector noted: “O’Brien is one of us. He understands the everyday challenges of workers.” He proved to be the anti-thesis to the policy heavy, substantive and nuanced debates between center-right Chiarelli (read Liberal) and center-left candidate Munter.

In contrast to his foes O’Brien’s policy platform was oddly thin and mostly ambivalent to issues of municipal governance. Transit? Roads? Parks and Recreation? Social Assistance? Housing? Outreach to ethnic and community organizations? In each of these O’Brien largely had no position – and in fact skipped out on a number of town halls hosted by interested communities and interest groups. Perhaps we can excuse a political neophyte for not having a policy position on these issues, but O’Brien did not even have a position on the single largest issue of the campaign – Ottawa’s proposed LRT.

Still to understand O’Brien’s electoral triumph we need to see beyond a successful outsider campaign and old-style retail politics. O’Brien’s election show how provincial intervention in civic politics have provided a ripe ground for reactionary politics. O’Brien’s key electoral promise offered a zero percent freeze on municipal property taxes over his term proved enormously popular. Ottawa’s historically progressive electorate turned massively in the last weekend to O’Brien seemingly in support of this position.

Most of O'Brien's support could be understood as a property owning class who were reacting to past increases in property taxes and the murkey and secretive MPAC assessment process. In a cheap trick played too often by municipal politicians, O’Brien took advantage of this anger promised to end the creeping uncertainty over the cost of property ownership. O’Brien’s key promise proved very popular in the rural and suburban wards where he registered between 50% and 82% of the votes. However, O’Brien was also able to take advantage of an influx of middle-class information and knowledge workers into the city center who had also changed the voting sensibilities of the city center. Such “mercenaries of cultural urbanity,” as Keil (2000) has dubbed them have imported a perspective that supports an odd combination of pro-public (transit and recreation) and anti-public (policing, property taxes) policies. These were sufficient in number to bring O’Brien enough city center votes to win the election handily. Added to his healthy sub-urban, ex-urban and rural base these city center votes gave O'Brien 10% more total votes than his closest rival.

Yet, in contrast to what his campaign promises might suggest and to his level of support, O’Brien is not a suburbanite nor an outsider. O’Brien is a consummate insider domiciled in the exclusive enclave of the über-powerful in downtown Ottawa: the lavish condominiums of 700 Sussex Drive. O’Brien is not a convert to city-living nor to the pro-public residents who have long-campaigned for affordable housing, social services and the mixes character of their neighbourhoods. In his other major policy proposal, O’Brien promised to clean the city center from the panhandlers and provide the city with more policing. This pronouncement indicates how O’Brien is as part of the “revanchist class” (Smith, 1996) of city-dwellers who hold a pointed disdain for the disorder of city-life who hold that the evils of city-life can be brushed away by the school of hard-knocks and a dash of entrepreneurialism and a can-do attitude, and moral rectitude.

Cleary O’Brien was able to exploit the rural/urban, suburban/urban, property owner/renter cleavages that were emerging from amalgamation of areas with radically different service needs. In this sense, O’Brien victory is the culmination of the forced amalgamation of the suburban cities, rural townships and old City of Ottawa in 2000, and the takeover of city politics by suburban and rural interests. In many ways O’Brien’s victory mirrors how successive waves of neoliberal governments have supported one-class of city-region dwellers over others, and how government support for new urban policy has provided support for revanchist cultural mercenaries. In this case, O’Brien’s everyday-life is a model Ottawa's acceptance of private-public partnerships and city center embourgeoisiment.

First, lets take his home. The condominium at 700 Sussex was built by Claridge Homes with the willing assistance of the National Capital Commission. Under the terms of the private-public partnership, the NCC facilitated the development by leasing expropriated land it had held vacant since the mid-eighties to Claridge Homes and by helping guide development and manage the conceptual stages of the project. By expropriating and demolishing, and then holding the land for a decade and providing the land for lease under favourable market conditions, the NCC has acted as the ultimate public facilitator of private property development and city-center embourgeoisiment.

Second, it is important to take a closer look at his business. Ottawa’s high-tech sector was largely driven by public investments, most significantly R&D money from DND: not that is some can-do know-how! Of course one might ask if garnering public support for private enrichment is entrepreneurial or simply using public purse strings to achieve private goals.

O’Brien had taken his bring his guy-next-door circus to City hall. How will he understand the role of government in providing city services? How will he tackle issues of housing and social services? Who will he support and will exclude? So far the kind of entrepreneurial approach and city-center lifestyle O’Brien has embraced equates public support for an exclusive and revanchist elite politics.

I challenge the Mayor to go beyond his entrepreneurial past and truly be a populist who listens to the needs of the all residents and especially to those who are in dire needs of government support and initiative.