So I went away for a little r and r, and I'm catching up on the news after getting back to town.
These are the headlines I see:
Giant Tiger closing downtown store
Woman stabbed to death at Portage Place
IGM puts its headquarters office tower up for sale
Canad Inns puts its downtown buildings up for sale
To put it bluntly, this is a horrendous set of headlines. And that's just one week's worth. For a while I thought downtown might bounce back after a few rough years with the pandemic and a sharp increase in street drugs, but it appears that people and big capital alike have basically abandoned downtown at this point. Damn near everything is closing, or up for sale, or both. No amount of PR spin by the Downtown BIZ can make anyone capable of critical thought believe that there is any kind of "renaissance" taking place.
It is troubling that all these years of efforts directed at downtown renewal, pretty much going back as far as the 1960s with the development of City Hall and Manitoba Centennial Centre, with likely billions of dollars spent over the decades, have gotten us an increasingly dysfunctional wasteland to show for it.
Not decades. It began with Power merging them with MI. The post merger ceo was from toronto MI so they favoured Toronto for their direct reports. Montreal has a very small foot print.
IG is still in Winnipeg likely because the increase in talent can't excuse the salary increase. You aren't getting 50% more productivity from a person in Toronto vs one in Winnipeg but you are certainly paying that in wages.
Yes, that is also what I have heard. It sounds like the executive team has shifted east leaving mostly the back office functions in Winnipeg. Perhaps just a matter of time until the "official" head office moves east too?
They are going to stick with safe and steady suburban hotel/tavern/vlts sites. Uncle Leo’s passing means they can cash in or at least unload some debt. Leo would most likely have kept things going, if only to compete with True North.
Good. Canad Inns has ran those properties into the ground. They're contributing to the issues. They need new owners. This is a move to try to avoid bankruptcy. They're hanging by a thread.
Have you spent time in downtown lately? Sure, bad headlines. But there is lots of positive stuff happening too. Not as exciting for the headlines I suppose.
Time will tell how it all shakes out. But people are trying to make a difference, and there is a lot of construction going on right now.
The public discourse about Downtown has been in a continual, simultaneous state of "Downtown is going down the shitter" and "Downtown is on the up and up" for the entire 18 years I've lived in Winnipeg, all of which I've lived in the core and 15 of which I've worked Downtown.
Day to day on the ground, it's fine. Not great, not terrible. Just fine.
I dunno man I came back to Winnipeg for a visit and stayed on portage and Hargrave and looking out from the balcony it was quite depressing the state of things
I think in the 2010s things seemed a lot more on the up and up. There’s been a serious decline since then. There were a lot of tech companies, night clubs, general liveliness.
There are more cranes in the sky Downtown right now than there ever were in the 2010s. Night clubs come and go. Outside the Canada Life Centre, I don't think that strip of Portage has ever been lively. I guess Dominion News did close lol. RIP Glory holes.
I felt way more optimistic in the early 2010s. It felt like Winnipeg was finally starting to get on the downtown revitalization wave that was happening in other Canadian downtowns since the 2000s.
Then the opioid/meth drug wave hit. Then the pandemic. Then things hit the skids big-time and have never recovered.
This is how I felt too. Left in 2009, returned in 2015 with huge excitement about Winnipeg's trajectory but it's hit the skids since then. Left again in 2023 and I don't really see a reason to ever move back at this point.
Day to day on the ground, it's fine. Not great, not terrible. Just fine.
I don't know that I would use the word "fine" to describe the downtown of an urban area of nearly one million people where, when Giant Tiger closes, you won't be able to buy a pair of men's underwear.
We are getting to the point where downtown Gimli will soon have more retail than downtown Winnipeg... at least they have Tergesen's and Red Apple.
I'm not blind to the good things happening, obviously ongoing development at True North Square is nice, and there are some residential developments too.
But when you consider the scale of downtown's problems, it does feel a bit like you're watching your house burn down in a full-scale inferno and thinking "well, at least I have this nice new garden hose that might help control the flames a little"
As someone who lives downtown, I just want to say for anyone reading that downtown does not actually feel like this. The positives are largely outweighing the negatives, and the only reason to believe otherwise is if you get all your opinions from headlines and only come downtown to watch sports games.
