Manitoba’s premier isn’t giving the green light for a new default speed limit in Winnipeg.

The city’s public works committee voted on Wednesday to ask the province to change the Highway Traffic Act to allow it to lower the residential speed limit from 50 km/h to 40 km/h in residential areas.

“They can do it on their own,” Premier Wab Kinew told CBC Manitoba’s Information Radio in a Thursday interview.

“They have this ability to make this change on their own and if we, as a province, act we would be changing it for every community in Manitoba — so not just the cities like Brandon and Dauphin, but small towns across the province as well.”

Rural municipalities reach out to the province with similar requests from time to time, but Kinew said those communities typically sit along highways where speed limits are upwards of 90 km/h.

“I respect the fact that there’s a lot of different opinions on this, and we’re going to keep working on making communities safer at the provincial level, and working with municipalities on the tools that they have, too.”

WATCH | Manitoba premier rejects city request on speed limits:

Premier Wab Kinew talks about speed limits, new sobering centre, school funding and national defence

The Manitoba premier weighs in on a proposal to lower residential speed limits in Winnipeg from 50 km/h to 40 km/h, a new 72-hour sobering centre that can detain people under the influence of drugs like meth, and concerns about school division budgets.

Kinew also discusses his recent meeting with federal Industry Minister Melanie Joly about Canada’s defence strategy and opportunities tied to Churchill.

A pilot project launched in March 2023 reduced speed limits to 30 km/h or 40 km/h in four Winnipeg neighbourhoods, during which the city studied how the change affected travel speeds, safety and quality of life.

The city can change speed limits by posting signs on individual roads. But to swap out every 50 km/h sign for a 40 km/h one would cost the city millions of dollars.

Allowing a blanket change to the default speed would cost a fraction of that, a city report said.

Pedestrians and cyclists made up more than 40 per cent of the 106 fatalities recorded in Winnipeg traffic collisions from 2015 to 2022, and they represented more than 10 per cent of the 1,253 people seriously injured in that same time frame, another city report said.

While “death, dying and carnage” happens more often on major roads than residential ones, Coun. Janice Lukes said making a default reduction can calm a neighbourhood and improve its livability.

Lukes, who also chairs the city’s public works committee, called Kinew’s comments “very disappointing.”

“He is accurate in saying that if the city wanted to do it, we could,” she told CBC Manitoba’s Up to Speed on Thursday. “But what that would mean is we would have to put a sign at every single intersection in the city of Winnipeg, which would mean millions of signs.”

The public works department estimated it would cost $8 million to $10 million to put up that many signs, she said.

“We’re not going to sign every intersection in the entire city of Winnipeg, so what the premier’s statement says to me is, they don’t want to do it,” Lukes said.

“If the province doesn’t want to deal with it, then basically what we go back to is building up our streets with blobs of asphalt, putting speed tables [raised sections] in, putting concrete bulb-outs — cluttering up the streets like that and changing the built environment — so people will slow down.”

Lukes said the city needs the province to get involved and she’s not sure why the province can’t make the change just for Winnipeg.

“I’ve been working on this for 20 years and it’s taken us a long time in Winnipeg to get to this point to write a letter to the province, so I don’t know … I have to think this through further.”