LATEST CITY MOVE ON THE KELVIN COMMUNITY CLUB:
The other day the City of Winnipeg made a surprise move that may indicate that they intend to break yet another promise and close the Kelvin Community club even before the threatened end of the season. The City gave notice that the Lacrosse club who store their equipment at Kelvin have until tomorrow, Thursday the 15th, to retrieve it. While this may be a random move on the part of the City bureaucracy it would still fit with a consistent pattern of broken promises on the part of the clique presently in power at City Hall. Mayor Sam Katz's "promises" have been detailed previously on this blog (see Jan 20th), and his trumpeting of "promises made:promises kept" on his website sound rather hollow in terms of his previous "commitment" to "no forced closures" of community clubs.





Meanwhile long standing civic activist Nick Ternette has echoed the proposal to have the community club turned over to the community in a letter to today's Winnipeg Sun. He also points out that there are nine other community centres in this city which may face closure in the future. One can bet that none of these will be affluent areas of Winnipeg. One of those in the ward of Katz's best hatchetmen, councillor Steeves, is receiving further support, a matter that has angered Elmwood residents.





Molly has previously advocated on this blog that the idea of turning the community centres into cooperatives (what Ternette calls non-profits) is the best and most sensible thing to do. The simple fact is that the community clubs as they are presently constitute are not "community" at all. They are the property of the City of Winnipeg and whatever clique controls the City essentially owns the clubs. The local residents of an area will support an institution such as a community club to the exact extent that they have real property rights in that institution. The larger the political organization controlling the institution the more diluted such rights become by the real control exercised by the controllers of the organization.





The situation of the Kelvin Community Club and other such clubs in Winnipeg is a microcosm of this dilemma. People will commit to an organization, group or institution very much and sometimes only to the extent that exercise real control over that organization, group or institution. Sometimes this commitment can be inflated by hidden elites, but over the long term "real property rights" count- at least in terms of voluntary commitment. The way that state socialism collapsed in Eastern Europe is a case in point. No matter what the rhetoric, supported by a vast propaganda machine and a secret police apparatus, the reality that this "socialism" really meant that the "socialized property" was the actual property of a bureaucratic ruling class meant that very few people actually believed the lies in their heart of hearts.





Similarly in Winnipeg. Mayor Katz and his development friendly cronies are actually very skilled game players. They either run in wards distant from Winnipeg's poor neighbourhoods that may indeed benefit financially from diversion of City funds to the better off, or, like Katz, they wish to solidify their voting support by bribery of middle neighbourhoods (while giving the lion's share to the affluent) by taking from people who hardly vote for him anyhow. Good gamesmanship !





One wonders if a move to close Kelvin down even earlier than announced would be a move to "kick the bastard while he is down so he can't get up again" ie to close the whole matter before further support can be organized for Kelvin and-especially- before a different vision of how community centres should be run in this town can gain traction. It's a distinct possibility.
Molly