Righting the ship: Bowman on right course, with a long journey ahead
If a person were to take the editorial page of the Winnipeg Free Press at face value, they would have to be excused for thinking that Mayor Brian Bowman was on a puritanical mission to erase all memory of the Sam Katz era from city hall, collateral damage be damned.
Not that such a mission would be a bad thing.
Last week's condemnation of Bowman's "obsession with appearing to do the right thing" in the Winnipeg Free Press struck many in the city as being so far off the mark that we wondered whether the editorial board had decided to try and compete with satirical magazine The Onion.
The Free Press editorial board was so hyperbolic in their feigned indignation that it has been difficult to take their complaints seriously. After a decade of Sam Katz and five years of Phil Sheegl, years of unethical deals, closed doors, land swaps and development agreements that Winnipeggers roundly rejected in October, cleaning up city hall is exactly what the people of Winnipeg had in mind when they elected Bowman.
No wonder we were so shocked to see the Free Press breathlessly describe Bowman's drive for greater transparency in the awarding of development contracts in language which might be more appropriately applied to a vigilante. They described his actions to open the development contracts:
"…A shambles, but one directly attributable to the mayor's self-appointment as the sheriff of city hall."
"It's too late to repair the damage, but Mr. Bowman should remove his badge and take a deep breath before someone else gets hurt in his campaign to rid city hall of the ghosts of the past."
After years of the city being at best wilfully blind to the constant abuse of infrastructure and development resources, any push for transparency should be seen as a positive step.
And if Mayor Bowman is to be blamed for "doing the right thing," even where that "right thing" might be more ideological than practical, Winnipeggers will just have to get used to a government that treats us and our tax dollars with a modicum of respect. After all, that same drive to do the right thing, even where it might be counter-intuitive, has served Bowman well in two other serious incidents which have dominated discourse recently.
After Maclean's magazine described Winnipeg as Canada's most racist city, it is safe to say that almost everyone (Maclean's included), was pleasantly surprised by Bowman's response.
Rather than the "moral crusade" which the Free Press worries the mayor is spearheading, our chief magistrate's response was thoughtful, honest and exactly what Winnipeg needed. In a word, leadership.
The following week's boil-water advisory again saw Winnipeg in steady hands, despite the concerning false positives that led to it being necessary.
A fresh start
Although we don't yet know what led to those false positives, every indication points to the need for a serious culture shift at Winnipeg City Hall.
The Katz era allowed a generation of civic administrators to find their niche in a particular political culture, regardless of how poisonous that culture might be to everyone outside the inner circle.
At this point in Bowman's tenure, there's no doubt he is trying to do things differently than his predecessor. In order to make the sort of wholesale change Winnipeggers voted for, Bowman needs a fresh start.
Senior city managers should be replaced with competent, skilled individuals who share Bowman's vision for Winnipeg at a million people. A reluctance — or worse, an inability — to "clean house" could bring Bowman's vision to a screeching halt.
It is that vision of Winnipeg with one million citizens, which the mayor spoke about so often during the campaign, which seems to be lacking from the first hundred days of his administration.
Staying the course
It has been quite some time since we've heard any news on Bowman's plan to complete all four phases of the BRT system. Any discussion of the mayor's pledge to open a dialogue on a more equitable tax system for Winnipeg has been similarly lost. And one of Bowman's central campaign pledges, to do away with the overly generous political handouts to retiring councillors, was proposed and defeated by council.
In fairness, His Worship has only been in office 100 days; clearly, there is still time to raise these issues. And although most of Bowman's team are new to government, you certainly wouldn't know it by how they handled January's events.
Notwithstanding a few minor hiccups (an embarrassing contested vote at the inaugural meeting, for example), the mayor and his staff have moved gracefully from crisis to crisis, not falling into any of the usual political neophyte traps.
While Winnipeg has had its share of crises lately, deftly managing incidents as they happen is not good enough, at least not for a mayor elected with nearly 50 per cent of the popular vote on a platform built on a vision of Winnipeg 20 years from now.
Winnipeg has bought into Bowman's vision for the city at one million people. Surely not everyone who voted for him is convinced that finishing BRT is what needs to be done, but they are unquestionably expecting big things.
Bowman's first hundred days in office have already begun to change the civic tone in Winnipeg, but four years pass quickly. If the next four years are executed as admirably as the mayor's response to the Maclean's article was handled, this city will look very different in 2018.
Yet while he may want to address those big picture items right away, it will not be (and likely has not been) easy trying to get an entrenched and defensive civil service on side with a "vision" which could conservatively be described as progressive.
Bowman's challenge for this next stage of his term will be to bring civic leaders on side, or show them the door.
Corey Shefman is a lawyer and political consultant in Winnipeg. He served as GOTV director for the Bowman campaign. Corey tweets @coreyshefman.
Brian Bowman will be a guest on a special broadcast of CBC's Power and Politics on Thursday, Feb. 5, starting at 4 p.m. CT on CBC News Network.