Transport Action Canada (TAC) is a non-profit, volunteer-run advocacy organization. We advocate for convenient, affordable, and sustainable public transportation. Winnipeg heads to the polls on October 26, 2022 to elect a new mayor, new city councillors and school trustees. TAC has asked four questions of each mayoral candidate to determine where they stand on key public transportation issues in Winnipeg. Here is the current list of mayoral candidates.
TAC submitted the following four questions to each candidate. In the post below, we have included any answers received to date. We will continue to add answers as they are received.
You can click on any of the following links to jump directly to the question and its answers.
- Encouraging people to use other transportation methods beyond cars
- Discouraging urban sprawl / encouraging infill development
- Ensuring active transportation in future developments
- Winnipeg’s Transit Master Plan
Questions
1. Transportation is responsible for the second-largest portion of Canada’s carbon emissions. How will you encourage more people to walk, bicycle or utilize public transit instead of driving their cars?
Chris Clacio: The best way to encourage more citizens to move away from driving their vehicles is to get engaged and motivated citizens to communicate and work in collaboration with their elected officials and the front line staff of their city government. My first platform announcement was to change the Office of Public Engagement into the Office of Civic Engagement. If residents of a certain neighbourhood have a creative idea to promote and encourage other neighbourhood residents to walk, bike or utilize public transit then they should be able to work with the Office of Civic Engagement to implement that citizen type innovation, project, invention or initiative. The second part is the creation of a 4 year participatory budgeting process in a typical budget process we have today. The Mayor gets to create a budget working group to set up direct priorities and goals while each city department determines and makes a request to the budget working group for the funds. The municipal budget is split up between the operations cost which is a continuous cost like labour and fuel costs throughout the year and the capital budget for one time payments like bike infrastructure or purchasing fleet vehicles as examples. In a participatory budget my plan is to transfer the capital budget to be held by the ward councillor instead. I believe if citizens knew how the city government worked they would be more trustful and confident that their elected officials that they vote in really have the citizens who live in their wards best interest in mind and at the forefront of the decision making process in funding more active and multimodal transportation projects. I also commit to running for a second term in 2026, win or lose this election to see this happen.
Shaun Loney: Thank you for your email and advocacy for low carbon transportation options. We are excited to share with you Shaun’s announcement to create a new transit authority in Winnipeg called MetroMobility. MetroMobility will consist of an app that integrates buses, electric vans and bikes into one system. Transit users will be able to request an electric van that would come within 250 metres from their location. The electric van would then take them to the nearest rapid transit station. If elected, Loney will also accelerate the replacement of diesel buses with electric buses. Shaun has biked, walked and taken transit to work for decades. He has already announced that he will reject the car allowance that comes with being Mayor and will review the City’s policy of providing parking spots to civil servants to lead by example.
Jenny Motkaluk: Make transit more frequent, faster, and cheaper. Improve the ridership experience, and improve conditions for drivers.
Govind Thawani:
Rana Bokhari:
There are so many ways to do this that the city currently simply isn’t doing. The first step I will do when elected mayor is to quickly close the gaps in the city’s current Active Transportation Path network. It’s scheduled to be done over the next 20 years – that’s much too long. I’d like to see it done in 10 years or less.
I’d like to reduce on-street parking in favor of widening sidewalks and building bike lanes, and encourage more street closures for special events, or even permanently in some cases.
I’d like to talk about a bike share program in the city, look at Park and Ride lots around the perimeter to encourage transit use from rural Manitobans, and more.
The ultimate goal is to create walkable communities and encourage more pedestrianization.
Scott Gillingham:
As your next mayor, Scott Gillingham believes transit is critical to Winnipeg’s economic strength – and that more frequent bus service is the best, fastest and most reliable transit to reduce traffic congestion, offer affordable transport choices and help cut carbon emissions.
Scott Gillingham’s Big Move plan will:
• Restore Transit to 100 per cent of pre-pandemic service levels in 2023 (~50+ buses).
• Add 11 net new buses annually to the busiest bus routes from 2024-2026 (+33 buses).
• Accelerate route modernization upgrades in the Transit Master Plan.
• Launch the new on-request suburban services outlined in the Transit Master Plan, starting with the Castlebury Meadows – Waterford Green routes in 2023.
2. How will you discourage urban sprawl and encourage infill development?
Jenny Motkaluk: We should make more use of what we have. Convert abandoned homes into housing for those without homes.
