Oct 5, 2024
In this engaging episode of Invested in Our New Reality, Sueling Ching, President and CEO of the Ottawa Board of Trade (OBOT) joins host Sam Laprade to discuss the Downtown Ottawa Action Agenda, developed by OBOT and the Canadian Urban Institute, along with several other key stakeholders, to reimagine and rejuvenate Downtown Ottawa.
Listen as Sueling makes a strong case for the plan and its objectives and shares why creating a future-ready and dynamic urban core will benefit all residents of the National Capital Region.
Below, you’ll get a full guide to Episode 3 of Season 14: Downtown: Evolved, including a full transcript and a snapshot of the themes covered in the conversation led by our Season 14 guest host Sam Laprade.
In this episode:
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Season 14 of Invested in Our New Reality Downtown: Evolved celebrates the companies that make their home in Ottawa’s downtown and those working to transform and revive the city’s centre.
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Host, Sam Laprade: Hi, I’m Sam Laprade and I’m so glad you’re joining us for Invested in Our New Reality – Invest Ottawa’s podcast for business leaders and entrepreneurs.
Cities have seen a lot of change in the past five years and Ottawa is certainly no different. That’s why the 14th season of this podcast is called Downtown: Evolved because we’re looking at the evolution of Ottawa’s downtown core. We’re chatting with leaders that call the downtown their home base, as well as the people helping to transform and revive the city centre – a network of engaged stakeholders helping Ottawa maintain and grow its reputation as a vibrant, exciting place to live, work, play and visit.
Today I’m chatting with Sueling Ching, President and CEO of the Ottawa Board of Trade who has a front row seat to the issues and opportunities impacting Ottawa’s journey as a city.
In fact, the Ottawa Board trade recently came out with The Downtown Ottawa Action Agenda, which aims to reimagine and rejuvenate downtown Ottawa.
And Sueling is here today to tell us all about that and her thoughts on building a vibrant future for our city.
Sueling – Welcome to the podcast.
Guest, Sueling Ching: Hello Sam.
Sam: I’m so excited you’re here. You are everywhere! How do you do it?
Sueling: Well, I do it with a lot of help from my friends.
Sam: You are everywhere for sure!
You’ve seen so much change in the city of Ottawa in the past four or five years, especially, you know, with the important role that you have. What do you think are the city’s main pain points, but once again as well, what are the opportunities?
Sueling: First of all, Sam, thank you for having me. It’s just my pleasure to be here and talk about what the opportunities are for Ottawa.
There’s been a tremendous amount of change even when I first started with the Board of Trade, which was officially the first day of the pandemic, even before then, we were talking about the pace and scope of change in the economy worldwide.
And then how Ottawa would respond to that. And we were talking about how we needed to, you know, up our game of our small businesses as it related to digitization that this gift of this, the public service in Ottawa may not always remain the same. Right? Which had protected our economy a lot.
So, during the pandemic, we were challenged as everyone was across the globe. We really came together as a community and started thinking about, you know, how we would try and hit the ground running in terms of economic recovery post-pandemic.
We have been in Ottawa, further challenged, because of the trend toward remote work and how that has specifically impacted our downtown core. And so, we have been one of the slowest cities, major cities, to return to the office and to recover our downtown.
So, in terms of challenges, what we’ve identified as we continue to look at rebuilding our economy and our community, is ensuring that we leverage the things that we learned during the pandemic, including making sure that we work together at a very deep level within our community and with other levels of government. That we try to reimagine what our downtown could look like, knowing that it’s probably never going to go back exactly to the way that it was. And recognizing that it may not have been perfect before either.
So, we really do see this as an opportunity to be more diverse, more resilient and more vibrant in our downtown.
Some of the things that we need to address urgently are things like proper funding for the city, and it’s not unique to Ottawa, but it is unique to Ottawa in the sense that we do have a strong federal presence. They are a huge landlord in our downtown and they don’t pay taxes like any traditional business, but a payment in lieu of taxes.
The mayor has started a campaign asking to reassess and elevate that contribution, but there are other opportunities for both levels of government to look at what cities are responsible for, and how they are invested in supporting us and being able to do that properly.
