Five Minutes With… ·
Five Minutes With the Publisher
Jay Tarzwell · Publisher, The Barrhaven Bugle
This is the first in a recurring Bugle feature: five questions with a Barrhaven person you should know, answered in writing, in about five minutes, in their own words. It seemed only fair to make the publisher go first. No phone call, no meeting: Jay Tarzwell dictated his answers straight into the Bugle's interview form on his phone, in one sitting.
Who are you, and what is The Barrhaven Bugle in one breath?
“I'm a retired service member. I was posted to Ottawa in 2019, just before the pandemic, and we moved to Barrhaven because my wife's got a good friend who lives here. For the past seven years I've been living and working in Barrhaven, mostly from home. We came from Yellowknife: there are five times more people in Barrhaven than there were in Yellowknife, and two and a half times as many as in the entire Northwest Territories. And the Bugle? It started as the calendar of events and goings-on in Barrhaven that I thought I was missing.”
Why start a newspaper for Barrhaven, and why now?
“Last month my wife and I were having breakfast at Broadway's in Barrhaven, and she said, "Oh, the prime minister was here yesterday." I had no idea. And it occurred to me that I have no idea what is happening right here, because unless it makes the Ottawa news or the national news, you don't hear anything about Barrhaven. Not long after, I read a post about organizing a hyperlocal newsletter, and I thought maybe I could pull the event sheets from different organizations together, create a list of activities, and publish that: useful for me, and probably useful for other people. I run a résumé-writing and job-search business called Job Scout from home, so I took that idea and started building. I built the Substack, and after about two weeks I had six people signed up, and two of them were me. As of July 14, we're almost at 500.”
What's something about Barrhaven only a local would know?
“That's hard for me to say, because I'm not from here the way others are. Some people do know what's going on, and that's what the Bugle is all about: giving people from Barrhaven a focal point to find information about their own town. Yes, Barrhaven's not a city, it's part of Ottawa, but we're out here in the south and there are 110,000 of us. This is as different from Ottawa as Orleans is, and I think that's worth noting.”
What's one thing you'd change about Barrhaven tomorrow if you could?
“A higher-density shopping area that's more foot-traffic-friendly, a focal point for the commercial activity of the town. We have old Barrhaven along Greenbank, which does a good job of that; grow on what we have. And I think it's important to keep the money here, at the local businesses in Barrhaven, to keep them running. They have a lot of competition from online and from stores in Ottawa, but maybe the Bugle can focus locally and let people discover what is actually here.”
Who in Barrhaven should we talk to next?
“We've got an election in October. We've got two very active incumbent councillors, David Hill and Wilson Lo, and the Bugle is now tracking challengers in both wards. I think we should talk to the people who want to represent us: what they think of Barrhaven, what they're offering, what differentiates them. We're largely a new city, with massive infrastructure that's all new because of the growth. 25 years ago, when I came to Barrhaven to visit friends, where I live now was a field. What do we need, and what are they going to bring to the table for us? I think it's important to hear not from one, but from all of them.”
This interview was conducted in writing through the Bugle’s interview form; answers lightly edited for length and clarity.