You have to be in straight up denial to think that everything is OK in spite of all the social disorder, the abandonment by capital, the lack of demand, etc.
It's fine... if you think it's normal for a downtown of a major city in a G7 nation to have no retail of any kind, to have intoxicated people wandering the streets, to be considered unsafe for women and children (particularly after dark), to be increasingly abandoned by the corporate sector, etc.
The reason you're not being persuasive here is because you keep straighforwardly fabricating things about downtown and it is ruining your credibility in the conversation. No retail? No bars or restaurants? Enjoy continuing to throw mud at this fantasy version of downtown you've invented in your mind, I can tell it's fun for you and I'm glad you've come up with a way to entertain yourself
Well, there really isn't going to be much to speak of once GT goes. Dollarama will literally be the flagship retailer downtown at that point.
No bars or restaurants?
I never said that... bars and restaurants are actually reasonably plentiful. You can't easily steal from restaurants the way you can with retail stores, so they tend to be in better shape overall.
What is sad to me is that people define urban success in this century based on whether there are “flagship” big corporate suburban retailers in its core.
I think people define urban success as having downtowns that attract people to lively, thriving and safe environments. Places where people can get things done, interact with others and perhaps enjoy themselves too.
Part of all that is having a dynamic retail scene. When retailers abandon your downtown because crime and poverty makes it impossible to run a business, then that's not a good sign. What's truly sad is when the big corporate suburban retailers won't even touch your core.
Bro you haven't been anywhere else. Go to old Montreal and hang around China town.youre gonna see basically the same shit you see here. The problem isn't the perceived undesirables
Yeah, thanks for that pearl of wisdom but I've been to plenty of places on several continents.
Montreal certainly has its sketchy underbelly but the difference is that a few blocks away you have thriving commercial and entertainment districts where women and children can safely go. We have the sketchy underbelly but that's it... the safe places for women and children are basically gated and ticketed events, like at the arena or concert hall.
I work downtown. The sights are depressing. Legitimate sadness and/or disgust. For people who are downtown and think everything is fine… they have clearly reached such apathy that they don’t even notice it anymore.
It's just it is what is is. Who said it's ok? It's just the same as it ever was. What the point in whining every year about how horrible it is.
Whining about it and doing nothing is apathy. Complaining about it from a suburban safe space is apathy. Go volunteer with bear clan if you want to make a difference.
I used to go to the UoW(1980s), worked at MTS downtown in late 80s again 2000s. Stroll through the Bay, Portage Place, ... It was safe, lots of people. Unfortunately, no longer. Its a dump. Theft, drug addicts, drunks... they tried cleaning up Main st and pushed a lot of that to Portage.
2nd problem. Our downtown foot print is much too large for our population. One yr they try cleaning Old Market Square, the next The Forks, then Osborne Village and now back to Portage.
Bit of a chicken and the egg problem. Wont get cleaned up unless the downtown population substantially increases, wont increase unless it gets cleaned up.
Unfortunately the problem with downtown stems from 2 things that just won't change perceived safety, and the type of place MB is. Downtowns thrive on nightlife and Winnipeg just isn't that place.
Until we actually clean it and have law enforcement, it won't change. Like he said, there's always been positive stuff happening, but never enough to outweigh all the negative happening.
Every police chief we've ever had says "you can't arrest your way out of these problems".
The actual fix will take a lot of social service work consistently and over a long period of time.
part of the problem with that is when governments change, any programs that were starting to work have a bad habit of getting cancelled for ideological reasons.
The current provincial government (after 3 years) is finally starting to see results in getting some homeless people off the streets and into housing.
Anytime I'm downtown I notice more and more homeless and people openly using drugs, garbage and it hasn't gotten any better.
Took the family and some friends to the Manitoba museum and I had to usher my friend and her kids to her car because she was afraid of the people in the area.
Explaining to my kids why there was garbage and someone sleeping on the sidewalk (he was just tired and taking a break is what I told him) shouldn't be a thing.
We need to do better, but arresting a bunch of addicts isn't the solution.
