City hall-bound Bowman puts together transition team

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This article was published 27/10/2014 (4057 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Mayor-elect Brian Bowman is relying on a couple of former city hall staffers to ease his take-over of city hall.

Bowman announced his transition team today and it includes Bryan Gray, a former advisor to Sam Katz and the last head of the executive policy secretariat when it was disbanded in 2009, and Etoile Stewart, who held a senior role in the chief administrator’s office until she quit a few weeks ago.

Bowman has laid out an ambitious agenda for his first 100 days and has vowed to enact a flurry of campaign pledges at his first two council meetings.

University of Winnipeg political scientist Aaron Moore said that in addition to his own agenda, Bowman faces the difficult task of working with a council that include seven first-time members.

Moore said Bowman is going to need help to translate his campaign pledges into motions on the floor of council.

“He has a pretty huge task ahead of him,” Moore, an assistant professor at the U of W specializing in municipal politics, said. “Having people with experience, who can help him navigate, will certainly aid him.”

Bowman, along with other members of council, will be sworn into office at a special meeting of council in the evening of Nov. 4.

Bowman’s transition team will be chaired by Andrew Enns, president of NRG Research and Barb Biggar, who was director of communications and senior advisor to former premier Gary Filmon from 1988 to 1994.

Both Biggar and Enns were senior advisors to Bowman during his successful election campaign.

Dan Vandal, a council veteran who didn’t run for re-election but hopes to make the leap to federal politics with the Liberals, said Bowman will need help settling in at city hall.

Vandal said Gray and Stewart proved themselves capable individuals when working at city hall and Bowman will need someone like them to get him going.

“You need somebody… when you get in there to suggest improvements, and to suggest a good information flow,” Vandal said. “It makes sense to have somebody who’s already been there.”

One of Bowman’s campaign promises was to revive the executive policy committee secretariat — a body of policy experts who advise the mayor and members of his cabinet — which will be easier to do when the last person to run it, Gray, is on the transition team.

Vandal said one of the biggest tasks facing Bowman is understanding the agenda.

“He needs to get a handle on the report flow — which reports are in the queue, which ones are controversial and when do they come forward.”

Moore said having an experienced backroom political operator like Biggar and a couple of city hall insiders on the transition team doesn’t mean a return to the traditional style of politics that Bowman campaigned against.

Moore said these early moves don’t necessarily indicate Bowman will suddenly switch direction once in office.

“Given his mandate and support within the electorate, that has given him a lot of authority to make his own decisions,” Moore said. “I certainly didn’t get any indication by the type of election he ran that he was following the Sam Katz playbook.

“Within a year, we’ll be able to tell if there is a different path at city hall or the same old, same old.”

While Bowman campaigned as a political outsider, Moore said his landslide victory belies any suggestion that Bowman doesn’t have a capable team behind him and people shouldn’t be surprised some of those players will have political experience.

Other members of Bowman’s transition team include: Phillip Paskewitz, Bowman’s official agent during the campaign, who is employed as a financial services director with the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority; and, Jana Thorsteinson, another Bowman campaign advisor, who is manager of alumni relations at Red River College.

 

aldo.santin@freepress.mb.ca