With the announcement that Prime Minister Mark Carney will be running in the Ottawa riding of Nepean in the federal election, one of the city councillors whose ward overlaps with the riding has some “huge” ideas for how Carney could champion local infrastructure.
“When my potential MP for Nepean might also be the next prime minister of Canada, it kicks open the door of possibility to the kinds of initiatives that municipal councillors don’t often get to bring to the federal government’s attention,” Sean Devine, councillor for Knoxdale-Merivale, told Ottawa Compass.
Carney stopped by his candidate office in Nepean on Saturday, where he was greeted by a small but enthusiastic group of campaign workers and volunteers.
“Who is ready to stand up,” he started out saying, before teasing someone who had accidentally knocked over a campaign sign.
He thanked them for their support to help get him elected as an MP for the first time.
Carney has faced questions about his decision to run in that seat, which became vacant only after the Liberal party ousted MP Chandra Arya as its candidate three days before the election was called.
Devine, an advocate for walkable neighbourhoods and supporter of ambitious city-building ideas, said Carney’s decision to run in Nepean could bring local housing and transportation issues to the front stage.
Devine’s ward overlaps the north side of the federal riding, and Devine is himself a resident of Nepean. The rest of the riding wades into Barrhaven West, Coun. David Hill’s ward, and Barrhaven East, which is represented at City Hall by Coun. Wilson Lo.
Devine said Carney’s presence in his neighbourhood means “there’s an opportunity in Nepean to accomplish all these goals, in a big way.”
To accommodate Ottawa’s population growth, Devine proposes building housing on a parcel of land called the southern corridor, which runs between Woodroffe Avenue and Merivale Road, sitting on the boundary of Nepean and Ottawa-West Nepean — represented by Liberal Anita Vandenbeld.
The land was handed to the city in 2023 for development into housing. It also runs alongside the CN Rail’s discontinued Beachburg Line, which runs from Kanata to Ottawa South.
City councillors have been pushing for the City to acquire the CN railway corridor for years, but plans have never come to fruition due to the “significant cost” associated with the purchase, said Devine. The updated cost of purchase is not public.
Meanwhile, Ottawa design and consulting firm RAE Spatial Design has pitched the “BBR” project, which involves designs for a revamped railway corridor that connects more than 10 communities with modular housing and walkable neighbourhoods.
“When you combine the existing neighbourhoods that already align this corridor, and the development potential now available through these newly divested federal lands, we have an opportunity for build massive amounts of new, rapidly constructed, modular housing, adjacent to existing rail infrastructure that, over time, can become a major east-west transit line,” said Devine.
“We’ve certainly looked at it in the past, but the issue has always been the significant cost in acquiring the land from CN Rail,” he continued. “So, who better to help advance this idea than one of the candidates to be the next MP for Nepean?”
Devine’s pitch aligns with Carney’s current messaging, especially his latest promises to double the pace of construction to almost 500,000 new homes a year, which would involve public-private cooperation on a scale not seen since the end of the Second World War.
A Carney government also would create a new entity, Build Canada Homes, to act as a developer on housing projects and provide more than $25 billion in financing to innovative builders of prefabricated homes.
At a campaign stop in Vaughan, Ont. on Monday, Carney said the new approach aimed to “build faster, build smarter and to build more affordably.”
For Devine, Carney’s presence in Nepean and the possibility of the seat being held by the prime minister opens doors to ideas that he says could be otherwise overlooked.
“A former mentor of mine used to say, ‘Don’t think big…think huge.’ This is certainly one of those ‘think huge’ ideas,” Devine said. “When our most urgent priorities can merge with opportunities to do historic investments in the future of our city’s and our country’s economy, thinking ‘huge’ might be the only way to go.”
