Five years ago this past weekend, at the age of 58, the then-mayor of Ottawa Jim Watson confirmed what many people had probably already suspected. After a life in the closet, Watson publicly acknowledged for the first time that he was gay.
Since then, the vast majority of his public interactions have been positive. But there was that one time he came home to find the words “f**king f*g” spraypainted on his driveway. Or the time he was at the Carlingwood Shopping Centre and someone yelled the same at him. There were the emails, some, bizarrely enough, from Americans who were happy to sign their names and home states, using pretty much the same epithets. People rolling down their car windows to scream similar vulgarities at him when they saw him walking by.
“There’s always going to be a little bigotry or homophobia,” Watson says. “I’m very happy with the 95 per cent who pick your spirits up.”
It was actually a neighbour who called Ottawa’s 311 helpline to have the slur power-washed off Watson’s driveway. Another neighbour got signs made up with rainbows on them saying “We love all our neighbours” and had the signs put up on nearby homes.
“Most people are very kind,” Watson says. “But there’s still a nasty element out there that can’t accept people who are different.”
Watson and I got together for breakfast in Ottawa last week to see how post-political life has been going for one of the capital city’s most enduring public figures. Watson started his political life as an adviser to federal Progressive Conservative politicians. His mentor was British Columbia MP John Fraser, the first-ever elected Speaker of the House of Commons, whose advice to “never get into splendid isolation” Watson has tried to follow. That meant not being too impressed with fancy titles or ministerial limousines. Fraser died last April, and Watson was honoured to have been asked to give one of the eulogies at his funeral.
Despite that conservative background (and sharing a birthday with former PC premier Bill Davis), Watson began finding himself increasingly disappointed with Ontario Conservatives. In the 1990s, first while on city council and then as Ottawa’s mayor, Watson saw the capital getting what he thought was “the short end of the stick” from Queen’s Park. So when Liberal leader Dalton McGuinty called asking him to be a candidate in the 2003 provincial election, it wasn’t a tough sell. Watson won Ottawa West–Nepean, got into cabinet after McGuinty’s majority-government win, and spent the next seven years at Queen’s Park. In 2010, he returned to municipal politics, becoming the mayor of the bigger, amalgamated Ottawa. He won three straight elections and left city hall in 2022 as Ottawa’s longest-serving mayor ever.
But his third term was brutal.
There was COVID-19. Then there was the truckers’ convoy that took over the city’s core, making politician and police officer alike look powerless. And, finally, the new light-rail Confederation Line, which opened in 2019 and was supposed to make commuting downtown so much simpler, has proved to be so problematic that a public inquiry was held to find out how so much could have gone so wrong.
“Some people believe he’s a criminal because of that LRT,” says a Watson friend who preferred to remain anonymous.
But Ottawa’s 56th mayor believes that, over time, he’ll be proven right on the city’s biggest infrastructure disaster.
“I took the train to come here this morning,” says Watson, who uses the LRT three times a week. “A study showed it works 98.2 per cent of the time. But it’s that 1.8 per cent that’s the problem, and, as a result, people couldn’t care less that it’s working 98 per cent of the time.”
The former mayor is not wrong when he points out Montreal launched a new line that broke down the first hour it was operational. “The Big Dig” in Boston (an underwater highway) was 10 years late and $10 billion over budget. And, of course, the Eglinton Crosstown in Toronto is three years and $6 billion overbudget — and still with no opening date announced.
“But I get it,” he says. “People don’t want excuses. They want action. Eventually, it’ll get fixed. I still fundamentally believe 10 years from now people will ask, ‘How did we ever get along without this?’”
Watson says that since he left the mayor’s office two and a half years ago, he’s had precious few heckles from the public and that as many people ask for selfies as tell him he’s ruined the city. Last fall, he spoke at the local Kiwanis Club and was warmly received.
“He still connects with people,” his friend told me. “There were 80 to 90 people there, and he got a standing ovation. He’s aware of the anger out there toward him, but he doesn’t spend a lot of time defending himself over it.”
