Ottawa wants to get rid of the boring label
Leaving work and going home or shopping, Ottawa’s routine could be defined like this. There is a reason why the capital of Canada is known as ‘the city that fun forgot’, a title given to it by the late political commentator Allan Fotheringham several decades ago and which he has not been able to shake. However, things could be about to change now that the City Council is going to begin the search for a new figure, a ‘night mayor’ who will boost the economy beyond mid-afternoon and encourage leisure activities that can extend until mid-afternoon. evening.
When one of the trends in the YouTube universe is to travel to a place with the sole purpose of checking if the place is as boring as they say, something happens. Ottawa is divided between those who consider the title of city without entertainment to be exaggerated and those who agree to recognize that once 6:00 p.m. arrives, there is little to do. The impulse of the latter seems stronger and that has led the City Council to look for solutions to leave behind the label and exploit the night economy.
Ottawa is also known as the ‘seat of Government’ because around a quarter of the metropolitan area’s 1.5 million residents are civil servants. Starting next year, there will be at least one more whose position does not yet have a name but who will act as a kind of person in charge of coordinating a varied nighttime activity throughout the Ottawa’s first Nightlife Economic Action Plancollect The Wall Street Journal. Getting restaurants to open late or funding to open places where you can have a drink or listen to music more regularly to open the range of possibilities for residents and tourists will be your mission.
The focus is on boost the city’s economy between 6:00 p.m. and 12:00 a.m. to get closer to the model that is found in other large cities in the country, where nighttime spending is more relevant. The ideas will come from the US, Latin America and some European countries. In fact, Amsterdam had the original idea in 2012 to appoint a ‘night mayor’ (nachtburgemeester in Dutch) whose mission is to encourage nighttime businesses and convince the Government team to approve new initiatives. One of his latest proposals involves the creation of a new nightclub in an abandoned tunnel in the southeast of the city, near the AFC Ajax stadium.
This is not the first time that Ottawa’s image has been called into question. In the early 2000s, a campaign by the Ottawa Tourism and Convention Authority to encourage tourism to a city that combines beauty and the latest technology had the opposite effect. The slogan said ‘technically beautiful’ and mockery came from all over the world for a compliment that was too ambiguous.
