Two of four mayoral candidates share vision for Fort Erie’s future

Fort Erie incumbent mayor Wayne Redekop and challenger Juan Liu sat down for a mayoral debate in the studio at YourTV/Cogeco on Tuesday night.

The pair–only two of the four running for mayor in the 2026 municipal elections–shared their views and intentions for Fort Erie during a series of 12 questions delivered by debate moderator Anthony Luongo.

Through the lens of topics like health care, amalgamation and more, voters can learn how these two candidates envision the future of the town.

With their different backgrounds, Redekop and Liu are taking different approaches to how they’d handle the mayor’s seat.

Redekop grew up in Fort Erie and has extensive experience in the political sphere. He sat on Fort Erie town council from 1991 to 1994, spent nearly 10 years as mayor from 1997 until 2006 and has held the mayor’s seat since 2014.

Originally from Sichuan, China, Liu has called Crystal Beach home for 10 years. Although she doesn’t have any political background, she’s confident her world travels and study of other political systems are a solid foundation for her mayoral aspirations.

From the first question, touching on the town’s struggles with maintaining health-care services in partnership with Niagara Health, the difference in their approach was apparent.

Redekop spoke of projects already in motion, such as the recent approval to build a business case for a health-care hub as part of the Reimagining Douglas Memorial initiative.

He shared that such a hub has plans for services like expanded urgent care hours, primary care services and specialty clinics. These, he feels, will provide “the opportunity to ensure that the people who live in Fort Erie can access local health care in Fort Erie.”

“We are dedicated to ensuring that urgent care services will remain in Fort Erie and that we will have the health care services that our residents require,” he said.

Liu agreed that Fort Erie residents should have access to local health-care services. She finds it hard to believe that the town had a hospital in the past with a smaller population, but now it needs to fight for one.

“With 38,000 (people), (Fort Erie) should unquestionably have a large general hospital,” she said. “The hospital must not close.”

Her plan is to meet every reasonable requirement from higher levels of government to keep the hospital site open. If it ultimately closes, she will find another solution through local resources and what she refers to as “scientific patents,” which are a large part of her campaign.

Creating a strong economy is at the top of Liu’s list.

She said whether you’re looking at health care or affordable housing or anything else, “if you don’t have the money, you can’t do anything.”

Generating a stable economy, she feels, shouldn’t come from relying on taxation, either. In fact, she said, she’d like to abolish taxes altogether. She sees a tax-reliant structure as a “parasite system” that does nothing more than bleed people dry.

With that in mind, she’d like to look at Fort Erie’s resources alongside her patent projects to strengthen the town’s economy.

Meanwhile, although Redekop highlights issues like health care, infrastructure and growth as among the municipality’s priorities, what he sees as trumping all of those is standing against amalgamation.

“The single, highest priority is ensuring that Fort Erie continues as an independent, standalone municipality,” he said. “Because if our independence is jeopardized, that means all of our priorities no longer are priorities for a larger, amalgamated body.”

The complete debate aired Saturday at 2:30 p.m. on YourTV/Cogeco through traditional cable (Channel 700) and Epico (Channel 100) as well as on the station’s YouTube channel.

Online voting has begun in Fort Erie, and advanced in-person voting takes place October 14 and 17. Voting day is October 26. More information about voting stations and times can be found on the Fort Erie website’s elections page.

While all four of Fort Erie’s mayoral candidates were invited to the YourTV/Cogeco debate, Mike Campbell did not respond to the invitation and Tom Insinna declined.

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