Watson says he also expects LRT ridership to increase once public servants are required to come into the office four days a week (although that’s a battle royal currently underway between the federal government and the public servants’ union).
As for the convoy, Watson’s heard it all. “It was exhausting,” he says. “It was all piling on. Obviously, it should have been [broken up] sooner. Yes, we were caught off guard. But one councillor said we should bring firefighters in and hose down the protestors — in 30 [degrees] below! There were a lot of kooky ideas out there. But at the end of the day, there wasn’t one loss of life, and this could have gone completely differently if the police had acted in a different way.”
A big part of any mayor’s job is to get money out of the other orders of government, and on that front, Watson has a lot of nice things to say about the prime minister and many fewer nice things to say about the premier. He points out that Justin Trudeau came to almost every big city mayors’ caucus meeting, well briefed, and bringing millions of dollars for a new library, an innovation centre, the art gallery, and a new foot bridge in the Glebe named after former cabinet minister Flora MacDonald.
“They were good to the city of Ottawa,” Watson says of the current federal government. “The province, not so much.”
In fact, Ottawa and Doug Ford’s government seem to have a bit of a hate on. Ford avoided the national capital during the convoy crisis. The only government MPP who lost his seat in the 2022 election was an Ottawa Tory, Jeremy Roberts. Nepean MPP Lisa MacLeod was dropped from cabinet, and Carleton MPP Goldie Ghamari was dumped from caucus. And the Tories somehow managed to lose the Kanata–Carleton byelection a year ago to the Liberals’ Karen McCrimmon — a seat the Liberals had never won. And, strangely enough, with the biggest cabinet of all time — 37 members — Ontario’s second-biggest city doesn’t have a seat at the table.
“There’s not a lot of love for Doug Ford here,” Watson concludes.
Life after politics is pretty good for the former mayor, although not without its problems. He’s on the boards of two companies: a 25-year-old outfit called Terago, which installs internet connectors on the roofs of buildings, plus the Ottawa Community Housing Foundation. But perhaps his most meaningful association is with the homeless shelter called the Shepherds of Good Hope, where he volunteers every Tuesday making breakfasts and lunches.
“I enjoy that because it brings you down to reality,” Watson says.
The hardest part of his life is dealing with the colitis diagnosis he got during the final year of his mayoralty. Watson now has to inject a new medication into his thigh to treat his colitis and cut way back on the fast food that was a regular part of his diet in public life.
Just before we finish our breakfast, Watson comes back to the subject of the ill-fated LRT. “You know,” he says, “there wasn’t one loss of limb or life building that. People say, ‘How could they build the entire CPR across the country, and we can’t do this?’ And then I remind people, 6,500 people died building the CPR.”
“These are the things people don’t think about.”
But Jim Watson does.
This addiitonal comment from J. Robert S. Prichard, who served as chair of Metrolinx from 2010 to 2018, was received after publication:
“Contrary to the allegation in your article that the Eglinton Crosstown project is $6 billion over budget, the facts are that the approved budget for the project is $11.990 billion and the expenditures and commitments to date are $12.639 billion so that the cost overrun is $600 million or 5% of budget. Put differently, the cost overrun is only one tenth of the allegation in the article. Moreover, this has been achieved despite the additional costs of the COVID pandemic that affected all construction projects and various unanticipated costs over the past decade. When the project was first announced in 2010, the cost was estimated to be $5.3 billion for construction costs only and not the full costs of the project including land acquisition , design, inflation and maintenance among other costs. The total provincially approved project budget inclusive of all these costs was $11.990 billion.”
It is fair to be critical of the delays in opening the Eglinton Crosstown. It is not fair to cite the Crosstown as evidence of major cost overrun. In fact, it is remarkable that despite the scale of the project, the length of time for executing it and the intervention of a pandemic, the budget discipline has been so strong and effective.”
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