All kids should have chance to play in Winnipeg

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 05/07/2024 (777 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Winnipeg is a wonderful place to grow up. The Globe and Mail has identified Winnipeg as the best place for a child to grow up in all of Canada. Our city, according to the Globe and Mail, is the third-best place to live in Canada.

I grew up in River Heights. A middle-class kid. Good school, great community centre, wonderful big church, with a gym. Nice and safe, so my parents didn’t worry when I left on my bike in the morning and headed out to the zoo. Most of Winnipeg is a wonderful place for kids to grow up.

The Globe and Mail focused on affordable housing, child care, education and health care. The article mentioned a small problem of high crime rate but brushed that off since it only affected a small portion of Winnipeg.

I chose to live in Winnipeg’s Inner City, the community of North Point Douglas, for 17 years until my wife died four years ago. The inner city is an entirely different world from River Heights. If you have a drug dealer in River Heights, five neighbours will phone the police and they’ll also phone their city councillor. That dealer is gone immediately. In the inner city people don’t believe that anybody cares and if they do call the police about the drug dealer, not much happens. There used to be a drug tip line but the police gave up on that a long time ago. One drug dealer, two doors from an elementary school, took us seven months to get shut down. Can most people reading this article perceive of 200 taxis coming to an address every day, seven days a week? Can you perceive of so many drug customers coming to your street that you can’t get your car out to get to work?

Most of the inner-city community centres have given up on sponsoring soccer, hockey, gymnastics. Not enough families can afford the registration fees. Since the city introduced a “user pay” system there are almost no teams. The Tri Government Task Force on Illicit Drugs, also known as the “meth task force,” recommended a massive increase in recreation in the inner city to combat the drug dealers and the drug culture’s influence. The city also has two other reports recommending increasing recreation in their city to improve the quality of life and to combat youth crime. Of course, the mayor and city council, reading these reports, immediately respond by budgeting $125 million for a recreation centre in the wealthiest part of Winnipeg and recommended cuts, including to the Boys and Girls Club, in the inner city.

As our murder rate goes up and deaths due to overdoses skyrocket, nothing much changes in the inner city. That’s because Winnipeg is the best city in Canada to raise a child. Winnipeg is the third-most livable city in Canada.

As vacant houses burn and derelict wrecks dot the core, the mayor wrings his hands and says the city isn’t responsible. These burned-out former homes are really not important because Winnipeg is the third-best city in Canada.

The executive policy committee isn’t responsible because Winnipeg is the best city in Canada to raise a child. Oh, did anyone notice that all the members of the executive policy committee represent the parts of Winnipeg that are the best place in Canada to raise a child?

Nothing will change until the people of Winnipeg, living in the Maples, Linden Woods and St. Vital decide that they want the same quality of life for the kids growing up in the core as their kids have. Until the hockey moms and the soccer dads decide that core area kids should play hockey and soccer just like their kids, nothing will change. Until the homeowners in the healthy part of the city say that they don’t want vacant housing burning in the core, nothing will change.

Most of our city is a wonderful place to live. Enough of our city is the best place in Canada to raise a child that we can ignore our inner city. But what if we wanted to make all of our city a great place to live and raise a child?

There are many places to start, so why don’t we start with ensuring all kids have an equal chance to play?

Sel Burrows is a community activist and a member of the Order of Manitoba.