Nurses could declare HSC ‘grey’ area If members vote in favour, union would advise against taking new jobs at hospital amid safety concerns By: Malak Abas Posted: 5:54 PM CDT Tuesday, Aug. 5, 2025

Nurses will vote this week on whether to discourage their colleagues from taking jobs at Health Sciences Centre after a string of sexual assaults in and around the hospital last month highlighted ongoing safety concerns.

It’s called “grey listing,” where a union will warn its members an employer is failing to maintain professional standards and advise against taking new positions there.

The grey list is kept in place until requests made to the employer are met. It would not impact the jobs of the 3,000 Manitoba Nurses Union members currently working at HSC.

Members asked the union’s board of directors to sanction a vote after four women and a teenage girl were sexually assaulted on or around the hospital grounds on July 2, MNU president Darlene Jackson said.

“We now have a situation where a nurse was sexually assaulted outside on their way to the parkade, and another nurse sexually assaulted within the facility, and the worksite has just said, ‘This is enough, we need to enact grey listing,’” she said Tuesday.

The MNU is hosting webinars educating members on the grey listing this week, and voting will be open from Wednesday afternoon to Friday at 4 p.m.

If nurses vote in favour, HSC would be asked to require swipe cards to access hospital tunnels, create an early alert system to warn staff members and patients about security incidents, and ensure controlled entrances are staffed and maintained.

Jackson said one of the nurses who was sexually assaulted was in the tunnels at the time of the attack. Staff members working on campus at the time weren’t told about the incident or that the suspect was at large until a memo was sent the next day, she said.

“We started receiving messages from nurses once (the memo) was put out about this incident over 12 hours later, from nurses saying, ‘This is ridiculous,’” Jackson said.

“We now have a situation where a nurse was sexually assaulted outside on their way to the parkade, and another nurse sexually assaulted within the facility, and the worksite has just said, ‘This is enough, we need to enact grey listing.'”–MNU President Darlene Jackson

“No one is safe in this building, no one is safe on this property, and the employer needs to remedy this.”

A 28-year-old man was arrested July 3.

A Shared Health spokesperson said they were aware of the vote and are “working collaboratively” with the MNU to “identify solutions that address safety concerns while meeting the needs of staff, patients and the broader community.”

The MNU has resorted to grey listings only five times in its 45-year history. The most recent case was at Dauphin Regional Health Centre in 2007.

A union spokesperson said MNU members voted in favour of grey listing at HSC in 2020 amid a number of unresolved grievances. The employer agreed to work on the issues, and the grey listing did not happen.

Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara said the province is working with Shared Health to improve safety through initiatives such as a new “hold and secure” paging system that implements lockdown procedures in the event of emergencies. The paging system was implemented July 24.

“We’ve also met with (police) to advance enhanced safety measures in the immediate surrounding community. We’ve taken these steps because we want nurses to feel safe in their workplace.”–Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara

“We’ve also met with (police) to advance enhanced safety measures in the immediate surrounding community. We’ve taken these steps because we want nurses to feel safe in their workplace,” Asagwara said in an email.

”I understand why nurses are frustrated — they voted to grey list HSC in 2020 because the government at the time refused to sit down with them and address their concerns about security, their wages, a lack of beds and staffing shortages.”

An HSC nurse who was at work while the July 2 assaults were happening said she plans to vote in favour of grey listing her workplace.

“It’s cautionary to others that are looking for work, that the nurses are saying this is a scary place to be,” the nurse, who spoke with the Free Press under the condition of anonymity, said.

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She said in the month since, a nurse was slapped in the face while walking to the CancerCare Manitoba building, and it isn’t unusual to hear “code white” — indicating a violent person — multiple times in a shift.

She said she is disappointed with what she describes as her workplace’s minimizing of violent attacks.

“If our employer is not willing to be upfront and honest, then the nurses have to be upfront and honest to other people coming in,” she said.

A 2024 report from MNU found that just over one in five nursing positions province-wide are vacant.

malak.abas@freepress.mb.ca

Malak Abas
Reporter

Malak Abas is a city reporter at the Free Press. Born and raised in Winnipeg’s North End, she led the campus paper at the University of Manitoba before joining the Free Press in 2020. Read more about Malak.

Every piece of reporting Malak produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print — part of the Free Press‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press’s history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.