I’ve long believed that Ottawa, collectively, has an attitude problem: a surprising amount of unpleasantness and hostility for a city its size — Calgary is far friendlier, for example. I usually attribute it to pent-up aggression from a city full of miserable civil servants who then set the tone for the rest of the population. I can’t think of a better example than Lana’s experience in the Byward Market last week, where a vendor demanded she stop taking pictures in a public place. In a tourist area, no less. To be fair, it was an isolated (albeit mind-numbingly stupid) case: another vendor and the local business association had no problems at all with photography. But it can only take one unpleasant encounter to ruin your impression of a city; I, for one, had plenty of them during my four years in Ottawa.