Abel Gutierrez
What would you do to make transit service in Winnipeg more functional, reliable and safe for its users? What plans do you have, if any, to reduce car dependency in the city?
Winnipeg Transit has to be something people can depend on. That means reliable routes and schedules, but it also means making safety a priority for passengers and operators.
I support stronger security and enforcement on transit, better protection for operators, including proper barriers, and a visible transit safety presence that can respond when problems occur. We also need to continue reviewing the new transit network based on how it actually performs for riders and make adjustments when routes are not working.
I do not believe the City should try to force people out of their cars. Winnipeg families have different needs, and for many people driving will remain necessary. The better approach is to give residents real choices.
Dependable transit, safe active transportation connections and ATCs, while maintaining our road network. When transit becomes safe, reliable and convenient, more people will choose it voluntarily.
What do you think the City should be doing to ease the housing and homelessness crisis? What specifically would you change about the City’s current approaches?
Winnipeg needs more housing of every type. The City can help by speeding up approvals, reducing unnecessary red tape and making it easier to build both appropriate infill housing and new communities where infrastructure exists or can be properly planned.
At the same time, homelessness cannot simply be managed indefinitely on sidewalks, in parks and in encampments. People need a path toward stable housing, treatment, recovery and support, while residents and businesses also deserve safe and usable public spaces.
The City needs stronger coordination with the provincial and federal governments because many of the services required are outside municipal jurisdiction.
I would also place greater attention on vacant and derelict properties. They contribute to neighbourhood decline, create safety concerns and can become significant fire and arson risks.
We need compassion, but compassion also means helping people move toward stability rather than accepting dangerous conditions as permanent.
Public disorder has become a major concern among surveyed voters. How should the City best deal with it? The police budget is a major expense for the City; are people getting value for money?
Public safety is one of the most important responsibilities of municipal government. Residents should be able to walk through their neighbourhood, use a park, ride transit or leave property outside their home without constantly worrying about theft, violence or disorder.
I support stronger enforcement against open-air drug dealing, chronic property crime and repeat offenders. We also need visible community policing and targeted responses to problems such as arson and vacant properties.
At the same time, a large police budget cannot be treated as a blank cheque. Council should expect measurable results and make sure police resources are being used effectively.
We should also work with other levels of government and appropriate service providers so police officers, firefighters and paramedics are not continually being used as the default response to problems better handled elsewhere.
Value for money means both adequately funding public safety and demanding accountability for outcomes.
While poverty and addictions are largely another government’s responsibility, are there ways you see that the City of Winnipeg could be doing more to solve these issues?
Yes. Although health care, addictions treatment and income assistance are primarily provincial responsibilities, municipal government still has an important role.
The City can help bring governments, community organizations, first responders and neighbourhood groups together. We can support access to treatment, detox, recovery-oriented services and appropriate housing while ensuring public spaces remain safe.
I also believe prevention deserves much more attention. As a football coach, I have seen first-hand what youth sports and community programs can do. They give young people structure, positive relationships, mentors and a sense of belonging.
Investing in recreation and opportunities for at-risk youth is not simply recreation policy. It can be part of a long-term public-safety strategy.
Winnipeg needs to address the immediate crisis while also investing in the things that can help prevent the next generation from entering it.
Voters are concerned about the rising cost of living and affordability. What do you see are ways the City of Winnipeg could make life less expensive for residents?
City Hall cannot control grocery prices or mortgage rates, but it absolutely controls many of the costs it places on residents.
Property taxes, utility rates, fees and the overall cost of municipal government matter to working families. Before asking residents for more money, Council should be able to demonstrate that existing dollars are being spent effectively.
My approach would be to prioritize core services and infrastructure, scrutinize major expenditures, improve procurement and look for unnecessary duplication and waste.
Housing affordability also depends on supply, which is another reason the City needs to make development approvals faster, clearer and more predictable.
Affordability ultimately comes down to value. People understand that roads, fire protection, policing, transit and infrastructure cost money. What frustrates residents is paying more every year while feeling that basic services are getting worse. That is the cycle I want City Hall to break.
Jessica Wiebe
What would you do to make transit service in Winnipeg more functional, reliable and safe for its users? What plans do you have, if any, to reduce car dependency in the city?
Our campaign is fully committed to building a public transit system that families can truly rely on by focusing on functional, predictable service.
We will restore schedule predictability to guarantee on-time bus arrivals for daily commutes, bring back direct routes to crucial hubs like hospitals and schools, and simplify transit to make it completely accessible for seniors, students, and families.
