Promotional shiny blue can from the ’70s claims to contain a genuine sample of Winnipeg Air

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This article was published 04/07/2025 (462 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

This spring, while cleaning out the North Kildonan house where their father had lived since 1978, two brothers found a curious civic keepsake displayed in a living room cabinet: a shiny blue can purporting to contain a genuine sample of Winnipeg Air.

Daughter-in-law Ida Caligiuri listed the can on the online platform Facebook Marketplace for $10.

Dating back to 1974, bearing the signature of Winnipeg mayor Stephen Juba, the can was one of thousands produced by the municipal government as a promotional tool for the soon-to-open Winnipeg Convention Centre.

No, Winnipeg didn’t boast the mountain views of Calgary, or the chic, metropolitan vibe of Toronto, but what it could offer was its centrality, and, perhaps as enticingly, its central air.

“Winnipeg, mid Canada’s convention city, is noted for the world’s cleanest air,” the can’s label quotes Juba. “Why settle for just a sample … Come and enjoy all the air you can breathe.”

“Winnipeg, mid Canada’s convention city, is noted for the world’s cleanest air… Why settle for just a sample … Come and enjoy all the air you can breathe.”–Can label

The can wasn’t the only instance of the city’s longest-serving mayor’s predilection for ambitious, forward-thinking showmanship: through the end of his final term, one of Juba’s proposals had been the development of a monorail route to extend from Portage and Main to Westwood; the plan was scrapped in 1978, one year after Juba shockingly withdrew his candidacy minutes before the nomination deadline.

While Juba’s eyes were to the sky, his ears were to the ground, and they must have perked up upon hearing his city’s air quality had received positive word of mouth in the Toronto Star’s syndicated weekend supplement, The Canadian.

“And now, if I may, a word about the air. Breathing it is a pleasure, rather than a labour of necessity. If you have a smoker’s cough, go west, young man. Winnipeg banished mine within 24 hours,” wrote Maggie Grant, a former social editor at The Globe and Mail.

“The air’s so clean it has left even the most venerable buildings unsullied by discolouration. This, I assure you, is a treat to eyes attuned to the grime of our smog-beset east.”

“The air’s so clean it has left even the most venerable buildings unsullied by discolouration. This, I assure you, is a treat to eyes attuned to the grime of our smog-beset east.”–Maggie Grant

By 1973, Juba’s staff began early efforts to capitalize on the city’s apparent aerial purity, sending a purchase order for 1,000 labels from an Ellice Avenue firm called the Public Press.

Unlike the colourful can procured by the Free Press, earlier drafts of the souvenir featured a milky white label and a groovier red typeface, while Grant’s story — which was circulated to all Southam-owned publications across the country — had yet to be affixed.

Many of those early cans, including one given to the late traffic engineer Morris Prokipchuk, who worked for the city from 1951 until 1988, were handed out as freebies to city staff.

“The perfect present for a person who has everything,” says daughter-in-law Rosemarie Prokipchuk, who is selling the can for $30 on Facebook Marketplace.

In January 1974, the city’s finance committee approved a budget for 100,000 travel folders ($5,000 plus tax), 10,000 industrial and commercial brochures ($15,000 plus tax) and 5,000 cans of Winnipeg air at a cost of 10 cents per unit.

Those cans — which might have been inspired by Florida’s “canned sunshine” campaign in the mid-1960s — came from the Continental Can Company, where assembly-line workers manufactured containers for Coca-Cola, 7 Up, Klik, Spam and Spork.

“It was some kind of mixture of Spam and pork. Every now and then, a specialty can would come along,” says Doug Jacques, who worked at the factory from 1978 to 1982 during the mayoralties of Robert A. Steen and William Norrie, who briefly continued Juba’s giveaway gimmick.

Juba’s can — which would eventually be labelled with a powder-blue civic skyline above a lush, green Broadway — was such a product. The three-piece cans, moulded from flat steel, were assembled at the St. Boniface factory.

“When they came through, everybody pilfered a whole bunch,” says Jacques, who has a Steen and a Norrie, but not a Juba, in his personal collection.

The temptation to crack one open is strong: the image on the label, teeming with trees, cultivates an easy-breathing, grass-was-greener nostalgia. As does Grant’s quote, which encapsulated the city’s ongoing thirst for coastal validation.

We have to at least consider whether the contents of the can are a breath of fresher air, held tightly since 1975.

Like Schrodinger’s cat, Stephen Juba’s can is an experiment in paradox that feels especially pertinent as northern forest fires and climate change routinely push the province’s air quality into dangerous terrain.

“The first thing my kids mentioned when we walked out of the house today was that it smelled like campfire,” says the University of Manitoba’s Dr. Chris Pascoe, who with Andrew Halayko leads the breathing research team at the Children’s Hospital Research Institute of Manitoba.

“I do recall as a kid being very proud of our crystal blue skies, the fact that it was sunny all the time and that the air was beautiful. I think we do still have, for the most part, good air,” says Dr. Halayko, a professor of physiology and pathophysiology at the Max Rady College of Medicine.

“I think we do still have, for the most part, good air.”–Andrew Halayko

He appreciates the sentiment of canned air as a promotional gag; however, as a scientist, Halayko immediately expresses doubt as to whether the vintage sample was captured en plein air before being transferred in a vacuum-sealed container for lab-supervised canning in St. Boniface.

Doug Jacques breaks the illusion.

“There was no secret air pumped in. What’s inside there is just the air that was inside the factory. Just regular old air,” he says.

Even without opening it, you can almost smell the Spork.

ben.waldman@freepress.mb.ca