Denley: Why Bob Chiarelli may be handing Ottawa's mayoralty to McKenney

Former mayor Bob Chiarelli is unlikely to be your next mayor, but that doesn’t mean he won’t be a factor in the race. While there has been a dearth of public polling, what little we have suggests that Chiarelli has the potential to win enough votes to guarantee a victory for progressive candidate Catherine McKenney.

A Mainstreet Research poll conducted in the middle of September showed McKenney with 34 per cent support, the same number as July. Former broadcaster Mark Sutcliffe was at 20 per cent, up from 15 per cent in July. Chiarelli’s support had risen to 11 per cent, up from seven. The poll showed 24 per cent of voters as undecided. It’s considered accurate to +/- 3.5 percentage points 19 times out of 20.

That’s happy arithmetic for McKenney, not so much for Sutcliffe. In a two-person race, those candidates would likely be neck-and-neck. Chiarelli and Sutcliffe are drawing from the same pool of voters and both are perceived as being moderate, somewhat fiscally conservative and business-oriented. It’s pretty clear that voters who don’t support McKenney’s approach will have to focus on one of the two if they don’t want city hall to lurch to the left.

It’s difficult to argue that Chiarelli is the better choice. Yes, the former mayor does have decades of political experience, but the Bob Chiarelli of 2022 is not the Bob Chiarelli of 2006, the last time he held the job. It’s not just his age, 81. It’s actually his ideas that are out of sync with the Bob Chiarelli that we knew. Chiarelli was once good with facts and figures, but much of his platform lacks the cohesive, detailed approach one would have expected.

For example, Chiarelli would throw out the city’s greenhouse gas reduction program. At a cost of $32 billion over 28 years, he says it’s financially unsustainable. That’s a fair comment, but he suggests a series of uncosted ideas with unspecified benefits to replace it.

On tax policy, one of his former specialities, Chiarelli calls for a tax freeze in the first year of his mandate. It’s a catchy idea, but with inflation at seven per cent, a tax increase of two to three per cent would be much more prudent.

He wants the city government to help fix health care, an area where it has little responsibility or leverage. That’s mostly up to the provincial government, where he spent much of his political career.

Chiarelli says he will “put a halt to all new road construction,” and use the money to repair roads instead. The problem is, halting new road construction would also hinder suburban housing development at a time when the city is facing a housing crisis.

Still, housing is the strongest area of Chiarelli’s platform. By opposing significant intensification in single-family neighbourhoods, he’s telling most people what they want to hear. He’s right when he says it didn’t make sense to choose the isolated Tewin lands over development land in Kanata. Unfortunately, he wants to stop urban boundary expansion and depend on intensification to handle growth. The city’s Official Plan already relies on the kind of underdeveloped areas Chiarelli cites, plus plenty more in established neighbourhoods. Chiarelli says he wants more housing, but restricting development opportunities won’t achieve that goal.

Chiarelli has accomplished much in his career in city and provincial politics. He earned a reputation as a hard worker and he was certainly a tenacious campaigner. I got a first-hand look at that when I ran against him and lost in the 2011 and 2014 provincial elections.

Back in the day, Chiarelli was pretty good at seeing the bigger picture, but the opportunity for one last shot has clouded his judgment. That final chance has become more important than the outcome. Chiarelli’s run benefits a candidate whose approach he doesn’t support while hurting one with similar ideas. The old Bob Chiarelli would have seen the flaw in that, but the current Bob Chiarelli apparently does not.

Randall Denley is an Ottawa political commentator and author. Contact him at randalldenley1@gmail.com