Lowering parking fees in city a short-sighted endeavour
Proposed cost reduction would take funds away from already-starved budgets
MEAGAN HUGHES, STAFF
The City of Winnipeg is considering a city-wide reduction in street parking fees after hearing from frustrated business owners in Winnipeg’s Exchange District. Seventy-nine business owners petitioned to bring down fees in the Exchange District by $1.50 — from $3.50 to $2 an hour –and return to the hourly parking rate which was in effect in 2017.
Shawarma Khan owner Ibrahim (Obby) Khan claims the McDermot location has lost sales since 2018, when the parking fee increase occurred, and has been lobbying the city alongside 78 other business owners to reduce rates.
The city is already amid a study of parking cost to determine appropriate parking rates to assign each area
of the city. However, this data will not be available until October 2020, and Point Douglas City Councillor Vivian Santos has already put forward a motion that would lower parking rates without knowing what the study will find.
To pay for this motion, she proposed that the city foot the bill for changing the parking meters to the new rate. Changing the rate at all the city’s meters would cost about $176,000 alone.
But the city fails to take into consideration many of the already existing points of data available.
Winnipeg’s current rate of $3.50 per hour is already competitive with Canada’s other large cities. As of 2019, Toronto charged up to $5 per
hour, Vancouver charged up to $6 per hour and Calgary charged up to $4 per half-hour. Further lowering Winnipeg’s already low rates would only put the city more out of line with the rest of Canada’s largest cities. Business owners complain over lost sales since the parking increase occurred, but correlation does not equal causation and raising rates does not necessarily mean fewer people parking and supporting businesses.
When The Forks began charging for parking in 2019, visitor parking numbers actually increased.
It’s important that both business owners and city councillors view the issues from all angles and avoid shortsighted thinking when tackling this problem.
The City of Winnipeg relies on the revenue from street parking fees to help accrue funding for Winnipeg Transit. If Santos’s proposal becomes law, it will see the city lose $2.1 million in funding every year —$1 million of which goes directly to Winnipeg Transit.
Yet, the city, with a mayor who is constantly decrying a premier who cut funding to transit, is now considering further cuts at the behest of business owners on the backs of transit riders.
It is short-sighted to cave to the demands of business owners when the city is facing serious issues that require millions of dollars in funding
Winnipeg Transit Plus (HandiTransit) is already in need of an additional $1 million in funding this year to meet recommendations made by city administration following complaints about the service and an ombudsman report.
To date, only five of the 19 recommendations made in the report have been met.
This failing is despite the fact this
service is used by about 7,500 people who are unable to access Winnipeg Transit’s bus system due to significant mobility impairment or blindness.
In addition to transit, the proposed reduction in fees would see another reduction in $1.1 million to the city. In a city that has failed to adequately tackle pressing issues like the opioid epidemic by funding rehabilitation programs and detox facilities, it is short-sighted to cave to the demands of business owners when the city is facing serious issues that require millions of dollars in funding. There are funding and budgeting issues already plaguing Winnipeg without the addition of further pressure. Winnipeg city councillors want to rebuild the framework of how our tax dollars are spent and have referred to our current budgeting process as “fundamentally flawed.”
The budgeting process in Winnipeg is fundamentally flawed, but not in the way that councillors view it. When the agenda of 79 business owners takes priority over the needs of the approximately 168,400 people using transit every day and the countless number of people who constantly struggle with addiction, the budgeting process is most definitely fundamentally flawed.
Though the city should look into ways of preserving businesses in Winnipeg’s historical district — like further expanding bike lanes and keeping pedestrian paths clear during the winter months — it cannot be solely on the backs of people who use essential city services.
Winnipeg’s crime will not be solved by cop consultation
Law enforcement represents an untrusted, oppressive force to many living in the city
CAM CANNON, STAFF
eral recommendations on preventing what Burrows refers to as “criminal and anti-social behaviour.” Many of the recommendations are geared toward building community involvement in enhancing safety downtown — which in itself is unproblematic. Where problems begin to appear is in the nature of the involvement being put forward.
As part of his anti-crime work with the community organization Point Powerline, Point Douglas community activist Sel Burrows has released part two of his threepart report on recommendations for improving safety in the downtown area. Part one — which stressed disrupting criminality through the involvement of downtown residents — was released in December, and part three is expected to be released in February.
Part two of the report makes sev-
Common-sense approaches to drug and crime issues often fail to consider the history of policing, forgetting the hard lessons of the war on drugs — namely the so-called “iron law of prohibition,” the idea that as criminalization of drug use ramps up, so does the strength and danger of drug use. Police-based solutions create a kind of arms race between the police and those who sell drugs, leading to increased militarization of both police and crime, as well as putting people who use drugs at risk by compromising the supply of drugs. Communities should be building their capacity to take care of themselves without police involvement. There are countless opportunities represented by harm reduction strategies — such as safe injection sites — and “serve the people” initiatives like free-meal provision, mental-health supports and safe, accessible housing among others. Ultimately, the goal should be removing the conditions that create these issues — namely poverty, an inevitable consequence of the settler-colonial capitalist system — by implementing policy that works toward full employment, strengthening the social safety net and legalizing drugs. After all, the drug and crime epidemic is not the product of people making morally poor decisions — it is structural and should be approached as such. By beginning with an analysis of the issues that takes the socioeconomic structures that produce such issues as its basis, we can move beyond the common-sense moralism — the idea that the problem is people choosing to use drugs, or sell them, or participate in any other criminalized activity — which only serves to create moral panic, villainizes people that use drugs and has historically proven ineffective in actually helping people.
