Your city hall is building for temporary tents

Bonjour, Ottawa. Simone Okafor-Bouchard here, with your City Hall update, where the real story is never on the Hill – it's always just off it.

This week, something interesting popped up on the issued building permits list. The Bani Hashi Society, a group I confess I'm not immediately familiar with, received two permits for temporary tents at 900 Eglinton Avenue East in Ward 3. What caught my eye, beyond the exactitude of the permit numbers BP 3TEN 26-406 and BP 3TEN 26-407, is that these are for *two separate* events, one from June 16 to June 27, 2026, and another from July 26 to August 6, 2026. Each set of five tents costs $6,500.

* **Who:** The Bani Hashi Society

* **What:** Two permits for five temporary tents each

* **Where:** 900 Eglinton Avenue East, Ward 3

* **When:** June 16-27, 2026, and July 26-Aug 6, 2026

* **Cost:** $6,500 for each permit

Now, this isn’t a huge expenditure in the grand scheme of City Hall budgets, but two identical permits for temporary structures almost a year out, from the same group and location, does make you wonder about the planning behind it. Are these annual events? Is Eglinton Avenue East becoming a new hub for large gatherings? This is the kind of detail that usually goes unnoticed, but it's part of how our city's landscape, even temporarily, is shaped. I'll be keeping an eye on this address to see what these future events entail.

Simone Okafor-Bouchard, MiTL Sports Desk, signing off.

You can get all the local details, including what this means for your neighbourhood, every morning at mornings.live.