The Paul Wells Show - Ottawa's mayor on his first year in office

Episode Date: November 1, 2023

Mark Sutcliffe decided to run for mayor of Ottawa after being frustrated by the Freedom Convoy and the city's ill-fated LRT project. He won. A year into his term, he reflects on trying to solve some of the city’s biggest problems, including saving the downtown core and getting the LRT back on track. This episode was recorded live at the National Arts Centre. Subscribe to Paul's Substack for a premium version of this show: paulwells.substack.com

Sure, Ottawa's a nice town, but would you really want to run it? I had been a little bit frustrated with, well more than a little bit frustrated with how the light rail project had been handled and how the convoy had been handled. I wanted to get things back to normal again in so many ways. Today, live from the National Arts Centre, the Mayor of Ottawa looks back on his first year in office. I'm Paul Wells, the Journalist Fellow-in-Residence at the University of Toronto's Monk School. Welcome to The Paul Wells Show. There's the old joke about the dog that chases the car and then finally catches it. And then the question is, what are you going to do with the car?

Spare a thought for Mark Sutcliffe. Are you referring to the pursuit of me as your guest for this podcast? The pursuit of you of your current gig. Right. Which puts you at the bottom of a jurisdictional well that very few people in government ever have to think about. There's the federal government. There's the municipal government. There's the National Citizens Coalition. No. National Capital Commission. The NCC.

Yes. And then there's Ottawa City Council dealing with all that other stuff. Prices are going up. Crime is going up. Opioid use is going up. Life is more complex and uncertain and nervous-making for more and more people. And Ottawa, at the bottom of this jurisdictional well, is also physically the largest big city in Canada.

Your predecessor, Jim Watson, showed me a map once, Calgary and Toronto and Montreal and Quebec City, all fitting into the area of Ottawa. I still have that map. Yeah. And I use it all the time. And it's actually Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Calgary and Edmonton all fit inside Ottawa geographically. Which means the preoccupations of the people in most of what we call Ottawa are not the

preoccupations of most of the population of Ottawa who live here in the middle of it. That actually had something to do with you getting elected because you had more support in outer Ottawa than here in downtown Ottawa. So it's a bit of a puzzle, and we're here to talk about it. My guest today is Mark Sutcliffe. Thanks for coming out. It's my pleasure, Paul. Thank you for inviting me. And I was thinking as we walked out here that I have interviewed you many times, but I don't think

you've ever interviewed me so this will be fun. Yes we have traded significant glances off camera during that call-in show on CPAC. How much preparation is a CPAC call-in show for the job of being mayor? Not that much. I mean, you know, certainly having had a career in the media and having had a career where I was interacting with the public a lot and interacting with political leaders and listening to people's concerns. And to be honest, the great thing about that show on CPAC that I used to do is that we were trying to hear what was going on across the country and people's views on Canadian politics. And it was my job to understand them, not to argue with those people, but to really understand what people were thinking.

So I guess on some level it was a form of preparation. I think my journalism career helped me a lot from, because I think journalism is about trying to understand complex issues and boil them down into their essential components and communicate what the real issue is. And I think a large part of politics today is that as well. So I'm sure it helped. Now, a lot of people are listening to this podcast who don't live in Ottawa. So we should point out that you're a first term mayor, you've been mayor for about a year, coming up on sort of the anniversary of your election. That's right. It was October 24th of last year that I got elected. And then I was sworn in on November 15th. Why did you run for mayor? I've been asking myself that same question

recently. No, I wasn't planning to run for mayor. Two years ago, even 18 months ago, I had a great life and I was still doing a few things in journalism, but part-time, you know, doing a podcast, in fact, and still doing some things with CPAC and writing some columns and that sort of thing. But most of my work was coaching and mentoring entrepreneurs and CEOs. And I was really enjoying that. And then, you know, a lot of things happened in Ottawa over the last few years. And I think even people outside Ottawa know about the big ones. I think Ottawa in the last three years has really been known for two things, the convoy and our light rail system. And I watched all of that going on over the course of a few months. And the previous

mayor, Jim Watson, announced in December of 2021 that he was not going to run again. He'd been mayor for 11 years at that point. And a few people said they were going to run. And I was watching this and had no interest in running myself and presumed that there would be several significant candidates from the community, from the current council at the time. And a few people approached me and said, you should think about this. You should think about running. And I said, no, I love what I'm doing. I have no interest. It'll all be fine. And I kept going in the other direction. I started getting more clients. I was planning to a life not including being mayor of

