Austerity, anxiety and the making of a securitized Winnipeg

Canadian cities are increasingly managing social problems and perceived threats in public spaces through securitization, including the use of exclusionary zoning, hostile design, and the expansion of policing. Winnipeg City Hall’s recently announced plans to install airport-style security screening is an example of this, and one which did not emerge in isolation. Blocks away in the downtown, the Millennium Library—once a symbol of open and accessible civic life—has already undergone a highly public battle over safety, securitization, and access. Its recent history offers a critical lens for understanding how City Hall arrived at similar measures.

The normalization of airport-style security checkpoints in these public spaces reflects the convergence of several forces. Winnipeg’s deep social and economic divides have fuelled heightened narratives of insecurity, creating a climate in which intensified surveillance and expanded security appear as common-sense solutions. And because officials continue turning to police for guidance—rather than community planners, design architects, or other local stakeholders—security-driven measures are treated as the only practical path forward.

CUPE Local 500, which represents workers at City Hall and the Millennium Library, has supported and rationalized securitization as a means of protecting its workers. In doing so, the union has misaligned its interests with the employers, seemingly abdicating any sense of responsibility toward addressing structurally-rooted social issues.

The Millennium Library’s implementation of airport-style security screening in 2019 was an unprecedented response among major municipal libraries at the time, complicating the discussion around equity and access and sparking a highly contentious public debate that has continued to evolve. While some heralded the library’s beefed-up security protocols and infrastructure, community groups and others fought these measures and expressed deep concern about how the changes would impact the library’s public service vision and, with a significant drop in attendance after its implementation, its viability as an institution.

Compounding these tensions, reported safety incidents at the library surged nearly 70 percent in early 2025 after the city shut down Community Connections, the low-barrier support hub whose staff had routinely de-escalated crises and connected people to services before problems escalated.

As a key stakeholder in securitization debates, the union bought into two assumptions: that opposition to securitization means opposition to worker safety, and that securitization is inevitable—the ‘new normal.’

The manufactured inevitability of securitization

When City Hall announced its plan to implement increased security measures, CUPE Local 500 President Gord Delbridge took it as a sign that that the municipal administration was acknowledging their concerns and responding to the union’s safety-related grievances. Delbridge voiced some reticence about the security measures at the Millennium Library but maintained that it was a coordinated response and necessary to deal with legitimate safety concerns. He noted that his members were concerned that people might oppose the measures, not recognizing how unsafe they had felt in their workplace.

But Delbridge’s support for securitization rested on a false dichotomy that pits workers against community members, as if their interests are inherently at odds. This framing suggests that opposing securitization is equivalent to opposing worker safety, a zero-sum narrative that may play well in the media but forecloses other viable solutions.

The move toward increased securitization at City Hall and the Millennium Library reflects an emerging sense of inevitability—an assumption about which strategies decisionmakers consider acceptable, and which practices become normalized and replicated. This normalization can shut down space for alternative ideas to surface. It’s also in direct contrast to other approaches, which are driven by comprehensive community-wide consultations, such as the Thunder Bay Public Library, which underwent a decolonizing project. Their initiative included eliminating uniformed security guards, providing comprehensive de-escalation training to staff, establishing community hosts and offering a complement of other supports such as nurses, doctors, social workers, and Indigenous elders. Locally, non-profit organizations have developed similarly sophisticated ways to balance overall safety while resisting securitization.

Winnipeg had its own evidence that relational approaches work: during the period when community safety hosts were active at the Millennium Library, incidents requiring emergency services dropped by up to 89 percent, a striking indicator of what well-resourced, non-policing interventions can achieve.

Consistent with the perspective of inevitability, Delbridge accepted and identified security screening as “a reality” at concerts, airports, and hockey games due to safety concerns. He also normalized securitization when he stated that he thought it was not excessive, that his members unanimously supported the measures, and that they were already part of our everyday life.

After a decade of seeking guidance exclusively from police, securitization was the predictable outcome for both institutions. Prioritizing police perspectives came at the expense of exploring alternative strategies through meaningful consultations with community and other experts. In both cases, officials presented securitization as a necessary response to safety incidents, obscuring how these decisions were shaped by narrow, closed-door consultations. In the case of the Millennium Library, more invasive measures were the direct result of the police pressuring the library over many years to install their own security. At one point, because of the pressure, the library hired police officers to patrol its premises. Their presence led to arrests, conveying a discordant message to the patrons and the broader public. This was eventually abandoned.

A broader turn toward policing

While CUPE Local 500 has become a focal point in debates over the securitization of Winnipeg’s public spaces, it is far from alone. Since 2018, several Manitoba public sector unions have similarly called for more policing and expanded security measures to protect their members. Examples include the Manitoba Government and General Employees Union, the Manitoba Nurses Union, the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 832, and the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1505.

For critics, the concern with CUPE Local 500 and other public sector unions embracing securitization is that it risks becoming the default response whenever issues of worker or public safety arise. Yet the effectiveness of airport-style screening in actually reducing threats remains largely unstudied and unresolved. Moreover, these measures have not been paired with meaningful efforts to confront the deeper structural inequities—rising income inequality, inadequate housing, racism, and ongoing austerity—that underlie the very conditions producing safety concerns.

Unions are aligning themselves with securitization strategies to deal with problems that lie beyond what policing or surveillance are equipped to solve. This shift also points to a deeper crisis in union identity and ideological direction—specifically, how unions understand and articulate their members’ interests. It raises difficult questions about who is included or excluded from the public realm and deemed worthy of protection. In doing so, it reveals how public sector unions are struggling to develop an independent analysis, distinct from that of employers, government officials, police, or the corporate security firms that profit from rising fear and anxiety.

Occupational health and safety are rightly central to union advocacy, but public sector unions also need to consider how securitization—though intended to reduce risk—can undermine broader public safety and obstruct equity and social justice. Such measures can erode public support, disproportionately harm certain communities, and risk casting unions as out of step with the working class and structurally marginalized. The Millennium Library and City Hall cases offer an opportunity for unions, including CUPE Local 500, to clarify their role and recommit to a more expansive, justice-oriented vision of safety.

Securitization does little to address Winnipeg’s deeper safety crisis and, at best, merely displaces it. What is required is a renewed focus on the structural conditions—decades of austerity and public sector divestment—that have weakened public institutions and generated the very insecurity unions now confront. Unless unions take up this challenge, they risk undermining their own principles and hard-won gains. If we care about their future, we should expect more: a clearer commitment to whose safety they defend and how that safety is defined.

Richard Hines was an organizer with the community group Millennium for All. He completed his Master of Arts in Labour Studies at McMaster University in 2021.