Reconciliation Lives Here: The State of the Inner City Report 2016

Artwork by Kenneth Lavallee, Blanket Project Main and Logan 2016

By Niigaan Sinclair, Tamara Margaret Dicks, Timothy Maton,

This year’s State of the Inner City Report tackles arguably the most important issue of our time: healing and reconciling Canada’s relationship with Indigenous peoples. A year and a half after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) 94 Calls to Action were released, this research documents community-based efforts in inner city Winnipeg to implement these recommendations and more broadly break cycles of racism and colonization.

Poverty Policy Choices and Winnipeg’s Inner City

By Jim Silver

Provincial government policy can be designed to punish those in poverty, or to reduce poverty. Both approaches have been tried in Manitoba, the first in the 1990s and the other more recently. We can compare these approaches by examining Winnipeg’s inner city.

Over the past 15 years, and especially the past five years, Winnipeg’s inner city has benefitted from a community-led form of development supported by substantial public investment. The Winnipeg Foundation, United Way of Winnipeg and other such public bodies, and especially the provincial government, have led the way in investing public dollars in initiatives and strategies driven in large part by inner city community-based organizations (CBOs). Neighbourhood renewal corporations, women’s resource centres, youth-serving agencies, alternative educational institutions, social enterprises and a wide variety of Aboriginal organizations have developed sophisticated anti-poverty strategies in which public dollars have been invested.

Mainstream media, reconciliation and Wab Kinew

By Tina Keeper and Shauna MacKinnon

Winnipeg Free Press columnist Gordon Sinclair’s depiction of Wab Kinew is offensive with damaging implications that reach beyond the election (WFP March 12th and 26th, 2016). Sinclair uses his privileged position as a columnist to portray Kinew as a violent man who can’t be trusted; a person with ulterior motives and someone to be feared. It’s shocking that Sinclair, a powerful and intimidating man himself, describes feeling physically threatened by Kinew stating that he offered to shake Kinew’s hand at a recent press conference because “walking up and offering my hand to him first was a good idea, because you know what they say. A man can’t hit you when you’re shaking his hand.”
Having attended that event, we were taken aback by Sinclair’s representation of events, especially in the context of a city and province struggling to deal with deep-rooted racism.
While there is no excuse for the misogynistic, homophobic words Kinew communicated in past years, there is a broader conversation that needs to take place and longer term implications to be considered.

The Next Step: Literacy Programming in Manitoba

Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives – Manitoba new publication release:

Low levels of adult literacy in Manitoba are a barrier to full participation in our society. Easily accessible supports, located in low-income communities are needed to address this challenge, a new study finds.

In 2013 one in six Manitobans had literacy levels so low that they could not participate fully in life. Literacy costs our society. Low literacy rates impact people’s ability to access health care. People with low literacy are more likely to be on social assistance or incarcerated. Women with low literacy who are primary care givers of children, struggle to read to their children, making it difficult to break intergenerational cycle of poverty. Aboriginal people are more likely to leave school before grade twelve and require literacy supports as adults. Refugees may arrive from countries where basic education was not possible, requiring access to literacy programming.

The Next Step: Literacy Programming in Manitoba, by Jim Silver finds that the national policy framework established to support adult literacy was dismantled in the mid 2000s, cutting core funding to national literacy organizations and redirecting money to training and job readiness. But if people do not have basic literacy skills, they cannot participate in job training programs. Literacy for family, social or political participation is no longer the focus.

Investing in Social Enterprise to reduce poverty and green house gases

By Lynne Fernandez
A new Errol Black Chair paper explains how a combination of governmental policies and initiatives in Manitoba allows social enterprises to reduce Manitoba’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions while training and employing Inner City workers. The provincial government and Manitoba Hydro are supporting social enterprises so they can work in two emerging ‘green’ sectors: building retrofits and alternative energy installations.

No Jesuit School in Winnipeg’s North End: Stop them before they do it again

The Catholic Church ran more than half of Canada’s residential schools. In these schools they immersed Indigenous children and youth in Catholic culture. The effect on these children and youth and their families has been so great that on the first page of its Final Report the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has said that what the residential schools did “can best be described as cultural genocide.” The TRC has called upon the Pope to apologize “for the Roman Catholic Church’s role in the spiritual, cultural, emotional, physical, and sexual abuse of First Nations, Inuit, and Metis children in Catholic-run residential schools.”

Now this same Church wants to establish yet another Catholic school in a largely Indigenous community — Winnipeg’s North End. The principal and executive director of the proposed Gonzaga Middle School acknowledges that the culture of the school will be Catholic, and goes so far as to say that the school “will immerse students in Catholic culture.” The principal will personally interview potential students and their families, hand-picking the 60 students he considers to be the most suitable candidates. They will then spend their middle school years being immersed in Catholic culture, and when they are finished middle school they will be steered into one of Winnipeg’s private Catholic high schools, where their tuition will be paid for.

Mothering Project: Effective prevention with vulnerable families

By Carole O’Brien

 “The root causes of neglect—including poverty, poor housing, food insecurity, and substance abuse—lie beyond the scope of the child welfare system to resolve. But a collaborative approach, working with parents and harnessing the collective resources of child welfare and other provincial government departments, other levels of government, and the province’s many community-based organizations, can make a difference for vulnerable families.”  Honourable Ted Hughes, 2014)

These words from the findings of the Inquiry into the tragic death of Phoenix Sinclair stressed again the need to create comprehensive, preventive measures that support vulnerable families.

Lived Experience and Perspectives: Women, mental health and housing in Winnipeg

By Jen Erdmann

Supportive Housing is an important model on the housing continuum and a positive choice for many people living with mental illness. Whether it is because a person faces greater challenges or because they do not wish to live alone, supportive housing, commonly referred to as “group homes”, holds the potential of being a place where residents may develop a greater sense of personal community, as well as providing the additional safety and support that comes with round the clock staff.

Winnipeg’s Racism Challenge

The Maclean’s article citing Winnipeg as Canada’s most racist city has prompted a public conversation that may prove to be useful. It is important that Winnipeg’s two solitudes get to know each other, at a personal and social level, and that non-Aboriginal people speak to and about Aboriginal people in a way that is respectful.

No silver bullet to ‘solve’ poverty

In response to “Generosity doesn’t solve poverty” Winnipeg Free Press article December 17

Mary Agnes Welch is right when she says charity is “not fixing the province’s most serious problem.  However, her critique of provincial anti-poverty efforts falls short. Complex problems, like the kind of poverty that exists and persists here in Winnipeg, require multi-faceted responses. We need to build on what’s working in Manitoba if we are to solve the problems of poverty here.