[esquire]

Personally I'd say downtown Winnipeg is progressing. Unfortunately, downtown initiatives have still been mostly top-down (government-driven projects). In a successful downtown, these should be a side dish to bottom-up (market driven) projects. In Winnipeg over the past 50 years, the government driven stuff has been the main course.

Over the last 10-15 years we've been seeing more small scale private sector development, and let's not forget that a large part of that activity in Winnipeg has involved the renovation of old buildings in the Exchange District and surrounding area. So when a bunch of businesses need space in Winnipeg, it might mean few old buildings get renovated while in Calgary it results in a new 20 storey building.

The bottom line is I'd like to see things improve at a quicker pace, but there has certainly been progress over the last 20 years. Anyone who remembers the moribund state of downtown Winnipeg in the late 90s will see that in spite of some changes for the worse (the almost total extinction of downtown as a major retail hub, for example), things have gotten better on the whole.