When she was elected to city council in 1980, Helen Promislow (NDP - Kildonan Park) hoped to push the civic government in new directions. Today, after two years on the job, she feels it might be easier to move a mountain than bring change to city hall.
The civic government "is like an enormous complicated machine," she says. "It creaks, occasionally it moves, but it isn't flexible. It hasn't any room for new ideas."
Promislow's complaint is heard frequently at city hall these days. Of a dozen councillors surveyed, all expressed varying degrees of frustration at their inability to get things done at city hall during the last two years. Some, like Promislow, blame civil servants who seem to stubbornly resist change. But they also blame council itself for failing to show strong leadership during troubled times.
Winnipeg faces major crises brought on by recession, yet a number of councillors feel city council seems bogged down by trivial matters such as whether to continue running a sight-seeing train to Shoal Lake.
"We do all right solving the short term problems, but on the long term policies, we seem to be spinning our wheels," says Charles Birt (Pembina) that ICEC's caucus chairman. "We aren't addressing the right issues. For instance, we spend 2½ hours debating nuclear disarmament, and then only two hours on the rest of the agenda."
In the last few years, "council has seemed dead in the water," says Harold Macdonald (ICEC - Corydon). "We haven't come up with one single major program. Both the Core (Area Initiatives) program and Plan Winnipeg really came from the other levels of government."
"One of our biggest accomplishments (since 1980) was to stop the (proposed) Sherbrook McGregor Overpass." It says something about this council, he agrees, that its most significant act the last two years has been to kill a bridge.
Council's seeming inactivity stems at least in part from the recessionary times. "It's easy to look like a winner when you're growing," says Gerry Ducharme (Ind. - Seine Valley.)
But no government looks very progressive now. We haven't got the money."
However, a number of councillors say lack of money isn't the only problem. In varying degrees, they feel like bit players in a game controlled by the city's administrators.
The most common complaint is over information. Councillors generally feel they often don't get enough specific information to reach their own conclusions about certain issues.
"We're literally snowed under by paper, but it usually isn't the right kind of information," says Promislow. "We can't question the administration's conclusions because we don't have our own research. We don't know what questions to ask."
This feeling of alienation extends beyond council's NDP caucus. In one example, Coun. Larry Fleisher (ICEC - Crescent Heights) says he waited nine months to get information from the administration about how other Western Canadian cities handle their amusement tax.
On another occasion, he says he has been given information that is obviously incorrect. "They told me, for instance, that repairs to the St. James bridge would only cause a 10-minute delay at peak traffic. I drove it myself and I know it's more like 40-minutes."
"When I get information like that, I begin to wonder: are they giving me good information, or are they feeding me a crock that fits their own point of view?"
Fleisher doesn't blame the administration. "They got a job to do, but sometimes I get the feeling that they're running the city and I have very little to do with it."
Coun. Jim Ragsdill, the most outspoken critic of the city's civil service, says city staff have the power to kill any program they don't support.
"It's easy to get something done if they (city staff and administrators) support it. But the minute you want something they oppose, they'll give you 15 different reasons why it won't work."
Ragsdill, the city's ambulance commission chairman, says the best example is the proposed amalgamation of the city's ambulance and fire departments. The amalgamation would save lives and save the city $500,000 a year, he says. "But it's been delayed 2½ years, because the city's fire department doesn't want it."
In fact, Ragsdill believes some city civil servants may go beyond passive resistance to undermine a proposal or policy that doesn't suit them.
"I remember a couple of years ago I told council 'let's look at cutting back city staff by 10 per cent.' Well, right after that I started getting calls in my district about roads that weren't being plowed and whole lanes of garbage that were missed. I'm not saying it was deliberate, but it sue was a coincidence."
Both Mayor Norrie and the city's chief commissioner, Nick Diakiw, reject the notion that city staff wold actively work against a city councillor in such a manner.
"I would be shocked if something like that were to happen," says Diakiw. "I like to think we have a professional civil service that carries out the wishes of council as best it can," he says. "Generally speaking, we try to supply the kinds of information a councillor seeks, although there may be delays from time to time."
Norrie agrees. Many councillors still won't accept the fact that they have to leave the running of the city to the board of commissioners and the administration, he says. Before Unicity, when the city was organized into six municipalities," councillors were virtual administrators in their own districts. That attitude, he says, lingers on.
Norrie rejects the argument that council is less effective now than two years ago. "I think council is more together and cohesive than ever before."
However, his deputy mayor, Jim Ernst (ICEC - Grant's Mill), doesn't agree. Ernst says council has lost its direction since the last election, partly because of the once-dominant ICEC party has lost much of its power.
Council needs some majority group, he says, "either the ICEC or some other group. Otherwise council has no clearly-defined philosophy.
Macdonald agrees. "For good or for bad, the ICEC was a leading force." Now that it no longer commands a majority on council, "we got a group of solo players trying to play every game in town."
This isn't the first time that city councillors have bemoaned the lack of long-term planning. In 1979, council scheduled policy meetings to thrash out major issues facing the city. But only a few councillors showed up for the first session, so the rest were abandoned.
However, councillors such as Bill Neville, chairman of the environment committee, believe council has to change or the city will find itself in trouble.
"We're facing problems such as 'no growth' for which we have no past experience. We need visionary people who can make the system change to suit the new circumstances.
Neville, Macdonald and several other councillors would like to see Winnipeg adopt a system used by Edmonton and Calgary in which councillors have a budget to hire research staff.An assistant would help clear away some of the "incredible minutae that we have to deal with," says Neville.
The problem, he concedes, is that very few visionary people become councillors and the ones that do tend to become burned out. "They get tired, they get distracted. Eventually, the inertia of the system takes over."