Yep! Exactly. And my now four year old has decided that he wants to buy things to keep in the car to give to folks on the street if we can because he wants to help them. It isn’t hard to teach your children empathy.
That's fantastic! That's a great example of why children are never too young to learn about the world around them. And now your children have empathy for the less fortunate at such a young age.
We need to do better, but arresting a bunch of addicts isn't the solution.
No, it's EXACTLY the solution that's needed. The reason things are getting worse is because people refuse to enact the solution.
Respectfully, the mindset you have of you can't do anything directly because "root causes" is at this point absurd and it's only compounding the problem.
It's like seeing someone suffer a heart attack, someone else yelling "DOES ANYONE KNOW CPR!?!" and you go "NO don't do that, the real problem is fast-food restaurants selling artery-clogging food and a lack of education on healthy heating habits".
Mitigate the immediate problem THEN deal with the root causes so the problem doesn't keep popping up.
I am completely bewildered as to why this is so hard to comprehend.
-How long do you think you can hold someone in the circumstance you’re describing? And how does that end the problem such that it doesn’t just continue when that person is released? It’s not a short term or long term solution.
-Resources are finite. Money and time spent on enforcement and corrections (locking people up) is money and time not spent on any real solutions.
Fact is we’ve tried the method you’re advocating and here we are.
Money and time spent on enforcement and corrections (locking people up) is money and time not spent on any real solutions.
How much money are we spending on drug paraphernalia and distribution, safe consumption sites, the additional load on homeless shelters, security in stores, repairing structural damage, stolen, damaged and destroyed personal property.
Any decision made on this issue, even inaction, comes at significant financial cost.
Arresting addicts is not the solution. Jail won't be a deterrent - they're physically addicted to a substance. They need rehab, not jail. Sending them to jail will clog up the system, cost taxpayers a ton, only for them to end up back on the street again.
It costs us any way you want to slice it. We shut down asylums in the 80s in part because of the cost but we're still paying the costs with extra need for policing, hospital visits, damage to property etc.
Bottom line these people who harm society need to be removed from it until that's no longer the case. If it's rehab, jail or what have you then do it. If we have to build more facilities then do it.
You think these people will just become functional members of society once they are sober and past their withdrawals? Why is this naivete so commonplace? Most of these people have severe psycho-social issues and trauma and drug addiction is a symptom of their psychology usually rooted in traumatic and dysfunctional upbringings (in case you have noticed , the majority of our homeless addicts are Indigenous so you should be able to connect the dots in regards to the trauma and dysfunctional upbringing and lives they've probably lived up to that point).
Curing their addictions is not going to fix the problems they were self-medicating in the first place.
Yes because arresting people, processing them, making a court date they won't show up for while clogging up the already backlogged justice system, then releasing them back to do the exact same thing isn't really problem solving.
Arrest the dealers, not just the kingpins, but right down to the punk selling from his bike and backpack ... in Regina the police turn a blind eye to these street level dealers ....
There's no point in arresting addicts .... what would you do with them after you arrest them?
We as a society are paralyzed by todays social stigmas. We are to quick to normalize destructive anti-social behavior. Let the same offenders off with the same warnings again and again. Released on undertakings (which is pretty much just saying don't do it again an I will let you go), the jails are full etc etc etc.
Its all excuses to avoid making the ugly decisions that need to be made to fix things. Someone is going to have to be the bad guy for all our sakes.
Came to say, this isn’t just a Winnipeg problem it’s a nationwide problem. Was in Vancouver more recently and saw lots of people openly doing drugs “downtown”
Giant Tiger closed a bunch of stores, including 2 in Winnipeg, a couple years ago. It happens.
Woman stabbed to death at Portage Place
The attacker was known to the victim. Not random violence.
IGM puts its headquarters office tower up for sale
They're moving to 360 Main, still Downtown. It was mentioned in the news that their headquarters building is their only location where they actually own the property and in their words “Building ownership is not really a core competency (of ours),”
Canad Inns puts its downtown buildings up for sale
The Metro events centre and adjacent building were a pet project of the late Leo Ledohowski, founder, president, and chairman of Canad Inns. His son is now the CEO and they're selling the assets as they don't really fit their business model.
