Winnipeg’s collective identity tethered to ‘coulda, shoulda’

The plane banks to the left, revealing our snow-swept city directly below. The rivers orient me and I find my house, then the schools my children attend, like matchboxes on a white tablecloth. I’ve only been away for a few days, but it feels like a lot longer, and I’m happy to be back home.

Winnipeg can appear a place where nothing of import happens. We don’t surge ahead, we don’t make international news, we haven’t put a celebrity on the world stage in a few decades.

Frozen in a snowy tableau, we remain fixed in our identities of coulda-been and almost-was. A middle child unsure of identity and place, content being just good enough, but always wondering what we could have been if we’d only had a little more momentum, recognition, vision. Small, cold and isolated.

Architecture from our boomtown days sits like ornamental paperweights holding our history down: the legislative building, Union Station, the Fort Garry Hotel, the entire Exchange District, now a national historic site.

Unseen below the snow, an aqueduct built for millions of Winnipeggers that has never been used at full capacity.

Fire and decay stalks our landmarks, threatening to level what reminders we have left. Rebuilding is a non-starter. A parking lot is the foregone future of a lost past.

We were destined for greatness. We planned for it, anticipated it. The arrival of the railway brought a population boom of 3,000 per cent in the first 10 years. From 1901 to 1911, we more than tripled our population. We were the fastest growing city in the country, the “Chicago of the north” for our important architecture, wealth and trade potential.

Land values skyrocketed, wealth accumulated, mansions sprang up along the riverbank on Wellington and especially on Roslyn Road, now replaced by mid-century apartment blocks from which to survey the homeless encampments below.

Hollowed out by the world wars, and bled of trade by the Panama Canal, I wonder, sometimes, if our current attitude of entitlement to a better future is a lingering spectre of our boomtown days and sudden collapse.

In the midst of intergenerational bereavement for a promised future that never materialized, we shake our fists at city leadership, at arson and crime and poverty and racism and addiction, and wonder, how has it gotten this bad?

Our leaders are similarly affected, concerning themselves with ill-begotten bylaws against constitutionally protected protest, against safe transportation and thinking an imported fix for transit will work in a city that hasn’t gone anywhere in a century.

City council forbids the citizenry from envisioning a brighter future in the absence of their own bright ideas.

We are Eeyore in the Hundred Acre Wood, looking at our reflection in the rivers from this side and that, and discovering nothing flattering.

Our collective identity is a riverboat moored to what we could have been, what we’re owed, and what we were promised.

This unmanifested future makes it easy to layer any narrative upon us. Films like My Winnipeg and Universal Language have created alternate Winnipegs that are no less accurate depictions despite the complete fabrications within them.

Mightn’t there be a Sherbrook Pool under the Sherbrook Pool? A walking tour that includes a regular stop at a forgotten suitcase left at a bus stop?

After all, there is an academic conference coming in June that features a six-hour tour of plaques and addresses related to Marshall MacLuhan.

Winnipeg is a place where truth is not stranger than fiction, but where fiction is often truer than truth. The medium is the message, indeed.

But this is an opportunity, if we will ourselves to recognize it as such. Do we have the capacity to take stock of what we have and who we are in order to assemble the film reel of the next century?

What other Winnipegs are possible? Or shall it be another season of “Ho, hum, I suppose there’s nothing for it but to raise the police budget. Have you seen my tail?”

Importing solutions from other jurisdictions doesn’t work here, we know that much.

We are backward by design. Our unfettered access to land has created a city that burgeons at its margins and rots at its core.

We need planners who are collectors of information, prospectors, willing to pan for gold here along the riverbanks, discover where our unique richness lies and be ready to make a claim on our future.

Winnipeg is the place where anything can happen.

It is a snowy canvas of possibility, a table laid with the finest linen, just waiting for the next course.

Unfortunately for us, the kitchen staff have been rather uncreative with their fare, and the ingredients are past their best-before dates.

winnipegfreepress.com/rebeccachambers