No progressive solution to the current drug and crime epidemic should involve the police, rather, we should be excluding them
Underneath this series of seemingly common sense, easy to implement recommendations is an approach to drugs and safety that primarily benefits property own-
ers — who face declining property values from high rates of crime — at the cost of people that use drugs and other groups of marginalized people who would likely face the negative impacts of increased policing. When approaching issues of safety, we need to centre on the fact that the police in Canada are a settler-colonial institution that functions to maintain structural oppression by force. The police are an instrument of social control above all else.
Recommendations such as setting up a tipline specifically for taxi drivers to inform police about potential crimes make sense, but only if you accept that policing, and ultimately the law, can be used toward ends that are beneficial to the community — not just to property owners.
The decades-long experience of the war on drugs has demonstrated that actions based on such assumptions only serve to make drug use more dangerous and increase the militarization of the police, making the city far more dangerous for the marginalized people who usually bear the brunt of police violence.
To be blunt, no property — in owners’ or thieves’ hands — is worth
more than the lives of people who use drugs, nor the lives of the marginalized people that tend to live in areas hard-hit by crime. No progressive solution to the current drug and crime epidemic should involve the police, rather, we should be excluding them.
Further, according to a recent poll conducted by the Angus Reid Institute, trust in the criminal justice system in Manitoba is the lowest in the country.
If we want to help make our communities safer, we should start by listening to them to understand why this lack of trust exists, and proceed together from there instead of insisting on continued police involvement — even as a last resort — as Burrows’s report does. When approaching social issues like crime and drug use, it’s not enough to count on the systems that produced the issues to resolve them. We need to go outside of established institutions and build our own working-class institutions. Building a larger police presence may achieve some extent of immediate results, but we need to ask questions about what this does on a structural level.
Spengler Cup a hockey nerd’s dream for Brendan Burke
Alberta netminder talks international experience, adding to already-impressive resume
JASON
PCHAJEK, STAFF
U sually when you make a deal with your dad, it involves chores or good grades. For University of Alberta Golden Bears goalie Brendan Burke, it meant something so much more. It meant he got to play for Canada.
Burke was invited to play for Team Canada during the 2019 Spengler Cup.
The tournament features club teams invited from various professional leagues playing against the host, HC Davos, as well as Team Canada who appear in the tournament every year. His road to the tournament started with a conversation with his father.
“He said if I got off to a good start this could be an opportunity for me this year, and luckily the team got off to a good start and I’ve been playing well,” Burke said.
“A couple weeks before the tournament, when the roster was shaping up, they gave me the call [to] let me know I’d be there as a third this year.”
Burke — the son of Sean Burke, a former NHL goaltender who is now the general manager of Team Canada for the Spengler Cup — was tapped by his dad to join the Canadian squad
for the 2019 tournament. Team Canada secured a gold medal the U of C goalie can add to an already stacked mantel.
Burke is already a Western Hockey League champion, Ontario Hockey League champion and Memorial Cup champion, and he can now add Spengler Cup champion to that list.
Burke is far from the only U Sports talent his father has taken to the Spengler Cup. As the netminder explained, it’s become a perfect place for his father and the rest of the Canadian brain-trust to pluck thirdstring goalies for the opportunity of a lifetime.
America, you’re not going to go spend your Christmas in Switzerland to most likely not dress.”
For Burke, the chance to rub shoulders with professionals and wear the maple leaf was too great to pass up.
“It’s a hard-core hockey fan’s tournament — especially if you’re not living in Europe,” he said.
“It’s obviously a little more acces-
“And to be a part of it — being the hockey nerd that I kind of am — I was just thrilled and super appreciative that I got to go.”
Team Canada was stacked from top to bottom for the 2019 tournament, with former NHL players lined up next to career European pros. For Burke, there were also a few personal connections among the sea of new faces.
“It’s a hard-core hockey fan’s tournament — especially if you’re not living in Europe”
— Brendan Burke, University of Alberta Golden Bears goaltender
“With my father being involved the last four years, he’s taken a [U Sports] goalie in the past to be a third,” Burke said.
“He kind of looks at it as the perfect league to take a third guy from, so […] it’s probably the highest league that you could get a guy to go. If you’re playing pro in North
sible and popular over there, but if you’re from North America and you’re a hard-core hockey fan it’s just one of those tournaments you’ve got to follow.”
The Spengler Cup began in 1923 and is a major bucket list item for most major hockey fanatics, played in the historic Vaillant Arena.
“If you’re a fan of hockey, especially being hard core, it’s one of the tournaments of the year,” Burke said.
“There were some guys in the room
I’d played against, played with — Adam
Tambellini is a guy that I played with so I was excited to see him,” Burke said.
“Good friend of mine, glad to see he made the team.
“It was great, lot of […] older players I never played with but even that I watched in the NHL like Dan Winnick, Scottie Upshall — they both played in Arizona when I was growing up, and being a kid in Arizona I was big Coyotes fan. Those are guys I looked up to.
“Getting the opportunity to play
with them was once in a lifetime.”
Born in Scottsdale, Ariz., Burke also got to see his father don a Coyotes sweater.
The elder Burke had a stint with the Coyotes from the 1999-00 season to the 2003-04 season.
The Spengler Cup trip was not just personal glory, seeing old friends and crossing something off his bucket list — for Burke it was also a learning experience, and he’s taking plenty of lessons back to Alberta with him.
“I can’t pinpoint one thing that I’m going to take,” he said.
“Any time you get to practice with guys from a higher level, be surrounded by coaches who’ve coached in the National Hockey League or played in the National Hockey League […] you’re always going to improve.”
The U of A currently sits first in Canada West, and with Burke’s international experience the club is poised for a return to the national championship.
“Hopefully I can take some of their skills and things that I picked up into our league,” Burke said.
“Being around people like that can only help going back to university hockey.”
