Clive Doucet (born 1946[2]) is a Canadian writer and politician. He served as the Ottawa City Councillor for Capital Ward from 1997 to 2010 and ran unsuccessfully for Mayor of Ottawa in the 2010 Ottawa municipal election, finishing third with 15 per cent of the vote. Eight years later, in 2018, he again ran unsuccessfully for Mayor of Ottawa, this time finishing second with 22 per cent of the vote.
Early life
Doucet was born in 1946 in London, England to an Acadian serviceman from Grand Étang[3] and an English war bride. Doucet grew up in the city of Ottawa, Ontario, having moved there at the age of six. He also spent some of his youth in St. John's, Newfoundland. Doucet was raised as a Catholic, and his mother was Protestant. He became a Quaker in 1980. He first came to Ottawa in his teens when his father worked there. Doucet played for the Carleton Ravens football team for one season, and then moved to the University of Toronto. A football injury took him out of that sport and into the sport of rowing. He received a master's degree in urban anthropology from the University of Montreal.[4] In his younger days, he spent a summer working in a rock copper mine in British Columbia and helped build the National Arts Centre as a construction worker. Before entering politics, Doucet was a municipal affairs policy advisor.[5]
Central to his political platform has been the creation of a light rail rapid transit system across Ottawa manifested to date with the O-Train demonstration project (today's Trillium Line).
On 6 July 2010, Doucet announced his candidacy for Mayor of Ottawa in the 2010 Ottawa municipal election. Doucet joined a record number of 115 candidates running for municipal office in 2010, of which 15 challenged mayoral incumbent Larry O'Brien.[6] Doucet placed third with 15 per cent of the vote.[7]
On July 27, 2018, Doucet announced that he would once again be running for Mayor of Ottawa in the 2018 Ottawa municipal election.[9] Doucet placed second behind incumbent mayor Jim Watson who he had also lost to in 2010. He won 22% of the vote.
Throughout his career, Doucet has been a writer of novels, poetry, plays, and non-fiction, often writing about his Acadian roots. His most recent book, Urban Meltdown: Cities, Climate Change and Politics as Usual, was published by New Society Publishers in 2007.[11] In its review, The Walrus wrote "When Doucet speaks from the firm ground of experience as city councillor, his sharply logical solutions to municipal problems seem both hopeful and achievable."[12]
Fiction
Disneyland Please, novel, 1978, shortlisted for the W.H. Smith First Novel Award
John Coe's War, novel, 1983
Gospel According to Mary Magdalene, novel, 1990
The Priest's Boy, linked short stories, 1992
Non-fiction
My Grandfather's Cape Breton, originally 1980, republished in 2003 – a memoir of summer boyhood visits to his grandfather on the family farm on Cape Breton Island in the 1960s.
Lost and Found in Acadie (2004), a meditation on Acadian history, the Great Expulsion of 1755 and his visit to the Second Acadian World Congress in Louisiana in 1999.
Notes from Exile, 1999 – profiles his visit to the 1994 First Acadian World Congress in New Brunswick.
Acadian Memories, 2005 – collaboration with photographer Francois Gaudet, a coffee table book keepsake of the Third Acadian World Congress held in Ste Anne, Nova Scotia in 2004.
Poetry
Before Star Wars, 1981
Debris of Planets, 1993
Looking for Henry, 1999 – an epic poem meditating on the deportation of Acadians in 1755 contrasted to the defeat of the Metis Nation in 1885, and how the victors get to write history.
