I always joked that if I had ever become disgustingly rich and famous, I would begin my autobiography with the words “I was born and raised in the North End of Winnipeg.” It adds a real tough-guy flair to things and sets me up for a good old-fashioned “overcoming hard times and getting out of the inner city” story arc.
Nobody is joking about Winnipeg anymore, though.

Last week, news broke that Air Canada would no longer have their employees stay in downtown Winnipeg, and instead have them spend their nights in a “safe” hotel near the airport, on account of violent crime downtown. As a result of this, many Winnipeggers took offence to the seemingly unprovoked move, and understandably so. It’s not as though Air Canada were reacting to any specific incident beyond “approximately 1,000 displaced people from rural Manitoba,” which hardly seems like enough to warrant a permanent policy change.

A decision made all the more glaringly prominent, considering that Air Canada’s contract with their union requires pilots on stopover be sheltered downtown, everywhere Air Canada flies.

Shortly after this made the news, CBC.ca ran a story on Oct. 4 entitled “Winnipeg: Is the bad rap deserved?” Despite being a largely unbiased look at the overall issue, the real news for me was not in the article but rather in the users’ comments below. Comments to CBC.ca are rated using a simple but effective system, allowing readers to either thumbs-up or thumbs-down each comment’s rating. I was shocked to find the highest rated comments were unanimously negative, either siding against Winnipeg on the matter or just bashing Winnipeg in general. Worse still, when I jumped into the fray to defend my poor city, I was told “Winnipeg is a cesspool of crime and filth.”

I’m reminded of an incident this past summer, when I had been working in Saskatchewan with the family business. It would seem my sister and I had the audacity to mention in passing to one fellow that we normally lived just outside of Winnipeg; the man, despite our semi-professional and public setting, immediately began a contemptuous rant, nearly asphyxiating himself on expletives I cannot repeat here, so deep was his apparent repugnance for our city.

In short order, we’re getting a really bad national rep folks, and not just in getting the butt end of jokes anymore. The consensus out there seems to be Winnipeg has become an uber-violent warzone that you’ll be lucky to get out of alive, should you have the misfortune of ever coming here.

OK, I’m not going to deny that we have an issue with crime in relation to the rest of Canada, but we’re no cesspool or warzone, and we certainly don’t deserve the overwhelmingly negative attitude people — many Winnipeggers included — seem to be developing for our burg. Winnipeg has been labeled as an “unsafe” place to visit, but the fact is we deserve no such reputation.

Let’s say we manage to smash our previous record of 34 homicides in one year with a whopping 40 murders in 2011. That puts us at a homicide rate of approximately 5.8 homicides per 100,000 population. It’s not a good number, especially when you compare it to other major Canadian cities. But before we let the rest of Canada quarantine us away as a “no-visit zone” for tourists and commerce, we need to look at that number in context with other major cities in North America: Las Vegas, one of the great Canadian vacation destinations, had a homicide rate of 7.6 per 100,000 in 2010. Likewise, New York City and Phoenix had homicide rates of 6.4 and 7.6 per 100,000, respectively; Minneapolis had a homicide rate of 9.6 per 100,000; Chicago had a rate of 15.2 and the American capital, Washington, had 21.9 murders per 100,000 people — a far cry from Winnipeg’s 5.8 maximum.

But if Winnipeg is so corpse-riddled, why don’t we hear equally as often about American cities from travelling Canadians? Surely if Winnipeg gives Canadians the willies, then these cities with much higher homicide rates must appear to be gripped in the foul clutches of unending terror and darkness?
They aren’t.

The point here isn’t to say that we don’t have a problem with crime; we certainly do and it needs to be addressed. No, the point I’m making here is that we’re often being judged through a hypocritical lens. They stick their noses up like we’re some sort of crime-hub of the universe, and I’m tired of it. Winnipeg is labeled a “warzone” by the same people who happily — and safely — vacation in the statistically more dangerous Las Vegas core.

It’s time to look at Winnipeg differently, Canada. We have a lot of things going for us. A low crime rate isn’t one of them, but we’re working on that. We can’t let the naysayers cripple our momentum with one lousy figure. Remember, folks: the worst player in the NHL still had the chops to make the team.

Gerald is a lifelong Winnipegger and proud of it.