Ottawa. And then gradually, many of the people who said they were going to run didn't. And I had been a little bit frustrated with, more than a little bit frustrated with how the light rail project had been handled and how the convoy had been handled. So I was probably more engaged in municipal politics and had stronger opinions about it than before when things were quieter. And as other people chose not to run, and people came back to me and said, you really should think about this. My wife and I had a couple of conversations, more than a couple of conversations. Ginny and I have three kids, and our son Jack was in competitive baseball, and we would have these long drives to tournaments and games in other cities,

and the kids would be in the backseat on their devices and we'd have four hours to talk and what we talked about was how we've always you know we consider ourselves incredibly fortunate uh we've been really lucky in our lives and we've been blessed in so many ways and we had been talking about how can we give back to our community you know should we get involved in a big way with a charity? Should we do something else? Should we volunteer somewhere? And Ginny said at one point, well, you know, we keep looking for a way to give back to the community

and do something significant. Maybe this is it. And so we considered it and talked to a few people and I decided to jump in. And I think the main thing that I wanted to accomplish was to bring some calmness. It had been a very volatile time in municipal politics in Ottawa over the course of a couple of years. There was a lot of fighting and divisions. And, you know, I think there were a lot of people who kind of resigned themselves to the idea that politics was going to be this way going forward, no matter what level. And I have always tried to be a consensus builder in my business

career and when I've served on boards. And so I wanted to bring, I wanted to get things back to normal again in so many ways in our city, in terms of how we were running the city, how government functioned, how city council functioned, and then some of the big challenges we were facing. Let's take the two things that you described in order, the LRT and the convoy, but let's start with the convoy. I mean, I wrote a whole book on it, and I still can't decide for sure whether it's the sort of thing that we have to worry about again, or whether it was just a weird thing that happened once and everyone learned their lesson, and now it'll be quite easy to avoid that sort of thing happening again. What are your thoughts?

I don't like to make predictions, so I'm not going to answer that question directly with a, you know, with a pronouncement. But I'll tell you, I was, for whatever reason, just my personality or my makeup in some way, I found in my journalism career, I was much less likely than other people to become attached to or invested in stories I was covering. I always just maintained a level of curiosity about them. And I would sometimes even wonder, like, why aren't you getting more emotional about this? It's a very moving story. But I was just, I was always fascinated with what was going on. I got emotionally invested in the convoy. Like many people in Ottawa, I was angry. When I would turn on the television and see what was going on, it really had an impact on me at a visceral level.

I found it very unsettling and frustrating. And I would conclude, to the extent that we can conclude anything, it was, I think, a constellation of events all happening. There were a bunch of things going on, and they sort of became a perfect storm of sorts that led to that event taking place and it being very hard to stop it from taking place or address it afterwards. So in one sense, I think it is a bit of a one-off. And like so many things, once something happens a certain way, it can never happen that way again because, you know, the rules of the game change and everybody behaves differently. So something else might happen, but it won't be exactly like that. So in one respect, I think it is a bit of a one-off,

I hope it is. But in another respect, I think it is part of an ongoing change, a trend, that we're going to see more people for the next little while engaging in acts of protest and disruption, interrupting things. You know, I think we are going to see more of that. And certainly the threat of that has been present in Ottawa ever since the convoy and ever since I became mayor. When you say you were really angry, who were you angry at? I was angry that it was happening. I'm not sure if my anger landed on anyone, probably everyone in a position of responsibility. I thought that

there were a lot of people during the pandemic who were turning the issue of vaccination into an us versus them kind of dynamic. I am fully vaccinated. You know, this is one of those situations where you now have to preface what you're going to say by describing your stand on vaccines but I'm fully vaccinated I have always encouraged everyone to get vaccinated there is no doubt in my mind that the vaccines are safe and appropriate and have contributed to our ability to start functioning again but I understand why some people weren't so ready to take the vaccine as I was I understand why some people weren't so ready to take the vaccine as I was. I understand why some people were skeptical. That happens. You're

