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More and more parking spaces amid empty promises

https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/opinion/columnists/2026/01/09/more-and-mor...

I tell my teenage stepdaughter to slow the car down as the security guard approaches. I’m giving her an evening driving lesson in the most obvious venue in West Broadway — the enormous, barren expanse of concrete that is the parking lot behind the Canada Life buildings on Osborne Street.

The guard knocks on the window and asks us what we’re doing on the property. I explain, but he asks us to leave. I explain we’re going to have to switch drivers but then we’d be on our way. We head out to the Hydro parking lot on Taylor Avenue, where I first learned to drive years ago.

While disappointing, this less-than-warm greeting should have been expected from the company formerly known as Great West Life.

For years as I passed by, I watched as the old house at 51 Balmoral St., adjacent to the parking lot, slowly rotted in place. The story goes that it was the last home standing after Great West Life flattened all surrounding dwellings during their expansion in the 1970s and ’80s. The owner was elderly, and wished only to die in the home, upon which it would be forfeited to the company and slated for demolition with the others.

However, the resident lived long enough that the house was designated of historical value and levelling it was no longer an option. So, the company was saddled with a structure they wished to remove to make way for even more parking.

I was on the West Broadway Development Corporation board during the years Great West Life was desperately trying to offload 51 Balmoral, lest it remain saddled with its increasingly expensive upkeep.

Eventually the decision to allow demolition came to a vote for the board. I was the lone holdout against demolition that eventually resulted in Great West Life partnering with the YMCA to renovate and expand the house into a 100-space daycare, with 90 of those spaces reserved for its own employees.

I recall thinking at the time, “What was so difficult about that? Why couldn’t it have repurposed it long ago instead of fighting us for so long?”

But it shouldn’t have surprised me. Because the history of Great West Life/Canada Life in West Broadway is one of ceaseless unneighbourliness and willful ignorance to the needs of the community in which it conducts its business.

The area upon which Canada Life now stands was once home to Shea’s Brewery, Osborne Stadium and the Winnipeg Amphitheatre, a hallowed and unheated building from where the first hockey game ever broadcast by radio was played.

It was also home to an apartment building and eight heritage homes on the first block of Whitehall Avenue. All eventually made way for 450 vehicles to park.

In the 1970s, Great West Life petitioned the city to demolish not only the homes on the remaining block of Whitehall, but also the homes on Good Street and on the east side of Balmoral. Its design promised condominiums and rental units, and only a modest increase in parking spaces.

Of course, we got none of the housing, and parking in a decidedly immodest quantity.

The result? West Broadway was gutted of its historic homes, its cohesiveness and dignity as a residential community, and, importantly, much of the mixed-income housing our city now so desperately needs.

The homes that remain on Balmoral, overlooking the “graveyard” of their once-neighbours, are a testament to the fine architecture that was laid to waste in the pursuit of parking stalls and empty promises.

Now, when the city has agreed to build back some of the housing that was destroyed, promised and ultimately never delivered by Great West Life, the Granite Curling Club is paying the price through the loss of its parking lot.

The club has reported it's been unable to make any long-term arrangements with Canada Life to use even a portion of its embarrassing legacy of neighbourhood erasure to serve the community in which it dwells.

Instead, the last companion of the original stadium and arena continues to be crowded out by the land-hungry insurance giant.

The present moment offers an elegant opportunity for penance.

It’s long past time to recognize that the housing being built on the Granite’s lot is a mere fraction of what Great West Life themselves promised for the neighbourhood, and trading that for the parking which replaced it is an act of neighbourhood reconciliation desperately needed if this city is to define a better path forward.

With 67 years of encroachment upon the lives of the people of West Broadway, Canada Life might do well to remind themselves of an old adage: the best time to make amends is yesterday, and the next best time to do so is today.

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