The other thing we’ve identified in Ottawa, of course is infrastructure, and specifically as it relates to transit and making sure that people can get around our city easily. It’s huge for us because we have a very big geographic footprint, and so we want people to be able to get there around easily.
And then of course, making sure that we have not just the number of homes, but the proper homes that we want to attract for our economic development goals.
Sam: I want to know more about the Downtown Ottawa Action Agenda. For those that maybe aren’t familiar, what is it and how were you hoping to really move the dial for the city?
Sueling: So, what happened during the pandemic is we would consistently get asked about the return to office for our anchor employer, which is the public service, the Federal Government. And you know, we said, oh, there’s, you know, leadership role for the government to play a lot of the private sector employers were following the lead of the federal government. And so, I think in the beginning a lot of us working in economic development just thought everybody would go back to the office and everything would go back to the way that was.
At some point, we started to realize that was not going to happen and we started to have conversations about, OK, what opportunity does this provide for us then?
And we started having conversations about what’s happening in downtowns in other large cities across the world, specifically what’s happening in Washington, which is also a capital city of a country like we are.
And we engaged with the Canadian Urban Institute. We engaged with them all through the pandemic, looking at how the pandemic disproportionately was impacting cities.
And so, we engaged with them and aligned with a few of our economic partners, including the city, the NCC, Ottawa Tourism, Invest Ottawa and BOMA Ottawa (Building Owners and Managers Association) and created this Downtown Ottawa Action Agenda.
And what we were looking for there, it was a marriage of other plans that had been done some of the most current data that we had access to, looking at best practices of other cities, but also consulting deeply with key stakeholders, not just in the business community but the community as a whole. So, those that were serving the most vulnerable as an example.
So, we consulted with all of them and we created this action agenda. And our intention there was to outline a vision that we all could be working toward for this transformation of the downtown core – to emphasize within our work the importance of making sure that we were aligned and making sure that everyone understood how important the core was, not just to the people living in the core, but in the whole city. And frankly in the whole region. And then frankly in the province. We’re the second largest city in the province, and a huge economic driver for the province, and we’re the nation’s capital.
So, I mean, our position was if nothing was to be done, we could envision having the Ottawa decline to the state that we’ve seen some American cities, right? And then how long would it take us to get it back? So, we really felt like the do-nothing scenario which we’ve outlined in here, you know, painted a very glum picture.
On the opposite side, we believe that if this plan, is implemented, is adopted by many stakeholders, then we will see a very big increase in local spend, annual property taxes to the tune of $1.3 billion annually.
Sam: No, it was. it was really, really well done and what I noticed when you, you sort of talk about the key priorities is really the push for more people to live downtown as well.
Talk to me a little bit about some of those priorities that don’t just address the businesses being downtown, but how important it was to have people call downtown home.
Sueling: And that’s the whole key Sam is that you know, we need more people downtown. We will see a reduced number in our current scenario with the hybrid work now the federal employees have been asked to return to office three days a week, but that’s not the silver bullet. There’s still a gap.
So, there were four big moves that we outlined in the plan. The first was to add 40,000 new residents to the downtown by 2034. Attract 50,000 jobs to the downtown to create a $500 million fund to kick start this action plan. And then to look at what are some catalytic anchors that we could create downtown. So, if we look at Spark St. and ByWard market public realms, you know the creation of a business incubation district and an arts and culture corridor. So, we believe that not any one of these things, but all of these things pursued concurrently will give us the downtown that all of us in Ottawa could benefit from and all of us in Canada could be proud of as our nation’s capital.
Sam: Absolutely. You’ve talked about a renaissance for Ottawa’s downtown core. Realistically, how do you make that happen given some of the major issues facing businesses in the city, some who have said they don’t feel safe operating, especially in the ByWard Market?
Sueling: If there’s one thing that the pandemic taught us that we will never forget is that we are all connected.
When we all collectively did what we were asked to do in order to protect the most vulnerable in the pandemic we all did that, but we started to see, you know, a smaller business suffered very much when we asked them to close their doors.
But I mean, then that started to have a trickle effect on families and even larger businesses. And I know Mary Rowe, who’s the president of the Canadian Urban Institute you know, she said, like, the downtown is really a microcosm of the entire city. And so that’s where we see things most starkly, like in the ByWard Market, for sure.