not going to get 100% of people to embrace a new idea on the same timetable in a country of almost 40 million people. And the fact that those people who were not ready to accept the vaccines on the same timetable as me or you, that we should demonize those people as opposed to trying to find a way to engage them and give them a reason to do it, I was disappointed in that and how politicized that became. Which is not to say those people who were skeptical were right. When you're trying to win people over on something, the way to do it is not to tell them they're wrong and to tell them they're stupid or that they're wrecking everything for everyone else. So I was upset about that. I was upset that people would come and take over our downtown and use that as the reason to do it and disrupt so many lives and make

the people of Ottawa the victims of their protest when their argument was with the federal government and I was certainly disappointed with the police response and the fact that the event was allowed to continue for so long. And I'm not saying I would have done a better job. We'll never know. I wasn't there at the time, and it's not the mayor's job to fix that. It's the police chief's job. But I believe there was a better way to handle it.

You know, for example, Paul, I remember driving on the Queensway, and there were signs directing the truckers, the convoy protesters, directing them towards downtown Ottawa, telling them where to drive. Effectively welcoming them to the city of Ottawa like they were a convention that was coming to the capital. So what's changed since then that makes you more confident that we won't see a repeat of that convoy? you more confident that we won't see a repeat of that convoy? I think a lot of lessons have been learned from that experience and naturally you know as you know you've written about it there was massive scrutiny of those events and I believe a lot of lessons have been learned and I also think there is a different approach to policing just as there is a different approach to security after September 11th, 2001. When a major event like that happens that's disruptive at that level, there is

inevitably going to be a compensation for that in terms of how we approach those things in the future. So I think at the time of the convoy in February 2022, there was a lack of imagination that people could, I'm not comparing the magnitude of the two events, obviously, but in 2001, there was a lack of imagination that people would fly planes into buildings. In 2022, there was a lack of imagination that protesters would come and occupy downtown Ottawa for three weeks. I think the expectation was they're going to come, they're going to stick around for a while, and then they're going to leave because they're not going to want to be here anymore. It's February in Ottawa.

Who wants to be sitting outside or in a truck in February in Ottawa? There was the expectation that they were going to leave voluntarily, and that was a mistake. And I don't think that mistake will be repeated. There's a different approach to policing. There's a different approach to identifying these potential protests. So I don't think that specific type of event will happen again. We were chatting before we came out here and you said that you get a note from the police heading it every weekend about here's the things that we're keeping an eye on. Not necessarily every weekend, but it's pretty frequent that

going into a weekend, the police will be preparing for a multitude of possible events, some of which happen and some of which don't, some of which just don't materialize, and some of which are averted through good policing and good management of the situation. You know, I was thinking of a couple of weeks ago when we, when we, there's a, there, there are some new protesters who have started gathering just outside Ottawa, and they drive into downtown Ottawa, and they park their trucks legally in parking lots, and then they demonstrate on foot, which is perfectly legal and part of our democracy. In the last few weeks, there have been, of course, large demonstrations by citizens expressing their thoughts about the situation in the Middle East. by citizens expressing their thoughts about the situation in the Middle East. There have been people who have been gathering

in demonstrations about education in our country and the rights of LGBTQ plus members. And then in the middle of all of that, we can have thrown into it something like a university football game, where the Panda game in Ottawa, which is the annual game between Carleton University and U Ottawa,

it's a tradition that goes back many years, but in some years game between Carleton University and U Ottawa. It's tradition that goes back many years, but in some years it's all been carried off very well, and in some years there have been parties in the streets that have gotten violent and cars have been flipped over. And so our police service here in our little old Ottawa has to deal with all of that and prepare for each of these events and all of these events and the potential for them to overlap with each other and interrupt each other and so every weekend they're preparing for that kind of stuff and it's really remarkable that they have to do that. Jim Watson felt during the convoy and Justice Rouleau concluded after the convoy, that it really

seemed as though the Premier of Ontario, Doug Ford, believed or wished that Ottawa wasn't in Ontario. How are your relations with the provincial government? Excellent. I'm very happy. We're back. What's that? We're back in Ontario. We're back in Ontario. Yeah. I learned very quickly that one of the most important jobs of a mayor is to ask other levels of government for help. And I expect that we'll be talking about the fascinating dynamics of our political system where that becomes a big part of the job for the leader of the municipal government. It's just the way we're structured in this country that cities can't do things on their own and the list of things cities

