Incidents down at Winnipeg libraries, but attendance also drops at Millennium

New numbers show incidents of violence and inappropriate behaviour at Winnipeg’s libraries are down — especially at the Millennium Library — but attendance at the downtown branch has also fallen.

A quarterly city report covering October through December 2025 shows incidents at Millennium Library dropped 47 per cent compared to the same three-month period in 2024. Across the entire library system, incidents fell nearly 23 per cent.

Visits declined as well, though not as sharply. Attendance at Millennium was down nearly 23 per cent year over year, while overall visits across all branches dropped about 2.5 per cent.

The report notes the removal of buses from Graham Avenue in June 2025 may have had an impact on visitor numbers at Millennium.

But community services committee chair Coun. Vivian Santos says the downward trend began before the switch to the new bus network.

"When I did look at the report, I posed a lot of questions to the administration. I actually have more questions than answers to that," Santos said. 

"So I’m going to be asking them next week to see about if we can collect some more analytical data about who is not actually attending … Millennium Library. But on a good note, we’re seeing our community libraries, there is an [attendance] uptick. So maybe there’s a pattern there."

The Millennium Library has been the focus of efforts to improve safety in recent years, following a number of alarming incidents, including the stabbing death of Tyree Cayer in December 2022.

The report attributes the drop in incidents to a combination of measures introduced over the past few years, including increased security, more co-ordination between staff and community safety hosts, and short-term bans — typically three to six months — for repeat offenders.

Referrals to outside agencies from community safety hosts also rose sharply. The number of referrals increased by about 160 per cent compared to the same quarter the previous year.

Daniel Waycik, the operations director for Persons Community Solutions — a safety-focused social enterprise — said the decrease in incidents is encouraging, but cautioned against drawing simple conclusions.

"Seeing a decrease in measurement of incidents, I think, is always a positive indicator, something worth looking at," said Waycik, who is also development manager for the community safety host initiative, which trains security guards and was started in reaction to increased security measures introduced at the Millennium Library in 2019.

"It’s easy to look at specific safety measures in place and try and draw correlation… [but] it’s not so simple as the correlation."

Despite the reduction in incidents, the union representing library workers says many staff still do not feel safe.