Rematch one year in the making

Elmwood-East Kildonan voters may get a sense of deja vu at the ballot box next week.

Almost a year ago, incumbent Coun. Emma Durand-Wood won a byelection triggered by the death of former councillor Jason Schreyer with 31 per cent of the vote. She defeated six other candidates.

Two of those candidates have returned for a rematch: project manager Abel Gutierrez, who came in second last October, and Chris Sweryda, the former executive assistant for Schreyer, who finished fourth.

A pair of new faces have also entered the race: plumber Adam Dudek and cosmetics business owner Jessica Wiebe.

Durand-Wood knew winning last year’s byelection came with the understanding that she would have to jump right back into campaigning.

“I knew it would be a very intense year, and it’s motivated me to just do the very best that I can in this short time,” Durand-Wood, 45, said. “There’s a really, really high learning curve to taking on a new job like this.”

Durand-Wood, who has lived in the ward since she first moved to Winnipeg in 2008, said she is proud of the partnership she’s helped foster with St. Boniface Street Links over the past year. Recurrent encampments and the safety of people living both around and in them was a major concern for constituents last year.

This year, she said, questions about the Transit network overhaul that launched last year have dominated during door knocking.

“Looking ahead to the strategic priorities action plan that the new council will do, where we talk about our priorities, what are our common priorities that will translate into budget, that’ll be probably my top priority,” she said.

Gutierrez said he felt compelled to give it another shot this year.

“I felt like there was still a lot of meat on the bone where people maybe weren’t necessarily engaged in the byelection,” Gutierrez, 42, said.

A project manager for a local construction firm, Gutierrez has lived in Elmwood-East Kildonan since childhood, when he was moved into a foster home in the ward. He also volunteers with a number of groups in the area, including as a football coach and with his church.

He wants to address open drug use, petty crime, and vacant and derelict buildings, a particularly prevalent issue in Elmwood.

“We have a lot of boarded up, burnt-out shells in Elmwood … I anticipate that this winter is going to have a large amount of vacant building structure fires here in Elmwood-East Kildonan, just because of the number of structures that we have that are unoccupied,” he said.

Chris Sweryda, 39, juggles his time between finishing his master’s degree in law and running the Jason Schreyer Memorial Grocery Affordable Access Program, which sells food at below supermarket costs for low-income shoppers.

The program, which was launched in July 2025, was important to Schreyer, who was the area councillor from 2014 to 2025. Sweryda said his friend had even spent the day before his death hauling groceries for it. Today, it has expanded to three locations and about 500 families participate.

Getting the volunteer-run grocery program off the ground in the midst of the byelection meant Sweryda was only able to campaign for about three weeks last year, he said. This time, he said, he’s all in, and would hire staff to oversee operations if he was elected.

“It seems like most people don’t know who (Durand-Wood) is,” Sweryda, who lives along the edge of the ward in North Kildonan, said. “A lot of people still think Jason (Schreyer’s) their councillor, it’s kind of sad.”

Schreyer hired him in 2022 following a Free Press series based on Sweryda’s research on financial mismanagement in the city’s public works department related to traffic intersections.

Probing “the way the city spends money” is a top priority for him should he be elected.

“What I uncovered when I was doing that work seems to be a generalized mismanagement of the way money is handled in the city,” he said.

Dudek has been a plumber for more than two decades and comes from what he describes as a family of builders. That instilled an attitude in him that inspired him to run for city council.

“If you see a problem, you get your hands on it and you fix it, or figure out how to fix it,” Dudek, 42, said.

“So, with my love for this community and my neighbours, I saw a city that I’m not proud to drive down the street, and I saw a chunk of my ward that is falling into crime.”

Like other candidates, crime, safety and transit concerns are major issues he’s hearing about, but he also noted issues with infill housing are growing.

He promised to restore public hearings for density increases and said the city needs to be “reined in” on infills, especially in a working-class ward like his.

“A lot of our residents are pretty upset with it, and when I found out that city hall took neighbourhood’s voices away to oppose things like infills going in, that’s something I’m going to be very publicly putting forward to reinstate,” he said.

Wiebe never thought she would take a swing at city politics, but said she’s grown “fed up” with the city’s lax response to crime and was moved to action after two murders in the ward happened close to her home.

“As a parent, I think that that is my main priority, just making sure not only my kids have a safe future to grow up in, but also everybody else’s children,” Wiebe, 37, said.

Wiebe said she has experience living in Manitoba Housing and accessing income assistance, and has studied addictions and community health work.

She said voters want a councillor more focused on public safety initiatives, including increasing investment in drug recovery centres.

“I’ve had some residents actually send me emails privately about the drug use that is going on within our immediate community, and I know that I’ve been hearing a lot about the gang violence, the drugs, stolen property is a big one,” she said.

During the 2025 byelection, there were 31,819 eligible voters in Elmwood-East Kildonan. There were 4,977 votes cast at that time.

Election Day is Oct. 28.

malak.abas@winnipegfreepress.com