A new Community Centre for Justice for Dauphin is on the list of priorities should the Manitoba New Democrats form the next provincial government.
Party leader Wab Kinew was in the city, Aug. 18, sharing his plans to develop the facility, three years after the governing Progressive Conservatives unexpectedly and abruptly closed the Dauphin Correctional Centre.
“If our team forms the next government here in Manitoba in this fall’s election, we will build a new Dauphin Justice Center. We will build a new Dauphin Justice Center to replace the Dauphin jail that the PCs closed,” Kinew said. “We’re going to be building a facility that improves safety in the community and in the region. We’re going to be building a facility that is a concrete step towards addressing the crime that is too often present in our community. But we are also going to be making an economic investment to bring good paying jobs back to Dauphin and back to families who live in the Parkland.”
The plan, Kinew said, is centred on community safety and will act as a vehicle when interventions are necessary to address people who “are on a bad path” and need to be taken off the streets.
“But from there, we need to have a facility where we can address the addictions, we can address the trauma, we can address the issues that are causing them to go down the bad path and then we can show them how to lead a better life,” he said. “Specifically, the importance of working a good job and the benefits of hard work. This is part of what we need to see in responding to the issues around safety in our community.”
The closure of the Dauphin Correctional Centre by the governing PCs not only impacted community safety, Kinew said, but was economically difficult for the community given the loss of 80 jobs.
“And even though they tried to spin it this way and that way, at the end of the day from those 80 people who lost their jobs about 60 of them moved out of Dauphin entirely and the remaining 20, they lost work. They lost those jobs entirely,” he said, adding the Dauphin Centre for Justice will right that wrong. “We would like to bring back the 80 jobs. We would like to work towards that. We’ll work with the municipal leaders, MMF, First Nations. Those new jobs might look different than they did before because we might have some of the correctional type jobs that were there previously. Now we might also have some mental health, addictions training, educational type workers, as well as the maintenance staff. So we want to bring back the 80 jobs that were lost and we’re going to work with the community to make sure that it’s the right fit to hit those goals.”
What the new centre will look like will depend on extensive consultation with stakeholders, but as a starting point, Kinew anticipates an initial investment of $40 million to develop a 60-bed facility with annual operating costs of $5 million to $7 million.
“We’re going to have to spend some time looking at the scale. We want the municipal leaders and Indigenous leaders to be on side with that, so I don’t think we can prejudge that process,” he said. “At the same time the construction phase, I would imagine, is going to take some time, as well. But we will put shovels into the ground within a first term of a Manitoba NDP government.”
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