Mayoral candidates drop gloves over crime

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This article was published 14/09/2010 (5500 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Winnipeg’s gang problem is the focus of Winnipeg’s mayoral race for the second week in a row, as the top two mayoral candidates are trading barbs about the role job training can play in crime-prevention efforts.

On Monday morning, mayoral challenger Judy Wasylycia-Leis gathered reporters to a North End social-service organization and pledged to create 120 job-training positions over the next four years in an effort to keep former offenders and other youths out of gangs.

Two hours later at city hall, incumbent mayor Sam Katz accused his main rival of stealing from his playbook by trotting out a strategy he said he and council has already implemented.

In the back room of Dufferin Avenue job-training centre BUILD, Wasylycia-Leis promised to create a program called Community Works, which could see former gang members, other ex-offenders and young people at risk of joining gangs get trained to pave back lanes, prune trees or board up derelict buildings for the city, among other duties.

Their efforts could help the city tackle its backlog of infrastructure-renewal projects and also provide relief for the city’s labour shortage, Wasylycia-Leis added.

Her program would be modelled on BUILD, which trains 65 people a year at a cost of approximately $3 million, half of which is recovered through construction contracts from Manitoba housing, said training co-ordinator Andrea Derbecker.

Wasylycia-Leis said Community Works would cost $3 million to $4 million over the next four years, with the cost being shared by the city, province and Ottawa. The federal and provincial governments have funds set aside for aboriginal job-training, said the former NDP MP and MLA.

“This is about breaking the cycle of reoffending,” said Wasylycia-Leis, who said city workers would conduct the training and mentorship.

Mike Davidson, president of the Canadian Union of Public Employees Local 500, said the city’s largest union would support the idea, although it would require the trainees to become members.

Wasylycia-Leis also accused Katz of failing to devise a crime-prevention strategy during six years in office. Simply hiring more police officers — as Katz promised last week �ö is “a Band-Aid solution,” she said.

Katz, however, said people in many Winnipeg neighbourhoods, including Wasylycia-Leis’ core constituency in the North End, have told him they will be safer in the short term with more police around.

The incumbent mayor also said the city already has a variety of aboriginal job-training programs run by organizations such as FortWhyte Alive, the Winnipeg Aboriginal Sport Achievement Centre and other non-profit groups.

Katz said Wasylycia-Leis is merely copying his platform.

“I guess that means she concurs with what we’re already doing,” he said.

Neither Katz nor Wasylycia-Leis would say definitively whether they would increase property taxes to raise money for more policing or crime-prevention programs. Katz said that would depend on budget discussions, while Wasylycia-Leis said she will make a decision later on during the campaign.

Both said all three levels of government must do more to ensure social-service programs alleviate conditions for impoverished Winnipeggers, especially, Katz said, in areas where children are running around unattended at night.

And both said they intend to fully utilize CrimeStat, the city’s computer-assisted policing strategy, whose creation was the first Katz campaign promise of the 2006 election campaign.

bartley.kives@freepress.mb.ca