A photo of a pair enjoying the Rockeries in Ottawa's Rockliffe neighbourhood.
A pair enjoying the Rockeries in Ottawa's Rockliffe neighbourhood. Credit: National Capital Commission Credit: National Capital Commission

We in Canada are just beginning to appreciate how people experience environmental hazards and pollution differently, depending on how rich or poor they are.

There is a private member’s bill before Parliament, sponsored by Liberal MP Lenore Zann, which mandates the government to come up with a strategy to deal with what it calls “environmental racism.”

The bill points out that “a disproportionate number of people who live in environmentally hazardous areas are members of Indigenous, racialized or other marginalized groups.” 

It explains that “environmentally hazardous sites, including landfills and polluting industries,” have been established “in areas inhabited primarily by members of those communities”.

These odious practices, Zann’s bill concludes, “could be considered a form of racial discrimination.”

There is no consequential action associated with the bill. Private members’ legislation cannot entail new government spending. 

All the bill calls for is further study, with the aim of possibly taking concrete action in the future.

Not just race, but also being poor 

It is true that industries and governments have often located polluting waste sites, dirty industrial operations such as chemical plants and oil refineries, and even massive super highways in neighbourhoods where people of colour and Indigenous people live. 

It is also true that environmental dangers and hazards are visited upon people as a function of their social class as much as of their race and ethnicity.

If you’re poor in an urban area you will almost inevitably have noisier streets, dirtier air, more dangerous traffic, and less green space than your more affluent fellow citizens. 

Rich people don’t locate their monster houses in the shadows of traffic-clogged elevated expressways or giant smokestacks. 

The wealthy would rather build their homes adjacent to pleasant public green spaces. 

Urban authorities originally created those green spaces to provide everyday folks with accessible places of oxygenated refuge from the noise, filth and grime of the city.

That was the philosophy which motivated Frederick Law Olmsted, the pioneering 19th century American landscape architect. 

Olmsted designed Central Park in Manhattan and Mount Royal Park in Montreal, among many other large urban havens of trees, rocks, grass and breathable air. In his time, he took note of the vast private parks the rich fenced off for their own exclusive use, and commented: 

“The enjoyment of the choicest natural scenes and the means of recreation connected with them is thus a monopoly of a very few … The great mass of society, including those to whom it would be of the greatest benefit, is excluded from it.”

Olmsted and others convinced city governments to set aside land for the many, for which he carefully designed spaces that were at once wild and natural and inviting and family-friendly. 

For more than a century and a half, ordinary folks have been able to enjoy those green spaces. 

But a funny thing happened on the way to democratizing public parks. 

The market economy moved in and did what it does best. It sold off the most desirable real estate to the highest bidders.

Much of the land on the periphery of some of the best-known, landmark, urban green spaces has been gobbled up by the rich and the über-rich. A public investment for average city-dwellers has turned into a private benefit for a tiny elite. 

So, today we have the monster mansions of upper Westmount and Outremont bordering Mount Royal Park in Montreal and the chic and exclusive apartment buildings of Fifth Ave. and Central Park West dominating the landscape to the east and west New York’s Central Park.

At Central Park’s south end there are posh hotels, including the legendary Plaza. Only the park’s northern border, 110th St., has apartments within reach of ordinary mortals.

King Edward St. is far from the Rockeries

Canada’s capital city provides a graphic example of how what were supposed to be refuges of green space and fresh air for the many became exclusive housing opportunities for the few.

Drive east from Parliament Hill in Ottawa and you will first go through a commercial area of shops and restaurants. Then you will arrive at a street that is effectively a highway, funnelling a massive volume of traffic, much of it in the form of trucks, to the main bridge linking Ottawa to Quebec.

You are now on King Edward St. 

If you get out to stroll on this street you will have to talk loudly to be heard over the traffic. The noise is incessant and relentless.

You will notice, surprisingly, that this is not a commercial or industrial area. People live here, mostly in aging rooming houses. 

There are few trees on King Edward and the only green spaces are scraps of weeds. There is nothing resembling a park on the street or nearby, unless you count asphalt covered parking lots as parks.

This is not a high-income area. Aside from the denizens of the rental accommodations there are many un-housed people here, who congregate around the two shelters on or near King Edward. 

This street is home to several thousand people, but people are not the priority here. It is an entirely vehicle-dominated landscape. 

Cars and trucks rule. Human beings have to keep to their place, which is way down the pecking order.

Now, keep travelling eastward and a few kilometres later you will be in an entirely different universe.

This is green and pleasant Rockliffe, with spacious homes on even more spacious grounds.

Here the streets are lined with mature trees, and the lawns are always lush, green and well-manicured.

Drive into the heart of this neighbourhood and you come to a magnificent 2.65-hectare park, the Rockeries. In the spring this park features a profusion of daffodils. Year round, there are fine views over the Ottawa River and inviting walking paths. 

This is one of the oldest, largest and most attractive of Ottawa’s parks. It was created about century and a half ago out of what was once the private property of stonemason and builder Thomas McKay. 

The authorities intended the park to be a green and pleasant haven for lumber workers, bartenders, house cleaners, craftspeople and small shopkeepers who made up the bulk of the city’s population.

They were the many, the grassroots people, not the privileged few.

Today, however, the Rockeries have little connection to the grassroots. 

To get to this lovely park, the folks who live on King Edward St. would have to make their way through the genteel, hushed streets of Rockliffe. Few make the effort; many are not even aware of the existence of the Rockeries.

A notional public good, maintained by the taxpayer-funded federal National Capital Commission, has become, in large measure, a preserve for a wealthy elite. 

CMHC identifies big gap in affordable housing prospects

The appropriation of public (and often taxpayer-maintained) goods for private benefit is a small part of the inequality story in this country. 

There are other bigger parts, including the inadequacy of affordable housing, which the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) underscores in a new report.

The report notes that the overall housing supply is increasing, but the stock of affordable housing, especially rental housing, is not keeping pace with the growing need.

In the report’s words, “if we stay on our current trajectory, there will be more housing supply — but not enough to address affordability.”

The CMHC says the problem is most acute in Ontario, where the “housing stock-to-population ratio is declining.” 

That trend is worrisome because Ontario is home to 15 million of the 38 million Canadians. 

“Much more housing supply is needed in Ontario,” the report concludes bluntly. 

A long hot summer approaches, when millions of Canadians who don’t own country homes and cannot afford beach-side vacations will be seeking some cool and green relief from scorching, climate-change-induced temperatures. 

Those who are housed are better off than those who are not. 

Neither group will even have adequate access to the oxygen-generating parks and green spaces that were supposedly created to serve their needs.

This article is part of rabble’s series “The Boiling Point.” The Boiling Point examines the ways increasingly high temperatures due to the climate crisis are affecting our summers in Canada on a social, institutional, and ecological level. The series also explains how Canadians can take action against climate change and make real differences in their communities. Follow more stories here.

Karl Nerenberg

Karl Nerenberg joined rabble in 2011 to cover Canadian politics. He has worked as a journalist and filmmaker for many decades, including two and a half decades at CBC/Radio-Canada. Among his career highlights...