City must make improvements to Millennium Library

Opinion

You don’t forget the sound of a body falling from a great height.

First there’s the shuddering impact itself, then, almost instantaneously, startled cries from people nearby. There’s a moment you think what has happened isn’t true, and your reflexes want you to laugh at what you thought it was, what you were wrong about, but then you understand you were not wrong, and terror enters at your mouth and shuts it as it dives in and occupies every part of your body for a moment that seems to slow and then speed right up.

On Jan. 5, 2017, I was in the writers-in-residence office on the second floor of the Millennium Library with my partner, Christine Fellows, when we heard that sound. Someone had jumped over the railing on the fourth floor.

In the following years, one of the reasons I was grateful to find community and purpose with the library activist group Millennium for All emerged from my experience that day.

We know the reasons behind suicide are complex and often leave us with an impossible question: what could we have done?

One thing we can do is examine our systems, which we can change, and see how we might offer love, support and solidarity to people in crisis. This isn’t done by building fortresses to keep them out, but by extending welcome and care and meeting them where they are, in places like the Millennium, for example, which, I learned in my cherished time as a writer-in-residence there, is a vibrant, essential, and sometimes fractious intersection of every Winnipegger you can imagine.

On April 22, 2022, I was grateful to attend the grand opening of the Community Connections space at the Millennium. Staff and community members spoke movingly about this beautiful “made in Winnipeg” innovation at the city’s main branch, which would connect individuals with library services and social supports, offer a cup of coffee and a granola bar, and help defuse situations which might disrupt others in the library.

From the start, the mayor and city council failed Community Connections. The space opened with no new funding and was staffed by existing social and library workers. The service eventually received part of the support it needed: a budget to pay for one librarian, one dedicated social worker, and some part-time library assistants.

Despite being underfunded, the benefits of this innovative space were experienced not only by the people who used it, but by everyone who spent time at the Millennium Library. Crucially, the services it offered acted as backup for overstretched staff who worked at other desks in the building. When a visitor needed more support, Community Connections was there.

Until it wasn’t.

In the 2025 budget update, despite protests, testimonies, meetings, delegations, research, and pleading, mayor Scott Gillingham and his executive policy committee cut the meagre $614,000 for Community Connections entirely. The positions were eliminated and the space closed. This was not due to lack of funds, but rather the budget priorities of the mayor.

His recent comments implying another agency provides services for the public out of the space are untrue. Go any day, you will find the gates locked and the lights out.

On one of those days — Aug. 6 — another person jumped from the fourth floor at the Millennium. Out of respect for everyone involved, we shouldn’t know more than that.

Here’s what we do know. Scott Gillingham and his executive policy committee shut down the Community Connections space at the Millennium Library, a service that offered some solace and care to people in crisis.

After the death in 2017, and despite the concerns raised by Millennium Library staff and visitors, the previous and current city administrations failed to fund renovations to the building’s balconies to help prevent it from happening again.

And, the staffing levels at the Millennium Library, and all of Winnipeg’s branches, are dangerously low.

As Gillingham has heard repeatedly over the years from dozens of delegations, the best and most practical way to make the Millennium (and every other Winnipeg library branch) a safe and welcoming space is to hire more library workers and give them the training and support they need.

The mayor and council must act now to allocate funds for renovations on the fourth floor, for more workers throughout the library system, and for the immediate re-establishment of the Community Connections space. This time with the staff and funding it requires and deserves.

John Samson Fellows was a 2016-2017 Winnipeg Public Library writer-in-residence.