So how do we do that? Well, in the plan that we have included, all these different sectors of the community where people live, the homes that they have, making sure that we are taking care of the most vulnerable, making sure that we’re diversifying our economic base as well, and our confidence in the plan and our ability to do this as a community really comes from this idea of people stepping up as strong leaders. You know, having a shared vision, shared leadership and committing to a collaborative approach.
And you know, this plan has 60 steps in it. 60 steps that each of them has an outcome, each of them has an accountability, and so, right now we’re working with our partners in designing and implementation strategy so that we can start to pull together frankly a lot of these things that are already happening that are positive, but pull them together on one platform, in one story, and then help those who wish to invest in Ottawa, including other levels of government, to understand what those priorities are.
Sam: Recently Sueling, you know, one of the unions came out and really encouraged people to shop locally as opposed to shopping downtown. Was that kind of a stick in the wheel of this of this proposal, of this way forward? Was that a step back for you, or did you see it as an opportunity to really say this is an opportunity for us to actually talk about how big of an issue this is?
Sueling: Well, Sam, you and I are on the same wavelength. So, of course at first when we heard that, it was pretty disappointing, especially to those of us who’ve been working really hard to make sure that the entire community understands the importance of downtown, and those of us that were kind of like in it with these businesses that struggled through the pandemic through no fault of their own. It really did feel, I think to them, and to those of us who understand the situation, it was very disappointing.
But how we responded was that we used it as an opportunity to reiterate the importance of working together collaboratively, that everybody has a role and responsibility to play in the transformation of downtown. And Sam, I think the thing that is maybe not well understood is that the downtown success will impact every single person in the city.
So, the local businesses that have enjoyed a bit of a boom, you know, perhaps in the neighborhoods around where people are working from home, which they are still going to do two days a week, if we lost the downtown, that means that we’re going to be losing a significant, not that we lose all of it, but you know, the downtown accounts for over 20% of our tax base. Downtown is the major attractor for our visitor economy, which I think the latest numbers said that in 2023 a $9 billion industry, and accounts for a tax boost of about $2000 per household in Ottawa.
Those are significant numbers that impact every single home and resident in Ottawa. Not to mention we have people talking now about, you know, talent attraction and retention and you know, we call the visitor economy or tourism the front door to every other form of economic development. If people come here for a leisure or vacation or if they come here for a business conference, you know, then they’re exposed to what Ottawa has to offer, they may promote it or they may decide to come and live here or open a business here, or invest here.
So, the downtown transformation, the Downtown Action Agenda was not built for the downtown. It was built for the entire city and the entire region.
Sam: I am so happy you made that point. I just had a visitor here from the US. And we had all sorts of things planned and he said to me, well, are we going to head downtown?
And he was here in 2017 when that big incredible festival happened, celebrating 150 years of Canada. And so he wanted to go back and visit downtown.
And I thought, through his eyes I got to see a little bit about how people view going to a major city. You have to go downtown, right? That’s where, that’s where the beautiful architecture is, that’s where there’s a buzz. So, it was really interesting to get that perspective, and I’m really glad you talked about this being important for everybody.
Sam: This Downtown Action Agenda that you spoke about has been described as a blueprint for how cities can harness urban space and meet the needs of the 21st century. Where did the Ottawa Board of Trade turn for inspiration, and what other global cities are really leading the way in that revitalization?
Sueling: Yeah. So, I mean, we really did lean on the expertise and the network of the Canadian Urban Institute because they do work all across, you know, our country and all across North America and globally. And so, they were really in tune with what was happening in other cities and we did look at it from the approach of, let’s not try to just get back to where we were, but let’s try and think about, you know, how do we engage young people in our city? How do we build a city for young families – because we know that that’s where the future is. They used all kinds of examples within the report of things that they saw that were being done well. And so that was a big part of the report.
Sam: Really, really important, I think it’s fair to say that how we work, as we’ve talked about a lot, has changed since the start of COVID. A large chunk of the workforce now know they can efficiently work from home and they’re unwilling to go back into the office or to commute.
That new reality, you know, definitely was factored into your plan. Talk to me a little bit about how this weighs on you in terms of people really sort of digging in their heels and saying they don’t want to make that commute.
