I eagerly await local reaction to this gem:

…..[Toronto’s] figures are still below those in Vancouver and Winnipeg, where 34% of respondents fear being victims of crime.

The poll revealed Winnipeggers were most likely to say they do not feel safe walking alone in their own neighbourhood after dark, with 31% of respondents…..

…..”When we think of the big, scary places, Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal probably come to mind,” said Frank Cormier, a criminology professor at the University of Manitoba. “But consistently cities like Winnipeg, Regina and Saskatoon have some of the highest crime rates in the country, especially violent crime.

“It’s fairly widely known that Winnipeg for the past number of years consistently has been the murder capital of Canada. … A lot of people hear high ‘murder rate’ and they picture the random killing on the street. Murder rates consistently show that at least 80% of murders are committed by someone the victim knows very well.”

Winnipeggers were also most likely to agree with the statement: “A home alarm system is a necessity in my community.” Fifty-eight per cent of respondents in Winnipeg agreed compared with 55% in Vancouver, 43% in Toronto and 36% in Edmonton.

The poll also showed that 55% Winnipeggers and Edmontonians expect gang violence to go up in the community in the future.

Not exactly earth-shattering news, but it will be interesting to watch the reaction of Winnipeggers to this story. The last time a national newspaper criticized Winnipeg there was massive outrage, pathetically spearheaded by the Free Press. Last month’s Globe and Mail assesment of this city was harsh and unblinking…and spot-on.(Sadly, it’s now behind a sub-only block, but some juicy excerpts are available at The Black Rod

Nothing Julius Strauss wrote in the G&M was incorrect. Downtown Winnipeg, a place I see everyday and lived in for years, is a toilet. I have watched for decades how one castle in the sky after another has been planned and implemented, promising renaissance and rapture, only to deliver the usual anticlimax of indifference and destruction.

The new Red River campus? A groundbreaking work of beauty, and sure to give a jump start to the sagging Exchange area. The result? One bookstore, Borealis Books, gone under (I’m not sure if that’s a reflection on the area itself, or more the student body of Red River, when a high-end used bookstore folds after the influx of 1000s of students; then again, Red River’s downtown campus is home to its computer, graphics and communications departments, which basically means it’s home to 100s of Krista Erickson wanna-bees from Charleswood, box-frame bespectacled future media gurus, and tech-head ad geeks Photoshopping Great-West Life pamphlets and dreaming of a $65K a year job for a hip young marketing company that allows staff to watch Simpsons repeats while working. Not exactly the kind of crowd interested in buying a first edition of Kundera); now Mondragon is facing extinction….and that cheering you hear is mine own.

So, one of the city’s best used book stores, and a radical cafe that sees post-secondary students as its bread-and-butter have died, and are on life-support, respectfully. And those are the only two I can think of off the top of my head.

However, I hear that new Subway across the street is really booming.

The MTS Centre? Brings Winnipeg into the new millenium with a bang. Tell that to A&B Sound, directly across the street. We now have a giant purple and green elephant sitting across from MTS…..which is actually right at home along that entire block of boarded-up and piss-smelling firetraps.

Up next, the Human Rights Museum, Hydro’s new potemkin office, and the on-again-off-again Portage and Main-as-Time’s Square fantasy.

How many surrounding businesses will hear the bell tolling for ye when those places open?

As the Black Rod writes, in response to the Free Press’s saccharine, mooneyed-teenager boosterism:

If the Free Press had wanted to do real reporting on downtown…..

They could have reported on the colony of sniffers that’s set up at Higgins and Main, another five minute walk from the Exchange District. The city’s response has been to remove the bus shelter that they had turned into their own crash pad.

The Free Press could have gone in search of the panhandlers who’ve moved into the new downtown Library for the winter. Strauss writes about them and they’re not hard to find.

They could have interviewed City Councillor Don Benham, the champion of the panhandlers, who argues for their right to roam downtown and annoy people, regardless how it reflects on the city to visitors.

They could have attended an event at the MTS Centre and watched the panhandler swarm the crowd. The new arena does bring thousands downtown, and each one goes home and tells their neighbours about having to run a guantlet of scummy streetpeople. If that’s not an attraction, we don’t know what is.
op.cit

They could have also included how the downtown area seems to roll up the sidewalks at 6PM, thereby not allowing anyone access to the area even if they desired.

That the incessant building of condos will one day provide a safe and chic squatting space for sniffers and bums when that balloon bursts. (Note to developers: No one, I don’t care how young and hip and eager to be seen downtown, will drop $175K for a condo on Ellice and Vaughan or St. Mary and Portage. And if they do, then they deserve the fate that awaits them.) Now I hear that the continued plundering of heritage buildings near Waterfront Drive and on Princess Street will continue unabated. Take note Mayor Quimby, Lyle Lanley, and other snakeoil salesmen…..the condo bubble is strained to the point of collapse. A hundred years ago this city had a similar boom, with overnight millionaires taking champagne baths after selling palaces on spec. This helped pave the way for the fall of Winnipeg and its subsequent esteem-issues, which we have been dealing with for the last 75 years and can best be seen in the disgraceful Free Press whoring.

This low self-esteem causes us to react like wounded infants to any criticism (The Strauss story), and chalk it up to conspiracies by ‘big city elites from Hogtown”, or else go way beyond any rational, appropriate response to success (The nauseating worship of Cindy Klassen (Rename the Streets!) is the latest example of this. Enjoy it while it lasts Winnipeg, because like any and all other Winnipeg ‘heroes’ — Clara Hughes, Neil Young, Chantal Kreviazuk — once Klassen gets beyond Headingly she won’t look back, and for good reason — and I don’t mean to bash Klassen, she deserves recognition. It’s not her fault she was born in a city that will exploit her without shame to boost its own flaccid confidence.)

I digress…..

So, what sort of response will we see to the Murder Capital story above?

More absurd hairsplitting?: “Well, when you take into consideration that they failed to include Winnipeg’s lesbian-handicapped-eskimos in the study….. and that they took their stats from crimes committed while the moon was waxing, in a leap year, on odd-numbered Fridays…..

Or will it be more of that sad, parochial cheerleading? Trying to make Garbage Hills out of North End backlane autobin spillage? The belief that those pretentious Toronto yuppies just like to bash us Winnipeg folk and have no real idea what it’s like to live here? That there is a conspiracy to bash Winnipeg. “Yeah…. well…..we have a thriving theatre district and….and……and a booming arts community….and….and….and…..

You can almost see Morley Walker wiping snot away with his sleeve.

Or will it be more babas digging through photo albums and Whyte Ridge soccer moms sending the Free Press pics of flowers and Garbage Hill panoramas by dusk?

Or will there be more exposes of immigrants-done-good, and minority social-climbing?

Or Pretty Young Things fresh from the Asper School of Biz or Red River’s journalism program, rebelling against their Fort Richmond heritage and choosing to slum in Point Douglas or on Langside……at least long enough to gain experiences that will sound wickedly bohemian at future dinner parties they’ll hold in their River Heights character home they bought after the second attempted rape on West Broadway, or the tenth break-in at the Point Douglas place.

Maybe we should listen to Mayor Quim..I mean Katz and send them more photos of downtown Winnipeg and the Provencher Bridge?

Just make sure you airbrush out the winos, the panhandlers, and the floating corpses first.