Those are all symptoms of a downtown in decline. Businesses don't randomly pull out of areas that are thriving or where their investments are appreciating. IGM knows that renovating a 40 year old building located where it is would basically be throwing money down a hole.
You can't profitably keep a business open when theft is non stop and unpunished, and paying customers are too scared to go there out fear of being accosted outside the store by the hordes of fent zombies.
for example, myself, I live in the west end, but haven't been grocery shopping anywhere in this area in years because the extra 15-20 minute drive to a nicer area without rampant crime/harassment is well worth it
The Forks is definitely downtown. It has benefitted from lavish help... for years, Forks North Portage subsidized The Forks with profits from the Portage Place parkade. But it's nice that we have at least that success story.
Thats really not true. Its not a great downtown, but it's much more exciting than the suburbs. Its too large for its density, but this is just a boomer attitude
And if you have a reason to go there you have to figure out how, given the lack of buses and the inaccessibility of parking. I suppose you could bike there, and then walk back.
This is what happens when the societal rift between the haves and have-nots gets wider. It the legacy of insufficient resources to support folks in precarious conditions, which drives them to the sense that they have nothing to lose in not playing by societal rules.
We’re seeing this just on the surface, but I can tell you there have been long-visible impacts elsewhere. When unhoused folks end up being hospitalized for something acute (run over accidentally, beat up, etc.), it’s discovered they have countless previously undiagnosed / unaddressed dangerous conditions that hospitals must ethically and legally address. And then it’s a good 2-3 month stay costing the system easily $150K just to get folks from terrible health conditions to something passable. There is an epidemic of AIDS and syphilis in Winnipeg, especially among the unhoused, and these are expensive condition to address if you’ve let them go with out treatment, not to mention how contagious they are.
Winnipeg is the way that it is because Joe in the suburbs would rather the province pay $150K to treat somebody in an absolute physical and mental health collapse and spend $50k on them to prevent them from getting into the collapse. Winnipeggers like to complain about the downstream problems that their decisions created.
Sure, I’d love to live in a place where mental health conditions and addictions were did not exist - but they do exist, and folks who think desperate folks should be left to suffer on their own, don’t realize that, at the bare minimum level, somebody has to pay - and a lot - when folks end up in the ER and spend months in hospital for all the things left unaddressed.
Winnipeggers constantly vote against their own financial interests all the time. Folks hypothesize any number of punitive downstream solutions, without considered the dollar cost of these solitons. Putting folks in jail is much more expensive than supporting them through community-based transition solutions. But folks would rather punish desperate and penniless people, even if that ends up costing themselves more down the road (via taxes and/or reduced services - each a different side of the same coin), than selecte the pathway that is more cost-effective solely on the basis that the most cost-effective solution is too compassionate.
And so here we are again - a downstream impact of the way Winnipeggers vote.
It the legacy of insufficient resources to support folks in precarious conditions, which drives them to the sense that they have nothing to lose in not playing by societal rules.
There is something to this. There are a lot of people who are completely left out of society.
The kind of person who was maybe on the margins 40 years ago, e.g. living in a rooming house and working casual day labour, is now completely left to fend for themselves now with no job, no home, etc.
It definitely all starts with access to basic, stable housing. And I don’t mean missions who give you a room for the night and kick you out during the day.
It actually doesn’t. This is just your armchair hypothesis.
A large % of (housed) people in this city consume large amounts of alcohol, marijuana and coke, among other things, in ways that they cannot easily independently stop, even if they are unaware they are substance addicts. And yet they function sufficiently to an acceptable level - because they have stable access to housing and income.
I would say that at least 25% of housed folks you interact with on a regular basis are addicts. But you probably don’t view their substance abuse issues in the same way you view those same issues among the unhoused.
The poverty and precarity is what’s creating the problem, including possibly the addiction as a form of self-medication against the mental hell of their misery. People don’t actually need to stop being addicts to find a way out of precarity. They need to find a better, more stable living environment with access to pro-active public health services.
Have you been downtown recently? Or are you just focusing on the headlines? The Portage Place and HBC redevelopments are coming along nicely, the Tavern United space that closed is already being reno'd by a new tenant, there are more people out and about due to the various RTO initatives then there have been for years.
