Former police chief vying for council

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This article was published 22/09/2022 (1299 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A former Brandon Police Service chief is making his first bid for elected office in this fall’s municipal election.

Richard Bruce, who retired from BPS in 2006, is one of five candidates in Ward 1 vying to fill the vacancy left by incumbent Coun. Jeff Fawcett, who is running for mayor.

Bruce has also been a sessional instructor at Brandon University and the chancellor of St. John Ambulance in Canada for three years.

Through his experiences as a police officer, instructor and working for non-profits, Bruce said he has learned to take the approach of sitting back, listening and figuring out where to go from there.

“You’re better off if you can do things by consensus,” he said in a Wednesday interview. “Every once in a while, as a leader, you have to do something that’s not necessarily perceived as the best view for the aggregate.”

Using the late city councillor Errol Black as an example, Bruce said it’s possible to be the odd person out on an issue while still acting thoughtfully and respectfully.

As his competitors told the Sun in previous articles, Bruce said the issues he has heard most about when door-knocking are traffic and road safety.

“Traffic on Braecrest [Drive] is an issue,” he said. “Traffic getting off Braecrest onto 18th Street is an issue.”

There has been discussion in the city of building a roundabout at the intersection of Braecrest Drive and 18th Street North for years, but it has yet to come to fruition.

While Bruce doesn’t know what the optimal solution for that intersection is, he said an appropriately sized roundabout would be too large for that location.

With more multiplex housing being built and potentially adding hundreds of new tenants and cars to the area, he wonders if it’s possible to push a street like Clare Avenue — which doesn’t connect 18th Street to First Street — all the way through to help handle the traffic.

“On Outback [Drive], two apartment buildings and condos feed into that as well,” Bruce said. “At what point in time do we start to realize that there’s an issue here?”

Bruce said he has heard of people using Knowlton Drive as a shortcut for getting between First Street North and 18th Street North. That, he said, could be problematic given nearby Kirkcaldy Heights School.

At the nearby Sportsplex, Bruce said, something needs to be done about the decaying playground and defunct paddling pool. Since the playground at the school has signs up declaring no trespassing allowed from sunset to sunrise, it means the more publicly accessible playground is in much worse shape.

“It’s always different when you get in there and open up the books to look at them, but there are enough new places coming online that somewhere there must be surface dollars to do these sorts of things,” he said. “There’s lots of kids up there, I’m not sure why they didn’t do something after they took the paddling pool out.”

On the Sportsplex itself, Bruce said he has several questions with all the money that has been spent on it: is there a canteen up and running? What are the services being used there the most? Where are people coming from to use it?

He said he doesn’t believe the city has been taking a results-driven approach to the facility.

Regarding the $30 million the city is looking to borrow to carry out wastewater infrastructure upgrades in the southwest, Bruce said he believes the main issue has been in communication.

One area he said city council needs to improve on is informal meetings.

Earlier this year, the Sun reported that council has been holding informal meetings that are closed to the public and have most or all members present with city staff briefing them on various topics. These meetings have been held for at least the last 20 years but have increased in frequency during the current administration.

“That’s just not good politics,” he said. “Whether it’s organizational or political, what council does should always be a matter of record. I don’t like when councils do that. I see why committees do that, but when committees do that, there’s a record. I wouldn’t participate in that.”

While Bruce doesn’t live in Ward 1, he decided to run in that district because he enjoys the councillor who currently represents his home ward and doesn’t want to run against him, he said.

Until 2018, Bruce was also executive director of Westman Immigrant Services. He retired that year after six former employees of the organization publicly claimed it was a toxic workplace under his leadership.

At the time, Bruce did not comment on the matter when asked by the Sun. He declined to comment on the matter again on Wednesday.

The other candidates running in the ward are Kevin Chambers, Heather Karrouze, Jo-Ann Pasklivich and Jeff Plas.

Election day is Oct. 26.

» cslark@brandonsun.com

» Twitter: @ColinSlark