Anything seems possible now

For the sake of history, and accuracy, it’s important that Winnipeggers should record and reflect on all of the bad things that did not happen when the City of Winnipeg finally, thankfully, re-opened Portage and Main to pedestrians just over one year ago.

Traffic did not gridlock.

Pedestrians were not mowed down like traffic cones.

It did not divert much-needed financial resources away from more important infrastructure projects.

The sky directly over Winnipeg’s iconic heartbeat of an intersection did not fall.

Those are valuable observations given that all of these awful things, plus many more, were predicted by the forces on city council that sought to keep the intersection closed to pedestrians. Those forces include — again for the sake of an accurate historical account — councillors Jeff Browaty (North Kildonan) and Janice Lukes (Waverley West).

A brief flashback:

In 2014, then-mayor Brian Bowman promised during the municipal election campaign that he would re-open the intersection of Portage Avenue and Main Street to pedestrians, ending an ugly, decades-long policy of using barricades to keep citizens out of the intersection and driving them down below, or around, the intersection. In 2016, as council inched closer to officially re-opening the intersection, Browaty, along with Lukes and others on council, concocted a plan for a plebiscite to allow voters in the 2018 municipal election to have the final say; Bowman, despite having pledged to re-open the intersection, supported the plebiscite with the knowledge it was likely to kill his idea; suburban voters then quashed the re-opening plans.

Browaty had been committed to stopping the re-opening. He said repeatedly that allowing pedestrians to cross the intersection was going to “cause delays and cause problems.” He said Bowman’s “expensive, unnecessary plan” was a wasteful diversion of road-repair funds.

“It’s simply wrong.”

The Browaty-Lukes plebiscite was a perfectly crafted poison pill, a vehicle that allowed voters to do what they do well — vote against something, rather than for something. Two-thirds of those who voted in the plebiscite turned their thumbs down on the re-opening plan, most of them from outlying areas of the city.

Flash forward to March 2024 and current Mayor Scott Gillingham stunned people on both sides of the debate when he said he was introducing a plan to re-open the intersection to pedestrians. Gillingham, correctly as it turned out, noted that much-needed repairs to the intersection and the leaky membrane which prevented the underground from flooding would be far more expensive than closing the underground concourse and re-opening the street to pedestrians.

So, the barriers were demolished and hauled away, repairs were made to the intersection and sidewalks, and the first pedestrians since 1976 crossed the intersection legally. Gillingham, acknowledging the volatile politics of the issue, walked across the intersection on June 25, 2025, and immediately hailed it as a success.

“It’s working well, it looks great,” the mayor said.

The saga of the re-opening revealed a lot of the intrinsic and, in some instances, unseemly elements of municipal politics in Winnipeg. This is a city that has been largely governed by cautious mayors and councillors who have shown an unwillingness to try new things.

Gillingham’s decision to revive the re-opening may have been driven largely by financial concerns, but he should be thanked for realizing that the people who live and own businesses in the core — people who had campaigned for the re-opening — had a greater stake in the future of Portage and Main than suburban voters, many of whom rarely, if ever, come anywhere near that part of the city.

The intersection is open again. A historic wrong has been righted.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we used this as an example to embrace other new and bold ideas? After Portage and Main has re-opened, anything seems possible.