The soil and groundwater in Hurdman Park contains numerous contaminants, with nearly 50 total hectares contaminated by four individual sites, a federal database shows.

The organization responsible for the park, the National Capital Commission, lists Hurdman Park as an urban green space and as valued natural habitat. However, the NCC refused to answer any questions about whether the contaminants were a concern or if the contaminants were hazardous. The City of Ottawa refused to make anyone from Ottawa Public Health available for comment.

The interactive map shows the contaminated sites in Hurdman Park. Click on a site to find out more information.

Data from the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat

Mario Tremblay, a strategic communications advisor for the NCC who works on capital planning and land use, said by email that the Hurdman sites have been “subject to environment site assessments…which have characterized the environmental quality of the soil, groundwater, surface water and sediment.” He did not clarify what the quality had been characterized as.

“[D]ue to active construction at these properties… any further action such as development of remedial action plans will not commence until construction at these sites is completed,” he said.

The federal database lists all four sites in Hurdman Park as having “detailed testing completed” and states that remedial action plans are under development.

The active construction at Hurdman Park for the LRT Confederation Line is scheduled to end in Winter 2017.

Tremblay said that all sites have been subject to a “Phase II ESA,” an environmental site assessment. However, the website for AEL environment, an environmental engineering firm based in Mississauga, states that “Phase III ESA is the phase at which remedial work occurs to address contamination,” meaning that it is only with in Phase III that contaminants are actually removed and not just identified as being in the soil.

Two of the sites are listed as needing additional assessment and remedial activities, suggesting that the contaminants in the soil are worthy of attention and need to be removed. All four sites are listed as high priority for action.

The listed contaminants include petroleum hydrocarbons, or PHCs, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, which come from oil, coal or bitumen. The contaminants also contain metals and metalloids. Though experts contacted for this article were unable to confirm how hazardous the contaminants at Hurdman Park are, the Canadian Council for Ministers of the Environment website states that “PHC contamination can cause a wide variety of problems related to their toxicity, mobility and persistence” and a 2010 report from the same organization lists the “unsubstantiated PAHs that are known or strongly suspected to act as carcinogens in humans.” The federal database does not specify whether substantiated or unsubstantiated PAHs are present in the park.

Formerly a city dump, Hurdman Park is now a popular park for cyclists and runners, who don’t seem to mind the pipes emerging from the ground that funnel methane gas from the remainder of the landfill into the air.

Mike Giunta lives nearby. He says that the contamination doesn’t bother him. “Contamination, it’s relative. I mean, the river is probably contaminated too, at some level. I wouldn’t drink the water out of it. It doesn’t concern me”

“I don’t know if anyone wants to have their house on it but I think, as it is, it’s probably fine.”

Roseanne and Greg Hart have lived near the park for decades and frequently walk through it, even on this cold December day. While they both knew the site used to be a dump, they were unaware that they were standing metres from a listed contaminated site.

“I think it’s good for a green space,” said Greg. “Just don’t go digging it up,” said Roseanne.

The Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment report mentioned in this article, as well as a report commissioned by the City of Ottawa in 1988 to investigate sites that may have contaminants, are below.

Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons 2010 (En) (Text)

Intera Mapping and Assessment of Former Industrial Sites (Text)

As he puts the fur-lined leather hat down on the table he explains how it used to be a beaver. “It was run over” he says, “and then they turned it into a hat.” It is clear that he is very excited to have it. It’s cold outside, November in Ottawa, and he isn’t used to this weather. The hat, the weather and Ottawa are new to him. That’s because he’s only been in the city, in Canada, for 13 months. Before that he was in Jordan. And five years ago, Fadi Sakbani was in Syria.

Sakbani is a refugee. He left his native Syria because his house and his work place were both threatened by the ongoing destruction of the Syrian Civil War. He lost his job as a language teacher and couldn’t make a living. He fled into neighbouring Jordan. Now he sits in an Ottawa coffee shop on Bank Street explaining how he came to Canada.

It was in Jordan where he met Grace Chapman, a Canadian who was teaching English in Amman. Sakbani showed Chapman around the school on her first day. They bonded as they both arrived at the school early every morning and would talk over coffee. They became friends. Eventually they were teaching a course together and Sakbani would join Chapman and her now-husband for dinner at their house.

Fadi Sakbani sits in a coffee shop on Bank Street, Ottawa. A mere 13 months ago he was a refugee in Jordan.
Nathaniel Dove

“He was someone I could always rely on, and as a new teacher that’s an incredible resource to have,” said Chapman via email from Japan, where she now lives and works as an English teacher.

