Editorials

Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

City hall should be secure

By: Staff Writer

Posted: 12/18/2009 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

Council Speaker Harry Lazarenko says he ordered immediate security improvements after a man walked into the council meeting with an open bottle of gasoline on Wednesday. Coun. Lazarenko says he wants every visitor to produce identification and sign their names on the way in and out of the building.

They are just temporary measures while the city prepares a more comprehensive plan for the entire civic campus, which includes the council and administration buildings, the civic parkade and other buildings under the city's control.

It's unfortunate that the seat of municipal business will be adopting much tighter restrictions on the easy flow of traffic, but it doesn't have much choice in these times of heightened security awareness. City hall needs security that is comparable to that deployed at the Legislative Building, where visitors can be subject to a scan by a metal detector. The provincial and federal capitals are often assumed to be at greater risk of violent attack because of their higher profiles and because of the assumption that their work is more important than that conducted at city hall.

The work of city hall, however, is frequently more contentious and its impact on daily life far greater than much of the business conducted on Broadway and Parliament Hill. The evidence can be found in the phone records at city hall. Councillors are routinely swamped by phone calls, usually angry ones, but the numbers skyrocket when a controversial subject pushes the buttons of thousands of constituents.

It is common, for example, for councillors to receive 1,000 calls on a single issue, such as the ill-begotten plan to charge user fees for garbage collection, or the failed bid to locate a hog-killing plant in St. Boniface. Members of Parliament are lucky if they get that many calls in a year.

Civic politicians also deal with some of the most frustrating and difficult neighbourhood disputes, including arguments about the location of a fence or a deck, the placement of a drug and alcohol rehab facility, the opening of a restaurant patio, or even the construction of a new apartment tower that will disrupt someone's view.

In the early 1980s, Dr. Henry Morgentaler opened a women's clinic on Corydon Avenue before it was legal to perform abortions outside a hospital. The drama should have been confined to Broadway and Ottawa, but city hall was held to account by hundreds of demonstrators over a minor zoning issue for the clinic.

The point is that city hall attracts all kinds of people, including many with grievances and axes to grind that have little to do with the business of running a large metropolis. Angry people, some of them unstable, go to city hall to get answers to questions that no one can answer. Coun. Lazarenko, for example, has been asked to solve marriage problems, to find lost pets and to stop birds from pooping.

In fact, until measures were taken to improve security for councillors, it was possible for angry citizens to charge into their offices and launch into a rant. Those days are over.

The new security environment may have emerged from the shock and fear of 9-11, but foreign terrorism is not the risk for which city hall needs to prepare. It's the threat posed by the angry loner, the unstable homeowner and the mob mentality that frequently descend on city hall.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition December 18, 2009 A14

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