Sometimes, you can fight city hall

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 21/01/2025 (252 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Winnipeg Mayor Scott Gillingham’s change of heart on a proposed pilot project that would have cut snow-clearing services on residential roads is a useful reminder that citizen engagement with government can be a powerful tool.

The city unveiled the pilot project as part of its 2025 budget released last month. Under the proposed plan, the threshold to plow residential streets would have been raised to 15 centimetres of snowfall from the current 10 cm beginning in October.

The estimated savings: between $2.75 million and $5 million a year. But it would have come with a human cost.

Critics, including those concerned with how it would affect pedestrian mobility, immediately panned the idea. They rightly pointed out that many pedestrians already struggle with poorly cleared sidewalks and some are forced to use residential streets where there are no sidewalks. Less-frequent clearing of residential roads would only make matters worse, they argued.

People with disabilities, including those who use mobility devices, would have been particularly hard-hit.

David Kron, executive director of the Cerebral Palsy Association of Manitoba, said the proposed change would have forced some people to stay home more often.

“It doesn’t take a lot of snow buildup to make a street or a sidewalk inaccessible for folks that use a manual or power chair or, like myself … a cane,” he said. “If folks can’t get out of their homes, they can’t be part of the community.”

He and many others voiced their concerns about the pilot project. And, as elected officials often do when there is a groundswell of opposition to a proposed plan, they reversed their decision.

In a unanimous vote last week, council’s public works committee passed a motion to scrap the pilot project. Gillingham said he would support the motion when city council votes on the overall budget on Jan. 29.

“We had more feedback concerned (with) the snow-clearing pilot idea than we did about the (proposed 5.95 per cent) property tax increase,” he said.

The people spoke and the politicians listened. That is a hallmark of our democracy. People often think they have no say over how governments spend their tax dollars or what laws and bylaws they enact. In fact they do, mainly because politicians want to get re-elected and do pay attention to citizen feedback.

That may not always be desirable when debating controversial policies, such as supervised consumption sites or how to combat homelessness, since it can fuel populist sentiment in government that may contradict evidence-based research.

Politicians still have to make tough decisions from time to time that may not always be popular with the public. The province, under then-premier Duff Roblin, would never have built the Red River Floodway in the 1960s had it only listened to the critics.

But when it comes to basic services like snow-clearing, library services, public schools or health care, politicians do typically pay attention to public sentiment. If they don’t, they do so at their own peril.

City council may, for example, want to pay closer attention to the public backlash around the decision to scrap the Community Connections program at the Millennium Library. The city touted the program in 2022 as a valuable public service “that will connect individuals with library services and social supports, including items to help meet basic needs” when it was first launched.

Citizen engagement on public policy issues matters. The public has power and influence over what their elected officials do. The about-face at city hall on the proposed snow-clearing cut underscores that reality.