In the week leading up to the 2026 Municipal Election, we will be featuring profiles for candidates running for Mayor in Niagara's three largest municipalities - St. Catharines, Niagara Falls and Welland.
Today's candidate is Henry Bosch, who is running in St. Catharines. Bosch has 23 years of experience as a CUPE member and activist, bringing extensive union leadership and advocacy experience. He previously served as president of Local 1097 at Hotel Dieu Hospital. His experience includes board involvement, founding membership in the CUPE Ambulance Committee of Ontario (CACO), and liaison roles with the injured workers and CACO committees. Henry has also advocated against health-care privatization, campaigned to protect workers’ rights, helped elect labour-friendly municipal candidates and ran as the provincial NDP candidate in St. Catharines.
What is the single biggest issue facing your municipality right now, and what is the first concrete thing you would do as mayor to address it?
Homelessness. And because homelessness here, everyone thinks it's mental health and addictions, but it's three-pronged. It's mental health, it's addictions, and it's financial. I know some people that live in their cars with their kids. And what I would do is I would look at some of the vacant buildings, the schools and stuff, and see if we can retrofit them to make temporary housing, because what they want to do here is they want to make them, they want to just find a place when we'll ship them off somewhere else. make it temporary housing, then bring in some of the agencies to figure out with communication as to why these people are homeless and what can we do to help them and to reintegrate them back into society. It's going to take more than one conversation, obviously, but you need to talk to them. Sometimes they're shy to talk to you at first, but after they get to know you and realize you're there to try to help or the agencies are trying to help, a lot of people will reach out for the help.
Property taxes are a major concern for many residents. How would you balance keeping taxes affordable with the need to maintain roads, infrastructure and municipal services - and are you willing to raise taxes if you believe it's necessary?
Well, first of all, you would have to look at the budget. I don't have the ability to know what the numbers are and where the spending's been going, but you would have to look at where they're spending and why and where they're not spending and why, and to see if there can be some middle ground. I do know there was an issue that came up a little while ago where they spent, they put in their budget $900,000 for a pickleball court and 1.1 million for a ball diamond. Well, that's $2 million that could have gone to other stuff, even though we have infrastructure and roads and all that failing. I realize those are important things, but at the time when your city is potentially crumbling, maybe they should have been deferred and not the infrastructure and the housing problems and stuff like that.
Niagara continues to grow. How should your municipality handle new development and housing while making sure infrastructure and services can keep up with that growth?
What you do is when a developer comes in and they want to say they tear down one house and they're going to put four units in there, you have to let them know that they're going to have to help with the infrastructure because you can't just tie into one sewer thing. And that's the problem we've been having. Everyone ties in the sewer and the water and then we get the backlog because you go from, say, one or two toilets flushing to now nine or 10. So you would say it's a developer you want to build. However, you're gonna have to build some type of contingency in there to aid with the feeding into the infrastructure. You're not just gonna be able to tap in and say, okay, you know, we have these houses. So that's that's one issue that that could be done.
What do you believe Niagara's municipalities and the Region should be doing differently together, and what would you personally do as mayor to improve regional cooperation?
What you have to do is you have to work with the other municipalities. I know that they've said that the regional government, there's a lot of duplication services or there's a lot of services that the region has dumped back onto the different municipalities, which should be region run. And therefore, if it's region run, such as roads and stuff like that, there's some roads that should be and infrastructure should be done by the region, then all the municipalities would get in If you all get together, you can say, OK, on this one, we need to work on the infrastructure for the roads or we need to work for the garbage collection and stuff. There's so much segmentation that if you work collaboratively together, it can work. And that's why I was kind of against only the mayors becoming the regional councillors because there's so much more work to do, not just in your city, in your municipality, but in the region that it's going to be a huge workload for the 12 mayors. And to my opinion is that some stuff might just get sloughed off and some of the lower tier municipalities like Pelham and that might not be able to gain as much as say St. Catherine's that because you have more votes. And the current mayor says he's not going to use those powers that way. But he also did in the same sentence say that we will. You know, there'll be a give and take. I'll give you this if I get that. So it needs to be more of a collaborative of the 12 getting together and figure out what's the big issue that the 12 of us can fight for or elaborate for or put the money into.
If elected, what is one thing you would change about how your municipality operates that residents would actually notice within your first year?
Well, we would look at the taxes and try to level them off. That's one of the first things. And they would notice that we clean up the city. There's a lot of St. Catharines was called the Garden City, but now I'm not really sure what. There's not any gardens much left anymore. I know years ago they put what's called the rock pile on the corner of St. Paul and Ontario Street there. There could be a lot more greening, shall we say, of the city to make it more appealing because we sit in a very enviable position because we're fed by two major highways, the 406 and the QEW. We're one of the only municipalities that's fed by both almost directly. So we can promote the city that way. And if it's a beautiful city or if it's a clean city, that's what we need to promote.
Four years from now, what do you want residents to be able to point to and say, "That's what this mayor accomplished"?
Exactly what he said he would try to do. That's simple answer on that one, because I don't know how many times you hear. Well, I couldn't do this or couldn't do that. So I'm not saying I can do. I'm saying I will look at the budget and see what we can do to make this work. I'm gonna try and push as much as my agenda through through council. And if the residents don't want certain issues, then I'm gonna instruct council as well to not, you know, to not push one person's issue if it's if it's gonna affect the rest of the residents. So we need to be more collaborative as a around the horseshoe there. They need to work more together as 12, not as the different wards.
Bosch is one of five candidates running for Mayor in St. Catharines, alongside Mat Siscoe, Ann-Marie Zammit, Anthony Adeoye and Jimmy Jackson.