City tackles lifeguard shortage, pools fully staffed for spring, summer
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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 14/04/2024 (543 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
Things will go swimmingly this summer when it comes to the city’s pools and lifeguard numbers.
Coun. Evan Duncan, chairman of the civic community services committee, said not only is the city fully staffed for both the spring and summer swimming operations, it doesn’t need to hire or train additional lifeguards.
Duncan said that’s a turnaround from this time last year when the city was scrambling to train and hire lifeguards for its indoor and outdoor pools.

MIKAELA MACKENZIE / FREE PRESS FILES
The City of Winnipeg says it is fully staffed for both spring and summer swimming operations and doesn’t need to hire or train additional lifeguards to oversee city pools.
“This is good news,” Duncan said on Friday. “The City of Winnipeg’s community services is committed to swimming lessons as a core service. And I am 100 per cent committed to recreation and leisure for the city.
“It makes people happy and we want to make sure people are happy.”
Duncan said the city looks good for this year’s swimming lessons after pandemic closures resulted in a shortage of lifeguards so acute it couldn’t run anywhere near the number of programs it had a few years ago. Children had to sign up to a waiting list for lessons.
In 2019, the last full year before the pandemic, the city ran 8,305 swimming sessions with 38,268 registrants.
One year later, that number fell off the deep end, dropping to 3,686 sessions offered and 14,654 participants.
To recruit more lifeguards, the city ran free training programs in 2022 and 2023. That helped the city hire 199 new lifeguards last year.
It also helped the city bounce back to 6,245 sessions offered and 31,412 registrants in 2023, as well as 6,307 sessions offered and 33,535 registrants in 2022.
Duncan said he can tell the numbers for 2024 could surpass the high-water mark set in 2019.
“We’ve had 3,914 sessions offered and 18,983 registrants so far in 2024, compared to 2,648 sessions offered and 13,916 registrant at this time in 2023,” he said.
“If this keeps trending, it could be impressive. We are on target to get 39,000 registrants. We haven’t had those numbers in awhile.”
Christopher Love, of Lifesaving Society Manitoba, said the number of lifeguards in Winnipeg and Manitoba has rebounded to about where it was pre-pandemic.
“Prior to the pandemic there were between 1,000 to 1,100 lifeguards trained in the province every year,” Love said, noting it dropped to just over 900 in 2022.
“The preliminary numbers so far show we were over 1,000 lifeguards in 2023 across the entire province. The numbers seem to be in the range where we were prior to the pandemic.”
Love said last year’s lifeguard complement was down in the early part of the year, so he suspects the city’s push to operate free training programs helped bolster the number for the full year, resulting in more children being able to take swimming lessons.
“Everyone should be able to learn to swim,” he said. “It is not only a life skill, but a life-saving skill.”
Meanwhile, Duncan said because he also believes swimming “is a life skill,” he wants to meet with provincial officials to see if even more children can learn to swim.
“I would like to see the city and the province partner together to see swimming lessons as part of our academic curriculum, he said.
“We have the facilities, but the province is in charge of the education curriculum. I hope to have these discussions. There’s no reason why the city can’t open this conversation.”
kevin.rollason@freepress.mb.ca

Kevin Rollason is a general assignment reporter at the Free Press. He graduated from Western University with a Masters of Journalism in 1985 and worked at the Winnipeg Sun until 1988, when he joined the Free Press. He has served as the Free Press’s city hall and law courts reporter and has won several awards, including a National Newspaper Award. Read more about Kevin.
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