Rana Bokhari: We are already facing a housing shortage and the go-to approach has always been to build out, not up. That is backwards thinking, given the fact we currently cannot afford the infrastructure we currently have. So the only solution is to utilize the infrastructure we do have and build up, not out.
This means liberal re-zoning to allow homeowners to build multi-family units, perhaps laneway housing. There is currently a push to rezone a large commercial area near Polo Park to residential – I will do everything I can to make sure that goes through. We need to allow increased densification around transit corridors.
I have already pledged to reduce parking minimums and impose a fee on extra parking spaces to help fund Active Transportation and Transit, and to encourage use of parking spaces for other development, not cars.
Scott Gillingham:
While City Hall’s recent debate over infill housing focused on residential areas, that debate missed some ‘low-hanging fruit.’ Since some commercial corridors have an ample supply of surface lots and underbuilt commercial sites that could also support more housing. Winnipeg’s Complete Communities 2.0 policy has already identified corridors like Pembina Highway and Portage Avenue as ideal for greater housing density. Now, we need to move quickly to turn that policy into action.
As mayor, Scott Gillingham will push for more housing over commercial sites with four policy shifts:
- Allow residential construction as-of-right, with no parking minimums, over existing commercial sites along Pembina Highway and Portage Avenue. Existing C2 and C3 zoning rules already allow for up to four stories of commercial construction on these corridors. Pembina is well served by transit and active transportation routes, while Portage is a major transit corridor. New mixed-use zoning rules for these corridors would allow for taller housing construction, as long as these sites maintained a commercial street front. If successful, the strategy would be applied on other major corridors over time.
- Allow residential construction over medium and large retail malls, as-of-right, conditional on setbacks to minimize impacts on nearby residents. These sites already have services, ample parking and transit connectivity, and residential projects are already taking off as a trend in other North American cities.
- Launch a new tender for affordable housing construction over Portage Place. A recent effort to build more than 500 new homes over Portage Place faltered amid confusion over affordable housing incentives offered by each government. As mayor, Gillingham would work with other governments, the Forks (as the landowner for the site) and Indigenous partners to tender a common aid package to any qualified bidder.
- Office-to-residential conversions. Gillingham would ask Council’s Committee on Property & Development, Heritage and Downtown Development to hold urgent public hearings to review any barriers to these conversions.
Shaun Loney: Thank you for mentioning infill development. Please see our infill announcement. As Mayor, Shaun will create an office of infill development and implement a developer certification system. This would promote better relations with existing residents and ensure dedicated bylaw enforcement officers and infill development would be better received. We have also indicated that an administration led by Shaun will focus on a “fix it first” infrastructure strategy. This includes more infill housing, moving the railyards to create active transportation, rapid transit options and reinvigorating downtown by increasing the number of people who live in the downtown vicinity.
Chris Clacio: The best ways to discourage urban sprawl and encourage infill development is for the city to look at all their current practices, update old city policies, and create new city bylaws. The past several years the current administration developed a small scale and low rise residential development guidelines for mature communities strategy. From my understanding the next phase of the long term goal is to eventually create a residential infill strategy bylaw for the city which I support. I know currently the city also created a Tax Incremental Financing policy to support and promote more downtown infill development.
Other big changes I hope to do if I were elected is to work together with the provincial government property assessment department to amend The Municipal Assessment Act towards a new tax model which I call a land value tax model to shift away from the property tax model which is a type of regressive tax. Other parts of the world have one and a close to home Canadian example of this land value tax “was common in Western Canada at the turn of the twentieth century. In Vancouver LVT became the sole form of municipal taxation in 1910 under the leadership of mayor, Louis D Taylor.” Besides the long term goal of the land value tax, a short term goal is to remove single family zoning (residential 1 zones) from our zoning code, and remove the parking minimums from development agreements.
3. What steps will you take to ensure active transportation is included in new developments?
Rana Bokhari: Simply put, it will be required, and it will need to be connected to the existing infrastructure to ensure there are no gaps. I’d also like to explore the idea of bike parkades. We have hundreds of car parkades, why not bicycles? One only has to see how heavily they’re used during events at Investors Group Field to know that this is needed and wanted.
Scott GIllingham:
Scott Gillingham’s BIG MOVE plan includes more connected bike routes, more focus on safety for all road users, and a fix for the problem of roads being renewed without new bike infrastructure being built alongside them. As Mayor, Gillingham’s BIG MOVE will: Eliminate gaps in sidewalk and cycling networks on collector and arterial streets with an additional $13 million (total) over existing City budgets in 2023-2026. Existing capital budgets for active transportation include $11.9 million over that period.
