LETTER: Visions are overrated

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 21/11/2023 (721 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If you can tell me how long a piece of string is, I will tell you what’s wrong with downtown.

I should state first that I don’t have an oar in this boat, but I’ve been an unenthusiastic recipient of downtown sympathy for the better part of my life. From where I sit, the progression has been “How do we grow downtown?” to “How do we keep downtown relevant?” to “How do we bring people downtown?” and lately, “How do we fix downtown?” I can’t tell you when the transition from denial to bargaining started, but I do believe the silent majority arrived at acceptance years ago.

I’d like to know where the advocacy for a “vision” is coming from. It presupposes that a vision is needed or in some way will serve to “help” downtown. Is the downtown a business or organization unto itself? Who operates the downtown? Are these operators going to direct efforts in some way through the creation of a vision statement?

The downtown is not a business. It’s not a collective. It’s not a union. It cannot be directed like one. Individual people, property owners, tenants, businesses, non-profits and government entities routinely make decisions that just so happen to occur downtown. That doesn’t mean that from all this activity there’s something that emerges from it and becomes “the downtown” with its own distinct agency.

When I see someone ask for a “vision” for downtown, I see a desire to create a group comprised of individual people, businesses, charities, etc., and say that they need some kind of representation. This is almost always a recipe for disaster because no one can speak on behalf of an entire group. But you can count on there being competition for who’s going to be that representative. Worse yet, if you’re one of the individuals in such a group, can you emancipate yourself without leaving the downtown? Or must you remain involuntarily associated with causes you don’t agree with?

Let me be clear — when I see “vision for downtown,” I expand to “vision for people and businesses who live and operate in the downtown,” to which I then (pessimistically) reveal as “design a class of people based on an arbitrary characteristic, and treat them differently from everyone else.”

I also sense cognitive dissonance. There’s rightful concern about the condition of democracy in Brandon, whether that’s an uncontested mayoral race, or how familiar some faces on council have become, or poor turnout, or uncontested wards. In fact, if you take the amount of votes the mayor received in 2022 and divide it by the number of eligible voters, the percentage is less than 15 per cent. Most of our councillors did not fare much better. Why would we entrust the creation of a “vision” to people who we didn’t give our support to in the first place? Do we want a “vision” to be at risk of re-interpretation every four years?

I’m not arrogant (enough) to suggest what should or should not be done downtown. But I will suggest that no one else knows either. We should all remain highly skeptical of anyone who tells us how long this piece of string is, and question how they stand to benefit from their measurement.

JAMES EPP

Brandon