Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press (Newspaper) - August 12, 2024, Winnipeg, Manitoba THINK TANK COMMENT EDITOR: RUSSELL WANGERSKY 204-697-7269 ● RUSSELL.WANGERSKY@WINNIPEGFREEPRESS.COM A7 MONDAY AUGUST 12, 2024 Ideas, Issues, Insights Turning around the decline of Portage Avenue P ORTAGE Avenue, as it runs through down- town, was once a great street to visit, walk along and shop. It’s not so much anymore. Today, little remains of its glory days as one of Canada’s busiest shopping streets. What contribut- ed to this demise and is there a way forward? Portage was a vibrant and diverse street with large retailers anchoring bustling sidewalks lined with shops and services that catered to the needs of a fast-growing Winnipeg. Cars, bikes, buses and streetcars all made their way along the street and sidewalks were lined with pedestrians, often shoulder to shoulder. In its heyday, you could grab a coffee, see a movie, shoot a game of pool, get a haircut, buy a magazine or attend a medical appointment. But this diversity faded and by the 1970s, decline and empty storefronts began to dominate, especial- ly on the north side of the street. In 1980, govern- ment intervened and poured hundreds of millions of dollars to bring back retail. This saw investment in projects such as the Con- course, Portage Place and Eaton Place that were all connected to a growing skywalk system. Despite these investments, Portage Avenue endured a stunning loss of several million square feet of retail over the last few decades. To put this in perspective, you could think of stacking at five or six IKEA stores on top of one another to come close to what has been lost! It’s safe to say the large format retail experiment on Portage Avenue failed. Why? There are lots of theories such as the rise of the suburban mall and the suburbs in general; slow population growth; a faltering economy; the loss of businesses; young people leaving the city; the expanding skywalk system that moved people off the street to perhaps the rise of online shopping (let alone a pandemic). So can we move forward? Over the past 20 years, there has been a resur- gence in the downtown generally but Portage re- mained stalled and much like nearby Graham and perhaps Ellice Avenue, there just was not enough “good” to spread around. Perhaps the following considerations might help Portage reclaim its title as a great street. First: Portage needs to become a great walking street. We can only do this by encouraging people and businesses to make it such. Investment has to make it attractive to stroll, shop and linger with a range of service types and experiences available. For example, on a recent Friday at noon, I counted a mere 250 people on Portage between Memorial and Main. We need this to rise to several thousand. This might sound impossible but there should be 50,000 workers, 20,000 students, 18,000 residents and thousands of daily visitors to draw from in the downtown on any given day. Second: The redevelopment of the former Bay and Portage Place. It might seem counterintuitive to say the loss of over a million square feet of retail in these two projects will help grow retail, but my view is this will create street-level opportunities. There simply must be a reasonable threshold of retail function along Portage to support the popu- lation noted above. What better location than on a highly visible and historic thoroughfare? As well, these two projects will add even more housing to Portage that includes some already great office conversions. Third: Creating a vibrant street-level environ- ment. To encourage visitors, residents and workers to truly experience the street, there must be more investment in design, great lighting, better sidewalks and art. This will make walking and experiencing the street so much better. Four: Using sidewalks more creatively. While encouraging patios can help, sidewalks offer opportunities for small-scale retail, food carts, art installations and pop-up activities. We must plan for this to be, where possible, year round. We are a winter city and it’s time to use our outdoor spaces in the downtown more creatively year round. Five: Removal of the bunkers at Portage and Main. Portage must be walkable to and from the Forks and Exchange. This will enhance movement and encourage more pedestrian engagement along the street. We have thrown a lot of money at Portage Av- enue in hopes that large projects would leverage further investment (both retail and commercial). This did not pan out well. For Portage to become a great street again, it needs to start with an invitation for people to come back — but only to a street that has more to offer. In my view, there are plenty of people in the downtown. They just need better reasons to be on the street. Jino Distasio is a professor of urban geography at the University of Winnipeg and is a lifelong Portage Avenue walker, visitor and shopper. African protests mirror roots of Arab Spring ANTI-GOVERNMENT demonstrations that roiled Kenya in June are echoing across Sub-Saharan Africa. The demands differ slightly from country to country yet share the same narrative. Digitally savvy youths are using social media to organize actions lashing out against the corruption and state mismanagement that are eroding living standards. For years, the region’s governments binged on cheap credit as it sloshed around in financial markets, especially after the 2008 financial crisis. Oftentimes it simply financed the self-enrichment of political elites. Easy access to money also tended to cover up for bad policymaking that has partial- ly squandered three decades’ worth of economic growth. From 1990 to 2018, Latin America and South Asia reduced the share of their populations living in extreme poverty (less than US$1.90 per day) by more than half. Over that same time period Sub-Saharan Africa saw a reduction of only 15 per cent. Now, creditors’ lifelines are receding given higher interest rates and a more uncertain global economy. The mounting fallout of climate change is also diverting state spending away from other priorities such as security, education and health care. Citizens’ purchasing power is meanwhile withering in economies reliant on imports and suffering double-digit inflation. Make no mistake: the region still has vast po- tential. It possesses immense natural resources, a population that is overwhelmingly under 30 years old and forms the bulk of the world’s largest free trade zone. But electorates are increasingly impa- tient with leaders unable or unwilling to deliver on the promises they rode to power on. Kenyan President William Ruto’s experience epitomizes this. Ruto got elected in 2022 by lever- aging his humble roots as a chicken seller. His campaign branded him as a “hustler” in touch with the needs of struggling young people. Yet Ruto — one of Kenya’s richest men — is also complicit in running up the country’s crushing US$80-billion debt burden. He served as deputy to his predecessor, former president