Winnipeg mayoral candidate Joshua Pagdato prioritizes addiction crisis, homelessness

Joshua Pagdado, welcome to CBC. Thank you. So, you're a newcomer to politics. This is your chance to tell people what you want to tell them. What should they know about you? Okay, Joshua Pagdado is running for mayor because he wants to end the crisis. Period. What crisis? The crisis outside, the epidemic, the opioid crisis, the methamphetamines all over the place, the needles, the crack pipes, all of that. I want the destabilized population to get stabilized. Why is this, you sound like you have some passion in your voice. Tell me why you care so much about it. I just have the formula. I want to assemble a coalition of prefabricated housing industries. And I want to assemble a creative assembly line. Okay, I want to create an assembly line and manufacture 500 micro-homes a year and raise those inside of gated and staffed communities so we can convert our homeless shelters partially into intakes so they can get the health care boost that they need from the province. And I want to sort out who's got what kind of conditions so then we can raise the infrastructure needed with the help inside of that infrastructure. And so this way we can just stop with what we got going on downtown and in other areas surrounding downtown. I think that if we go this direction, we can stop the bleeding. And I believe that if we can figure out creative ways to make real pass to ownership, then we can get a real grip on stabilizing this population. So when you're talking about your plan, your vision to help, you have said, quote, Winnipeg is experiencing overlapping system failures, so housing addiction and crime. So when you're talking about this place with the mini prefab homes, the supports tapping into health care through the province, would all three of those things be addressed within that community, if you will? Yeah. Buses are acting like homeless shelters. Hospitals are acting like homeless shelters. Buses are not staffed homeless shelters. And hospitals are under a constant strain and they're just learning to adapt to this. And I feel that if we can raise the proper infrastructure for these specific issues we're seeing on a daily basis, then we can lighten the workload and stress of our healthcare, police, frontline operators, fire. We can really sit down and find new ways to introduce new public drug use bans. We don't have to have needles all over the floor outside. We can reroute Safe Supply, which is the provincial or federal organization responsible for safe supplies handing all that out we can reroute all of that into the infrastructure infrastructure villages themselves how many of them and do you with do you envision these um communities villages as to use your language within the borders of the city of Winnipeg so i'm going to name the initiative the Pleiades village initiative Pleiades is a star constellation it's it's got um the story is the seven sisters and these seven sisters all have different roles so there can be a village for elders seniors veterans there can be people aging out of CFS young people wanting to have a program where we can create a path to ownership maybe put a down payment on a home at the after the end of a two-year program where you can save $45,000 a year. So you would separate the populations based on what you hear about people's needs, maybe separate the populations by those needs so the supports in these villages will help them? Not necessarily by force, but just offer the opportunities. And then we can create new jobs with this as well. If we can make this program work and the assembly line works, there's no reason why we couldn't expand it into a new manufacturing sector. And maybe If we can make it work in the violence and crime capital of Canada, we can expand this thing nationwide and make Winnipeg the housing manufacturing hub of Canada. We can have a new, maybe surplus economy for the first time in over two decades because we're producing more than we're consuming for once. And other people, if we can find a need for these products that we can develop here, then we can expand it into other opportunities too. We can have a youth workforce development initiative to go with it to support this initiative. And then we can have new opportunities for youth starting grade nine. So let me ask you beyond the village concept and your biggest promise, your biggest thinking in your platform. You also promised to lower the cost of living overall. How would you do that? So I want to target areas. OK, I want to target organizations and pressures on our housing market. i want to create i want to find creative ways to unlock it for our generation i want to i want to bill vacancies because people are abusing it i want to fairly tax vacancy to large corporations and i want to challenge the province of manitoba as well i want to charge them vacancy for the vacancy of manitoba housing i think i feel that that should you know i i think that if i do this It'll stimulate competition back into our housing market, possibly lower the cost of living that way. I know I can't really mess with food municipally unless we break deals with large corporations in our grocery stores. But you're looking at the housing stock that is there. Geopolitically, yeah, that just doesn't sound feasible because of the price of gas and the way things are working out in the world right now. So rather than concentrate on that, I want to focus on what we can do municipally. Now, municipally, you're also looking at, your language is heal the sick. What do you mean by that when it comes to the sales of drug paraphernalia? Originally, when I said heal the sick, stabilizing the population and eliminating the list of excuses in terms of poverty. I want to create shelters that make sense so they can heal inside those new infrastructure, inside those villages. I want them to heal inside the villages and actually get better, recover from drug addiction. I want to ask you, you have a 10-year-old daughter in our last minute here. Why does she think you would be a good mayor? Oh, because she knows that I'm as authentic as it gets. I'm doing this out of sheer willpower, the strength of my hands and my feet. I am not pretend, and she knows it. Why do you think that you would be the best choice of the other 11 people that want the job? oh oh well me personally i'm just i i'm the representative of the people of winnipeg i'm doing this with nothing and i've gotten this far with nothing so that has to say something i'm completely organic um and people are you know tired of the same old same old and and change is a big topic this year but these people are just the just talking about it they don't really know what it is. I'm the embodiment of it. I mean, if you're ready for a change, it's kind of a big deal if I get elected to be the next mayor. Joshua Pagdado, that's our time. Good luck on October 28th. That was easier than it should have been. Thank you for being here. Thank you.