NDP pledge new jail for Dauphin

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This article was published 19/08/2023 (777 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

While the mayor of Dauphin says that the new jail that NDP leader Wab Kinew promises his government will build is an asset to the community, a University of Winnipeg professor said that the campaign promise falls in line with an ineffective approach to crime.

In an event in Dauphin Friday afternoon, Kinew announced that his government would build a new “Centre of Justice” in the community to replace the Correctional Centre that was closed in 2020. Kinew took aim at the Pallister-Stefanson PCs who decided to close the facility.

“When we’re talking about the closure of the Dauphin jail, it had an impact on safety, it had an impact on the community, but it had an impact on the economy, it had an impact on jobs,” Kinew told a crowd in Dauphin. “But Brian Pallister announced that closure, and when Heather Stefansson announced that she committed to keeping the Dauphin jail closed, it meant that this community lost 80 jobs.”

In an interview, Dauphin mayor David Bosiak told the Sun that the community would welcome the possibility of a new facility as it is still feeling the effects of the loss of the jail three years later. He added that the closure of the jail impacted the ability of RCMP officers to address crime in the community because they need to spend more time transporting people who have been arrested to Brandon or Winnipeg.

“This would be a tremendous asset…because we’ve seen a slow drain of public service jobs from this region for probably more that 20 years,” Bosiak said. “And this would help to stabilize that to a degree.”

Bosiak also said that the way that the Tories closed the jail, without any consultation with the community, blindsided council and left a bad taste in the mouths of community members.

“We will work with whatever party is in government,” he said. “We just hope to be treated with fairness and have an ability to communicate, which didn’t quite happen with the jail when it was closed.”

In an emailed statement, Manitoba Government and General Employee’s Union president Kyle Ross declined to comment on specific campaign promises, said that the union supported the decision 10 years ago to replace the Dauphin jail with a new facility.

“We welcomed the plan to incorporate more programming focused on healing and skills development. For all these reasons, we said the decision to cancel the new facility and simply close the Dauphin jail was a mistake,” the statement read.

Kinew said that the new facility would bring back the 80 jobs, as well as offer employment opportunities outside of corrections, including in construction and for mental health workers. He said the new facility would offer a new approach to tacking the “stranglehold of drugs and gangs” which he said have festered under the Conservatives. Jails in the province now are “gangster universities,” Kinew said, which have problematic policies services that need funding.

“What we see in our communities too often is that when somebody is in the process of being held accountable, their addictions get worse, their gang involvement gets worse, then we set them up for failure and then we set our communities up to have worse problems with crime in the future,” Kinew told reporters. “This facility will be a necessary step towards being able to turn that thing around, so that when people are released, our communities will be welcoming people back into them who are more prepared to live a positive and productive life.”

In an emailed statement, PC candidate for Dauphin, Gord Wood, said that he disagreed with Pallister on the decision to close the jail.

“The NDP made promises on the Dauphin jail for 17 years and broke their promises every time. If they hadn’t ignored the jail for 17 years, the conversation today might have been much different,” he wrote.

At the announcement, Kinew said that the project is estimated to cost $40 million and that operating costs will run from five to seven million dollars a year.. He said that his government will collaborate with the community and promised that shovels will be in the ground for the facility in his government’s first term.

Meanwhile, Bronwyn Dobchuk-Land, a criminal justice professor at the University of Winnipeg told the Sun that she was disappointed in the NDP’s announcement of building a new facility in Dauphin. However, she said it was consistent with the party’s track record of tough on crime policies that have contributed to incarcerating Indigenous people in Manitoba while saying that they will address the causes of crime.

“It’s unfortunate that this party, that pays lip service to addressing the causes of violence and social insecurity and unsafety, is actually laying out a platform that will be at odds with the goals of addressing the causes,” she said.

She said that in their efforts to cut all public spending, the PCs have cut spending on justice, whereas the NDP spent money on policing and prisons when they were in power and are promising to continue to do.

“I think it’s unfortunate that the NDP hasn’t taken the opportunity of what I think has been a shift in consciousness over the last five years, where people have come to realize a little more that policing and jailing aren’t solving our problems,” she said. “And instead, they’re leaning on their old strategies, which is to try hard to appear tougher on crime that the Conservatives, which in fact, they are in their history and their policy.”

Still, Dobchuk-Land emphasized that despite its name as a centre of justice, the facility is still a jail which won’t help address the causes of crime.

“They’re framing it as something that’s going to be different than a jail that will house Indigenous people,” she said. “But this is a strategy that we’ve seen across the [United] States and in some parts of Canada — if it walks like a jail and it talks like a jail, it’s a jail.”

She said that the jobs could be brought back in other ways that would take less time than building a new correctional facility.

“There are a lot of already existing underfunded social services, which could use the support of well-paid government workers in order to enhance them and provide services tomorrow that would not only create good jobs,” Dobchuk-Land said. “But also create healthier and more stable communities.”

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