BONOKOSKI: Forget the Raptors, where’s Ottawa’s parade for hitting a million?

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While Toronto was revelling and understandably gloating Monday as hundreds of thousands turned out for a huge parade celebrating their Raptors basketball team first win of the NBA “World Championship,” Ottawa remained as if was more than a half-century ago in an oft-repeated but never fully forgiven slight by former Maclean’s columnist Allan Fotheringham.

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It was back in the `60s, supposedly an era of drugs, sex and rock & roll, and the best the fabled Fotheringham could come up for the nation’s capital whose politics he covered and often skewered was “the town that fun forgot.”

And it has hung around ever since.

The big news recently in Ottawa during the Raptors glorious run was the announcement by Mayor Jim Watson that Ottawa, founded way back in 1826, has finally reached the population of one million.

That’s right. A million.

“It’s symbolic in some respects,” admitted Watson. “But it also brings us into the league of cities like Toronto and Calgary that are over a million people, and I think it’s a feather in our cap.”

There are stretches of high-density blocks in Toronto that are home to a million people, an exaggeration perhaps, but you feel the electricity and vitality in the air almost immediately upon entering them.

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By comparison, there is no electricity in Ottawa’s air.

This is the second time we have lived in Ottawa, the first back in the `90s when, upon returning from a three-year assignment in Europe, I was tapped to be editor and then publisher of the Ottawa Sun.

When I returned to Toronto to write in 2002, I swore I would not return but years later our daughter made it her home, then her matrimonial home and, with the onset of two little granddaughters, the heart made the choice for us.

So, here we are, already in year three.

And the town that fun forgot is starting to grow on me.

If you can avoid the divisiveness of politics, like thinking Justin Trudeau is a dolt, for example, you can have some pretty interesting conversations because the town is overly-educated compared to most others — which is likely why the median full-time income is $65,140 in Ottawa, which is $10,000 higher than the provincial median.

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But think what an American tourist must be thinking after driving for miles on end northbound Hwy. 416 looking for Canada’s national capital and never seeing a house let alone a community until just outside Ottawa’s city’s limits?

I also find it almost comical, thanks for Pierre Trudeau’s Official Languages Act, that the federal government still hires bilingual people with French surnames 99% of the time, compared to bilingual people with surnames that are not, but how real statistics negate the feeling that all of Ottawa speaks French at home.

Fact is, only 10% do, says Statistics Canada. More than 70% speak English, and the rest try their best to make Ottawa a city of diversity, even if it is not immediately visible like in Toronto, home of the NBA World Champion Raptors.

But Ottawa now has a million people.

Is that not a whoop-de-do moment?

Mayor Watson said it at least merits “a feather in our cap.”

Well, it’s certainly better than a kick in the ass with a frozen mukluk which, of course, is normal winter footwear in Ottawa.

As well as an unrivalled fashion statement.

markbonokoski@gmail.com

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