- Update the City’s roadwork priority formula to consider safety and equity for people of all ages, not just road deterioration.
- Create a Road Safety and Active Transportation Branch (starting at 2 FTEs in 2023- 2024) to add Active Transportation planning and design capacity.
- Assign co-signing authority over contracts and cheques to the Road Safety & Active Transportation Branch for any road project with a pedestrian or bike lane feature so these features get built as planned with best-practice designs. No safety feature, no payments. While other mayoral candidates may be tempted to redraw the bike lane map, as a city councillor, Gillingham consistently supported existing plans drawn up by active transportation experts after consultation with walking and cycling advocates.
Scott supported the 2015 Pedestrian and Cycling Strategy, voted this summer for the new Road Safety Action Plan, and as a City Councillor engaged in development of a new Transportation Plan. The missing pieces of the puzzle that have held us back are funding and prioritization – and as Mayor, the Big Move plan pedals hard to address both.
Jenny Motkaluk: Make properly designed bike lanes (like the Bishop Grandin Greenway) or don’t bother. Not in favour of retrofitting busy existing streets. In downtown, avoid retrofit of major streets like Donald or Portage; install traffic calming devices and separated lanes in less busy parallel streets.
Chris Clacio: Some of the steps I would take to ensure active transportation is included in infill and new developments is related to my answer in question #1 and #2. As well as place a moratorium on single family zones or residential 1 zones within the city boundaries to address the under housed population and to coordinate a housing first strategy with all sectors of the city. To partner together with the non-profit housing sector and to work with the rest of council to commit to finishing a comprehensive active transportation network throughout the entire city before 2030.
4. Do you support Winnipeg’s Transit Master Plan? Why or why not?
Scott Gillingham: Yes, Scott Gillingham worked hard in engaging and developing the masterplan and it’s the best utilization of moving people and goods through the city.
Shaun Loney: We are committed to accelerating the implementation of the Transit Master Plan from 25 years to 10. You will note we have identified several new sources of revenue to dedicate
towards Winnipeg’s share of resourcing the plan, including allocating Revenues from Transit Oriented Development towards MetroMobility. We will gain revenue from reduced diesel bus purchases in favour of electric shuttle vans, which require much less capital and significantly reduced operating costs. We will also gain revenue by taking better advantage of federal support through the $2.75-billion Zero Emission Transit Fund that is supporting the purchase of 5,000 electric buses.
Chris Clacio: As a mayoral candidate I fully support Winnipeg’s Transit Master Plan politically. The only concern I have, like many citizens, is that the implementation will take too long and will be too late for the city to really address the social, environmental, and financial concerns that will affect the city and citizens not just every 4 years but for the next 1000 years. On a personal note I do not understand why this document was not connected within the Winnipeg’s Transportation Master Plan: 2050 and/or the Plan 20-50 from the Winnipeg Metro Region. In the section “About the Plan” 20to50.ca, It writes “Within Plan20-50, municipalities harness the benefits of regional collaboration while maintaining the autonomy and local character that makes each of the 18 Metro Region communities distinct.” As I learn more about the profession of City Planning the more frustration I feel about the plan.
Rana Bokhari: Absolutely. But again, it’s a 25-year plan that needs to be completed more quickly – 10, 15 years maximum. We need to create a robust system not only to help create more dense, walkable neighbourhoods, but to fight climate change and ensure a sustainable system. I believe it needs to be a combination of BRT and some sort of LRT system, along with buses. We also need to speed up the implementation of the Frequent Service Network.
Jenny Motkaluk: (not specifically addressed) In favour of rethinking routes to serve more than downtown. Better utilization of what we have. Support gradual electrification of the bus fleet as older buses are retired.
Note: Jenny Motkaluk’s responses are summarized from a conversation between Jenny and TAC VP Steve Boyko.
Archived Responses
The following are responses from mayoral candidates who did not register for the election.
- Govind Thawani
- I would reduce bus fares to $1.00; add policemen on buses; study and change routes to optimize routes in time and efficiency; add bicycles racks to buses
- I would like to reduce the red tape in obtaining building permits. I would have a tax abatement to reduce costs for new home owner over 10 year ramp to normal tax rates. I would increase police in numbers to create safer neighbourhoods.
- New developments are always analyzed for the end users.
- I do not support the current plan. I want a hub and spoke system.