City seeking contractor to remove remains of Sutherland Hotel

A year and a half after a fire burned the Sutherland Hotel to the ground, the city is seeking a contractor to demolish what’s left and clean up the rubble.

According to a request for tender published online last week, the $300,000 project will be awarded to a contractor to perform a “wet demolition” — spraying the rubble with water during the demo to prevent dust and harmful particles from flying into the air — and “completely clear” the 785 Main Street site.

The city is paying for the cleanup, but the cost will be added to the owner’s property tax bill, said city communications officer Tamara Forlanski.

“When a property owner continuously fails to meet deadlines in compliance orders, then the city may undertake demolition and remediation as a final resort,” Forlanski said in an email.

Just days before the building caught fire last year, the Vancouver-based Anhart Community Housing Society purchased the land and was planning to transform the space into affordable housing. Since then, repeated attempts at negotiation with the property owner have gone nowhere, said chair and co-founder Keith Wiebe Gordon.

He wasn’t informed of the city’s request for contractors to clear the space, but called it a “good thing” and a step toward rebuilding on the land.

“We have tried the community approach for more than one year to acquire the property from the seller, but because the damages made the property basically not sellable, and it would require the seller then to honour the contract and negotiate with us, that’s never happened,” he said Monday.

“So we are now seeking other means to acquire the property. If we’ve exhausted all the community-based approaches, then we may have to let the courts decide.”

But seeking legal options would be a “last resort” for Anhart, Gordon said, adding that attempts to get the city to step in and take action on the property have been slow-moving.

“The City of Winnipeg might be a little light compared to the rest of the larger cities in Canada and North America when it comes to action,” he said. “I’m hoping, on a political level, the city would have in their means the ability to take action more quickly.”

The property owner is being represented by real estate agent Brad Gross, who confirmed negotiations are still underway and blamed the city for delays.

While he declined to provide specifics, he said the city’s permitting process was slow-moving and prevented the owner from moving forward.

“There’s a whole bunch of red tape. I don’t know what they’re delaying it for,” he said.

The 140-year-old Sutherland Hotel was ravaged by fire in January 2025 and mostly demolished after the fire was put out. It was vacant at the time and had been boarded up after another fire the previous summer.

At the time, Gordon said the cost to clean up the property was approximately $500,000, around the same as the purchase price.

Area councillor Ross Eadie said the request for contractors comes after a year of “pressure from the neighbourhood” to get rid of the rubble.

“This is an ongoing problem, because downtown gets faster action than outside of downtown, and this is just barely outside of downtown,” Eadie (Mynarski) said.

malak.abas@freepress.mb.ca