Regina politicians need to experience well-planned cities

City Hall | Paul Dechene

Sandra Masters is going to France. We were run through the details at the March 6 council meeting: Regina’s mayor is an invited guest of a pair of French mayors to represent our city and the Royal Regina Rifles for D-Day ceremonies in June.

Beyond the request for $6,000 to cover her costs — money which will be coming out of the clerk’s office travel budget — council has to approve any time the mayor or a councillor travels out of the country to represent the city.

The timing on this could be better.

Just days earlier, the provincial NDP released some suspicious expenses from Moe-Minion Dustin Duncan’s Paris trip in November. Based on travel logs the NDP acquired, it seems the dude skipped out on part of the World Nuclear Exhibition and charged the public $3,500 for a private car service to tour the sights.

Duncan disputes this characterization. But still, by the time the mayor’s request appeared on council’s agenda, the idea of an official trip to Paris being turned into a pleasure tour had already become thoroughly cemented in the public mind.

It was a dumb coincidence that Ward 3 councillor Andrew Stevens referenced while speaking in favour of the Mayor’s trip: “Sounds like a great event. I think if you take transit instead of a private chauffeur, you’ll be fine.”

In the end, the trip was narrowly approved in a five to four vote with councillors Lori Bresciani, Dan LeBlanc, Terina Nelson and Shanon Zachidniak voting against.[1]

Personally, I don’t want Masters to go to France just for D-Day. I’m hoping Masters will take the time to tour Paris. See the sights.

I’m even cool if some of my tax bucks backstop her tooling around like a kid on a school trip. Because there’s a lot to learn in Paris. Stuff that would be very useful for a prairie mayor. And not just about coffee and croissants.

In the last four years, Paris has completely transformed.

Paris Perspectives

I’ve never been, but apparently Paris used to be overrun by car traffic — congestion and chaos, a vehicular nightmare. But during the pandemic, the city’s mayor, Anne Hidalgo, decided to turn the French capital into a place that puts human beings first. Hidalgo shifted the city’s planning focus from accommodating automobiles and instead has centred pedestrians, bicycles and public transit.

By all accounts, Hidalgo’s efforts have been wildly successful. Paris, the poster-municipality for vibrance and beauty, is now an even more vibrant and more beautiful place to be — a city that’s safe and convenient to explore on foot, by bike, bus or metro.

Check the before-and-after photos online. They’re amazing.[2]

Paris’ mayor is even going a step farther this year and will be banning all private cars and trucks in the city centre.

“A city’s creativity doesn’t depend on cars. That’s the 20th century. We’re in the 21st,” Hidalgo told the media.

Finally!

This is a mayor with a vision for a great city. And it’s a not vision based on wider roads, bypasses or debt-saddled mega-projects.

It’s a vision focussed on people.

That’s something I wouldn’t mind seeing brought home to the Queen City.

In fact, let’s not just send Masters to Paris. Let’s send all of council to Paris. And administration’s entire executive leadership team, too.

Hell, shut down city hall for a week and send every city employee!

Make them take the Metro. Make them drink decent coffee and eat a real croissant. Make them walk through a downtown where you don’t constantly feel under threat of being flattened by a pickup’s wheels.

Maybe if our council sees how awesome a city can be if you stop paving it over for parking and roads, they’ll stop paving our city over with parking and roads.

That’d be tax money well spent, if you ask me.

There was a local city councillor — I won’t name names — who would wax philosophical now and then about how Regina is the greatest city… in the world.

Seriously. Not an exaggeration.

How sad.

Sure, I like it here — I think you’re great! — but how  utterly isolated do you have to be to look at our wide-ass streets, our desolate downtown, our crumbling sidewalks, our acres and acres of empty parking lots and think, that’s the best anyone on this planet can do.

Go to Paris, Regina.

FOOTNOTES

1. Ward 8 councillor Shanon Zachidniak explained her No vote by saying she’s heard from several of her constituents who questioned the value and optics of Masters travelling to France at this time. One resident, Zachidniak said, pointed out that in the 2022 budget process, after council voted in favour of Ward 4 councillor Lori Bresciani’s motion to cut the operating budget by $2.9 million, travel by staff was one of the things that was pruned. City manager Nikki Anderson confirmed that after the Bresciani Budget Cut (my term), staff travel had been slashed by 25 per cent but added that administration and council travel are entirely different budgets. Zachidniak countered that the point was not that the two travel budgets were financially linked but rather that it looks bad to have the mayor travelling to make connections and represent Regina around the world — first to Dubai and then to France — when city administration’s ability to do the same has been curtailed.

2. Hidalgo’s transformation of Paris has not happened without opposition, both local and international. You’ve heard about the 15-minute city conspiracy theory? Well, Paris is where that started. Hidalgo is the first mayor to implement 15-minute city ideas in the real world. For her, the goal is to create a city where all your daily necessities — work, groceries, school, entertainment and recreation — can all be accessed conveniently and safely within 15 minutes by walking, cycling or taking public transit. That’s it. It’s about freeing people from the shackles of having to own a private automobile. It’s also about reducing greenhouse gas emissions and, you know, trying to stave off the end of the world by climate change. But in the mind of conspiracy assholes, this has been perverted into a New World Order scheme to spy on people and control where they go. It’s all such fucking nonsense that’s awfully convenient for the oil industry, if we’re going to get conspiracy minded. If Hidalgo’s plans fail, it won’t be because she’s making Paris too nice. It’ll be because of a loud, reactionary movement of paranoid dorks screaming “Libérez Ma Voiture Ou Donne-Moi La Mort!”