Quote:
Originally Posted by esquire
If I seem a little down on the city lately, this is why... it felt like Winnipeg made some painstakingly slow progress over two decades from about 1997-2017, but so much of it has come undone over the last 5. And I am not that optimistic that we will regain that lost ground anytime soon... the current trendline for downtown Winnipeg is not great. So many shops and restaurants have closed down over the past couple years, and I'm not sure anyone will be in a rush to open new ones up in those spaces. It feels like any hope of seeing a truly improved and rejuvenated downtown sometime before I retire in the next 15 or 20 years is fading fast, and that is kind of a depressing thought. I never would have imagined that 2015-2017 or so was basically the high water mark for downtown Winnipeg in my adult life.
The situation is pretty dire but there has been surprisingly little public acknowledgment of that fact in the media, among civic leaders, etc., and even fewer ideas and solutions for dealing with it.
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This happens every time the Conservatives take office. They gut social services, poverty and its associated problems skyrocket, and we see the result in downtown Winnipeg. Then the NDP gets elected and cleans things up. Then suburban Winnipeg becomes complacent and greedy, wants tax cuts, accuses the NDP of being wasteful, and the Tories are re-elected.
This is what needs to be publically acknowledged in the media and among civic leaders