Sam: Well, I mean that’s why our transit and investing in transit is very important, so that we make it easy. From the beginning, we have been encouraging employers to create workplaces that were healthy and innovative and appealing for people to work, because I mean overnight, people learned how to work from home, right? It was really it was really done overnight. And then especially the first couple of years, we were just getting by. But then as you start to contemplate this as a future trend, you have to start thinking about, you know, how do we measure, performance and productivity? How do we ensure that young people are being mentored and given opportunities? You know, how do we create strong relationships and innovative conversations among staff teams?
I remember just before the pandemic, the CMHC had gone to this model and they had invested a tremendous amount of time and money to make sure that it was done well. And we just did it on a dime. We flipped a switch and it was happening, you know?
So I do understand that not every employer is set up to have it happen well, and that there’s, you know, we continue to see many employers invest heavily in their workplaces to draw the employees back, make sure they have a positive and productive opportunity.
But we have to be very real about what is going to happen in the future. And so that’s why building Ottawa up, telling the story of the lifestyle of living in Ottawa, where some people may want to live here and work elsewhere.
There’s people who want to work here or they have an opportunity because there’s lots of opportunity here, we have to make sure that we are making it easy for people to move here and even stay here.
So, for example, one of the biggest opportunities for us and the talent perspective, the people that come here for our world-class universities and colleges. And so how do we attract them to stay here as well?
So, it’s sort of a multi-pronged approach by making sure that people are attracted, but I mean our growth trajectory is still an upward trajectory. And so the opportunity for us now is to be really good at planning for the future in terms of housing transit amenities, city services and building neighbourhoods you know Sam? Like building neighbourhoods like that, people feel a part of. And telling the Ottawa story. One thing that we’ve identified is that Ottawa is particularly challenged in terms of our optics sometimes because we are the seat of the federal government.
I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed this in the media, but like when anything, when the federal government does anything, they don’t say the federal government or Parliament Hill, you know, like they do Queens Park, they say Ottawa. And you know, during the pandemic and during the occupation, we were having media calls from all over the world, you know, like things that happened in Ottawa are noticed globally because we are the home of the federal government. But you know, you don’t have anybody talking about the provincial government and saying Toronto.
Sam: Right.
Sueling: So, we all have to double down on making sure that we’re telling the positive story about Ottawa, that opportunity is here in Ottawa.
Sam: One thing I really admire about you Sueling, and I’ve, you know, had the opportunity to interview you many, many, many times is that you speak about collaboration a lot, and you speak a lot about working effectively with partners, sort of this idea of being all hands on deck and whether you know whether we live in Stittsville, we live in Orleans or we live in Barrhaven or in the downtown core, everybody has a role.
How are you engaging with residents, businesses and other stakeholders in this conversation in the process as a whole, and what are they saying? What’s the reaction you’re getting?
Sueling: The people we talked to and work with, do understand how important it is to collaborate and we see a tremendous amount of deep collaboration with our economic partners. In fact, the pandemic kind of in a way gave us that opportunity, we were all forced to work together because we were all scrambling to make sure that we were protecting our citizens and saving our businesses and building for the future.
So we work really closely with our economic partners. We have, you know, a series of roundtables work, for example, for the downtown, we continue to have our Downtown Ottawa Advisory Council with the city and BOMA and NCC and Ottawa Tourism and Invest Ottawa. And then you know, the Ottawa Board of Trade, as you know, is the voice of business and we are the nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that is only made possible for the local businesses that support us. And they support us by being members, but some of Ottawa’s top business leaders are also the leaders of our organization in a volunteer capacity. And, so they work through our Ottawa Board of Trade.
And then in terms of the community as a whole, I mean opportunities like this, hopefully you know are heard by people who are living in the community as employees and as executives and entrepreneurs and, you know, and the work Sam, that you and I did through the Ottawa Business Matters TV show. And we have newsletters and social media that’s active… so just giving the message out there.
We have spoken with some of our economic partners though, about opportunities to further elevate that narrative and that community conversation to make sure that people do understand. We are moving forward.
