OTTAWA — When Mathieu Grondin left Montreal to become the City of Ottawa’s nightlife commissioner, he knew the capital’s reputation as a sleepy city. That’s at odds with the 500 applications he got for his newly appointed “nightlife council” of people volunteering to help him promote the city’s after-dark activities.

“The people who think that Ottawa is boring, I don’t think they go out that much,” he says.

Cities are waking up to the potential in actively cultivating a nighttime economy—Toronto has a nightlife action plan, and Montreal unveiled a new one last week—but Grondin believes he has the only job of its kind in the country.

“I’ve dedicated my life to this cause and seeing what’s being done here was very inspiring to me,” he says.

Vibrant nightlife is a must for a modern city that wants to draw talented people and entrepreneurs, he says. It makes the city more attractive, keeps young people happy and helps a community retain high-paying jobs that could be located anywhere.

Grondin’s informal title as Ottawa’s “night mayor” conjures images of a guy who sleeps in a cave and emerges to run a shadow council in Gotham City after respectable folk have barred their doors, and who might be a vampire. He brushes that off.

“It’s a day job,” Grondin says. He might be a little more rumpled, a little more Montréalais than your average denizen of Ottawa City Hall, but he describes himself as a bureaucrat. Besides the new council of volunteer advisers—show promoters and venue operators; a Carleton University student rep; a drag performer—his office consists only of him.

Formerly an actor and director, Grondin founded MTL 24/24, a non-profit dedicated to promoting Montreal’s nocturnal economy from outside government. He took the job in Ottawa in June.

Governments, historically, have not been keen on nighttime activities.

“Twenty-five years ago, decision-makers left nightlife in the hands of the police, and they had no interest. Nightlife was solely associated with negativity, with nuisances,” Grondin says. 

Nightlife is entertainment, yes, but he says it’s also arts, culture, sports—and money.

“People work from nine to five. What do they do with the money they earn from nine to five? They spend it from five to nine, or 10—or five in the morning,” he says.

How they spend that money has evolved. Young people now drink less alcohol than young people used to, he says. They can keep up with friends online, so just seeing one another isn’t the going-out draw that it once was. They want to have more varied experiences than going to a bar or even a concert.

“They want to have bubble teas and go to the arcade and play bowling,” Grondin says; if he were an entrepreneur, he’d think about opening a Korean-style amusement parlour. “Maybe that’s what we need to bring back in our downtowns.”

Those downtowns are also often more complicated places than they used to be.

“Historically, higher classes would live a little bit outside of the inner city, and the inner city was for the working class. Now it’s been inverted,” Grondin says. “That means that we’re going from a renter’s economy to an owner’s economy, and when people own and are more educated and higher-income, they know how to fight for their rights.”

In practice, that means noise complaints—in many cases from people who want to be a quick walk away from restaurants and bars but otherwise don’t want to hear them.

Setting reasonable rules for noise, getting new night-oriented businesses to respect the neighbours who were there first, and getting those neighbours to accept some change—those are the kinds of tensions Grondin aims to manage.

Affordability is the other key challenge. Nightlife is driven by young people, both as consumers and providers. If they’re squeezed, the after-dark economy suffers, Grondin says.

That economy includes the people who work in it, whether they’re waiting tables, baking the next morning’s bread, or on shift at a hospital. Even if they have well-paying jobs and safe homes, those people often feel marginalized, Grondin said.

“Try to find a ‘daycare’ for a whole night. It’s more complicated, it’s more expensive,” he says, “You pay the same level of taxes but you don’t have access to the same services. You can’t go to the library, you can’t use the pool. Access to public transportation is limited.”

If you want a 24-hour economy, you need to think about those things, Grondin says.

One of his office’s first products will be a safety and security plan for Ottawa’s nighttime workers and participants. Grondin avoids prejudging what that will include, but he points to an example from Amsterdam, one of the first cities to formalize a position akin to his 10 years ago. 

Amsterdam’s legendary entertainments attract tourists who don’t know where they’re going or what they’re doing, Grondin says, so the city has a friendly “night watch.” Early in the evening, they might help people find particular bars or music venues. Later on, they’ll help the over-refreshed and/or lost into taxis back to their beds. 

“We want people to be safe on the way to a venue, inside the venue, and on their way back,” Grondin says. It’s good for business, good for visitors and residents alike, and therefore good for the city.

Grondin had been a nightlife advocate for years before COVID-19 hit and was used to making the economic arguments for it. He learned something, though, during the depths of the pandemic: Going out to a show isn’t only entertainment, it’s vital socializing that might not be possible during the day.

“In the punk scene and the hip-hop scene and the raver scene, they all have this sense of community, and it’s important to foster that and take care of it,” he says.

More poignantly, newly out LGBTQ people are often welcomed into that community by night, he says. If you have a “chosen family” you can’t see, you suffer.

“The importance of community and caring was really brought forward with the pandemic,” Grondin says. “That’s something I’m much more sensitive to.”