Congratulations are in order – the people who have spoken did, for most of you anyway, overwhelmingly, giving council a fairly strong mandate to govern the city for the next four years. If there’s going to be a time when confidence amongst you as a group would be at a record high, it is likely going to be now. There’s a lot that could be done. After a rather uneventful campaign filled with uninspired promises by both long-time councillors and legitimate challengers that failed to captivate anyone, maybe we shouldn’t expect that much – but that would mean that the door is wide open for us as a citizenry to be blown away.

To be honest, there’s a lot you as a city council will have to do to inspire the city as a whole, and its young population in particular. If you hadn’t noticed, although margins of victory were quite large by most of you, the actual numbers of voters showing up to the polls – only 38.4 per cent of the city’s registered voting population – were near record lows. Only in the wards where actual races emerged between incumbents and upstart challengers – St. Boniface, River Heights-Fort Garry and North Kildonan – were turnouts anywhere approaching 50 per cent.

In the meantime, the numbers of students and young people voting was much, much less than that, a reflection of not only apathy, but a lack of trust and optimism they have in Winnipeg’s future. As my colleague Mike Pyl wrote in the Oct. 19th issue of The Uniter, “cities can be bold, exciting, and vibrant. They can inspire passion, provoke creativity, and drastically enhance one’s quality of life.” Add to that a good job in our particular fields, and for many of us in the early-to-mid twenties age demographic, the most mobile sector of the country’s population, that’s what we are looking for.

To be sure, Winnipeg has provoked untold amounts of creativity. Our arts and culture scene is flourishing on and off the mainstream track, and the city has offered a high quality of life at a relative bargain to hundreds of thousands of citizens over the years, but that has been, in many regards, in spite of the local political climate, not because of it. Feeling like those chosen to lead the city don’t fully grasp that there’s more to civic governance than basic upkeep can be stifling, leading people to chose to take their businesses, and their lives, elsewhere.

One of the issues raised several times in this election, mostly when the candidates were actually dealing with or debating in front of students, relates directly to this: How are you going to keep the young, educated and creative population in Winnipeg for the long haul? So while it was actually being discussed, the answers nonetheless failed to inspire many of those exact same young people. Just like the city has in many ways.

Young people are naturally curious about the world, and will travel and live elsewhere no matter what, because it’s the easiest time to take a break from the “real lives” of school and settling down. Ideally, these people will come back, armed with a knowledge of the wider world around them, having seen what has and hasn’t worked elsewhere, and fully capable of bringing about positive change to their hometowns.

But that often isn’t the case here. In Toronto, many are calling for the tearing down of the Gardiner Expressway that cuts through the city along the lakefront, making it an election issue. In Ottawa, the city is nearing closer to replacing their aging bus rapid transit system with light rail. And in burgeoning Calgary, for all of its sprawl-induced faults, its downtown is booming and its rapid transit system, the C-Train, runs entirely on wind power. Can you blame people who decide this isn’t the place they want to be after experiencing major cultural, environmental and aesthetic steps forward, and then return to Winnipeg only to find more roads servicing more developments, a repeatedly shelved rapid transit plan, and an empty, often scary, downtown?

So, to the current city council, I say the world, or at least this city, is your oyster; go above and beyond those election promises you made and surprise the many cynics out there who don’t hold high hopes for the next four years. Winnipeg is at a crossroads; with so many cities across the country (and, in an ever-localized era, around the world) taking huge strides to better-position themselves within their regions, countries or continents for an uncertain future, Winnipeg has some catching up to do, especially to provide the opportunities for its young people that other cities are able to do.

I personally will probably leave anyway, as young people with a sense of adventure who desire personal journeys are apt to do. But I'll constantly have an eye looking in on Winnipeg to be in tune with the city and know what's going on back home. After all, Winnipeg will always be home to me, a place I’ll want to be given that it can offer me what I need and want to live a productive, happy life. It’s not an issue of keeping me here, but bringing me back. I wish you luck, new council. For all of our sakes.