But life in Jordan was difficult for Sakbani. It “got really tough for Syrians,” he says. It was easy to find a job—Sakbani is fluent in English—but as a refugee he was not allowed to work fulltime, even with a work permit.

“You have no social rights there, you can’t get healthcare, you can’t get education, so I just decided to leave,” says Sakbani. He began exploring options. He was awarded a scholarship to Estonia but declined when he realized he would have to commit to returning to Syria after he finished his degree. So in January 2016 Sakbani reached out to Chapman about coming to Canada. She agreed to help.

“As I had e-mailed a family friend and my mom, a thread of e-mails began of us putting together the puzzle pieces and figuring out what we needed,” she said. According to the government’s rules on privately sponsoring a refugee Chapman would need to assemble five people to be sponsors. Those that agreed would need to prove that they could raise the money necessary to support a refugee—collectively about $13 000, according to the website—and that they would all be in Ottawa, where Sakbani would live.

As Chapman was in Kuwait at the time she was ineligible to be a sponsor. But she was still able to organize a group of family friends and her parents to bring Sakbani to Canada.

And his immigration was quick—ten months between the message to Chapman to his plane landing in Canada. Sakbani says that the process usually takes two to three years. He knows he is lucky.

“I think it’s one of the most successful cases that I’ve witnessed here in Canada, because I know a lot of Syrians who were sponsored by the government, by communities or even individuals, private groups, and they’re really grateful but they were not as lucky as me… I was spoiled. I’m still being spoiled.”

Sakbani is an exception to many trends. Not only was the speed of his case so remarkable but he didn’t end up in the areas in Ottawa where most Arab immigrants in the past five years have settled, Osgoode and Versant in Gatineau. Sakbani thinks that so many people live in these areas because they want to be surrounded by people who share the same language and culture.

An interactive map showing where the majority of Arab immigrants to Ottawa now live. The darker the blue colour, the more immigrants reside in that area. Click on the map to explore the data. All data from Statistics Canada

“If I had a family… I would have probably had to live in a community that has more people from my own culture so my family would be able to have friends, because they speak zero English.” He says that not everyone is open to other cultures.

Instead he lived with one of his sponsors in the Glebe for his first year in the country. He now lives with a roommate, another refugee, in Centretown. He has a part-time job and he attends Algonquin College for computer engineering.

He has come very far and accomplished a lot since leaving his home country. His journey has been very different from those of other Syrians.

“Most of my friends just got on a boat together, like all my friends in Syria… got on the same boat, in the Mediterranean, from Turkey—illegally, of course.” This is in 2013, when there were massive amounts of people leaving Syria.

“People where just throwing themselves in the sea…hoping to get picked up near the Greek shores. They were lucky to survive.”

As the cup of tea he is drinking is emptied he starts to look out the window, into the cold street down which he will have to walk to get home. “How can people survive here? I know that I need a couple more winters to get used to it, I’m not looking forward to it. It’s the first snow this year and I’m not happy. I know what’s coming and I’m not looking forward to it,” he says, laughing.

He is wearing a sweatshirt with “Quebec” written on it, the kind that you find in a souvenir shop. And he is smiling. He likes it here. Even in the short time that he has been in the country he says that “Ottawa feels like home.”

Three Centretown shawarma restaurants have violated the health code a combined 71 times since January 1, 2016, an analysis of data compiled by the City of Ottawa has revealed.

The three restaurants, Prince Gourmet Shawarma and Falafel, Shawarma Deluxe and Shawarma’s King Restaurant have a variety of violations of the provincial Health Protection and Promotion Act. The Act governs how the food is stored and prepared and regulates the cleanliness of facilities.

Shawarma Deluxe, located at 347 Dalhousie Street in the Byward Market and Prince Gourmet Shawarma and Falafel, located at 55 Byward Market, have both been inspected three times in 2017. According to an emailed statement from Ottawa Public Health “[f]ood premises are inspected once, twice or three times each year, depending on the risk classification of High, Moderate or Low.”

The City of Ottawa website states that a minimum of three inspections per year makes a restaurant a high-risk food establishment. Shawarma’s King Restaurant, at 395 Bank Street, has been inspected twice in 2017, making it a medium-risk food establishment.

When asked about health code violations at Shawarma Deluxe, co-owner Joseph –who only gave his last name as “Shawarma Deluxe”— said “so far we have [had] no complaint[s]” from the health inspectors. When asked to address the 22 health code violations that Shawarma Deluxe has accumulated since January 1, 2016, Joseph blamed the spite of some customers. “When you work in the public for a long time, you can’t please everybody,” he said.

