Downtown

The problem

Ask a downtown business owner what's hardest right now and you'll hear about the street: people in crisis in doorways, public substance use, vandalism, staff who came to work in retail or hospitality and are spending their shifts acting as front-line social workers. You'll hear that safety perceptions drive foot traffic, and foot traffic drives whether the doors stay open.

I want to answer this carefully, because it's where candidates most often promise what they can't deliver. Homelessness services — shelters, outreach, social services, public health — are Niagara Region's responsibility, not the City's. Policing is regional too. I won't tell you a city councillor can fix homelessness; anyone who does is overpromising. My full position on the drug-use and homelessness crisis, including what I'd ask of the Region and the Province, is on its own page: Public Drug Use and Homelessness.

But the impact of the crisis doesn't land on the Region's property. It lands on ours: City sidewalks, City parks, City by-laws, buildings the City has the power to inspect and enforce against. Managing the impact on the community is squarely the City's responsibility, and the City has more tools for it than it's using. That's the part of this file a councillor owns, and I'll treat it that way.

The other half of downtown's problem is quieter. Storefronts sit empty not because nobody wants them, but because taking one over can mean inheriting years of unknown compliance problems. That's a City process problem with a City solution, and it has its own page: business permitting.

And then there's the garbage.

Garbage and recycling downtown

Downtown business owners are telling me collection has become a serious problem this year. They're right, and the reason matters, because the fix sits in a different place than most people assume.

Niagara Region collects garbage, organics, and recycling in St. Catharines. But the Region provides a base level of service — inside a designated business area, that's one garbage pickup a week; outside it, one every other week. Anything above that is an enhanced service, and in the Region's own words, each local municipality "directly pays for the cost" of the enhanced services it chooses. The four-day-a-week garbage pickup in the downtown core isn't something the Region decided to provide. It's something the City of St. Catharines decided to buy.

So the service level downtown is a City budget decision. That's the whole point.

Two things changed the picture this year. First, on January 1, 2026, the Region stopped collecting recycling from businesses altogether — a consequence of Ontario's new Blue Box rules, which hand residential recycling to producers and leave commercial properties out. In the downtown enhanced area, recycling dropped to a single Saturday pickup. Businesses outside that area were told to hire a private hauler. The Downtown Association went to the Region's Public Works Committee in March 2025 to make the case for downtown businesses. The Region made the change anyway.

Second, the enhanced area is a map, and not every downtown business is on it. A business on a "basic collection" street gets one pickup a week on Tuesday. Church Street is inside the BIA but outside the enhanced recycling zone. If you're wondering why your neighbour's bins are emptied four times a week and yours sit for seven days, that's why.

What the City already does well points at the answer. Downtown has shared front-end cardboard containers that businesses use together — an enhanced service the City pays for — and a public-space recycling pilot with bins throughout the core. Both work. Neither has been scaled to cover the gap the Region's change opened.

Parking downtown

Ask a downtown landlord why a building is still empty and you'll hear about safety first. The second answer is parking. Owners tell me they've lost prospective anchor tenants — employers who would bring hundreds of jobs downtown — because those tenants couldn't secure enough long-term parking for their staff.

The City is the main supplier of that parking. It runs two downtown garages and eight lots, more than 1,000 spaces in all, and it sells monthly permits first-come, first-served — in its own words, "due to the high demand for parking in the downtown core." Since 2013, new development downtown hasn't been required to build parking of its own. That was the right call for a walkable core, but it means a tenant moving into an existing downtown building depends almost entirely on what the City can offer.

Meanwhile, some of the empty land downtown can't help. Property owners tell me that once a building comes down, the lot can't be used for parking — even when the owner wants it to be. A vacant lot that sits behind a fence for years is the worst outcome on every count: no building, no tax growth, no parking, and one more gap on the street.

Council endorsed a review of parking services in June 2025, focused largely on modernizing outdated systems. That's useful. It isn't the same as a plan for where the next employer's staff will park.

The downtown bus terminal

ATU Local 846 represents Niagara Transit's operators and maintenance workers, and has endorsed my campaign. On October 2 I met with its president, Gord Campbell. His message for the City was short:

"We need more security in the downtown terminals."

The local also tells me there are currently no vehicle detailers at Niagara Transit's St. Catharines garage on First Street Louth.

Who runs it. Since January 1, 2023, Niagara's buses have been run by the Niagara Transit Commission, a board created by Regional Council. The City's transit system — its buses, garage and routes — was transferred to the Commission at that point. The Commission's budget is set within a cap approved by Regional Council. City council does not staff the terminal or the garage, hire cleaners or security, or set the Commission's budget. A city councillor who tells you otherwise is overpromising.

What the City does hold is three seats on the Commission's board. According to the Commission's website, those seats belong to Mayor Mat Siscoe, Councillor Dawn Dodge, and Ward 4 Councillor Caleb Ratzlaff. The City's voice on the terminal is the people in those seats.

What the Commission says. Its rider-safety page says security staff are on site at the St. Catharines terminal during operating hours, and that cameras cover the bus bays and waiting areas. The terminal's posted hours are 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday to Saturday, and 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Sundays and holidays. I'm asking the Commission what security presence is at the terminal and when, where and when its buses are cleaned, and whether it tracks assaults on its operators. I'll publish the answer.

On assaults. Since 2015 the Criminal Code has treated an assault on a transit operator as an aggravating factor at sentencing. ATU Canada estimates about 3,000 assaults on transit operators a year across the country, counting only the ones that get reported. Charging and sentencing are federal and police matters; a councillor can't change either. What a councillor can ask is whether Niagara Transit counts assaults on its people, publishes the number, and has a standard for what happens after one.

What I'll do

• Seek one of the City's seats on the Commission board. That board is the one place a St. Catharines councillor can put terminal security, bus cleaning and operator safety on the agenda and vote on the budget that pays for them.
• Treat the terminal block as City ground. The sidewalks, lighting and by-law presence on St. Paul and Carlisle around the terminal are the City's. The downtown by-law presence and the single reporting channel above apply there first.
• Ask the Commission, in writing and in public, for three things: security at the downtown terminal for every hour buses use it, not only the hours the waiting room is open; coach cleaners at the St. Catharines garage; and a published count of assaults on operators and what follows each one. These are asks of the Commission, labelled as asks.
• Keep transit public. The Commission contracts its rural and specialized microtransit to a private operator, and has asked the Province and Ottawa for $10 million in capital to bring that service in-house, because the contract limits its control over the service. I support that. A publicly run, publicly accountable system is the one I'll back from a Commission seat and at council.

What a councillor can't do

A city councillor cannot fund, run, or fix the shelter and treatment system; that's the Region and the Province, and pretending otherwise is how this file got where it is. A councillor can't direct the police. A councillor can't rewrite the Province's recycling regulation or run the Region's collection contract. And a councillor can't clear people out of public space by decree — Ontario courts have set limits on what municipalities can do where shelter alternatives don't exist, and any protocol the City adopts has to be lawful or it won't survive. What a councillor can do is make sure the City's own half of this file — enforcement, maintenance, public space, partnership, and the collection service the City itself buys — is done consistently, funded, and reported on. That's the honest version of "dynamic," and it's the one I'm offering.