Wanting to be a role model for women is what led Johanna Downey to run for Caledon Council

February 3, 2022 · 0 Comments

By Rob Paul

Some people grow up with a drive to get into politics, others find themselves engrossed in it out of the sheer love they have for their community.

Johanna Downey didn’t initially plan to run for Caledon Council, but the Ward 2 Regional Councillor is now in the last year of her second term, and it all began nearly a decade ago when fellow Councillor Jennifer Innis approached her about the idea.

“She came to me and said that the Regional seat in Ward 2 will be open and that I should really consider running,” she said. “At the time, Councillor Innis worked for the Mayor as an executive assistant before running for Council—she has a much more political background and me not so much. After she approached me, a number of my neighbours in the Ward 2 community started approaching me to tell me I’d be very good for this. My first instinct was to think it’s an old white guy job because historically, if you looked at our Council that’s what it looked like, even despite having a number of female mayors, there was a disparity.

“That thought stayed in my head and I started to think about my two daughters, and I looked at the homogenous council of old white men and thought, ‘how could they possibly represent their community?’ Their community doesn’t all look like that; maybe at a time it did, but it doesn’t now. The short answer is that I wanted to put myself in a position so that my daughters wouldn’t ever think that role isn’t for me. That was a horrible thing for me to think, that I couldn’t be in that position because people that look like me weren’t, and so I just thought I needed to put myself there so my daughters and other women and minorities will see those positions are for them and that a Council should represent its community in many ways.”

Born and raised in Bolton, Downey moved to the west side of Caledon after she got married to raise a family, which has only strengthened her passion for the community.

“My father moved to Bolton in 1961. He was an elementary school principal and he was very involved in Bolton Rotary, and a lot of community events,” she said. “I think that I’m the same, I have the same love for being active in the community. Not everyone steps out their front door and really takes advantage of what their community has, but I love that we have everything that we have in Caledon. Caledon is an amazing place to live because it has so much to offer. People will maybe go to Brampton for a restaurant for example and I’ll always say, ‘Hey, wait, there’s an actually really great independent restaurant up in Alton you should check out.’ It’s because maybe if you live in Cheltenham or Bolton, you don’t really consider taking the drive within your own town. I’m always telling people we have everything you need here, and I really just love where I live. I think it’s really important to be active and out in the community. I’m a social person, I love coaching soccer, being involved in community events, and volunteering—that’s what builds community. It’s so easy to say your community doesn’t have something and be negative, and I always look at it with the mentality that if somethings missing in your community, then do it, build it.”

Downey has always wanted to ensure there are diverse options for all demographics in Caledon and that’s why one of her biggest accomplishments, she says, was getting a community hub for an area that was in dire need of one.

“On a local level the community hub in Southfields Village is something I’m very proud of,” she said. “It’s still in its infancy, but the concept is quite brilliant and aligns with the Provincial mandate of having a true community hub—having services that families need, fitness, library, pool, seniors’ space, children space, social services. It gives us the possibility of having everything under one roof. When I started, that community literally had nothing. You couldn’t even host a meeting unless you rented the school gym. The phone calls I would get were around seniors and supporting young families. Those were the gaps I saw, and I’m really pleased they’ve been addressed.”

As important as the community hub for Southfields was, the achievement that stands out most to her in her time on Council is the work she’s done to help stop human trafficking in the region, a plan that has had a wide scale impact and will help influence other Region’s in the future.

“On a regional level, my proudest accomplishment is the strategy to address human trafficking in Peel,” she said. “Peel’s municipalities are the only ones to have a strategy, no other municipality in Ontario had endorsed, or written their own strategy. The Province has basically aligned their strategy with ours so there’s quite a few similarities. On top of that strategy, the more tangible piece is that in four short years the strategy was endorsed and we now have two houses in Peel for survivors. Honestly, people tell me all the time I need to talk about my accomplishment, and I always tell them it’s about the team, but I will say that it was 100 per cent me getting that on the table. I’ll take full credit for bringing it to the table, but there was a huge team behind it in terms of actually getting the work done.

“That work had been happening, but they didn’t have the political guidance in order to bring it to the finish line and I’m very proud that I could see where they needed to put themselves and I was able to put them there. Now we have amazing houses operated by Elizabeth Fry (Society of Peel-Halton), the board oversight is Peel Regional Police, and it’s phenomenal. Now other municipalities are modelling after us.”

Going forward, there’s two particularly important initiatives for her as a Councillor; the first is figuring out the illegal land use issues as a result of trucking in the area and the other is keeping students in Peel safe when they get off the bus.

“There’s this idea that we’re trying to shut down trucking and that couldn’t be further from the truth. There’s a policy deficit in how we address the logistics industry. Peel is the goods movement hub of Ontario, if not Canada, it’s a huge driver and we’re the engine. Yet, when we calculate in planning and calculate our employment lands, there isn’t an accurate equation for the number of trips a business generates. It’s great if your municipality has big businesses but we’re not calculating for the trucks on the road and where they stay at night. It’s now turned into a huge problem with trucks being stored on agricultural land. That’s big on my radar at this moment.

“Stop-arm cameras on school buses is getting to the finish line for September 2022. Now all the jerks that drive by school bus stops are going to get tickets. That’s four years in the making because three different ministries funnel into it but because they’re bringing automatic monetary penalties, they’re giving us access to use the system—it won’t have to go through the court, literally if you pass a school bus stop there’s no contesting it. In Peel we have 1,600 buses on the road and there’s 20 bus stop blow-bys per day on average. In Caledon our issue is bigger because the faster a car is going obviously there’s higher chance of it being a fatality (due to more rural routes).”

One of the important aspects of being a councillor in Downey’s opinion is having the ability to stay fluid and adapt policies as the community and its needs change to better serve residents.

“I think that being able to address the needs of your community in a way that is productive and fulsome,” she said. “When I first started, I had a friend in a new neighbourhood who had put up a pool cabana and she ended up having to go to Committee of Adjustments because it didn’t meet the building criteria—their contractor was from Brampton and followed Brampton rules. They ended up having to pay a fine and for a lot line adjustment and she was out of pocket something like $3,000. I told her that I couldn’t un-ring the bell on the situation because I can’t change things case by case, but as a legislator I can make sure that the policy is changed so nobody else has to go through it.

“The reality of our job is to create good policy and legislate so that everything works for everyone. We create rules and policy that can be applied to our entire community and at the time Caledon didn’t have a lot of experience with high density communities, so our rules were written for low density lots. It was about changing policies so that not everyone would have to go through committee of adjustment. It’s about changing policy as the community changes for the betterment of residents.”