Mayor O’Brien Unplugged*

… and you thought only George Bush uttered great political quotes?

8. “Bash them and then move on,” Larry O’Brien told a a group at a Kiwanis lunch gathering in January 2007. He was referring to his fellow council members. At a council meeting shortly after he made the comments the multi-millionaire mayor bought all of the councillors hamburgers and thanked them for their hard work!

6. Number six is more of a collection with the best saved for last. Larry tried to bask in the Ottawa Senators’ limelight and in the process found a catch phrase. “I’d like to see those Senators not skate, but swagger down the ice.” - May 2007. “I know that Ottawa can become one of these cities with swagger.” - April 2007. “He’s well aware of the swagger factor.” - May 2007. “Welcome to Swaggerville!” - May 2007. And then… this gem:

“The City of Ottawa and the country of Canada owes you the war brides a great debt… When you came to Canada, you came to Canada with swagger,” said O’Brien, holding up a bust of Winston Churchill. “He had swagger too,” said the mayor with a wink. - May 2007

7. Eloquently talking about getting rid of the homeless, “And we did that with real pigeons about 25 or 30 years ago and, lo and behold, you barely ever see a pigeon around here. You start doing that with the panhandlers — you stop giving out those toonies — and they’ll stop hanging around here.” Seconds later it got worse, “They do that in Perth and other cities. They give them a bus ticket to Ottawa for God’s sake!” He ticked off the mayor of Perth and had to apologize to the town of 6,000. The Ottawa Sun’s Sue Sherring found her memory flashing back to this incident:

Asked to explain how he would deal with the city’s homeless in an editorial board meeting with the Ottawa Sun during last year’s election campaign, O’Brien set off on a bizarre analogy about how the Carp dump keeps seagulls away.

“At the Carp dump, they have a scarecrow set up, they had a massive seagull problem. I went out there and there were no seagulls. I asked how they did it. They said, ‘We have a shotgun that goes off every 15 minutes, but the shotgun and the scarecrow doesn’t do it on their own, but once a week we use a real shotgun and we shoot a bird. And there’s nothing that scares these birds more than occasionally seeing one of these birds drop into the water.’ “

6. “I’m sorry, it’s out of my budget. It’s not a city expense per se, it’s a mayor’s office expense,” when asked to publicly release the salary of his new staff (all but one of his original staffers quit on him) which is something he had done a few months prior. Of course, if you’re not from Ottawa you know that the mayor’s office budget is not funded by taxes — it’s actually made up of money that is grown on local trees and the magical money is picked every spring. By leprechauns.

4. “Zero means zero!” - October 2006. Woops-a-daisy!

3. Larry O’Brien addresses aboriginal members of the community, “My forefathers came to Canada 150 years ago. As a man with an Irish background, I know what it is like to feel alienated,” the hi-tech millionaire said.

2. It used to be my favourite but still ranks right up there as the number two quote by our mayor. He was asked by reporters to explain allegations (which have since resulted in two criminal charges being laid against him) pertaining to the 2006 mayoral campaign. “I fell asleep on my boat in July drinking a beer and when I woke up I was the mayor of Ottawa.”

1. It all comes full circle to the number one Larry O’Brien quote. “How do you erase everything I’ve said so far?” O’Brien is caught on tape after grabbing a CBC reporter’s recorder. The man, who made his millions in the high tech sector, is unable to erase the tape recording.

*Please note, I have “some sort of a political bias as a 22-year-old Liberal” according to the man himself.