have to do is growing every day. So my goal from the outset was to have a great relationship with the federal government and the provincial government. You know the election happened on October 24th and And at 11 o'clock that night, I got an email from the city clerk for the city of Ottawa, Rick O'Connor, who has since retired. And it said, will you please come into City Hall tomorrow morning at 9.30 to start to go over a few things. So I came to City Hall at 9.30. And during that meeting, my phone rang and I didn't answer it. It said unknown number. And I listened to the voicemail message afterwards and it was a message from Doug Ford congratulating me and asking me to call him back and he gave me his number. And I called him

back and he answered the phone. And ever since then, if I text Doug Ford, he will call me back usually within 15 or 20 minutes. If you ask me what one of my biggest surprises, that would be one of them, the fact that the Premier of Ontario is so accessible. He prides himself on that. And I think he deserves a lot of credit for it that if I have a question or a request that he gets back to me right away. And so we've developed a good working relationship. And I've developed a good working relationship with members of his cabinet and with the local MPPs and with the federal government as well. But since your question was specifically about Doug Ford, we have a good relationship.

And there was one issue where Ottawa felt like we were overlooked and shortchanged in the distribution of some money from a particular fund. And I called the premier, and I went and met with him and a few of his cabinet ministers at Queen's Park. And within a few weeks, they fixed it. So I'm very happy with the relationship that we have. After the break, I'll talk to Mark Sutcliffe about Ottawa's cursed light rail train and how to save the city's downtown core. Part of the mission of the Paul Wells Show

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wherever you get your podcasts. Let's talk about the LRT. If we must. It was coming. I've got friends who will not forgive me for being gentle to you until now because they live out in the West end of town and they need the LRT to come to town. And sometimes the LRT is not running or it's half as long as they expected it to be. And this is the result of a terribly mismanaged procurement process,

which was the object of an absolutely damning commission of inquiry report, saying it calls into question the basic honesty of both the contractor and the municipal government of the time and the municipal government's ability to manage a program of this scale in the future. Have you heard of any of this stuff? Is this all new to you?

There was an inquiry? I should read that. You should really get on that. What on earth are you going to do with the LRT now? You get teleported into this file five years into the mess. What options are available to you for handling that kind of challenge? It's a big challenge. There's no question. And, you know, there are so many things that went into creating this problem that it will not be easy to fix it. You know, a mess that takes a decade to create can't be fixed in a couple of weeks or months or even a year or two.

There's so many things about this. And I was writing columns about this, not obsessively or to any great extent, but from time to time, I would write a column or two about the process of making decisions about LRT and why we chose to go in this direction, why we chose to have a tunnel, where we put the tunnel, a lot of the decisions that were made. And of course, with the benefit of hindsight, it is very, very easy to second guess all of those decisions. But I think there were a lot of things that contributed to this. And let's start with the fact that every major infrastructure project in the world arrives late and over budget. And every municipality that is involved in a major infrastructure project

is inherently at a disadvantage in negotiating with multinational, multibillion-dollar corporations that do this all the time. And you're doing it for the first time. So any time a city decides, OK, we're going to go from being a bus city to being a train city, you're going to enter into a swamp and walk through quicksand and deal with all kinds of things you never expected. And the people on your team can't possibly be in a position

to make perfect decisions every single time. I'm not defending any of this, I'm just saying that's just the reality of the situation. So looking forward, we have to fix light rail and we think based on the information that we've been given by our contractors that we have isolated the most significant problem with light rail that has led to a couple of derailments and the shutdown of the system during this past summer, which is the axle bearing system. It's now being redesigned and that will take time. And in the meantime, we've got to figure out all the other things that might go wrong with this train or have gone wrong in the past and what the solutions are. might go wrong with this train or have gone wrong in the past and what the solutions are so that in a couple of years from now when the new axles are put on the trains we can have a properly functioning system it's not going to work 100 of the time no public transit system does

