A parked truck with a Canadian flag upside down is seen in Ottawa, on Feb. 14, 2022. The trucker convoy is just one of a few blows downtown Ottawa has taken in the past three years.Lars Hagberg/Reuters
In the spring of 2020, Jason Komendat was in the midst of moving Retro-Rides, a bike shop and café, to its current location on downtown Ottawa’s Sparks Street pedestrian mall, when the pandemic hit.
“Our neighbourhood figuratively burned down,” Mr. Komendat said. “It was gut-check time.”
Nevertheless, by the summer of 2021 the shop and café were fully open. Then came the Omicron lockdown. Then came the gridlock of the area by people protesting vaccine mandates. The streets were filled with trucks, diesel fumes and honking horns.
“It just killed us all over again,” Mr. Komendat said.
Like all Canadian cities, Ottawa’s city centre was damaged by the pandemic, as people worked from home and office buildings sat empty.
But in the national capital, public servants have been slow to return to work. And the protests left the city traumatized. Officials are so fearful of future protests that they have closed Wellington Street, at the foot of Parliament Hill, to traffic.
“We are never going back to the world we lived in 2019,” said Mark Sutcliffe, Ottawa’s mayor. “And we need to adapt to what things are going to look like going forward.”
The question, to which no one has the answer just yet, is what that adaptation will look like.
More than 105,000 federal public servants work in Ottawa, with another 36,000 across the Ottawa River in Gatineau. The federal government occupies about half of the office space in the downtown.
In this almost-one-industry town, the federal government took longer than many private-sector employers to encourage workers to return to the office. Treasury Board waited until last December to establish a back-to-the-office mandate for the federal work force of two or three days a week, to be fully implemented by the end of March.
Public service unions are strongly resisting that mandate.
“Any plans to unilaterally change the terms and conditions of our members’ employment and impose a mandatory return to offices would be an egregious violation of workers’ collective bargaining rights,” the Public Service Alliance of Canada declared in a statement.
“Remote work is a critical issue at the bargaining table this round.”
However those negotiations work out, Treasury Board could be vacating up to 30 per cent of its office space in the coming years, both to accommodate the new reality of people working from home and to establish a more environmentally friendly footprint.
The tech sector is also vital to Ottawa’s economy, employing more than 68,000 people. Shopify did the downtown no favours when it announced during the pandemic that it was vacating the six floors of a new office building it occupied in Centretown, the area south of Parliament Hill where many office buildings are located. Most of the company’s workers now work permanently from home.
As the city staggers to its feet after the twin traumas of the pandemic and the protests, there are more empty shops than usual on Bank Street, the main drag of Centretown. The Byward Market feels emptier than usual during office hours.
“It’s been flat, basically,” says Miriam Farbiasz, who owns the Byward Fruit Market with her husband Isaac. “We continue working but with bated breath.”
The University of Toronto’s School of Cities recently issued a report ranking the recovery to 62 North American urban downtowns by comparing cellphone usage in spring 2019 and November, 2022. Ottawa ranked 45th.
Ridership on OC Transpo is still only at 65 per cent of prepandemic levels. This may be just as well, for the city’s new light rail train service continues to break down regularly, further souring the public mood.
The empty offices, the vacant storefronts, a deserted Wellington Street have raised questions about the future of the downtown.
“I really believe we are seeing a decentring of the Centre,” says Ian Lee, a professor at Carleton University’s Sprott School of Business. Because of the dominance of knowledge workers among major employers in the national capital region, “Ottawa is much more unbalanced than other Canadian cities,” he believes. “In Ottawa, it’s going to be much more difficult to require people to return to cubicle work in the downtown, as knowledge workers can work equally or more productively from home with only a computer and a connection to the net.”
But this is not the end of the story, not by a long shot. “Are we traumatized? Yes, we are,” says Sueling Ching, president and CEO of the Ottawa Board of Trade. “But we should be inspired by the resiliency we’ve seen by our entrepreneurs and employees.”
The pandemic forced workers, employers and governments in Ottawa to confront challenges that existed before it arrived: the disadvantages of the hub-and-spoke method of commuting and the need to diversify the city centre.
The protests and the closing of Wellington Street forced federal and municipal planners to confront the future of Parliament Hill, with a new South Block scheduled to open in the coming years and the renovated and restored Centre Block expected to reopen around 2030.
Like other cities, what has been bad for Ottawa’s downtown has been good for its suburbs, where people are now more likely to work and shop and dine locally. The 15-minute neighbourhood – in which people can meet most of their daily needs within a 15-minute walk of their home – is coming closer to reality.
Everyone agrees that, in the long-term, Ottawa needs to find ways to further diversify its economy and to increase the residential population downtown – though anyone who thinks it’s a piece of cake to convert Class-A office space into residential units should think again.
Even with the public service working from home much of the time, Stephen Beckta says business at his three upscale restaurants, two of which are downtown, is almost back to pre-pandemic levels.
“Since September, sales have been really great,” he says. “It feels like life is returning to normal.” The barber and shawarma shop that depend on foot traffic may not survive the loss of daily commuters, but destination businesses in the core continue to attract customers from across the city.
A new combined Ottawa Public Library and Library and Archives Canada building is going up at LeBreton Flats, and there are hopes of building a new arena there for the Ottawa Senators.
For Mayor Sutcliffe, “if we’re not going to have as many people working downtown, then the big solution is to have more people living downtown.” That means encouraging new housing construction and conversions in the city centre.
“Downtown could be a 15-minute neighbourhood and [suburban] Barrhaven could be a 15-minute neighbourhood,” he says.
In the short-term, at Mr. Sutcliffe’s urging, council voted last week to reopen Wellington Street to traffic, while the city and federal government work out its long-term future.
In Mr. Komendat’s bike shop and café, drills whir as the business gets ready for spring. He’s staying put, pandemic and protesters notwithstanding.
“Every day and every night I feel the anxiety as I wonder what the possibilities are to make this happen,” he says. But he sees a future in which people live and work and enjoy the downtown as a neighbourhood. “I’m hopeful and confident,” he says. “Let’s make this the place it should be.”