Growing and planning together

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 27/08/2024 (432 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

For more than a decade, the Winnipeg Metropolitan Region (WMR), with the participation of the municipalities and the support of the province, has been working on Plan 20-50 to coordinate development across the region.

But last week, to the complete surprise of those working on the plan, Premier Wab Kinew announced that individual municipalities would have the ability to opt out of the regional plan.

A plan with an opt-out clause is merely a set of suggestions. It will not have the power to achieve its goals. It is a waste of a decade’s worth of hard work, analysis and relationship building, undermined by a decision made in a few weeks, without even consulting the WMR itself.

The 18 municipalities in the Winnipeg Metropolitan Region are interconnected and entwined.

People live in one jurisdiction but work and play in others.

The shopping and amenities that they desire are often in neighbouring towns and cities, and services that support the health, education and safety of community members are distributed throughout the region. Businesses cater to the whole population — a population that is now approaching one million — and industries rely on the region’s available labour force and its central location for continental distribution.

As the population increases, the communities are literally growing into each other and mobility between communities is increasing.

Planning in this context is inefficient without coordination and collaboration between the municipalities. For example, in the coming years, each municipality is hoping to grow.

Because there has been no coordination between individual municipal plans, the total amount of land designated for future residential uses across all 18 plans is more than three times the amount of land needed to accommodate even the highest growth estimates for the region’s population.

This unnecessarily threatens agricultural operations within the region and encourages the costly overdevelopment of road and sewer infrastructure.

Challenges like these have been on the provincial agenda for decades. Gary Doer’s NDP government passed the Capital Region Partnership Act in 2005 creating the WMR’s precursor, the Partnership for the Manitoba Capital Region.

It brought together leadership from the region’s cities and municipalities to consider how to coordinate land use and infrastructure development and for the projection of environmental and water quality.

The need for a regional plan has long been considered a necessary tool for this coordination, to ensure a strong regional economy and to quality of life for members of all its communities.

The legislation to make the plan itself possible was passed by Brian Pallister’s Progressive Conservative government in 2021, recognizing the importance of coordinated planning processes to both the economic vitality and sustainability of the region.

For the past decade, the (very small) staff of the WMR have worked with teams of consultants to develop the first regional plan.

They have followed the leads of other cities in Canada (for example, Edmonton and Halifax), conducted detailed reviews of existing plans, analyzed trends, studied current and possible development patterns, examined precedents for best practices and consulted stakeholders.

This work has been overseen by a board comprised of the mayors and reeves of the municipalities and cities involved.

A plan of this scope is necessary if we want to live in a successful region.

We need to build infrastructure that we can afford to maintain; we need to provide transportation choices (including public transit) that connect our communities; we need to protect valuable agricultural lands and operations within the municipalities; we must provide housing appropriate for all income levels; and we need to attract and retain businesses to support a healthy economy.

Plan 20-50 is not perfect — no plan is.

Planning is an ongoing process and plans must be reviewed and updated on a regular basis.

The WMR provides a forum for this work, and for municipalities to discuss their differences and find common cause. The challenges that we face as an urbanizing region are larger in scope than any one of the municipalities. Opportunities to improve the region for all who live here require collaborative efforts.

This is the region’s first plan — and we should be giving it a chance to work before we provide opt-out opportunities for individual municipalities that might not yet appreciate its benefits.

Richard Milgrom is an associate professor and the head of the department of city planning at the University of Manitoba.