A vision without a plan is just a dream

(25 February) - John Lennon said life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans. Let’s hope he wasn’t right.

The city had a consultation on its downtown secondary plan last week. There were two days of workshops about the direction it will take over the next two decades. I only managed to get to the Wednesday evening one. The workshops went on all day Thursday and into the evening.

Participation was more or less by invitation. Notices were sent to various downtown stakeholder groups and individuals. In the interests of full disclosure, I made the list because I was recently elevated to the chairpersonship of the Library Board. A new library is a key component of downtown redevelopment.

Libraries are genteel institutions that don’t make rush, or rash, changes. We stand politely in queues, sometimes for as long as a quarter of a century. We don’t mind. We’re more than half way down the line by now. Fifteen years in and we can already see the misty outline of a new library taking shape on a horizon a mere ten years out.

That’s the thing about the future: pessimists say it never arrives. An optimist will tell you that every week brings it seven days closer.

The workshop last Wednesday appealed to the optimist in me. We were presented with great visual renditions of how our downtown could look in 2031. The planning consultants have a tremendous vision. They see a boulevard down the centre of Macdonell Street. Wider sidewalks with outdoor cafes. A more attractive St. George’s Square without a bank on every corner, anchored instead by restaurants and shops.

They see creative uses for our riverfront with more parkland and no strip malls. Everything downtown will be linked by attractive pedestrian corridors. If you want to walk along a path from Cork St. to Quebec St. you won’t have to step gingerly around puddles of last night’s puke.

It will be a wonderful place, in 2031. Almost makes me want to start looking after myself to improve my odds of being here to see it.

It’s a grand vision, but a vision without a plan is just a dream.

A plan is not simply a description of the destination. It must outline the ways and means of getting there. How do we get the banks off the Square, and where do we put them? How do we get the strip mall off the corner of Gordon and Wellington and open the river front? How do we stop new ones from being built, if they conform to current by-laws and plans?

Big box development on the edge of town, as allowed by the Commercial Policy Review, isn’t about to go away. It is the root cause of downtown misery, but the OMB won’t let us stop it.

I was pleased as Punch to see the new downtown library open for business in the 2031 vision. It means we won’t be left in the queue for ever. The optimist in me thinks it is great that planners still see all this as achievable in 20 years, even though they’ve bumped Baker St. redevelopment off for ten. Unless, of course, some government infrastructure money puts the shovels in the ground sooner. If that happens, we’ll be ready. If it doesn’t, we’ll keep on waiting.

You can see the dream for yourself at a city hall open house on March 9. I hope they can make it work because, as Mark Twain said, twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did.