Not even a year after the
National Capital Commission (NCC) opened Kìwekì Point,
significant damage to the new structure by a school bus driving “illegally” on a lookout pathway has left residents surprised.
The damage was found on Whispering Point, the lookout section over the Ottawa River and the Gatineau Hills, which provides an “architectural shelter with deep-seated nooks,”
according to the NCC’s website.
Colin Churcher is an octogenarian who regularly walks the point from his home neighbourhood of the Byward Market. It’s his first time seeing the damage since the Ottawa Citizen pointed it out to him.
“It’s a wonderful lookout, even today when it’s pretty cold, but that’s kind of bothersome,” Churcher said of the damage.
“It’s a pity because it’s taken a long time to get this whole thing done… and it’s a great shame that somebody has damaged it,” he added.
The Ottawa Citizen found more than 64 wooden panels were damaged in total, with indents, split wood and school-bus yellow paint scratched across the top of the structure.
Valérie Dufour, spokesperson for the NCC, confirmed with the Ottawa Citizen that there was “significant damage” on Whispering Point on Dec. 3.
Dufour said that they are in contact with the police and have shared surveillance camera footage that shows “a school bus illegally driving on the Kìwekì Point Pathway.”
“We are in touch with the Kìwekì Point designer and fabricator teams in order to repair the structure as soon as we can,” Dufour added.
“We will seek full monetary compensation for the damage caused,” Dufour said.
Todd Plaskacz is another local resident who found that damage on his Boxing Day walk.
He was hopeful that the fix could be easy to accomplish, as it was a wooden structure.
“You can clean it up and make it look pretty much the way it was, with minimal recognition by a tourist that anything bad had happened,” he said.
“But obviously an additional cost.”
Kìwekì Point was first opened in May 2025 after five years of construction that began in 2019. The development cost a total of $45 million.
When it was opened,
NCC CEO Tobi Nussbaum heralded the point in an Ottawa Citizen op-ed
as a “confluence of the Ottawa, Gatinaeu and Rideau Rivers,” all of which were “trade routes, sites of diplomacy, and gathering places of the Algonquin Anishinabeg and neighbouring nations.”
In the op-ed, Nussbaum wrote that the newly redesigned point places Algonquin history alongside that of Samuel de Champlain, whose statue used to be the site’s apex
