St. Catharines mayoral hopefuls share plans to address city’s key issues

The Niagara Region is one of the most populated municipalities in the province, with five candidates running for the mayoral seat in St. Catharines.

CHCH News spoke with them and asked each candidate what they believe is the number one issue in the city right now, and what they would do to address it if elected.

“I would like the opportunity for that second term to be able to finish the work that I started with the community,” said St. Catharines incumbent mayoral candidate Mat Siscoe.

As election day approaches, Siscoe says the number one issue he has been hearing at the door revolves around infrastructure.

“We’ve dealt with some pretty devastating floods this summer, and a lot of people have had a lot of questions,” said Siscoe. “I’m pretty proud of our track record this past term, you know we have tripled the amount of money going into water, wastewater, and stormwater. But I’ve been very clear, we need the provincial and the federal governments coming to the table with infrastructure dollars as well — it’s not fair to put all of those costs on property taxpayers.”

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St. Catharines mayoral candidate Ann-Marie Zammit has previously worked for Public Health Ontario in project management. Her top priority is infrastructure, also pointing to the floods.

“The first thing is ensuring that it’s prioritized, and the way to do that is to go to the budget and ensure that is the part of the budget we are going to be taking special attention to,” said Zammit. “The infrastructure was a known issue and to continue to ignore that would be a disservice to the residents, especially now that it has come literally floating to the top.”

St. Catharines mayoral candidate Jimmy Jackson has worked in social services, as a steelworker, and as a business owner. He says the infrastructure is far behind.

“Like, people’s places got flooded,” said Jackson. “To me, as a mayor and as a council member, you should be listening to your engineers that provide these reports, you should be advocating to the province for funding, you should be bringing way more economic development into the city.”

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St. Catharines mayoral candidate Anthony Adeoye worked in business management and within municipal governments, and for him, homelessness is the top issue.

“We have to start looking back to the root cause of this problem, which is poverty and cost living,” said Adeoye. “Once elected, we are going to be making the announcement of a cap on property taxes for the city portion of it, which the mayor is supposed to do.”

St. Catharines mayoral candidate Henry Bosch was a long-time paramedic and union representative, who also says homelessness is top of mind.

“What the current municipal government is trying to do is just trying to find where we move them, to find another place to put them,” said Bosch. “What I say is, we need to look at closed schools or vacant buildings, retrofit them because it’s going to be cheaper than trying to build something and then have the agencies come in.”

Jackson has shared multiple posts on his social media by the Dominion Society of Canada, which is a group calling for mass deportations of immigrants from Canada.

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He also has ties to people identified in some reports as being part of the white nationalist group Second Sons.

CHCH News asked him about the concerns surrounding these ties.

“I don’t fully align with them 100 per cent, but do I think they make a big point — yes, because I’ve talked to services on a municipal level and they are strained, and there’s a lot of people coming here and claiming refugee status when they are not refugees,” said Jackson.

A recent Dominion Society of Canada conference was blocked in Hamilton, and parts of Niagara following pressure from local officials and police due to its views.

Voters will be heading to the polls in less than a week on Oct. 26, and CHCH News will continue to speak with the Niagara Falls candidates before the big day.

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