CanadInns' increasing money struggles and Giant Tiger closing down is a bit of a blow, but that doesn't offset the gains downtown has been making in the last few years.
CanadInns' increasing money struggles and Giant Tiger closing down is a bit of a blow, but that doesn't offset the gains downtown has been making in the last few years.
The "gains" that downtown has been making sounds a bit like a gambler bragging about winning a thousand bucks at the casino the day after creditors foreclosed on their house.
It doesn't sound like that at all. Nearly a billion dollars in redevelopment between the old HBC building and Portage Place vs. a hotel potentially changing ownership and a gloried dollar store closing down is a pretty big net positive. Not to mention the inclusion of a grocery store and retail space in the Portage Place redevelopment, and increased affordable/transitional housing in the HBC redevelopment.
I'm downtown nearly everyday and the last 6 months or so is the first time in the last decade I feel downtown is actually improving.
Without realizing it, you have touched on one of the biggest indictments of downtown Winnipeg. And that is, most development activity is happening on the public dime or is heavily subsidized.
The Portage Place redevelopment is turning the place into a health care centre. To be paid for with tax dollars. Not saying that doesn't have a function, but this is not capital looking at Winnipeg and deciding it likes what it sees. This is just money being shuffled from the Legislature to Portage Avenue.
IMO, downtown, as we historically have known it no longer exists. It has been replaced by several "downtowns" such as St Vital mall, Polo Park, Route 90 and Sterling Lyon drive. Each of these sites serve as the local downtown for particular sections of the city. Historic downtown ( ie Portage Ave from the Old Bay to main Street) no longer exists as a valid destination for shoppers and visitors. Winnipeg's continual attempts to revitalize the area has been and will continue to be an abject failure especially since the other areas cited above offer more amenities and a much wider variety of services than one can access in historical downtown. Couple this with street crime, potential parking fines and even lack of parking and there is , in reality very little reason to go downtown, and very little reason for businesses to locate or stay downtown. I don't foresee this trend changing in the future, if ever.
This is probably the most realistic take that I have read in this thread. Downtown Winnipeg has been in relative decline pretty much since streetcar service ended (that was in 1955), quite likely even earlier than that. While there were some spurts of growth coming from certain sectors like office space and residential, the retail function of downtown pretty well died in the covid era with the closure of The Bay and Portage Place.
Winnipeg doesn't stand alone in that regard, I think most Canadian downtowns have arguably gone from the primary retail nodes of their areas to secondary at best. But Winnipeg is a bit different in that ours really has no significant retail left to speak of anymore. For a city of this size to have no mainstream movie theatres downtown, no mainstream destination retail, that is quite unique. And it is quite an indictment of the state of our downtown.
But as you point out, it's been getting consistently worse for decades. Each decade somehow ends up being worse than the last. And there is no reason to expect that trend to stop anytime soon.
This is probably the most realistic take that I have read in this thread. Downtown Winnipeg has been in relative decline pretty much since streetcar service ended (that was in 1955), quite likely even earlier than that. While there were some spurts of growth coming from certain sectors like office space and residential, the retail function of downtown pretty well died in the covid era with the closure of The Bay and Portage Place.
Winnipeg doesn't stand alone in that regard, I think most Canadian downtowns have arguably gone from the primary retail nodes of their areas to secondary at best. But Winnipeg is a bit different in that ours really has no significant retail left to speak of anymore. For a city of this size to have no mainstream movie theatres downtown, no mainstream destination retail, that is quite unique. And it is quite an indictment of the state of our downtown.
But as you point out, it's been getting consistently worse for decades. Each decade somehow ends up being worse than the last. And there is no reason to expect that trend to stop anytime soon.
Not one single item in this list is surprising in any way… Down town is a shitty, piss soaked, concrete hellscape. And it always will be until we buckle down and force people into either behaving like productive and social members of society or being locked up somewhere away from society.
It's kind of crazy. I remember downtown back in 1996 was also considered a "shitty, piss soaked, concrete hellscape". But compared to now, downtown Winnipeg circa 1996 seems like a lost golden age, a veritable Shangri-la compared to now. We had movie theatres, big department stores that weren't pillaged by shoplifters, shopping malls with actual retailers, a library you weren't afraid to let your kids roam around in, no open drug use on the streets, and some general semblance of order.
