As you may remember from your visit Peter, we live on a “bicycle street” where “cars are guests”, and marked by having a reddish road deck (the color of cycle paths across the country), and their own road sign.
our street, you see the colored road deck and the sign on the right hand side
Legally they’re bicycle paths where other traffic is allowed in addition. As far as I can tell, formally that doesn’t change any of the rules (speed, right of way), and it’s first and foremost a set of visual cues for cars to behave differently.
Something like that might still work for downtown Charlottetown, despite making parking free giving the opposite signal. Making signs like that, in consultation with inhabitants and business owners could be a step still open to you, as constructive civil disobedience of sorts. It’s quite common here too for people to mark stretches of road they live on with signs about the behaviour they’d like to see from traffic (usually warning signs for kids at play etc.).