Q&A: 'An Edmonton for all of us': Affordability is top priority, mayor says

In his fourth year as mayor of Edmonton, Amarjeet Sohi says he and other members of city council have managed to build more housing, maintain core services, invest in transit and keep the city affordable. 

Appropriately enough for the former bus driver, the mayor did his year-end interview with CBC while riding from Mill Woods to downtown on the Valley Line Southeast LRT, which opened in November 2023. 

Along the way, he talked about his focus on continuing these trends in the final 10 months of his term. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You have a long relationship with transit. How has it changed over 20 years and where do you see it going?

The opening of the Valley Line Southeast LRT is very near and dear to my heart because I worked so hard to get this project going when I was on city council. Now to see it in operation and close to 1.2 million people use this line already. So that is obviously helping with mobility, affordability and providing people with choices — how they want to move around our city. 

And also the bus network has grown considerably. We saw a 34 per cent increase in our bus ridership passenger growth over from last year to this year. 

People often say that they feel transit isn't safe enough. What do you say to that? 

People's personal experiences are what they are. And one incident is too many.

So anyone who has experienced violence or discomfort and disorder on transit, that's their personal experience. I want to acknowledge that but at the same time, we are making it safer. And data will tell you that it's getting better and the ridership is growing and the more people using transit system actually is the best way to make it more safer. 

There has been a crackdown on encampments over the past year. The police, in conjunction with the city, started closing encampments and that displaced quite a few people. Do you agree with that tactic?

Whenever you remove encampments, I hear that from communities, that you're basically dispersing people into other neighbourhoods. Yes, encampments are not safe, they pose a huge safety hazard for neighbourhoods, for people who live in them. But without building more homes, without having more treatment facilities, detox facilities, without having more interim transitional housing, we will continue to deal with symptoms instead of actually looking at fixing the problem that we need to fix.

There is conflict between groups of people about bike lanes. Can you talk about council's decision to spend millions of dollars on bike lanes? 

Building transportation network is a core responsibility of the municipality, whether we build roads, bridges, public transit, bus service or active modes of transportation. Because Edmontonians, not all of them have the ability to drive because of their socioeconomic situations — they can't afford to buy a vehicle or they can't afford gas or insurance costs or other costs related to private transportation. So they deserve a mode of transportation that is affordable for them, that is safe for them.