NDP plans to replace Tory-shuttered Dauphin jail

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This article was published 18/08/2023 (750 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Manitoba NDP has announced plans to open a facility in Dauphin to replace the jail closed by the Progressive Conservative government three years ago.

NDP Leader Wab Kinew made the campaign announcement in Dauphin Friday.

“When we’re talking about the closure of the Dauphin jail, it had an impact on safety, it had an impact on the community, but it had an impact on the economy, it had an impact on jobs,” Kinew told the crowd. “But Brian Pallister announced that closure, and when Heather Stefanson announced that she committed to keeping the Dauphin jail closed, it meant that this community lost 80 jobs.”

It was shut down without warning or a plan to help the workers, Kinew said.

In 2020, the Tory government announced it was closing the century-old jail and gave the facility’s 77 employees the option of transferring to a different jail or staying put and looking for new work. It also forced inmates to move farther away from their families.

David Bosiak, the mayor of Dauphin, told the Brandon Sun the community continues to feel the effect of the loss of the jail. He said many workers were forced to retire. In one case, a worker had to take a demotion and move to another town.

He said the closure has hurt the RCMP’s ability to address crime in the community because they spend more time transporting suspects to Brandon or Winnipeg.

“This would be a tremendous asset… because we’ve seen a slow drain of public service jobs from this region for probably more that 20 years,” Bosiak said. “This would help to stabilize that to a degree.”

Bosiak also said the way the Tories closed the jail, without consulting the community, blindsided council and made community members bitter.

“We will work with whatever party is in government,” he said. “We just hope to be treated with fairness and have an ability to communicate, which didn’t quite happen with the jail when it was closed.”

In an emailed statement, the PC candidate for Dauphin, Gord Wood, said he disagreed with Pallister about the decision to close the jail, but blamed the NDP for it getting to that point.

“The NDP made promises on the Dauphin jail for 17 years and broke their promises every time. If they hadn’t ignored the jail for 17 years, the conversation today might have been much different,” he wrote.

In an emailed statement, Manitoba Government and General Employee’s Union president Kyle Ross declined to comment on campaign promises. He said the union supported the decision 10 years ago to replace the Dauphin jail with a new facility.

“We welcomed the plan to incorporate more programming focused on healing and skills development. For all these reasons, we said the decision to cancel the new facility and simply close the Dauphin jail was a mistake,” the statement read.

Kinew said a new facility would cost $40 million and annual operating costs would be from $5 million to $7 million.

He promised construction would begin in his government’s first term.

Bronwyn Dobchuk-Land, a criminal justice professor at the University of Winnipeg said she was disappointed with the NDP’s announcement, which she said is consistent with the party’s track record of being tough on crime.

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“It’s unfortunate that this party, that pays lip service to addressing the causes of violence and social insecurity and unsafety, is actually laying out a platform that will be at odds with the goals of addressing the causes,” she said.

“They’re leaning on their old strategies, which is to try hard to appear tougher on crime than the Conservatives, which in fact, they are in their history and their policy.”

She emphasized that despite calling it a “centre of justice,” the facility is a jail.

“They’re framing it as something that’s going to be different than a jail that will house Indigenous people,” she said. “But this is a strategy that we’ve seen across the (U.S.) and in some parts of Canada.”

— Brandon Sun