By Doug Nesbitt

Winter in Ottawa is not always friendly. And it’s just not the weather. In early December 2008, the global economy was in tatters, Harper had prorogued parliament to prevent a majority coalition of “separatists and socialists” from taking power, and York University academic workers were entering their second month of a long, bitter strike.

That’s when Ottawa’s proto-Ford buffoon of a mayor, Larry O’Brien, a millionaire businessman (sound familiar?), intervened in negotiations between the City of Ottawa and the public transit workers union, Amalgamated Transit Union Local 279.

Rob Ford before Rob Ford

O’Brien had come to power in 2006 through some shady dealings with a perennial right-wing mayoral candidate, and won a surprise victory against an NDP candidate who was considered the front-runner until a few weeks before the election. Promising no new taxes, restraints on public services and abandoning the City’s hard-won plan to expand light rail transit (sound familiar?), O’Brien increased policing, passed a law banning the homeless from sleeping on the streets, and in subsequent budgets, tried to close public library branches and community centres, raised transit fares and cut bus routes (sounding even more familiar?). O’Brien won the election because he swept the rural wards and higher-income suburbs, although he was handily defeated in the urban core and older streetcar suburbs. The Ottawa megacity, a product of the Harris years, once again ensured that municipal government remained a dysfunctional mess, pitting urban against rural in a manner that largely failed in representing the needs of both constituencies.

After failing to deliver on his first two budgets and facing a budget deficit of $12 million, O’Brien tried to create a new public enemy by taking on the most powerful municipal workers union (sound familiar?). After months of negotiations that flew well below the local media’s radar, suddenly there was a looming transit strike in late November 2008. O’Brien had intervened, so the story goes, to try and repeal the union’s seniority rights to booking weekday routes that had existed for 106 years (Haligonians, does this sound familiar?). The City also tried to increase the eight-hour split-shift from 12.5 to 14.5 hours. Wages and benefits were also a major issue.