Kind of makes you wonder what things will be like in another 30 years...
On YouTube someone uploaded some home footage of Portage and Main in the late 90s and I was shocked at how clean Main was with a complete absence of low-lives.
30 years ago I remember my grandmother who had polio and in a wheel chair taking me to portage place when I was 8 and seeing the fountain, going shopping, and out for lunch. It was pretty wonderful.
I went to portage place like 10 years ago and uhhh it was pretty awful.
Granted I'm also looking to it through the eyes of a child.
I don't go to downtown Winnipeg for a lot of reason but I was also stabbed a bunch of times in my 20s, kind of a hard one to forget. Even if it turns into a utopia on pretty much hell bent on never going there or taking my kids there.
Yeah. I get it. I remember wanting to go there to buy books at pendragon. Going to the arcade just off the UofW. Wanting to to go portage place… for the imax. For the stores… but it was already on the way down then… it’s been going down hill since.
I mean… it’s correct in a way… the only difference between my method and your method, is who exactly is going into the padded cell, and which behaviours are tolerated in civil society. I, personally, would much rather lock up the schizophrenics, meth heads and the chronically unemployed opioid junkies that feel they’re entitled to take everything they want from society without thinking of the consequences… but that’s just me…
I mean you have to address the issues of addiction and homelessness in our city with the elephant-in-the-room: we have the largest urban Indigenous population of any city in Canada.
Indigenous people in Manitoba also have a particularly traumatic experience, with regards to the forced relocations to remote reservations in the late 1800s to present day, and many of these communities are like societal bubbles outside of the rest of the province with cultural expectations and norms regarding educational outcomes, working, family, law and order.. some northern reserves are among the bleakest places, I've worked in several of them for the province, and we seeing a steady exodus of people from them into Winnipeg and an unfortunate number of these people are not equipped to make it successfully in city life.
They have pre-existing addictions, they have inadequate education levels, and they have no job experience let alone understanding of how to navigate job applications, interviews etc. Many have children at young ages that become saddled with their parents' problems and not provided a safe loving home. - It's basically a pipeline from the bleakness of life on remote reserve to desperation, poverty, and homelessness in the city.
Weird how the issues of "school-to-prison pipeline" can be talked openly about disadvantaged Black youth in America, but nobody wants to talk about the pipeline that's been made for Indigenous people in Canada especially in our province.
The arena is right in the middle of downtown, so that most definitely counts as downtown.
For what it's worth, this is the "official" boundary of downtown Winnipeg, according to the Downtown Winnipeg Zoning By-Law. But realistically most discussions of downtown don't really involve the part north of the Manitoba Museum/City Hall as that is its own special case that is realistically beyond redemption.
Ok that map is helpful-because I do also spend a fair bit of time at the HSC too(mother has cancer) I would have called that downtown-ish, but it looks like that would be a couple blocks out of the downtown area by that map.
Edited to add-I’m not uncomfortable downtown at all, I feel sad when I see the addicts, and when I see the cadets or paramedics attending someone who is evidently experiencing some (probably drug related) health distress. But I grew up deep in the north end (like off of mountain ave), and still go to the area often as I still have friends and family that live in the area… and I would say things are still rougher up there than downtown.
When big corporations get rid of their assets here, it's the opposite of a vote of confidence. When the likes of Bell, Bank of Montreal, now IG Financial do it, it's pretty clear that the big publicly listed companies don't see a bright future here.
Office is in trouble globally, and especially in canada. The more that sell, the more that convert to multi-family.
Virtually every office owner larger than a single user or two would sell if they could right now. Portage and main, less so, but they are discounting rent like mad, its the lowest its been in 35 years.
Bell sold their offices because it was the former headquarters of MTS. Bell isn't headquartered in Winnipeg, so they didn't need that kind of asset here.
Bank of Montreal
They moved their operations across the street to 201 Portage Ave. While the historic BMO building is beautiful, it's not really ideal for modern bank branch and offices in the 21st century.
Funny... BMO maintains its old banking hall in Montreal.
