For those of you who don’t know, I organized the Canada Day celebrations on Petrie Island for 12 years from 2005 to 2017 and one of the biggest challenges in putting the event together was in trying to get support from the City of Ottawa.

Prior to amalgamation in 2001, there were two major Canada Day celebrations in Orléans, one in Fallingbrook organized by the Fallingbrook Community Association and one in Chapel Hill organized by James Locke and Bruce Murdock.

Both events had a considerable amount of support from their local municipalities, which back then were Cumberland and Gloucester. In both cases the support was not so much financial as it was in the form of material and services.

Prior to amalgamation, it was not uncom-mon for local municipalities to provide stuff like picnic tables, garbage cans and generators to volunteer run community events. Municipalities felt they had an obli-gation to do so. And that support was not just limited to Canada Day events. Prior to amalgamation there were all kinds of community events in Orléans, organized and run by community associations and service clubs like the local Lions Club.

All that began to change after amalgamation. “Cost recovery” replaced “help facilitate” as the policy of the day.

Prior to amalgamation it was standard practice for members of the local police service to be present at events without the event organizers getting a bill in the mail a couple of weeks later.

The first year I organized the Greater Orléans Canada Day Celebration on Petrie Island, the newly amalgamated Ottawa Police Service told me it would cost $15,000 to provide an adequate amount of policing at the event, to which I responded, “Okay, well there won’t be an event then.” Thankfully, then Orléans Ward city councillor Herb Kreling, who also happened to chair the Police Services Board at the time, stepped in and quickly rectified the situation.

From that point we never paid for polic-ing, which we never should have. After all the event was for the residents of Orléans, all of whom pay taxes to the City of Ottawa. It was also pointed out to the Ottawa Police Service that if the police officers weren’t on Petrie Island they would be assigned to the festivities happening downtown. In other words, there was no additional cost to the city in having them at Petrie Island, it was just an attempted cash grab from a community event organized and put on entirely by volunteers.

But that wasn’t the worst of it. Before amalgamation, community events would not only get materials such as picnic tables and garbage cans from the local municipality, they would be delivered and picked up free of charge by municipal workers.

After amalgamation, the picnic tables and garbage cans were still free, but the events were expected to pay for delivery even though the workers doing the delivery were still on the clock with the city. In order to avoid the extra costs, events such as the Greater Orléans Canada Celebration started doing all the work themselves.

As time passed, the City of Ottawa, started charging rental fees for those very same picnic tables and garbage cans that were already bought and paid for by the same taxpayers who were going to the event. Lunacy.

I bring this all up after hearing the news that the City of Ottawa is in the process of pulling its financial support of the Tulip Festival over the next two years. It’s going from $100,000 to $50,000 this year and nada next year.

The Tulip Festival is THE signature festival in Ottawa. In brings in thousands of tourists every year who inject millions of dollars into the local community. The $100,000 provided by the taxpayers of Ottawa is returned tenfold and more. Cutting the funding is not only short-sighted financially, it is further evidence of the erosion of municipal support for community events in this city dating back to amalgamation.

It’s not too late for council to reverse its decision and reinstate the funding. Just like it’s not too late for city council to go back to the days when the city used to help facilitate volunteer-run community events rather than discourage them by ever shrinking hoops for them to have to jump through.

If they did, you would see a lot more family-friendly community events and this city would be a lot better off for it.

(If you wish to comment on this or any other View Point column please write to Fred Sherwin at fsherwin@orleansstar.ca)