Rockcliffe Park is as lovely a neighbourhood as you can find in this country. It has large, secluded yards and calm, shady streets. Its residents’ stately manors and homes are nestled between the river, forests, and a semi-private lake, which the plebes are only welcome to swim in upon invitation from owners of private docks along its shore. Some of Ottawa’s best private schools claim the neighbourhood as their home, and the residents’ association is certainly one of the city’s best resourced.
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Rockcliffe Park also houses a significant portion of the capital’s decision makers and gross domestic product.
The prime minister and governor general live there. The leader of the opposition shares a backyard fence with the high commissioner of India. There are so many diplomats hanging around, their neighbourhood block parties may now have to register on the foreign interference registry. Venerable public servants, a handful of journalists, business leaders, and, of course, lobbyists rub shoulders on the hiking trails or at the sailing club.
In 2024, Mark Carney—then just one of the illustrious members of the Rockcliffe community—was the headliner for the association’s speaker series. He was described by the association president as “our Mark,” before he spoke to a packed fieldhouse crowd, which included Joe Clark as well as probably more members of the Order of Canada than any other room in the nation.
Rockcliffe isn’t the star of this story. I don’t mean to bother the good people who live there. But I happen to be fascinated with the connections between this country’s handful of policy influencers, business people, politicians, media pundits, and moguls who run much of Canada. There are neighbourhoods quite similar to Rockcliffe across the country. Not all of them hold the same level of power, but all share common characteristics: safe and quiet streets, good or excellent infrastructure, access to nature or, at a minimum, ample green space, and a great chance of residents being put in touch with the right people.
I don’t believe any of this is a conspiracy. Rich and influential people have wanted to live among one another since tribes started to settle down in the earliest days of Mesopotamia. But as we experience a widening chasm between what Canadians want and the policies they are being given, I believe there is value in examining where the government is getting their ideas from. And part of the answer, I believe, resides in the circles in which our decision makers exist.
There has been a disconnect for some time between this government’s priorities and those of the average Canadian. The easiest example of this mismatch is on the issue of AI. This government has gone full speed ahead on artificial intelligence, despite Canadians’ apprehensions. Smarter people than I have dug into this better than I ever could, so I won’t say more. But you get it: Carney wants to go in one direction, Canadians disagree, he does it anyway.
In a report on extreme wealth released by the nonprofit Canadians for Tax Fairness, the authors found that “extreme wealth concentration is a problem not because it allows a few people to live lives of luxury, but because of the extreme concentration of power and the corrosion of democracy that can accompany it.” This is true for Rockcliffe but probably even more true in well-to-do Toronto, Calgary, and Vancouver neighbourhoods.
Much as small-c conservatives and their cousins even further to the populist right like to think of themselves as exempt from the Birkenstock-wearing, murse-toting, bicycle-riding, matcha-drinking urbanite intelligentsia, the business leaders they so idolize and seek to please are oftentimes engaged in the neighbourhood associations and business improvement areas which make those well-heeled places so pleasant. My favourite example of this is Jordan Peterson spouting nonsense about the fifteen-minute-cities hysteria when he, in fact, lived and worked in one of the country’s most walkable—and unaffordable—neighbourhoods in Toronto.
The majority of Canadians don’t live in such pleasant environments. Contrary to what European tourists might believe, many of us have never seen a moose or heard a loon call on the way to school. We don’t all universally love nature, because we haven’t all been able to grow up on pristine lakes, and we don’t all ski because getting to the nearest hill without a car (never mind learning how to practice and love the sport) is near impossible.
Proximity doesn’t mean decision makers are corrupt, but it does mean they are sympathetic. And distance can mean the very opposite: once impacts are out of sight, they become out of mind. The Rogers family notably invests in conservation in the Muskokas. Rich people caring about nature around their holiday homes is nothing new. Rich people caring about the well-being of people near their industrial projects, however, would be a novel approach.
Last year, I was asked to speak to decision makers, lobbyists, AI evangelists, and business leaders about whether the Build Canada Act was a good idea. It was a powerful group in which I was, in a room of probably a hundred people, the token environmentalist. I asked the audience to raise their hands if they lived in a rural area. Out of the hundred of us, only one did.
To me, this is significant. The choices that are made in the halls of power, whether by executives or politicians, are determined without much understanding of or consideration for the ground-level repercussions. Those decision makers are furthermore shielded from those decisions by the cartographies of their lives, miles away from any potential impacts generated by the gas turbines, open-pit mines, fracking wastewater, or abandoned oil wells their final investment deals lead to.
I’m not saying this to argue that those who live in calmer, healthier environments have anything to be ashamed of: they don’t. I don’t think it should be viewed as a privilege to avoid, say, childhood asthma. Likewise for access to quality public services. We all deserve them, regardless of income or ability.
