Millennium Library workers’ union demands action on safety following suicide By: Malak Abas Posted: 6:04 PM CDT Monday, Aug. 11, 2025

The union representing Millennium Library workers says it’s considering taking legal action against the city to more quickly implement safety changes after a man died by suicide at the downtown library last week.

The city’s main library branch was closed from Thursday to Saturday afternoon after a 40-year-old man was found with “significant injuries” Wednesday evening. Medics were called to the scene and he died in hospital. Police described the incident as “non-suspicious” at the time; sources confirmed to the Free Press Monday that the man jumped from the fourth floor.

Gord Delbridge, the president of CUPE Local 500, said the union will be sending letters to Mayor Scott Gillingham, city council and city administration to formally demand planned safety improvements — including a redesign of the facility’s lobby — are expedited.

The lobby redesign, approved in the fall of 2023 in an effort to improve sightlines for security personnel, staff and community support workers, does not have a construction start date.

Delbridge said the union plans to “consult with legal” options unless the city takes quick action.

“We’re going to do everything in our power to ensure that this is not something that gets swept under the rug and we just carry on,” he told the Free Press.

“We’re not going to let this go.”

Delbridge met with library staff Monday to discuss last week’s incident.

He said there have been concerns raised about private contracted security at the library; he wants to see a shift to community safety officers trained and managed by the city.

“You want to make sure you have the right people, professional people that you’re investing in, as opposed to trying to accept a proposal from the lowest bidder on a private contractor,” he said. “The city needs to invest in themselves.”

The union is going to the provincial government in hopes of securing funding to bring back Community Connections, a space in the library lobby that was staffed by library and community crisis workers and provided people seeking help with low-barrier supports and referrals to other organizations before it was cut from the city’s 2025 budget and closed. It cost $628,000 to operate the space for a year.

“Should a librarian be coming to work feeling scared, threatened, having to deal with these traumatic incidents that are taking place there? Maybe, if there was that Community Connections (space) there, would this individual have, maybe, stopped in there and spoken to someone first?” Delbridge said.

“We’re going to do everything in our power to ensure that this is not something that gets swept under the rug and we just carry on.”–Gord Delbridge

In an email Monday, Gillingham said he would focus on “continuing to work with (CUPE) to improve safety at all city facilities.”

“Without knowing (the man’s) circumstances, it wouldn’t be right to speculate about what might have made a difference…. As we plan for future redesigns of the library, we’ll look for ways to make it safer while still ensuring it works for the staff and customers who use it every day,” he said.

He pointed to existing safety investments, including an enhanced security system and metal detector, community crisis workers available by appointment and the Downtown Community Safety Partnership working in the former Community Connections space.

In a June council meeting, city staff told the standing policy committee on community services there was “no partnership” between Millennium Library and DCSP.

Questions from the Free Press to the city’s media centre on security staffing and the proposed redesign of the lobby were not answered by press time.

In 2017, a 25-year-old man jumped from the fourth floor in the library and later died in hospital.

John Samson Fellows was the Winnipeg Public Library’s writer-in-residence from 2016-17, along with partner Christine Fellows, and was working out of Millennium Library when the man jumped.

He recalled the “moving” level of support he and his partner received from the library, including an offer of counselling despite their status as contract workers, not staff.

“After that happened, I never went to the fourth floor again,” said Samson Fellows, a noted songwriter and musician in Winnipeg bands the Weakerthans and Propagandhi.

In his ensuing work in library activism, he said Millennium Library staff, patrons and other supporters had called for renovations to the balcony railings to prevent another incident, but those calls were ignored.

“I think it tells us that the city has its priorities wrong, that they don’t prioritize Winnipeggers in their budgets, and that they’ve starved our library system over the years to such a degree that it’s it’s become really precarious,” he said.

Joe Curnow, a spokesperson for library advocacy group Millennium For All, called last week’s incident a tragic chapter in a “persistent story from city council of underfunding evidence-based approaches to safety.”

“City council seems unwilling to invest in anything that we know would actually make people safer, and that’s things like increasing the staffing levels, that’s things like Community Connections, that’s things like investing in the infrastructure.”

She said the fourth-floor railings have been a “persistent source of concern” for library staff.

malak.abas@freepress.mb.ca