there are shutdowns for all kinds of reasons but we want to have an ordinary number of shutdowns not an extraordinary number of shutdowns we want to have an ordinary number of shutdowns, not an extraordinary number of shutdowns. We want to have shutdowns that happen for an hour because something fell on the tracks or there was a maintenance issue or a computer glitch. Not the kinds of shutdowns that last for six weeks because the axles don't work. So we've got to fix that. And then we've got to open the next phase of light rail, which is under construction as we speak. Whose fault was the first endless screw up? Like so many things, I think it isn't the fault of one person or organization, but a combination of events that all fed on each other and contributed to this undesirable outcome. I was skeptical about a lot of things,

and I'm not saying this now to say I told you so. I'm just reflecting on the process that led up to that point and what I observed at the time. Having trains that had never been used in, you know, a brand new model of train, and we would be the first city to have it, raises some red flags for me. I'd rather have the train that's been used somewhere else and they've ironed out the bugs and now we get the version after that. You know, that's not always as easy as it sounds because we're dealing with long timetables. You're making commitments several years into the future when you're buying trains for a light rail system that hasn't been built. I had concerns about the location of where we were putting the stops and the tunnel and

things like that. I had concerns about the declaration of this is going to be on time and on budget because it wasn't going to be on time and on budget and it didn't end up being on time. And if it was on budget, it's only because other decisions were made to keep it on budget and there are the kinds of decisions you don't want to make and I think that's one of the greatest lessons coming out of this I know that the public never likes it when something goes over budget but if you're renovating your house and you have a choice between getting the outcome you want and paying a little bit more and you can afford to pay a little bit more or reverse

engineering so that you stay on budget but you don't actually get the renovation to your house that you intended to get most people are going to choose to go over budget and that's not a bad thing to do but i think there had been a political commitment by the mayor and the previous council they were married to the idea of we're going to deliver this on time and on budget, and it's not going to cost one cent more. And that influenced a lot of the decisions that were made. And that's not healthy. All the fixing that's going now, it's the contractor that's paying?

Yes. Or am I, as an Ottawa resident, paying? It's the contractors that are paying. Okay. With every infrastructure project that went through COVID, there are all kinds of other costs and challenges, some of which we're paying.

But the cost of fixing the trains we bought is the contractors. Now, the LRT is a problem that is specific to Ottawa. There's also a whole bunch of problems that make Ottawa like most Canadian cities right now, which is that downtown is kind of scary. Business is not thriving downtown. People are sometimes reluctant to go downtown. persist. And so it's really hard to get a sort of sense of momentum in what's going on. And probably this is vastly aggravated by the fact that so many people who would work in downtown in Ottawa are federal public servants, and they've been adamant that they are really reluctant to come back to their jobs. How big of a headache is that? It's a big headache. And I guess I would say that Bill Gates has an

expression that I've quoted often that most people overestimate what they can accomplish in one year and underestimate what they can accomplish in five or 10 years. To twist that around, I think most people overstate how big the issue of downtown Ottawa is today and understate how big an issue it's going to be over the course of the next five or 10 years. So as we speak, there are significant challenges in downtown Ottawa, and I'm not going to gloss those over or underestimate them, but I don't think downtown Ottawa is as bad as some people think it is. There's still a lot going on. Tourism's happening. Events are happening. People have come back. It's just one barometer, but my office window happens to

overlook a sign outside the parking lot at Ottawa City Hall. The sign says how many parking spaces are available in the garage. And when I started my job as mayor, every day it would say, you know, in the middle of the day, it might say 200, 250 spaces were still available. And now typically on any given day, it's full and there's no spaces available. It's one small indicator of the fact that more people are coming downtown now than a year ago. More people are using public transit in Ottawa than a year ago. And businesses are doing a little bit better. I've heard from some business owners, they're doing a little bit better. better. I've heard from some business owners they're doing a little bit better. So it may not be as bad as people think but there's a more chronic and persistent problem that I'm very worried about which is if our number one

employer the federal government is not going to have its employees in the office five days a week going forward and if it's going to reduce its footprint in the downtown core by as much as 50%, which is a distinct possibility, they've talked in numbers of that magnitude, then what is the future of downtown Ottawa? What role does it serve? How do we get people downtown? How do we have more people living downtown? How do we have more people coming downtown to go to the National Arts Center or the National Gallery or other attractions? How do we have more people living downtown? How do we have more people coming downtown to go to the National Arts Center or the National Gallery or other attractions? How do we build more of those attractions? It's going to take a lot of creativity and a lot of hard work. Downtown revitalization is sort of a thing that, you know, no matter when you ran for municipal

