We are seeing the results of compassion without accountability, which really is just abandonment
By Kevin Klein
Walk down Main Street on any given afternoon, and you’ll see it before anyone has to explain it to you. People bent double at the waist, frozen mid-stagger, lost somewhere between standing and collapsing. Winnipeg Police officers have started calling parts of downtown “zombie land” in private conversations with me, and they aren’t exaggerating.
This city has allowed open-air drug use to become normal in its core, and the people running city hall and the province have responded with press conferences instead of consequences. That has to change, and it starts with treating addiction as a crisis that requires intervention, not a lifestyle that requires accommodation.
The scale of what’s happening downtown is not a mystery to anyone who works or shops there. Crystal meth, crack and fentanyl have turned stretches of Main Street, Portage Avenue and the surrounding blocks into places small business owners dread opening in the morning, because they don’t know what they’ll find in their doorway. Needles. Human waste. Sometimes a person too far gone to move. Compare that to cities that have taken a recovery-first approach, mandating treatment as a condition of release rather than leaving addicts on the sidewalk with a pamphlet, and the difference in outcomes is not subtle. Winnipeg keeps choosing the version of compassion that asks nothing of anyone, and the results are exactly what you’d expect.
Then there’s Mayor Scott Gillingham’s ten-day public safety blitz, rolled out with plenty of media attention as the October election approaches. For ten days, downtown saw a real police presence and real consequences. Then the ten days ended, the cameras left, and everything went back to the way it was. If a crackdown works for ten days, that is proof enforcement is effective, not proof it’s unnecessary. What it actually proved is that this mayor understands what needs to happen and chose not to do it, because sustained enforcement requires political courage he hasn’t shown outside of an election cycle.
For a typical Winnipeg family, none of this is abstract. It’s deciding not to take the kids to a downtown event because you don’t want them walking past someone smoking fentanyl on the sidewalk. It’s a small business owner on Main Street who has stopped calling police because officers show up, move someone along, and watch them return an hour later, because there’s no consequence attached and no treatment bed waiting. It’s a transit rider who has changed her route home because the bus shelter has become a place to use, not a place to wait. These are not inconveniences. They are Winnipeggers being pushed out of their own downtown by a problem city hall refuses to actually confront.
The predictable response from advocacy groups is that policing doesn’t solve addiction, that what’s needed is more compassion, more funding, more of the same approach we’ve been running for years. That argument might carry weight if the current approach were working. It isn’t.
Handouts to organizations that call themselves advocates, without any requirement that they move people toward treatment, have not shrunk the no-go zones downtown, they’ve entrenched them. Compassion without accountability isn’t compassion. It’s abandonment with better branding.
What Winnipeg needs is straightforward. Police need the mandate and the resources to maintain a consistent, daily presence on Main Street and the surrounding core, not a ten-day stunt before an election. Every arrest for drug possession should come with a direct pathway into mandatory treatment, not a citation and a release back onto the same corner.
The province needs to fund treatment beds and recovery programs at the scale this crisis demands, and redirect money currently going to groups whose only measurable output is opposing enforcement. And city hall needs to stop pretending that unsupervised drug use in public spaces is someone else’s problem to solve.
Gillingham had his ten days. They proved the model works and that he won’t commit to it.
Winnipeggers deserve a mayor willing to apply pressure on this problem every day of the year, not just the ten before an election matters. Downtown Winnipeg is not lost. But it will be, if the next four years look like the last four.
Kevin Klein is the publisher of the Winnipeg Sun.