He also said some complaints leveled against Shawarma Deluxe stem from drunk people coming into the restaurant and vomiting in the bathrooms. Joseph did not clarify how these complaints were related to the health code violations that regulate the food preparation area cleanliness.

At Prince Gourmet Shawarma and Falafel, Ahmed Al-Bawaadh, an employee and brother of the owner, claimed not to be aware of any violations. When the 20 health code violations were mentioned another employee ended the interview saying that they were busy during the lunch rush. At the time, a few minutes before noon, the Prince Gourmet Shawarma was largely empty as there were four other people in the restaurant. All had already ordered and been served their food.

Fadel El-Hussein, a co-owner of Shawarma’s King Restaurant, the sign and website for which reads Shawarma King Restaurant or Shawarma Kin respectively, said that the 29 health code violations that it has accumulated are largely the fault of the previous owner.

“A lot of that was from the old management. We inherited old equipment, the whole building was old to begin with, so we did a lot of renovation,” he said. El-Hussein said that he and his business partner purchased Shawarma’s King two years ago and that the entire front food preparation area was renovated in the past month and a half. The last inspection of Shawarma’s King Restaurant took place approximately two months ago.

Ottawa Public Health refused to comment on their inspection process or on the effects or consequences of what repeated violations of the same health code violations entails. An emailed statement said that “[t]here are different levels of deficiencies, from non-critical to a health hazard. Non-critical deficiencies (ex. lack of environmental cleaning) can be corrected at the time of the inspection or shortly after, where a re-inspection would be required.” The statement went on to say that an inspector is able to issue a closure order where there is an immediate risk to the safety of the public’s health.

The cost of a standard hospital stay in Alberta has risen by almost 30%, an analysis of data released by the Canadian Institute for Health Information has revealed. This coincides with an increase in population for Alberta of nearly 12%.

The data shows an increase in the cost of a standard hospital stay, up by 26% between 2011-2012 and 2015-2016. Census data collected by Statistics Canada shows that Alberta’s population has increased by 11.6%—the highest of any province or territory— between the 2011 census and the most recent 2016 census.

According to John Church, a political science professor at the University of Alberta who studies health care in Canada, there are a number of reasons for this increase. The first reason is the lack of an integrated healthcare option outside of the hospital setting, which means “that everybody gets driven into the hospital setting, whether they need to be there or not.” And the hospital setting, Church said, is the most expensive setting for a patient to receive medical services.

“If you have a situation in which I don’t need to be hospitalized… then my hospital care is going to look pricier” said Dr. Raisa Deber from the University of Toronto’s Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation. Deber said that it’s where and how the money is being spent as opposed to the fact that money is being spent.

It’s the issue of “what exactly am I paying for in the hospital as opposed to what am I paying for in other settings?” said Deber. She pointed to chemotherapy as an example, saying that if the drugs are delivered in a hospital, as opposed to an outpatient clinic, the cost of the drugs count towards the hospital’s budget.

The second reason that Church pointed to is the lack of a single patient record system, which can result in patients undergoing tests which other healthcare workers have already administered.

Church also pointed to the fact that wages in Alberta are typically higher than other healthcare workers across the country. A separate report from CIHI states that the average gross clinical payment to Alberta physicians was $380 000, the highest in the country.

And given Alberta’s rising population, Church says that this issue is poised to get more expensive. “More people means more people potentially needing health services” Church said. Church said that the demand on Alberta’s healthcare system will increase, both in numbers and in demand on its services, that as the population ages it will require more health services that can handle the more complex health issues inherent with age.

Church pointed out that elderly people often require the most amount of healthcare, that most people consume the most health services in terms of cost in the last few months of their lives. Deber concurred, stating that “if [the] population [is] going to be younger and healthier, then you would expect [the cost of an average hospital stay] to be smaller.”

A report from the Alberta Auditor-General has identified these three reasons for expensive healthcare in Alberta as “pervasive barriers” that prevents Albertans from “receiving the quality of care they could receive.”

“Unless there are fundamental changes… people will continue to flood to the emergency room” Church said. Church identifies timely access to healthcare outside of hospitals as necessary to alleviating this costly issue. This includes “everything from seeing your family doctor to seeing a range of service providers that provide services to seniors, [to services] that provide access to community-based mental health service [and services that are] providing sufficient access to things like home care.”