At the same time, we fully respect individual choice and support the freedom of residents who prefer or need to drive their own vehicles. Rather than forcing restrictions on drivers or making driving harder, our platform focuses on offering better transit alternatives as a genuine option. By making public transit an attractive and dependable choice, we can naturally remove unnecessary traffic from our roads, creating a much smoother commute and reducing gridlock for everyone.
What do you think the city should be doing to ease the housing and homelessness crisis? What specifically would you change about the city’s current approaches?
To ease the housing and homelessness crisis, our campaign will actively transform empty city-owned land and underutilized buildings into stable, livable homes.
We are changing the city’s current approach by moving away from leaving vacant spaces sitting empty, choosing instead to aggressively target them for immediate, family-friendly housing developments.
Our strategy prioritizes long-term safety and deep community connection over short-term, temporary shelters.
By building safe environments and shifting our focus toward community-centric housing, we will ensure that vulnerable individuals and growing families have the permanent stability and strong neighborhood support systems they need to truly thrive.
Public disorder has become a major concern among surveyed voters. How should the city best deal with it? The police budget is a major expense for the city, are people getting value for money?
To address public disorder effectively, our campaign will shift Winnipeg toward a collaborative model that pairs firm law enforcement with compassionate community support, ensuring that every dollar in the police budget directly translates to visible safety on our streets.
We will tackle public disorder by significantly increasing the visible presence of uniform officers and community safety officers on foot and across the transit system to deter disruptions in real time. To allow police to focus on serious crime, we will launch integrated response teams that partner law enforcement with mental health professionals and social workers to address the root causes of addiction and crisis directly on the streets.
Additionally, we will enhance rapid-response civic services to quickly remove graffiti, repair property damage, and clean up vandalism, immediately restoring a sense of order and pride in our neighborhoods.
To guarantee that taxpayers get maximum value for their money, we will enforce strict fiscal accountability by treating the police budget like any other major city expense and conducting regular performance audits to keep funding focused on frontline safety rather than administration.
Our strategy will implement targeted, data-driven deployments to place high-visibility policing exactly in the hot spots identified by local residents and businesses.
Finally, we will invest in highly cost-effective, tiered safety models—such as expanding the use of community safety officers for non-violent public order issues—which optimizes our budget and successfully frees up specialized police resources for high-priority crimes.
While poverty and addictions are largely another government’s responsibility, are there ways that you see that the City of Winnipeg could be doing more to solve these issues?
While addressing poverty and addiction relies heavily on provincial and federal funding, the City of Winnipeg cannot simply sit on the sidelines.
We can maximize our local impact through a strategic Four Pathway framework that prioritizes advocacy, compassionate response, and neighborhood-level support.
First, our platform champions strong municipal advocacy for treatment facilities by demanding localized recovery investments from higher levels of government and working to eliminate waitlists so that residents in crisis have immediate access to life-saving care and long-term detox beds.
Second, we will implement a new community crisis model that deploys dedicated, localized teams to handle non-violent mental health and addiction crises. This specialized support safely diverts minor crisis calls away from police, fire, and paramedics, ensuring individuals receive compassionate care while freeing up emergency services for high-priority safety issues. Finally, we will focus on creating community-led wellness sites by transforming designated local spaces into vibrant, welcoming neighborhood hubs equipped with direct access to professional counseling, addiction resources, and social supports to help individuals build a reliable path to long-term recovery.
Voters are concerned about the rising cost of living and affordability. What do you see are ways the City of Winnipeg could make life less expensive for residents?
To tackle the rising cost of living, our campaign is committed to delivering a direct Lower Costs of Amenities strategy to make everyday life more affordable for the residents of Elmwood & East Kildonan.
While global inflation affects everyone, city hall has tangible levers to lower household expenses and relieve pressure on family budgets.
First, we will focus on lowering essential city utility fees by reviewing and capping water and waste rates to ensure basic utilities do not become a financial burden for families, while optimizing civic departments to eliminate wasteful spending and protect property tax dollars without triggering hidden fee increases.
Second, we will make groceries and daily essentials cheaper by using municipal zoning laws, tax incentives, and streamlined business licensing to attract affordable grocery options directly into Elmwood & East Kildonan, alongside partnerships with community organizations to establish regular, affordable neighborhood food markets that cut out corporate retail markups.
Finally, our plan tackles rental prices and housing costs by streamlining the approval process for new, affordable rental developments to increase supply, while offering property tax relief and fee waivers to developers who commit to building dedicated, long-term affordable rental units in our community.
