Winnipeg more than its worst headlines

Winnipeg takes a reputational beating sometimes and some of the criticism is deserved.

Concerns about public safety are real. Homelessness remains painfully visible. Too many people are struggling with addiction, poverty, mental illness and inadequate housing in plain sight.

Those concerns deserve to be taken seriously. But a city can be making measurable progress, struggling badly in other areas and still be reduced unfairly to its worst headlines. Winnipeg deserves neither denial nor caricature.

Take public safety.

Winnipeg’s crime severity index rating remains high. But it fell nine per cent last year. Downtown crime is also down this year, with police reporting a 10 per cent decline overall and a 19 per cent drop in violent crime. Yet many people still do not feel safe.

Only 44 per cent of respondents to the latest police survey said they felt reasonably or very safe walking downtown during the day. At night, that fell to eight per cent. Among women, just three per cent said they felt safe.

A city can be becoming statistically safer while its people still do not feel safe. Both things deserve attention.

Homelessness tells a similar story.

The number of people living in known encampments has fallen substantially, from roughly 700 last fall to 245 this summer. Hundreds of people have also moved into housing through provincial and community efforts. That is progress. But people are still sleeping in doorways, back lanes and parks. Outreach workers estimate another 150 to 200 people may be sleeping rough outside established encampments.

Progress can be real without being sufficient. And perhaps that is where our conversation becomes harder.

When suffering becomes part of the daily landscape, people can become tired. Frustrated. Sometimes unsure what they are supposed to do with what they see. That is human. But it is worth noticing before indifference begins to feel normal.

Can we admit that the numbers are complicated without using complexity as an excuse?

Because there is another Winnipeg in the numbers, too.

The city has passed 850,000 residents, adding more than 8,000 people last year alone. Thousands of newcomers continue to arrive and make this city home. Employment in the Winnipeg region reached roughly 524,000 in August, up more than 15,000 from a year earlier. The unemployment rate was 5.4 per cent, below the national rate.

We are also building. Winnipeg issued permits for more than 6,200 new homes last year, including a record 1,040 units downtown. Housing starts surged again in the first half of this year.

None of those numbers cancels out the person sleeping outside. Nor does economic growth make someone feel safer walking downtown at night. But the reverse should also be true.

Our hardest problems should not erase an entire city.

This is also a city growing quickly, welcoming newcomers, adding jobs and housing, supporting a rich arts and cultural life, running outreach and community-safety initiatives and containing thousands of people quietly trying to make their neighbourhoods safer, kinder and more livable.

For those of us who love this city dearly, in a province that still proudly calls itself “Friendly Manitoba,” that love should not make us defensive.

It should make us attentive to where we are falling short. And grateful, too, to the outreach workers, shelter staff, community organizations, first responders, public servants, neighbourhood volunteers and residents doing the quiet work that rarely makes the headlines.

Winnipeg sits almost at the geographic centre of North America. But the heart of a city is not found in its coordinates. It is found in the people who call it home.

Perhaps what Winnipeg needs right now is not a magnifying glass trained only on its failures or a defence that looks away from them. It needs a wider lens. A city is more than the sum of its failures. It is also what its people keep choosing to build despite them.

Winnipeg has work to do. But it is also growing, changing, welcoming, building and trying.

This city is more than its worst headlines. And for those of us who love it, perhaps the task is simply to see it whole.

Marwa Suraj is a health-care professional, naturalized Canadian and proud Manitoban.