One great city?
So much to hate, so little time
Tessa Vanderhart Staff
I’ve never known a city quite as deserving of my disdain as Winnipeg.
It’s not even that I have a characteristically Winnipeg inferiority complex: it’s just that, for me, the lack of benefits outweighs the low cost of living. Before any other reputation the city has — for frugality, for gritty tenacity, for moderation that could only come from geography — certain negative qualities will always precede it.
To be brutally honest as a Winnipeg winter, you’d have to hate yourself to live here. And, apparently, most of us do.
On a clear day, you can see the problems well, more clearly.
Back in the day, Winnipeg used to be a stronghold of socialism. We retained the collectivist elements — being united in our demise — only to have the positive social philosophy replaced by a dismal and disinterested mediocrity.
Winnipeg isn’t a city; it’s a collection of small towns, albeit ones with ridiculously high crime rates and neighbours that hate each other. Yes, I’m talking to you, Transcona.
It’s hard to reconcile this self-image with the unfortunate reality that Winnipeggers are all- too-often aloof, gritty and painfully realistic. I suppose staring out into the blank, grey prairies will do that to a person — but 700,000 people? That seems a bit excessive.
Even our trendy areas are so sprawled as to be utterly unsatisfying, so much so that any pinings for an urban aesthetic must be fulfilled in the real downtown. When areas develop, the backlash is immediate: the implosion of the Corydon strip, especially in winter, exemplifies how the city is ashamed to progress.
And so, we’re back to square one, the substantive problems of Winnipeg — a dead inner city and all that entails: poverty, homelessness, and drug abuse. Not that these problems are not unique to our fair city, but they are dealt with in exceptionally poor ways, if at all. This isn’t so much because they’re fundamentally irresolvable, but rather because the overwhelming recourse seems to be ‘what’s the point?’. Sadly, I couldn’t tell you what the point is anymore. Like most people, I give up.
One great city?!
Winnipeg is that city most Canadians consider to be “major,” but still gets listed last, every time. It’s not that we’re the most useless kid on the playground, but, well, we’re mediocre at best. Problem is, Winnipeg knows it: not only are we constantly belittling ourselves, using the excuse that the city should be realistically compared with Saskatoon or Halifax (though, really, if we’re talking cold, hard, economics, even hardly-vibrant Halifax is a stretch). We could abandon any last shred of dignity and compare Winnipeg to these smaller cities, but what would it mean if we didn’t make the cut even then? Being mediocre is one thing, but the current prognosis for the city is the utmost in pathetic: completely giving up, the way downtown has been abandoned, the way suburban sprawl has been allowed to dominate, the way it is almost impossible to find something praiseworthy without caveat.
Take the Free Press as a case in point: even where pride is deserved, the overwhelming pull toward the centre subverts any real innovation, any depth the city might have had; it’s all a façade, much like the architecture cited when selling the city to an outsider. In essence, a city that once used to teem with culture rots away from the inside, too easy to ignore.
Living in Winnipeg is a lot like having depression (which, apparently, is an epidemic in this dirty gutter of a city): if you don’t take your antidepressants, for whatever reason, the harsh and unrelenting reality becomes increasingly apparent — and eventually, you’ll start to lose whatever merits you had in the first place.
Oh, the richness of metaphors that surround this great city: each resident, no matter what self-confidence they pretend, is themself mediocre at best and (unknowingly) slightly better than that, at worst. It’s no wonder we have so many cultural exports, weaned on the cold angular city and eventually forced out by its disdain for success.
And frugal as Winnipeggers may be, culture is definitely one thing you don’t want to buy at the Dollorama.
If Winnipeg’s greatest contribution is its people, that’s immensely more depressing. Self-hating, fine; but willing to sit idly by and accept — even embrace — the mediocrity that surrounds us, and be complicit in the demise of the city, is not bleak but reprehensible.
You really like it here? You’re lying. You’d have to be; even if it’s only cool to self-hate in Winnipeg, we can’t all hate ourselves into this mess — and we sure as hell can’t hate ourselves out.