Uhuru Kenyatta, for nine years before getting the top job. During this time, the head of Kenya’s anti-graft agency said a third of the state budget, some US$6 billion per year, was being siphoned off by corruption. Around three-quar- ters of Kenyan government tax revenue now goes toward servicing its borrowing costs. To plug fiscal holes, Ruto’s government has steadily hiked taxes since last year. All of this while his administration has allotted close to $10 million to offices gifted to his and his vice-presi- dent’s spouses. The moves have earned Ruto, a de- vout evangelical Christian, the nickname “Zakayo” — Swahili for Zaccheus, a greedy tax collector from the Bible. The final straw came in late June, when Ruto advanced a tax bill proposing new levies on a swath of consumer staples, ranging from bread to diapers, on a population where nearly 40 per cent of 18- to 34-year-olds are unemployed. Thousands of anti-government demonstrators filled the streets on-and-off for several weeks. They torched govern- ment buildings in several cities and encircled par- liament buildings in the capital, Nairobi. At least 61 people were killed and hundreds were arrested by security forces in the ensuing crackdown. Ruto has since scrapped his tax proposal, sacked his entire cabinet and tried to initiate a national dialogue. But significant damage to his credibility has already been done. Indeed, credit services agency Moody’s in July downgraded Kenya’s sov- ereign credit rating to junk status. This inspired demonstrations a month later in Uganda, to criticize the rule of 79-year-old autocrat Yoweri Museveni. In power since 1986 — before the majority of Ugandan voters were born — Mu- seveni’s regime has intimidated, harassed and violently suppressed dissent for years. The country has been near the bottom of Transparency Inter- national’s Corruptions Perception Index for over a decade, ranking 141 out of 180 countries in 2023. In Nigeria, a coalition of civil society groups then organized 10 “days of rage” in early August. With inflation sitting above 34 per cent, they demanded that President Bola Tinubu reverse sweeping reforms enacted last year that ended government fuel and electricity subsidies and abandoned a fixed exchange rate for the country’s currency. Despite consensus among economists that the moves were needed to fix Nigeria’s sclerotic economy, implementation was rushed to appease foreign investors. Tinubu still approved US$38 million in luxury perks last November for his fellow lawmakers. In early 2010, popular youth-led uprisings against endemic corruption and economic malaise coalesced into the Arab Spring, toppling rulers in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and elsewhere. Current protests in Sub-Saharan Africa evidently share the same roots. Whether demonstrators can maintain mo- mentum and produce similar results is an open question. Kyle Hiebert is a Winnipeg-based political risk analyst and former deputy editor of the Africa Conflict Monitor. Trump’s grievance pinball “UNHINGED” has become a shopworn word in the years since Donald Trump descended the escalator in Trump Tower. But the former president’s hour- long news conference last Thursday afternoon from his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida might have been a new personal best. It’s clear what is going on. Trump, who only three weeks ago thought he had this election in the bag, is freaking out over the ascendance of Vice President Kamala Harris to the top of the Democratic ticket. Trump sees what we all see: the euphoria that has overtaken Harris’s party, the tens of thousands who are flocking to her inaugural swing through battleground states, the torrent of poll numbers that show the race is suddenly tied. “We were given Joe Biden, and now we’re given somebody else,” he said, adding — not convincingly — “I think, frankly, I’d rather be running against somebody else.” But rather than framing a sharp and coherent case against Harris, which his strategists so desperately want him to do, the former president on Thursday veered from grievance to grievance like a pinball. As he took questions from the media, desperation was practically oozing from his pores. And without the cheers of a rally crowd punctuating his rambling mono- logue, the incoherence of what he had to say was all the more apparent. How much Trump misses and needs those throngs of supporters was clear. Again and again, he boasted — lied, actually — about their size. “Nobody has spoken to crowds bigger than me,” Trump said, claiming that he drew more people to the National Mall than the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. did in 1963 when the civil rights leader gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. He lamented, falsely, that the numbers that Harris is drawing have been inflated by the media. Yet Trump has been strangely absent lately from the stage he loves and his most recent appearances have been disasters. He delivered a racist rant about Har- ris at the National Association of Black Journalists convention on July 31 and days later attacked Georgia’s popular Republican governor, Brian Kemp, during a rally in Atlanta. This week, his only rally is on Friday in deep-red Montana. Asked why he is doing so little cam- paigning, Trump first dismissed that as a “stupid question” and then claimed it is “because I’m leading by a lot and because of letting their convention go through a lot, I’m doing tremendous amounts of taping here. We have com- mercials that are at a level I don’t think that anybody’s ever done before.” Really? In the first five days of this month, Trump and his allies spent about US$16.5 million on advertising, accord- ing to AdImpact. That compares with about US$23 million by President Joe Biden, Harris and their allies. Since early March, the ad-tracking firm estimates, the Democratic side has spent nearly three times as much as Trump’s has. The truth about Trump and his fixations is often made clearest by what he chooses to lie about. He’s scared, because he is running behind — in polls and in fundraising. And he isn’t at all sure what to do about it. And, oh, there was some actual news in this news conference: Trump proposed three dates next month for debates with Harris. As of this writing, Harris has agreed to one of them, on Sept. 10, sponsored by ABC News. That is the same arrangement previously agreed to by Trump and Biden. There have been many unpredictable twists in this campaign, and surely there will be more to come. For now, however, the biggest question is whether Trump, a master of driving events, can climb out of the back seat in which he finds himself. Karen Tumulty is a Washington Post associate editor and columnist covering national politics. JINO DISTASIO MIKAELA MACKENZIE/ FREE PRESS FILES The sidewalk in front of Portage Place in Winnipeg in March 2023. Portage won’t be a great street again, Jino Distasio writes, without an invitation for people to come back. KYLE HIEBERT KAREN TUMULTY ;