Winnipeg's History of Displacement

I really wanted to write a positive post about Winnipeg. I have started one connecting some positive changes that have been happening around the downtown. There are glimmers out there of a more thoughtful approach being taken at City Hall. It is important to highlight them and encourage more!

But then, the headline hits calling for the banning of tents along “image routes” and highways. I was driving to Calgary on July 23rd, the day that story hit, and so I had a lot of time to stew about this proposal.

The proposal to ban encampments because of concern about the city’s “image” follows hard on the heels of another motion to ban encampments where children might be playing, such as parks, playgrounds, and community gardens.

First off, that a councillor would consider Pembina Highway or McPhillips as the Winnipeg “image” is bizarre to say the least. They are generic arterials that frankly could be in any North American city. Dressing the proposal up as being concerned about the safety of the encampment residents is equally laughable. What is obvious, despite the obfuscation, is that these are simply proposals to move the homeless along. After all, “out of sight, out of mind”: problem solved!

This is an ongoing pattern from the City of Winnipeg around encampments and homelessness. Over the past 6 years I have lived in Winnipeg, there have been numerous actions and proposals that seek to ban homelessness, or at the very least to make it as uncomfortable as possible.

January 2019: Library Security

Increased security is added at the downtown Millennium Library, with metal detectors and bag searches. The library is one of last free public spaces that is accessible to everyone. The added security measures have a significantly greater negative impact on the homeless population who are accessing the services, or just trying to sit down and warm up.

June 2020: Noise emitters

The City of Winnipeg is forced to remove noise emitters it has placed under bridges to “shoo away homeless people with nowhere else to sleep”. These speakers were placed under bridges to get homeless people to move along. Bridges which serve as a bit of protection and shelter from the elements.

This followed hard on the heels of evictions and removal of two other encampments that summer:

January 2022, Burn Barrels

A cold winter and COVID had more people living in encampments across the city. People were avoiding shelters for safety and health reasons, among the myriad other reasons that people avoid homeless shelters. The City of Winnipeg decides to help by distributing 12 burn barrels around the city for people in encampments to use.

But wait, there are rules! They are only allowed to burn cut firewood (not supplied), not near their tents and shelters, and they will be regularly inspected to make sure the rules are being followed.

January 2022, Removal of doors from bus shelters

That same brutally cold winter people were resorting to using bus shelters as “housing” in an attempt to stay warm (and stay alive!). Several bus shelters near where I live were turned into temporary housing. It was obvious and shocking that Winnipeggers were living in that situation. It was galling that 3 of the 4 bus shelters next to the Legislature had people living in them and MLAs and City Councillors drove by them every single day and did nothing to address the crisis.

What the City of Winnipeg did do was remove the doors and disconnect the heat from a number of bus shelters. Of the 170 heated bus shelters across the city, 11 had their doors removed and 6 had the heat disconnected. Most of those where near where I live.

June 2022: Dismantle Bus Shelters

Concern that homeless people might use a bus shelter for shelter led City Council to vote to dismantle bus shelters where people might find shelter.

December 2024: Closing Community Connections

The City of Winnipeg closes Community Connections at Millennium Library. This move targets more marginalized folks across Winnipeg and makes it more difficult for people to access services. Importantly, considering the added security at the Library adds barriers to homeless people getting into the library, Community Connections was outside the security barriers at the entrance to the library.

I wrote about Community Connections in January:

Winnipeg Council is Disconnected

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January 23, 2025

The months long fight to keep Community Connections open at the Millennium Library was before the Executive Policy Committee on January 22nd. Ongoing funding for this space is not included in the 2025 budget. The cost for maintaining this vital space is $628,000 a year.

July 2025: Move to Ban Encampments

This week, the pattern continues with two separate proposals to further ban encampments.

Moving the problem along, banning encampments from visible locations, making it more difficult to access services, is not solving anything. The City approach has been to either willfully ignore the housing challenges we are facing, or aggressively working to hide the homeless crisis.

In January this year, Manitoba released its Your Way Home strategy to end chronic homelessness. It is an important strategy and starts moving us towards real lasting solutions. A positive strategy of working with encampment residents, the social service sector, and government is what is required to charting the path forward. A positive approach that recognizes that this will take time, in order to meaningfully improve the situation. And it will never go as fast as everyone would like!

It is naive to think that banning encampments will make them go away. It hasn’t worked in the past, it won’t work now. The solution to homelessness is housing. The solution is making it easier for people to achieve appropriate housing and the supports they need. Every single news story talks about that. While on one hand officials say that wraparound supports are needed, on the other hand they make it more difficult to access supports, let alone survive.

Al Wiebe said it best when he called the noise emitters “dehumanizing”. We need policies and approaches that start with recognizing the humanity of everyone in our community, regardless of their income or where they live.

Making it more difficult to be poor to the point of outlawing being poor in public, is the furthest thing from recognizing the humanity of some of our neighbours.

brian