SICKNESS IN A PROSPEROUS CITY

SICKNESS IN A PROSPEROUS CITY

By George Siamandas

© George Siamandas

As the 1900s unfolded, Winnipeg enjoyed year after year of tremendous expansion. By 1910, the highest growth rate in Canada. Even greater than that of New York. Well on its way to realizing its destiny as the "Chicago of the North." Mansions sprang up along Wellington Cresc, and Winnipeg counted 19 millionaires to Toronto's 21.

But something was amiss amongst these signs of plenty. Increasingly, health statistics showed Winnipeg's children were very sick. Especially in the north-end working class districts where immigrants had swelled the population. Here were the highest rates of child mortality anywhere in North America and Europe. 138 deaths per thousand in 1905.

A decade later, infant death rates soared again: 199 per thousand in 1914. Twenty per cent dead!

Reports found that "Winnipeg's conditions were comparable to those in a Medieval European city." The squalor in the north end was "beyond the powers of description." Overrun tenements. No sewers. Epidemics followed one after the other.

How had it happened and what did Winnipeg do to turn things around?

Dr AJ Douglas, Winnipeg's first medical health officer would prove to be a forceful advocate of the need to take action on child health. Establishing a child health bureau, requiring hook-ups to sewers, a housing code, even recommending the city build public housing in 1914. On the job for 40 years, Dr. Douglas made sure conditions improved.

A hundred years later, the story of children's health has startling echoes. Winnipeg remains the child poverty capital of Canada. And today youths are burning down some of the very same slum districts, found to be causing sickness and poverty almost a century earlier.