Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press (Newspaper) - March 3, 2022, Winnipeg, Manitoba C M Y K PAGE A7 NEWS I TOPIC ● WINNIPEGFREEPRESS.COM A7THURSDAY, MARCH 3, 2022 THINK TANK PERSPECTIVES EDITOR: BRAD OSWALD 204-697-7269 ● BRAD.OSWALD@FREEPRESS.MB.CA ● WINNIPEGFREEPRESS.COM A7 THURSDAY MARCH 3, 2022 Ideas, Issues, Insights MIKE DEAL / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS FILES With the latest plan to redevelop Portage Place Shopping Centre shelved, it’s time for inner-city community leaders to come up with a bold new vision for the mall. New vision needed for Portage Place T HE clamour around the future of Portage Place has quieted down to a chirp. For the moment, it’s closer to the timbre of the spar- rows that live in the mall than to the bluster of Bay Street billionaires. The stage is now set for a more modest — yet in many ways, profoundly more ambitious — vision for the neighbourhood mall than the one formerly proposed by Toronto mega-developer Starlight Acquisitions. An unintended but welcome effect of the Forks North Portage Partnership’s proposed — and now terminated — sale of Portage Place to Starlight was that it prompted community leaders who opposed the sale to sketch the broad outlines of a grassroots vision for Portage Place, based on priorities that radically differ from those of large property owners and business-oriented politi- cians. Inner-city community leaders now agree that the counter vision for Portage Place that they have spent the past several years articulating makes an open-ended community consultation about the mall’s future unnecessary. The commu- nity-based vision for Portage Place — as formulat- ed by community leaders who made presentations at city hall and formed the Portage Place Commu- nity Coalition and Portage Place Community Voic- es Committee — is made up of four key pillars: 1. Portage Place should become a non-profit community centre (that may include for-profit stores offering affordable necessities, as deter- mined by the community) primarily for the peo- ple in the neighbourhood, rather than a corporate shopping mall aspiring to serve Jets ticketholders. 2. Hundreds of new rent-geared-to-income so- cial housing units should be built at Portage Place. 3. A real safety plan that centres on Indigenous women and girls should replace the current secu- rity approach. 4. Indigenous peoples should own Portage Place. How possible is this? Since 2019, three things have transpired that make a community-based Portage Place appear realistic: First, the federal government, which owns the land and parking garage beneath Portage Place jointly with the city and province, has acknowl- edged it must consider its treaty obligations before privatizing its Portage Place assets. This means a treaty land entitlement process, similar to the one that led to the Treaty One Development Corporation’s Naawi-Oodena redevelopment of the Kapyong Barracks, could be a possibility for Portage Place. Second, the city and province have shown their hand by offering a combined $49 million to Starlight for the redevelopment of Portage Place. What’s more, the federal government did not re- ject out of hand Starlight’s request for $50 million plus $240 million in loans. While the civic and provincial commitments were made with the aim of attracting investment and increasing the tax base, those levels of gov- ernment have a responsibility to fund community centres and social housing. Given that before the pandemic, the building was offered for sale by Vancouver-based Peterson Group for only $23 million, a public purchase of Portage Place would seem to be easily accomplished. Third, the Hudson’s Bay Company’s downtown Winnipeg department store, which permanently closed in 2020 and is valued at $0, is attached to Portage Place by a skywalk. The bulk of the HBC’s wealth was stolen from Indigenous peoples by means of exploitative terms of trade and a 7,000-000-acre land grant from the British Em- pire, made without the involvement of Indigenous peoples. Given the immense level of unmet need that exists in Winnipeg’s city centre, and the stated willingness of the city and province to support its redevelopment, the Bay building would make a logical component — and HBC would make a logical funder — of an Indigenous-owned Portage Place/Bay building community centre and hous- ing complex. The profit rates of enclosed shopping malls around the world are declining, and a worldwide process of “de-malling” is taking place, with cities from Lisbon to Memphis turning disinvest- ed malls into human-services centres. Winnipeg community leaders have a demonstrated capacity to transform large, outmoded buildings into thriv- ing new community infrastructure, with a long track record of