More than half of all Manitobans feel less safe now than they did 3 years ago, poll suggests

More than half of Manitobans feel less safe than they did three years ago, a Probe Research poll commissioned by the Association of Manitoba Municipalities suggests.

In a poll of 1,000 Manitoba adults done from May 31 to June 13, 56 per cent of respondents said they feel their communities are less safe than they were in 2020.

Thirty-nine per cent of respondents said they did not feel any different about community safety, while five per cent said they felt more safe.

Kam Blight, president of the Association of Manitoba Municipalities, said he hopes all political parties in the province make crime and safety a priority in the upcoming election.

"Manitobans are concerned about their safety and they just do not feel safe in their own municipalities and their own residences. Businesses don't feel safe and it's turning away investment," Blight said in a telephone interview from the rural municipality of Portage la Prairie, where he serves as reeve. 

"We're just trying to make sure that we continue to get that message out there that this is an urgent issue and something needs to be done."

Blight said mayors and reeves in Manitoba want the province to devote more police officers to their communities as well as more social services that combat the root causes of crime.

"We need to make sure that the proper resources and infrastructure are in place to get help for those individuals that want to get the help, so they're not being turned away," he said.

The poll results present a quandary for the governing Progressive Conservative government, said Kelly Saunders, a political science professor at the University of Brandon.

The PCs use advertising to tout themselves as being tough on crime but have been in power throughout the three-year time frame during which the poll suggests Manitobans have started to feel less safe.

"That's not a good image for a conservative government that really banks a lot of its credibility on being tough on crime," Saunders said.

The poll, which sampled adults using both human operators and automated phone calls, has a margin of error of 3.1 percentage points and a certainty of 95 per cent, according to Probe Research. It must be noted automated phone polls may be less accurate because they may not reach younger respondents as well as they reach older respondents.