When ‘welcoming’ loses its focus

While I was on a vacation in Victoria a few years ago, I was told to check out the home of my friend’s family member on Trutch Street.

When I couldn’t find it, I did a quick Google search and discovered the street had been renamed Su’it Street about a year earlier.

The new name uses the Lekwungen language of the Songhees and Esquimalt Peoples, who are Indigenous to the area, and replaced the previous name of Joseph Trutch, an official tied to the denial of Indigenous land rights in British Columbia.

I was really taken aback at how meaningful and thoughtful the change felt — simple, clear and respectful, restoring Indigenous presence while acknowledging a historical wrong.

That experience came to mind while reading Niigaan Sinclair’s recent defence of the Welcoming Winnipeg committee and his frustration with how the city has supported the committee. But the bigger problem facing the WWC isn’t just a lack of staff or money. It’s that the committee’s role has grown so large that it now struggles to separate meaningful reconciliation from decisions that simply don’t make much sense.

The committee was created in 2020 with an admirable goal: to make sure Winnipeg’s public spaces tell a more full story, especially when it comes to Indigenous history and contributions. Many people would agree with that. The trouble, however, is how that goal is being applied in practice.

Under its mandate, every proposed name change for parks, public markers, monuments, green spaces and other city-owned sites had to go through a formal application to the Welcoming Winnipeg committee detailing how the site related to Indigenous history, whether it offered educational opportunities and how it contributed to telling a “complete” story of Winnipeg. If the application didn’t demonstrate a clear Indigenous connection, it was extremely unlikely to be supported.

The committee also decided which applications to review and in what order — it wasn’t a simple first-come, first-served process. Some proposals took upwards of three and a half years before any decision was made.

In any given month, dozens of name-change proposals could be put forward — for parks, monuments, markers, green spaces and other sites — and all of them had to pass through the committee before reaching council. It’s not hard to see why backlogs formed, why new applications were eventually paused or why the whole process was temporarily put on hold.

For example, a proposal was put forward in 2020 to rename Edison Park in North Kildonan. The park had simply taken the name of the adjacent street which was named after American inventor Thomas Edison, who has no connection to the area.

The proposal was to rename it Matheson Millstones Park after the Matheson family, who built a water mill on nearby McLeod Creek in the 19th century, with two of the original millstones still sitting in the park today.

It was a simple idea grounded in local history and supported by about 90 per cent of people consulted. Still, the committee rejected it, and city council opted to approve the name change anyway.

Tensions came to a head at a March 2024 council meeting, where debate over the name change dominated discussion, even overshadowing the discussion surrounding the reopening of Portage and Main. The Welcoming Winnipeg committee even sent two members to the meeting to attempt to reject the change, turning a local park name into a drawn-out debate.

Later that year, a proposal to rename historic, 130-year-old Central Park received an outpouring of backlash from people who were understandably confused about what part of “Central” was supposedly unwelcoming.

It highlighted just how nonsensical the situation had become: Winnipeggers were frustrated both by a growing backlog of applications and by committee scrutiny of names that clearly weren’t controversial.

Decisions like that create resentment, even among people who generally support the committee and its broader goals. When a name tied directly to visible, on-site history gets turned down, the issue stops being about reconciliation and starts feeling like a process problem.

Over time, that kind of decision chips away at public trust.

This is not an isolated incident. It shows that not every meaningful name change needs to be exclusively Indigenous to matter. Names tied to local history, community contributions or visible artifacts, like the Matheson Millstones, can also be meaningful and worthy of recognition.

None of this diminishes the importance of Indigenous recognition in Winnipeg. On the contrary, it underscores why that work must be focused and credible. Renaming Bishop Grandin Boulevard carried weight precisely because that name was tied to figures and legacies with clear historical consequences.

When every name change becomes an ideological test, the truly meaningful ones risk being lost in the noise.

A smaller, more focused mandate would let the committee spend its time on names and spaces that genuinely need rethinking, while allowing straightforward, locally driven proposals to move ahead without unnecessary conflict.

Back in Victoria, what made Su’it Street stand out was its clarity. The reason for the change was obvious, and the result felt right.

Winnipeg would be better served by that same approach. A Welcoming Winnipeg depends not on how many decisions a committee controls, but on how meaningful those decisions are.

Kenneth Ingram is a musician, educator and historian whose favourite place to be is right at home in West Kildonan.