I am dedicated to helping the residents of Elmwood-East Kildonan.
We need leaders within our city who actually care about the people they are here to serve, bringing love and compassion back into each neighborhood.
Emma Durand-Wood (incumbent)
What would you do to make transit service in Winnipeg more functional, reliable and safe for its users? What plans do you have, if any, to reduce car dependency in the city?
As someone who rides the bus nearly every day (my family doesn’t own a car), making sure we can have a robust, reliable transit system is a huge priority of mine.
Prior to 2016, the Province provided matching operating funding to municipalities to incentivize strong transit investment. Since 2016, dedicated provincial funding for Winnipeg Transit operations has been frozen at $42 million per year, while the City has continued to increase its own funding of Transit to $86.6 million in 2026. Recently, I was happy to sign Climate Action Team Manitoba’s Transit Pledge, to advocate to the Province to restore the 50-50 funding arrangement.
But we don’t need to wait for the Province to step up in order to increase funding to transit. Currently, the City of Winnipeg has plans for two unsustainable road expansion mega-projects: the widening of Kenaston Blvd and the extension of Chief Peguis Trail. Even if we managed to secure provincial and federal funds for their construction, the City’s portion of these billion-dollar expansions would be entirely funded by debt, which would add over $30 million in debt service costs to our operating budget for the next 30 years. While these two projects are still currently unfunded, if we were already willing to find that extra money, simply cancelling plans for these two projects would mean we could be adding $30 million per year to transit operations instead of making payments on unnecessary debt. That works out to an almost 35% increase to the City’s operating contribution to transit compared to 2026.
In addition to increasing funding for transit operations, there are also multiple low- or no-cost actions we can take right now as a city to improve transit service, such as:
- Giving buses their own lanes at known “choke points” to ensure they stay on schedule
- improving stops with shade and seating
- providing a safer, more pleasant pedestrian experience with traffic calming and intersection reconfigurations
- approving development in places where it is already “on the way” for transit, in locations where more transit demand improves the system for everyone by adding frequency, rather than on the edges of the city where more transit demand simply spreads resources thinner for everyone else.
Since taking office last year:
- I’ve voted multiple times to increase transit hours and frequency
- I’ve proactively met with transit staff monthly to discuss issues and concerns experienced by Elmwood-East Kildonan residents
- I’ve proactively met with union leaders at ATU 1505 to better understand the perspectives and needs of transit operators
- I’ve attended all internal Primary Transit Network council seminars offered by the CAO’s office
- I’ve voted to approve multiple “transit-improving” developments while voting against “transit-draining” developments
Reducing car dependency means providing viable alternatives. So in addition to transit, we need to make active transportation safer and more convenient. That means continuing to build out our biking network, working towards reducing residential speed limits and improving traffic calming, and providing more places to securely lock up bikes, within new housing development, businesses, recreation spaces, and beyond.
What do you think the city should be doing to ease the housing and homelessness crisis? What specifically would you change about the city’s current approaches?
Housing is a basic human right. Right now, too many people in Elmwood-East Kildonan are struggling to find housing that’s right for their age or stage of life. Many seniors are ready to downsize but can’t find housing in the area they want to live in, with the amenities they want, or at a price they can afford. Families compete over too few apartments with adequate bedrooms. And almost everyone wants to live somewhere with easy access to transit, shopping, and other amenities. We need to build all types of housing so that no one is stuck in a situation that doesn’t meet their needs, or can’t afford. We especially need more affordable and deeply-affordable housing.
We can’t talk about housing without talking about homelessness. I’m a proponent of the “Housing First” model. Housing First is an evidence-based approach that focuses on eliminating chronic homelessness by providing unconditional safe and permanent housing as the first step to getting folks out of encampment or shelter living, paired with robust wraparound supports to start addressing health issues like addiction and trauma, mental health and other help they may need. To that end, I arranged to have St. Boniface Street Links provide homelessness outreach and encampment cleanup services in our ward, starting this past May.
There is also a huge need for homelessness prevention services. Many people find themselves teetering on the edge of losing their stable housing. Homelessness prevention efforts support these folks with the resources and skills they need to avoid losing their safe place to live in the first place, including housing supports, food security and mental health supports. In the past months, I provided funding support to groups doing this work such as Adventist Community Services and Chalmers Neighbourhood Renewal.
