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Whatever. Brunette abstained.

Commissioner Aditya Jha, a technology entrepreneur who lives in Toronto, voted to carry on but cautiously. He said he’d never seen a job description for an NCC board member, but he assumes he’s there for his business expertise.

“Our land is gold,” that expertise tells him. “We’ve waited for over 50 years. I think that now, with the light rail coming and everything happening in the city, if we have to wait for another 10 years, we are not going to lose anything much.”

The land next to downtown Ottawa won’t become any less valuable, this is true. But the commission ended up with this giant asset because of its own caprice. It once belonged to families and business owners the commission expropriated and evicted for a government complex it never got around to building. Every day that goes by, the shame the NCC wears deepens a tiny but perceptible amount. LeBreton Flats is not to be hoarded.

Also, Jha wants the commission to keep some of that gold in a final deal for the property: “One other thought could be that we could link the top-line share … there could be what I call a shopping-mall kind of a model. Sometimes they say, ‘Come, be in my place, if you make money, we will get a portion of that.’ That could be one of the options,” he said.

That’s what the city government did at Lansdowne. It called the arrangement a “waterfall” rather than a “shopping mall” because they aren’t actually idiots, though it gave the city a direct financial reason to turn public land over for a Winners.