office in the last 50 years, it would be something you would talk about. I don't think there's ever been a time in Ottawa where it's been more important to talk about downtown revitalization than right now. I don't think we've ever been through anything like this before. So we need some very creative, imaginative, long-term thinking to create a downtown Ottawa that will flourish and will survive this incredibly dramatic change that's about to happen. Is this one reason why you're so eager to have a new hockey arena built not a half hour away where the current one is and not even in the Breton Flats which is this open area about three blocks from downtown but right downtown is because it's going to shovel some dirt into this capacity

hole that you're describing? Yes, it is. And I've said all along, if the Ottawa senators who have an option to build on a property on the Bretton Flats, if they want to move forward with that, that's their decision. The decision of where the arena will go is largely the decision of the owner, the new owner of the Ottawa Senators. What I've said all along is I think we should be looking at options. It's a big decision. It's going to be one of the largest projects that we embark on as a city. It's a big attractor. It brings people together. It can have a great economic impact. So if we're going to make that decision for the next 50 years, let's not just consider one option, let's consider several.

And I would say five years ago, downtown would not have been as viable an option, would not have been a viable option, perhaps. The federal government was expanding at the time, using more and more real estate. There wouldn't have been a space to do it downtown. There wouldn't have been the space to do it downtown. There wouldn't have been the need to do it downtown. And at that time, the idea of doing it at Labretton Flats might have been appealing because it's undeveloped land close to the

downtown core. I think the situation has changed significantly since then. And again, doesn't mean it can't go on Labretton Flats. I'm just putting other options on the table. If we want to get more people downtown, we want to have more attractions downtown, and we're also about to build a new arena for a hockey team and for other events, major concerts and other attractions, why would we not at least consider putting it right downtown as it is in Toronto, as it is in Montreal, as it is in so many other cities. And if there's real estate available in downtown Ottawa for the first time in decades, because of the federal government's change in plans, why wouldn't we look at some of that real estate?

I think there's an opportunity there, and I think it can be part of a solution for downtown Ottawa. But I'm merely putting that out there as an option for the senators to consider. Do you spend much of your, oh, I was going to say, do you spend much of your time talking to other mayors about this work? Is it a sort of a trade craft that gets discussed among mayors? And then I remembered that in fact, you went down to New York for some trade craft yourself under the a the ages of Michael Bloomberg. What was that like? I mean, I'm fascinated by the idea that this is a portable set of challenges and skills and opportunities, mayoring. Yeah, like so many things, I always talk about how parenthood,

that as you are going through the experience of bringing a baby into the world and raising a child, it feels every day like you're the only person experiencing it, and yet billions of people have been through it. And many jobs are like that. I'm the only person in the city of Ottawa who is the mayor right now. It is a, you know, there's one person gets to hold the job at a time. So the fact that there are mayors in other cities who are going through that same experience, that same isolating experience, is very helpful and beneficial.

And so I do try to talk to other mayors as often as I can. It is comforting, as well as obviously being informative and instructive to understand what other cities are dealing with and how they're solving their their challenges it's also comforting to know that other people are going through the same challenge as we are so when you live in ottawa and you spend most of your time in ottawa you might think that all of the things we're experiencing are unique to ottawa and some of them may be unusual in proportion but largely they're not unique. There are other cities obviously dealing with homelessness,

with housing issues, with struggling downtowns. And so talking to others is very comforting. So Michael Bloomberg, to his credit, having been the mayor of New York City, discovered and acted upon the notion that the world's greatest challenges right now are being experienced at a local level, largely. And yet, municipal governments don't typically have the resources to solve them.

And so he invested through Harvard a considerable amount of money, even for Michael Bloomberg, who's a very wealthy man. We were joking, some of the other mayors and I, about how much money it must have been because the program is not called the Harvard Bloomberg City Leadership Initiative. It's called the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative. So that tells you just how big the check must have been from Michael Bloomberg to get this thing off the ground. So the program remarkably is entirely paid for by Michael Bloomberg's foundation. So my travel costs, my accommodation, all of my meals, the entire experience was covered by his foundation.