inspiring examples that includes the redevelopment of the Canadian Pacific Rail- way depot on Higgins Avenue into the Neeginan Centre, the Gault building on Arthur Street into Artspace, the Christie’s Biscuits factory on Notre Dame Street into the Specialized Services for Children and Youth centre, and, as we speak, Kapyong Barracks into Naawi-Oodena. What is needed now is a formal counterpropos- al, based on the four pillars above, for commu- nities and organizations to rally around. As the powers that be quietly scramble to find another developer to gentrify the mall, the door has opened for community leaders to seize the public conversation. Owen Toews is the author of What’s Going on With Portage Place?, a recently published report by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alterna- tives in Placing Community at the Heart of Recovery from COVID: The State of the Inner City Report 2022. It’s available at policyalternatives. ca/manitoba. Home on the Prairies; roots in Ukraine ‘PUT sunflower seeds in your pockets, so when you die on my land, flowers will grow.” That’s what the Ukrainian woman in civilian clothes told a Russian invader with an automatic rifle last week. It’s the least he could do, before a distant brother shoots him dead in the fields, on the steppe or in Kyiv. The people of Ukraine are taking up arms, as the military and citizen defence units of a demo- cratic nation shoot down the planes and level the tanks of an authoritarian aggressor. Like one-sixth of Winnipeggers, my blood is Ukrainian. My great-aunt was born on the Prairies, in a sod hut under a rainstorm, as great-grandpa worked the land as he would have on the steppe back home. My family came to Manitoba, up to Grandview and Dauphin, to grow wheat and barley, beets and potatoes. Then they grew families, from farmers to doctors and lawyers and diplomats — and jour- nalists, like me. They built churches and towns. They communed with the Cree and the Ojibwe. They helped built this province into what it is. They fled the chaos of Europe in the early 20th century. Now, it seems, the chaos has returned to their homeland, as it so often has. Cousin Daria was the first I spoke to, before the bombs began to fall. I promised her I would do what I could as a journalist to help. Our ancestral ties are different — her moth- er’s family, Auntie Hania, came later in the 20th century. Daria’s nationalist fervour is felt in text messages and phone calls from the front; mine is a distant memory and a longing for real ties. My side of the family were bohemian bumpkins who barely knew what country they left, while the borders shifted constantly — much different than the family of my ex-girlfriend, Alexa, whose parents fled the Soviet Union just decades ago, rather than a century. But as I watch the bloodshed on CNN and on Twitter, my heart twinges for the place I know I am from, despite never having touched its soil. Two of my auntie’s cousins, men, are staying to defend Ukraine, while the others flee to Poland. Auntie Angela in Berlin went to the vigil as the bombs fell, the blue and yellow of Ukraine crowd- ing the street. In Winnipeg, thousands crowded in front of the legislative building Saturday, chant- ing in solidarity, calling for the West to act. Cousin Joseph is researching Ukrainian art, and he wrote an essay decrying Russia’s propa- ganda war, its oligarchy and Putin’s authoritari- anism. “How is this happening again?” Daria wrote to me weeks before Vladimir Putin’s troops moved in. “It can’t happen. Ukraine has worked so hard for their independence.” But that raises a question — how do I report on a war in a country I have never been to, but that feels my own all the same? Last week, while working on a story, I walked into a store on Selkirk Avenue that is run by a Ukrainian. I recognized the man behind the till. He comes to my uncle’s house on Christmas Eve every year. He sings carols. He also sings for Ukraine, collecting cash for the armed forces and for the care packages sent to those who need it. Is it right for me to write about the horror in my ancestral home? Do my blood ties muddy my ability to report on what’s happening, or do they strengthen it? I’m not sure, but I lean toward the latter. In a group chat, the family shares their wishes and news. Cousin Natalya wishes she was “home” in Winnipeg rather than in Toronto. Cousin Ivana wishes Natayla was here, too. Auntie Vonnie says the bloodshed is surreal. Auntie Carla had to work another shift as a public-health nurse amid the pandemic, but she says she was there in spirit on Saturday outside the legislature. Overseas, my relations are fleeing their coun- try — our country — or they’re fighting to keep every inch of its soil. Little boys play piano in the lobbies of hotels