What would you do to make transit service in Winnipeg more functional, reliable and safe for its users?

One of the most popular strategies in other cities, but I think it’s a citizen strategy that we need to adopt, is an integrated mobility strategy. An integrated mobility strategy means that every solution for mobility is connected rather than disconnected. Currently we have a separate budget for bike paths and for active transportation, whatever other type, rolling and accessibility and cars and transit are all separate items in the budget lines and an integrated mobility strategy would see that all of those have to work together within one single strategy and so they have to communicate in a better way if one department solves all of those problems.

So, that’s the first step and the second step is the city needs to step up and ask the province for 50/50 funding as soon as possible. Some of us candidates have already been talking to MLAs to sort of assess the possibility of this. There’s a really good step already that has been taken with including people younger than 18 years old to be able to come on the bus for free. That is an enormous hit for family sustainability, for affordability. If you have four kids and you’re trying to take the bus to go somewhere and now all of the kids are free, it’s an enormous relief, right? And so that’s the first step.

We need to get to a place where the transit is funded appropriately. The idea of a feeder network as presented by the master transportation plan and the master transit plan a couple years ago and rolled out is a really great idea. But, we have a deficit of rollout in Winnipeg. We have a deficit of implementation in Winnipeg. We come up with really great ideas and then they get into council and they get their legs chopped off and then they are rolled out in a very different way than the project was originally intended. That’s what’s happening to the transit network right now, it requires to be funded properly, and it requires to be studied a little bit more and rolled out to its entirety of what was proposed originally and also integrated with all the other solutions. 

What plans do you have, if any, to reduce car dependency in the city?

OK, so transit users, for example, it’s been demonstrated statistically that the most important piece of the transit, for you to use the transit and 25% of your usage of transit is determined by your commute between your house and the bus. Which means that we need to work on that chunk more than anything else. In many cities, when the commute from your house to the bus and the bus to your house back was improved, many people started taking the bus instead of driving their cars.

Our city is very cold. There is a certain amount of comfort that goes into that, but it’s very important that we find solutions to make streets safer, and I mean safer in terms of the speed of cars, for example, could be reduced, that makes the streets more walkable and more accessible to people that are walking. Making the bus stops nicer, better placed and more shelters and safer. For example, for aging adults or people in wheelchairs, it is almost impossible for them to traverse some of the streets in our city during the winter, that also needs to be taken into consideration. It’s interesting that it’s not even currently a transit solution. It wouldn’t be up to the transit department to solve that problem, but you know in every city that has studied ridership, they’ve discovered that that commute is very important for whether transit is used or not and the other thing is, we need to generate more ridership.

We need to generate a sense of ownership of our transit system and so the solution to that is actually what the province is already doing, which is offering youth the opportunity to ride the bus and getting them used to riding the bus as an option, and letting them understand that riding the bus will save them money in the long run, it’s cheaper than buying a car. There is a saying amongst urbanists that ‘a sign of a really well put together city is where the wealthy people and educated people take transit as opposed to driving’ and we want to get to that place in Winnipeg.

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?

So, we can’t punch away our poverty. Currently, that’s what we’re trying to do, utilizing the police and arrest to penalize people who are in the worst possible conditions that I can think of for a city in the first world, seems like a really bad approach to me. We need to build housing, and we need to create a path to housing, a smart path to housing that includes people. Currently, the solutions that exist don’t offer generosity and reciprocity and kindness to people that are living in encampments and that are living in the streets and that’s why those encampments are created. They’re created because that is a place where people find generosity and reciprocity and kindness from other people and so they are just generating a community. We are currently not offering them a community.

That problem needs to start from a place of generosity and reciprocity and kindness. Of course, there’s no Scandinavian solutions to homelessness, which were to build housing for them and offer them houses and that actually solved the problem and ended up being cheaper in terms of like the healthcare expenditure for these people once they were housed and in a safe place, they didn’t need to go to the hospital as much and it ended up being less of an expense.

The city doesn’t have the tools to do this on their own. The city can only do so much. The budget for the city is very small compared to the problem. This is a Canada-wide problem. This is not just a Winnipeg problem, and so it needs to be solved with the provincial government, the federal government, but it is a housing deficit. We have billions of dollars from the federal government right now for the housing accelerator and some of that money needs to be dedicated to people who are currently unhoused.

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, how are people getting value for money?

Well, currently they’re not, in my opinion. If you look at the police budget or the last five or six budgets or for the last 40 budgets, maybe you’ll see that the police budget always goes up, more like cost of living. Like I was saying earlier, you can’t punch your way out of poverty. The majority of crime is created by poverty. It is created by poverty situations, it is created by lack of access to systems and services. There is a short-term approach, which is punishing criminals, but the police doesn’t have the tools to do anything to prevent crime. They only have the tools to punish crime. That is how the system is built. They’re part of the penal system, which means they can only really catch criminals, and then the penal system punishes them by putting them in jail.

We have to cut off the supply of humans that are going to crime and the way to do that is to generate better public services, generate better services for kids like music schools, sports, arts organizations, access to culture, access to libraries, access to safety programs and after school homework programs and those programs feel like charity, they feel like something charitable to the city. Those things, they are not a charity. They are an investment on those kids. We should be investing in those kids in the same way that we invest in our kids in neighborhoods that don’t have those problems.

In my ward, there’s a problem of petty theft and people are concerned about it and they’re feeling unsafe on their streets. And it is important for us to recognize that that problem is not necessarily going to go away until we treat the ailment, which is poverty, so we have to be focused more than anything else on treating poverty. Of course, we need the police to react when a crime has been committed, but we need social services to help these people step away from crime and remove the possibility of them ever going into crime by giving them other options. This is again a kindness crisis, and this is another problem that can also be treated with kindness. 

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?  

I think we need to start thinking about social programming as an investment on our own people as a city and these programs help people get themselves on their feet. These programs help people get themselves into a home, these programs help people get themselves out of the conditions of poverty that have pushed them to these extremes. It is very sad.

I grew up in the third world; I grew up in Mexico City. I’ve seen poverty, both of my parents grew up in abject poverty. Both of my parents grew up with access to food being a problem, and one generation later I’m here, I’m in the first world and looking at the way we abandon people with our system sometimes is very painful to see. The city can walk away from abandoning people and start using its resources to the best of our ability to include people into the fold, to bring them in and help them out. Of course, the federal government, the provincial government have more tools to do that, but as a city, we have access to tools that can help us do that.

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?

Fixing transit and getting transit going into a convenient, useful tool is a way that we can enormously help people with affordability. People having the option of not driving places, not having to repair their car as much, not having to spend as much money on gas, which is very expensive right now, could help them enormously with their monthly bills. Tax relief is a complicated thing for the budget of the city. We dedicate a lot of money to the sprawl of the city and in my opinion, and in the opinion of many economists that have reviewed the budgets, sprawl is actually costing us money that we’re not getting back and it’s making our taxes more expensive. So, if we want to keep our taxes where they are, or where they’re not going to be able to go down for a really long time, we need to slow down sprawl and start dedicating resources to things inside of the city.