When Scott Gillingham sits at the mayor’s desk in downtown Winnipeg, one of the things that he looks at is a pair of point shoes gifted to him by a dancer from Canada’s Royal Winnipeg Ballet sitting on a credenza.
“Every time I look at those point shoes, they’re there to remind me of discipline, hard work, putting in the hours of honing one’s craft so you’re ready for the performance moments,” he says.
The artistic inspiration hits Gillingham especially hard on the one day a year that he sits in a room at the RBC Convention Centre with hundreds of members of Winnipeg’s creative community at the Mayor’s Luncheon for the Arts, hosted by the Winnipeg Arts Council. 2026 will mark the fourth time Gillingham has presided over the proceedings, and will be the last of his first term as mayor.
“The Mayor’s Luncheon for the Arts is one of my favourite events of the year because it recognizes something that’s fundamental to Winnipeg’s identity, and that’s the fact that we are a city of the arts,” he says.
Serving the arts through policy
When he first campaigned for mayor back in 2022, Gillingham ran on promises to bolster funding to Winnipeg’s four main performing arts organizations: the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, Manitoba Opera, the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, and the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre. These organizations have used this support (a $2 million fund called the Downtown Arts Capital Fund) for infrastructure upgrades.
“The performing arts communities spend so much of their time obviously raising funds for their performances, but often, it that capital like grants that are necessary,” says Gillingham. “The money for the bricks and mortar are sometimes harder to come by for arts communities, and so we know that for them to deliver their performances, they need to make sure their buildings are operational and in shape and responding to the needs of their audiences.”
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Another infrastructure project related to the arts that Gillingham and city council have taken an interest in is the proposed refurbishment of the Pantages Playhouse Theatre. The executive policy committee has recently directed city staff to explore the possibility of a land exchange deal to gain ownership of land known as the Pantages Annex Parcel that it would, in turn, give to the Performing Arts Consortium (the organization leading the charge on the Pantages project).
Scott Gillingham posing with leaders of downtown arts organizations in 2025. (Source: Royal Winnipeg Ballet)
Gillingham notes that this kind of investment is one part of his administration’s approach to the revitalization of the downtown, which also includes a major investment in housing. “What’s going to be key to the health of Winnipeg’s downtown in the future is more people living in the downtown,” he says. “That will also be very important for the success of the arts community.”