Statement to City of Ottawa Planning and Development Committee

Remarks by Board Member Gordon Cullingham on behalf of Heritage Ottawa to the City of Ottawa's Planning and Development Committee on Friday, March 8, 2002.

Gordon Cullingham

Thank you Mr. Chair:

You have heard from the LACAC delegation the reasons you should support an

increase in the amount of money made available for heritage restoration of designated structures. I represent Heritage Ottawa, and I want to vigorously endorse that objective. Our dedication is to preserving the atmosphere of handsome self-respect that heritage buildings endow a city with. This is a lesson taught endlessly by the example of great cities, whose attraction for the money-spending tourist seeking esthetic thrills is simply a result of history and hard work - make your citizens proud of your architectural achievement, and the world will come to see what the fuss was all about. They win. We win.

That pride-before-parsimony attitude explains why the world flocks to Paris and to London and to Rome. It also explains why so few emigrants from Europe came from the great cities: why leave Paris?

Such riches were not achieved by mere luck or by crude wealth: they were the result of policies that knew the value of beauty, and of a civic inspiration born from a determination to say something vital. It made everyone want to speak.

To many it may seem here in Ottawa that it is too late now to start doing the right thing. Too much has been lost. But that kind of defeatism is patently self-destructive. We live with what we have…as we die with what we destroy. So let's get on with what we can do. We can help to preserve our treasures by leadership and by encouragement, by those financial incentives that tell our citizens that we care how they parade our best, and how they guard our memories.

That's what these heritage restoration grants do. Modest as a they are, these local subventions are our way of saying that this municipality has some perspective in its evaluation of itself, that it is determined to pick up where the higher levels of government left off in heritage preservation, and to dare to say that their default will not divert us. This is good work, and we're doing it because no one else will do it for us.

Only a nation blessed with profuse natural resources would get the idea that good things are free. The rest of the world knows they aren't. But heritage isn't a natural resource, it's a human one. And so it takes a bit of will to say "We can afford it." And we can afford it, not because we don't have budget problems, not because we are imprudent, but because we are rich, not poor.

Thank you, Mr. Chair and Councillors.