Hydro ignores our history and heritage

City does well to protect Exchange buildings

It is amazing what a difference one day can make. In fact, in the case of Manitoba Hydro – that most sacred cow of all Manitoba’s crown corporations – the period of time that it took to go from announcing an almost impressively naïve expansion plan to public repentance for that very plan took less than 24 hours.

There was substantial and warranted public outrage this past week when Manitoba Hydro announced plans to purchase, renovate and all but destroy three historic Exchange District buildings on McDermot Avenue.

The plan required by Manitoba Hydro (in order to account for increasing power demands in the area) entailed gutting the interiors of the three buildings to provide space for new substations.

It was a move that seemed to infuriate people city-wide, as even our often indifferent mayor Sam Katz – no friend of responsible downtown development by any means – expressed his surprise to hear of Manitoba Hydro’s ill-conceived plan in the pages of the Winnipeg Free Press.

Evidently swayed by the number of complaints in print, on radio and in public spaces all over the city (which, if shoppers at Polo Park constitute an appropriate sample size, were filled with denouncements of the arrogance and stupidity of the expansion plan), Manitoba Hydro representatives emerged Thursday to announce the plan had been put on hold.

It is baffling that Manitoba Hydro was seriously considering ravaging principal links to Winnipeg’s past.

Perhaps they hope to wait until Winnipeggers become enraged with another municipal matter and then pounce while public pressure is waning. Or perhaps they really do intend to find other solutions to their expansion needs that do not require wiping out designated historic buildings that happen to offer innovative spaces for a host of art galleries, residences and commercial interests.

It is baffling that Manitoba Hydro was seriously considering ravaging principal links to Winnipeg’s past, but it is even more baffling that the public corporation has not completely ruled out the possibility of doing so. Putting something on hold merely delays the matter – it does not rule it out as an option.

To convolute matters more, the Edmonton group that currently owns the properties has yet to declare that the buildings are even up for sale, so why Manitoba Hydro ever envisioned that they had the option to purchase them is still unclear.

What the public backlash makes clear, however, is that residents in the Exchange District and throughout the city care about their historic buildings. Winnipeg has done relatively well with preserving these and other monuments to bygone eras of the city’s architecture, and to have three of these monuments destroyed would erase parts of our heritage.

Though Manitoba Hydro noted that other expansion options would likely bear larger costs in monetary terms, losing these three buildings would come at a greater cost to those who already use them daily and to our collective city history as a whole.

Andrew Tod is a University of Winnipeg student.

Published in Volume 63, Number 18 of The Uniter (January 29, 2009)

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