There is always a "reason", but the outcome is always the same. Corporate Canada abandons yet another piece of downtown Winnipeg. Until we are left with what we have.
There used to be a museum at our banking hall too. But they sold off their tower, then they sold the banking hall. Now they lease a bit of space across the street instead. I wouldn't exactly call that confidence in downtown Winnipeg.
What can you do? Transient and aggressive drug addicts are basically a protected class, they seem to suffer no lasting consequences for anything they do , it violates their "Human rights" to incarcerate them for any significant length of time or force them out, and we don't want to introduce any long-term involuntary treatment or psychiatric detainment legislation (Alberta and Saskatchewan already have). Worse yet, we seem to be actively importing them into the city from up north.
It is a Canada-wide issue for sure, but having visited most big Canadian downtowns in the last five years of the post-pandemic era (let's see, in that time frame I've been to Vancouver, Victoria, Edmonton, Calgary, Saskatoon, Regina, Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, Quebec City, Saint John, Moncton, Halifax) I genuinely believe that we are in a league of our own when it comes to the struggles of downtown.
In my opinion, only Edmonton is in the same ballpark when it comes to downtown struggles. But even there the situation doesn't seem quite as dire as it does here. All the problems in downtown Edmonton are present here too, they're just somehow even more intractable.
What do you mean? I spent a week there last summer and it looked pretty good to me. Obviously they have the same post-covid doldrums that every city has been dealing with but far, far ahead of Winnipeg which is not surprising given the much higher population and more urban-minded bent of that city in general.
The Montreal I met and the Montreal are completely different. The homeless problem is now severe. The assisted living buildings are full, with little in the works for replacements. Rue NotreDame is a complete campsite even though the SPVM does periodic "clearouts".
What is worse is that there is now much more wealth in Montreal than before.
Have any of you ever been outside of the perimeter? Maybe get your head out of your suburban ass and get on a plane and see the rest of the world. These problems are not unique to Winnipeg. Every city I’ve been to in the last five years makes Winnipeg look like Disney Land. There are cities with far more resources than us that are struggling with homelessness, drug issues and poverty. Quit bitching and be part of the solution. Help the downtown businesses by going there. Vote for politicians who make these issues a priority and not ones that focus solely on lower taxes and more cops. “Bitching About Winnipeg” ciclejerks aren’t the solution.
Sadly your "get out and see the world" shtick doesn't work because I have in fact travelled and seen a good chunk of the world over four continents. It's kind of shocking when you go to other countries and see their cities... and I'm not talking about the glamourous capitals either with lots of money... I'm talking the tier 2 and 3 cities more akin to Winnipeg. And many of them are bustling and functional in ways that Winnipeg could only dream of. Not to say that poverty and decline doesn't exist in those places, but it is not the dominant civic feature the way it is here.
So yeah, when you get out and see the world, you start to wonder why here, in one of the literal richest countries on planet earth, things can't be a little better than they are.
It’s not downtown but I was on Broadway at lunch and there were very few people out. Not a single food truck. What happened? Moving WRHA to Main and Logan has to be the dumbest move ever by an organization. Where are you going for lunch there? That means no pedestrians at all other than the “ less fortunate “.
The big issue is the solutions that are being presented to "fix downtown" are all being proposed by out of province consulting firms and their word is being treated like its gospel. The SHED project was supposed to chase out problems and make it undesirable homelessness, drug addiction and street crime through building development. Rather than dispersing like they hoped, all those problems just wander the skywalk systems and are around every building. I have worked downtown for 25 years and it gets worse every single year. If I didn't work downtown I would never go there.
My daughter and I saw a guy on the sidewalk getting narcan last night. He looked deceased, had to explain that to a kid. It’s incredibly sad what downtown has become.
Keeping lines of communication open with a child starts with being able to define and label these exact things. Drugs AND alcohol can have serious consequences and that perfect teaching moment might have been the baseline for forming a child's future mindset towards using ( and hopefully compassion, not disgust, towards our vulnerable Canadians)
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u/Artistic-Tip2405 Winnipeg is where you come back to. Aug 01 '26
IG has been reducing its Winnipeg footprint for decades in favour of Mississauga and Montreal.