Every year they invite 40 mayors from around the world to New York City for a three or four day gathering and they have professors from Harvard facilitate conversations about important topics that we're all facing. There's a social networking aspect to it, but there's some intense work that we do together, workshopping, and then we follow up in online courses and calls, and there's all these different tracks you can sign up for, and we engage with each other monthly, virtually going forward. And I've now built relationships with a few of the other mayors. And it's really a fantastic program. And it's

to Mike Bloomberg's credit that he saw the need for this and threw hundreds of millions of dollars behind it. Is there an observation or a tip or a piece of advice that you brought away from the Bloomberg mayoring camp? I have to assume the first piece of advice that you brought away from the Bloomberg mayor in camp? I have to assume the first piece of advice was start as a billionaire. Yeah. In terms of how to become a mayor or yeah. Cause that helped in his case. It's probably just,

it's probably just handy in any, in any endeavor, but no, was there something, is there, is there something that you came away from and thought, I mean, that wouldn't have occurred to me

if I hadn't gone down to this program? I don't know if there's any sort of light bulb moment like that or counterintuitive thing. I think it confirmed a lot of things and reinforced a lot of things that I probably suspected or believed already. One of the things that they focused on the very first day, and by the way, I had this incredible odyssey just to get to New York City because my flight was cancelled at the last minute.

If you don't mind indulging a little story here, I was going to be on a direct flight from Ottawa to Newark, and they were going to have a car pick me up in Newark, which would have been a great experience having, you know, one of those guys with a sign with my name on it, pick me up and drive me to my hotel. I've never been through that before. But my flight got canceled so that I then had to fly Ottawa, Toronto, Toronto, Washington, Washington, New York. And I got to Washington, fine. And then the flight from Washington to LaGuardia got progressively delayed hour by hour in 30 to 45 minute increments until it was due to leave at 1.30 a.m. and arrive in New York City at 3 a.m. And then it just got canceled. And I was now in Washington in an airport at 1.30 in the morning, due at a conference starting at 8.30 the next.30 that morning. So literally in

a few hours. So I found three other people who were in a similar predicament and we rented a car together and we drove to New York City. Three total strangers, a student at West Point, the vice president of sales of a shipping company, and a television commercial director, of a shipping company and a television commercial director who all had to be in New York City the next day. And we rented a car together and they found out, you know, about an hour into the drive that I was the mayor of the capital of Canada. And we drove to New York and then I went to the conference. I mean, this is certainly the setup for the new Aaron Sorkin TV show.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that would be the first episode anyway. So the very first day of the conference was all about communication, which I was surprised by, because I thought we'd be talking about homelessness and housing and public transit and things like that. But the lesson of that is you're nowhere on any issue if you can't get people to buy in to why that issue is important and why you have the right solution. You're nowhere.

And so much political communication is talking points and messaging and explaining and bureaucratic terminology and so on. But you got to talk to people about at the level that they're engaged with the discussion. And so the whole first day, which I managed to stay awake for after having been in a car all night, was all about communicating with the public and bringing them on board with what's going on. And it's so easy to slide out of that when you're working in a big bureaucratic apparatus. And so I have to keep reminding myself to get back into the mindset

and the headspace of Ottawa residents rather than the mindset and headspace of the people who are working every day at City Hall. And it's a constant process of sliding into the bureaucratic world and trying to jar yourself back into the lives of residents of Ottawa. That's probably a good note to end on.

Mark Sutcliffe, you've been generous with your time. You've given us insight into an extraordinarily complex and difficult job, and you've helped us all understand better the cities in which we live. Thanks so much for doing it. It's been an absolute pleasure, Paul. Thank you. Thanks for listening to The Paul Wells Show. And thank you to the National Arts Centre for hosting this conversation. The Paul Wells Show is produced by Antica in partnership with the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy.

Our producer is Kevin Sexton. Our executive producers are Laura Reguerre and Stuart Cox. Our opening theme music is by Kevin Bright and our closing theme music is by Andy Milne. Go to paulwells.substack.com to subscribe to my newsletter. You'll also get a premium version of this show with bonus content.

We'll be back next Wednesday.