in Kyiv while outside in the villages, ladies in ba- bushkas make Molotov cocktails and the govern- ment hands out automatic rifles. Here at the intersection of the Red and Assini- boine rivers, I just repeat words of hope. Erik Pindera is a reporter at the Winnipeg Free Press. Data collection key to preserving freshwater I HAVE to admit, my heart sank as my eyes caught the headline “Latest Manitoba model- ling contains limited wastewater data” (Free Press, Feb. 14). “Limited water data” is a somewhat ubiqui- tous expression that continues to plague those who work in the field of freshwater science. It’s a polite and opaque way of saying “we re- ally don’t have nearly enough data to build an accurate and complete picture of the health of our fresh water — nor to plan for the future.” All the more galling, given that it was pub- lished during Love Data Week. While that article ultimately revealed that what was limited was the amount of wastewa- ter surveillance data released by the province to help model the trajectory of COVID-19, that phrase remained somewhat triggering for me — especially since I had learned earlier that day that pharmaceutical pollution has wreaked incredible havoc on the world’s rivers. Despite proudly touting here in Canada that our fresh water (20 per cent of the world’s supplies) is our most importance resource, the freshwater data landscape is sparse and patchy. So much so, in fact, that just over a year ago, WWF-Canada revealed it couldn’t even determine the health of 60 per cent of Canada’s watersheds, citing lack of data. I know data is not a particularly sexy topic; in fact, it’s a pretty nerdy and cumbersome one. But it really is the building block of the scientific processes that keep us and our environment safe. Without reliable, consistent and accurate data on the health of Canada’s freshwater environments, we don’t know how healthy and safe those freshwater supplies are, nor can we completely understand the impacts humans are having on them. The aforementioned study on pharma- ceutical pollution and rivers could not have drawn its (admittedly dispiriting) conclusions without access to vast swaths of accurate data from across the globe. And when it comes to monitoring Canada’s freshwater supplies regularly in order to obtain that data, COVID-19 certainly hasn’t helped. So, what is the solution? Well, as al- ways, we need to innovate how we do things. When it comes to scientists monitoring freshwater systems, there are some incredible new innovations on the horizon — many of which are right here in Canada. Citizen science, or community-based water monitoring (CbWM) — empowering plucky citizens across given regions to grab their knapsacks and go out and take samples of their surrounding bodies of water to be submitted to larger datastreams across the country — has boomed during the pandemic. And that’s a critical part of our freshwater monitoring infrastructure in Canada — a land of often remote and scattered freshwater bod- ies that are impractical for our limited cadre of scientists to reach. And we need to maintain this momentum for community-based water monitoring through federal and provincial investments to ensure they’re viable options to complete our freshwater data puzzle here in Canada. This includes investment in existing CbWM organizations dotted around the country so they can empower (and fund) local commu- nities to monitor their local water bodies; share the results in accessible formats across communities, cities and provinces; and make informed decisions to effect real improve- ments to the health of those water bodies. When it comes to scientists monitoring freshwater systems, there are some incredible new innovations on the horizon — many of which are right here in Canada. For example, researchers at the IISD Exper- imental Lakes Area, just outside Kenora, Ont., are monitoring one of their lakes for everything from temperature to chlorophyll from the com- fort of their own home office. This is thanks to a rather funky Canadian invention: a solar-pow- ered floating platform that tests the water for given parameters, processes the information and then transmits that right to an office in Winnipeg (or London, Tokyo or Sydney, for that matter) to be understood and acted upon. As the pandemic has taught us, data about health — whether human or environmental — is the only way we can understand current trends and make the best decisions about how to improve them. Canada’s most precious resource, fresh water, is no exception, but we need to invest in its monitoring — for us, and for future generations. Matthew McCandless is executive director of the IISD Experi- mental Lakes Area. OWEN TOEWS ERIK PINDERA MATTHEW MCCANDLESS A_07_Mar-03-22_FP_01.indd 7 2022-03-02 5:06 PM ;