The city also has a role to play in enabling and facilitating the construction of affordable, and deeply affordable, housing. Since being elected, I’m happy to have supported the construction of several affordable and supportive housing projects, including some right here in Elmwood-East Kildonan, like Elmwood Hub at 545 Watt St.
As we can see, there is no single solution. Housing and homelessness are complex issues that require multiple approaches, and the cooperation and work of multiple people, groups and orders of government.
Public disorder has become a major concern among surveyed voters. How should the city best deal with it? The police budget is a major expense for the city, are people getting value for money?
When problems arise in our neighbourhoods – like crime, or derelict and problem properties – it’s incredibly unsettling and upsetting. These things affect us all, and our current reactive approach to addressing them isn’t working. We need to tackle their root causes, in addition to putting in place deterrents, in order to prevent small problems from becoming big ones.
While City Council does not have the power to direct police resources or operations, we can tackle hot spots and problem properties and reduce fire risk by working collaboratively with the appropriate authorities to ensure they are aware of these places, and can act on them, early on. Together with residents, I have been actively reporting problems in the community to:
- City by-law enforcement
- Winnipeg Fire & Paramedic Service
- Winnipeg Police Service
- Manitoba Justice’s Safer Communities and Neighbourhoods office
We can also make progress on crime prevention by addressing its root causes. Research shows that crime, poverty, lack of recreation and opportunities, along with disconnection of community are interlinked. It also shows that Canadians value crime prevention over law enforcement. So what can we do?
Over and over, I hear that young people need recreation opportunities. Plenty of evidence shows that when kids and youth are busy, safe, and connected to their communities, gangs and crime don’t become an attractive way to get by and find a sense of belonging. This means both investing in services for families and youth, as well as supporting the organizations that are offering programming and support to youth.
In a broader sense, the city can support the well-being of young people by:
- Improving food security
- Fostering economic development by making it easier for local businesses to set up and create neighbourhood job opportunities
- Ensuring that it’s safe and convenient for teens to get around independently, through reliable public transportation and safe ways to walk and bike
In fact, all of these actions work towards poverty reduction, not just for youth, but for everyone. And poverty reduction is crime prevention. These are the preventative, “upstream” actions that work, and they are actions I’ve already been working on within the Elmwood-East Kildonan community to ensure everyone’s basic needs are met.
While poverty and addictions are largely another government’s responsibility, are there ways that you see that the City of Winnipeg could be doing more to solve these issues?
Caring for our neighbours in need is everyone’s responsibility, and as mentioned above, research shows that many issues such as poverty and addictions are linked to things that fall under municipal responsibility, such as a lack of recreation opportunities, disconnection of community, and lack of affordable and reliable transportation options to get to job opportunities.
Again, as mentioned above, the city can help support the well-being of our neighbours, and help alleviate poverty by:
- Improving food security
- improving transit
- fostering local economic development
- improving recreation options to help nurture deeper community connections
- spending money that does more than one thing, in order to keep life affordable for everyone (see next question)
While some of these may require increased investment, many of these can be achieved simply by changing zoning regulations, for example to more easily allow neighbourhood food sources (both growing and selling), and to make it easier for residents to set up a local business and create more neighbourhood job opportunities. And as I mentioned previously, there are many things we can do to improve transit and walking so more economic opportunities become accessible to more people.
Cities are complex places, with multiple interconnected issues and interdependencies. So while “poverty” and “addictions” may not directly be municipal responsibilities, as we can see, there are many things the city can and should be doing to help make progress on these important issues.
Voters are concerned about the rising cost of living and affordability. What do you see are ways the City of Winnipeg could make life less expensive for residents?
There’s no sugar-coating it: our city is not in great financial shape. As we’ve seen over successive budgets, it’s not a problem we can get out of by cutting spending. Likewise, increasing fees and taxes is pushing household budgets to their breaking point. The problem is structural, and solving that will require making changes to how we grow our city.
But while we do that, we can also ensure the money we spend within existing budgets does more than one thing, including making life more affordable for the people who live here. For example:
- We can help reduce home heating and energy costs, and reduce the risk of basement flooding, by growing and caring for our urban forest;
- we can reduce household transportation costs by providing convenient, viable alternatives like transit and active transportation;
- and we can reduce pressure on property tax and water fee hikes by growing our tax base where the infrastructure to support it already exists.
Editor’s Note, Sept. 30, 2026 : Responses still pending from candidates Adam Dudek and Chris Swereda
Compiled by Savannah Guzzi
jmajorrrc@gmail.com
Questions about the candidate questionnaires? See here