The following is the second of a three-part year-end interview with Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson. The first instalment covered his three-term tenure as mayor while the final part will address light-rail transit in Ottawa. The interview was filmed in its entirety on Monday, Dec. 13, 2021.
Mayor Jim Watson said this week he’s hoping 2022 can be “as normal as possible,” even as the end of the COVID-19 pandemic’s second year in Ottawa sees a return to uncertainty and warnings to keep holiday gatherings to smaller numbers once again.
Watson joined Global News remotely for a year-end interview on Monday to reflect on, among other topics, the second year of COVID-19 in Ottawa.
Since that interview was recorded, Ottawa Public Health has warned about the spread of the Omicron variant overwhelming contact tracers and has reactivated its mass vaccination campaign in an attempt to get as many booster doses in residents’ arms as possible.
Dr. Vera Etches, Ottawa’s medical officer of health, already recommended earlier this month to limit gatherings leading up to the holidays.
While Watson recognized the need for families to recuperate over the holidays, he told Global News that the second Christmas under COVID-19 should again be a more contained affair.
“We can’t be under siege all of the time. We want people to have an enjoyable Christmas and holiday season. But you know, maybe this is not the year to have 25 people come to your home, maybe keep it to your immediate family. These kinds of things do make a difference,” he said.
The past few days have seen the federal and provincial governments again forced to rapidly implement new policies to curb a looming wave of COVID-19, a pattern that’s repeated itself over the past 20 months of the pandemic with varying effectiveness.
Overall, Watson gave both upper levels of government a passing grade for how they’ve handled the past year of the pandemic.
“I think given the circumstances, they’ve done a very good job. No one has a road map which to follow when it comes to dealing with a worldwide pandemic,” he said.
“It’s easy to criticize governments at all levels, saying, ‘You can do this, the computer crashed, we didn’t have enough vaccine right away.’ But generally, I think we’ve done quite well as a country, as a province and as a city.”
Locally, Watson said he gives full credit to Etches and the team at the city for administering a mass vaccination campaign over the past year that’s seen 88 per cent of residents aged five and older get at least one dose and 82 per cent of the eligible population get both shots.
More than half of kids in Ottawa aged five to 11 are already vaccinated with their initial shots just a few weeks after becoming eligible.
Both federal and provincial health officials have pointed to Ottawa as a “gold standard” in terms of getting vaccine operations running and getting needles into arms, Watson said.
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“I’ve been very, very proud of the team Ottawa approach.”
Though the rapid spread of the Omicron variant puts much of the country in a difficult but familiar position to start the new year, Watson is hoping 2022 will bring animation back to the city’s main streets as a hopeful containment of the virus sees workers return to downtown offices.
He’s said in the past few weeks that he’s working with Ottawa—Vanier MP Mona Fortier, the president of the Treasury Board, to push for federal workers to eventually return to the office.
He said this isn’t just a priority for him economically — considering local businesses catering to the workforce — but also socially, as the “cabin fever” of 20 months of remote or hybrid work takes its toll.
“We don’t want to put anyone’s health at risk, but at the same time, at some point, whether it’s in a month or two months or a year, we’re going to have to start to get people back to populating the downtown core. … My hope is that we can get back to as normal as possible,” he said.
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