The Ottawa Business Journal just launched the City Building magazine last week and we host a city building summit once a year. You know, we talked about Ottawa being in the golden age of development, with our transit system, with the Ottawa Hospital, LeBreton, Landsdowne, there are just so many big, innovative infrastructure projects happening that we’re literally all living in Ottawa right now at a spectacular time of opportunity and growth.
Sam: Yeah, absolutely. I think every person should go to city building. As you know, I went last year and just sat there in awe. I had no idea what was under underfoot in terms of, and I think I’m pretty informed, but I learned so much that day. I thought it was brilliant.
How can people get involved? What do they need to do? What are you hoping you know someone listening today? What actions can they take? \Well, where do you want them to? To go?
Sueling: We would like all of the businesses in order to become members of the Ottawa Board of Trade. That’s the first thing.
We want people who are living in Ottawa to make sure that they’re informed about the positive things that are happening and become ambassadors, right? And good news storytellers.
There is this concept that we share with the United Way, who of course are one of the leaders in our city as it relates to supporting vulnerable populations and social justice. It’s called Community Wealth Building and Community Wealth Building, it’s broad, but from our perspective, it looks like you know, buy local, promote local, hire local, give local. We want to be big picture thinkers, but we also have to understand that the power of community creates what impacts you the most in your everyday life and builds opportunities for tomorrow.
The Canadian Urban Institute hosted their annual nationwide conference in Ottawa last year. And I remember one of the leaders on stage said that the world’s problems will be solved by cities.
And I thought. OK. The innovation, the opportunity for collaboration, the opportunity to go deep and change people’s lives happens in communities just like Ottawa. And those things will be then transferred to some of the global issues that we’re all facing.
So, I encourage people to think of it that way for them to think of themselves as part of the solution instead of leaning into our human tendency, of only looking at the challenges.
But looking at those challenges as opportunities to work together to make a difference.
Sam: As we wrap up this conversation today, I would love to know how you’re feeling. How’s Sueling feeling about the change in the city? What keeps you up at night? But also, what gives you hope as you as you work on this very, very big project that really is a legacy project. I mean, you are at the forefront of what we’ll talk about in 20 years from now.
Sueling: So, I will say Sam, it’s complex, right? It’s complex. It requires a lot of people singing from the same songbook. A lot of synergy and optimizing our collective efforts and resources.
Having said that, I feel really optimistic because I’ve seen what we can do together, and I do see strong leadership in our city right now. I do see additional acknowledgement from other levels of government about the importance of Ottawa, and the opportunity to invest in our city.
As I said, you know, there are a lot of big projects, important projects moving forward. So, I feel very optimistic, and I feel very impressed by the business and community leaders that I see working together. And I do believe that we will look upon this time in the future as a time of great transformation and opportunity for our city. Not just to grow our economy, but to use that as an opportunity to grow our community prosperity for everyone and start to address, like there’s opportunities now to address our growth agenda from the lens of climate action, from the lens of diversity and inclusion.
So, there’s the opportunity to reimagine our city, taking into consideration these things that we might not otherwise have been motivated to do pre-pandemic.
So, I look forward to continuing to work with you. And everyone who’s involved in our community who understands that, that leadership and collaboration is going to be the key to our success.
Sam: Beautifully said and I just want to thank you for your leadership. Even on, you know, the toughest of days, you were willing to speak, you know whether it be on radio or on TV and you know you really had the opportunity during the pandemic to lead when you were just given those reins, right? And you just never, you just never gave up. And I think that that tenacity is through your team as well. So, congratulations to all of you.
Sueling, it’s been a really great chat and I really appreciate you taking the time to chat about the Ottawa Board of Trade’s role in helping to supercharge the downtown evolution. I’m absolutely certain we’ll be talking again, and I can guarantee you we’ll all be watching as you help move this agenda forward.
Thank you so much Sueling,
Sueling: Thanks, Sam.
Sam: Appreciate it! And thank you so much to our listeners. Until next time, I’m Sam Laprade.
Thanks for listening to this episode of Invested in Our New Reality. We’re committed to bringing you dynamic conversations with business leaders who are transforming and reviving the National Capital Region.
So, stay tuned to our next conversation about Downtown: Evolved and be sure to reach out to us at investottawa.ca with your thoughts and comments, we’d love to hear from you.
Until next time, I’m Sam Laprade, and I’ll chat with you again soon.
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