Humans, On Rights

Victor Mondaca once slept by the river in Winnipeg with nothing but the clothes on his back. Today he works in executive leadership in community-based housing and co-founded Nahuen Consultation with his partner Amanda, training frontline workers, librarians, students and everyday Winnipeggers in de-escalation, harm reduction and how to reverse an overdose.

We sat down with Victor, who is Mapuche, to talk about what actually makes a community safer, and why pushing people out of sight makes things worse.

We’re talking:

• Recovery as something built over time through culture, family and purpose, and the role shame plays in keeping people from help
• What reconciliation between police and Indigenous communities would actually require
• How science can break down stigma around substance use, and why we treat some substances so differently from others
• What real community safety looks like, and who gets left out when we push people out of sight

Victor’s argument is simple and harder to practice than it sounds: if we want safer neighbourhoods, the people most at risk have to be part of the “we.” He has responded to multiple overdoses while out in our city because the person was in plain view. Move people out of sight, and outreach workers can’t find them either.

As Victor puts it: “If the end goal is safety, then we need to look at the most vulnerable and ensure their safety too.”

Victor Recommends:

• Reading: Drug Use for Grown-Ups by Dr. Carl L. Hart, which challenges common assumptions about drugs, drug use and drug policy.
• Reading: “Anatomy of a hush-up: How Health Canada buried the safe supply expert reviews” by Euan Thomson at Drug Data Decoded, an investigation into expert reports on safer supply that Health Canada never released.
• Watching: “Connecting to Culture,” a three-part series from the First Nations Health Authority on Indigenous harm reduction, told by Elders, peers and youth.
• Watching: “The Power of Addiction and the Addiction of Power” by Dr. Gabor Maté, a talk on addiction, trauma and disconnection that asks what has happened to someone rather than what is wrong with them.

Learn more about Nahuen Consultation—including upcoming harm reduction training opportunities in Winnipeg—on their website.

After years in a gang, addiction and 17 months in custody, Sean Rayland-Boubar, an Anishinaabe entrepreneur from Sagkeeng First Nation, built Red Rebel Armour, a Winnipeg streetwear company that hires people leaving the justice system. He's giving others the second chance he had to fight for, while still facing many of the same barriers they do.

Sean tells Stuart why the gangs have always had one advantage over every employment program: they'll put you to work the day you get out. Red Rebel Armour is his attempt to match that low barrier to entry with work that leads somewhere better.

We're talking:

• Why transportation, not a criminal record, is often the biggest barrier to employment
• How flexibility and accountability work together in second-chance hiring
• How jail can feed gang recruitment instead of ending it
• Reconciliation, from treaty obligations to residential school denialism online
• The personal costs of being a cycle breaker

Sean also shares the story behind Red Rebel Armour's Every Child Matters design, which creates seasonal jobs each September and funds donations to local organizations.

He closes by reflecting on the documentary about his work with Elder Lionel Houston, with a message for anyone in prison who believes their life is over: "Whatever you're going through is just a season."

Watch the "Pain into Purpose" documentary

Visit the Red Rebel Armour website

When Dr. Lorena Sekwan Fontaine was a child, her aunts and uncles would turn their backs or leave the room whenever they spoke Cree. She thought they were hiding something from her. They were: the language itself, learned the hard way in residential schools, where speaking it meant being hit. That memory sits at the centre of this conversation with Stuart Murray, a wide-ranging look at what Fontaine calls linguicide, the deliberate killing of a language, and what it means for Canada's human rights obligations today.

Fontaine, a lawyer and professor and head of Indigenous Studies at the University of Manitoba, traces her path from a childhood split between English at home and Cree overheard in secret, to a legal career built on the realization that Canadian law had no real framework for what residential school survivors had lost. Section 35 of the Constitution recognized Aboriginal and treaty rights, but on language, she says, it was "an empty box." She and Stuart also dig into why the Indigenous Languages Act, which now folds language rights into Section 35, is a real step forward but still leaves Indigenous language rights far weaker in practice than the constitutionally entrenched rights of English and French speakers, particularly in education.

We're talking:

• Why Fontaine resists the term "linguicide" becoming a place where the conversation gets stuck, when the real goal is moving forward
• The gap between Section 35's language protections and the constitutionally entrenched rights of English and French speakers
• Her own daughter's education, and the choice to enroll her in French immersion when no Cree or Ojibwe option existed
• Whether Orange Shirt Day is driving structural change or settling into symbolism
• Her vision for twenty-five years from now: Indigenous languages on street signs and spoken at the counter, not just in the classroom

Read Fontaine's book, Living Language Rights: Constitutional Pathways to Indigenous Language Education, and watch the CBC documentary Undoing Linguicide, drawn from her doctoral research.

Winnipeg designer, artist, and storyteller Lennard Taylor joins Stuart Murray to talk about clothing as identity, not just fabric. Lennard traces his path from a soccer career cut short by injury to two decades of painting, sewing, and dressing people out of his studio and boutique on Sherbrooke Street.

Lennard pushes back against fast fashion, arguing that most people have lost the basic skill and instinct of dressing themselves with intention. He talks about his "bloodline" signature, a red stripe stitched into many of his garments as a symbol that everyone bleeds the same blood regardless of skin colour or language. He names his pieces after real Winnipeg clients — the Catherine pant, the Brenda Swing shirt — because his designs are, in his words, built from real community relationships, not abstractions.

Much of the conversation is about zero waste: free repair workshops that teach basic skills like sewing on a button, turning worn or memory-laden clothing into sculpture instead of landfill, and a longer-term vision for turning textile waste into building material for housing. He closes on why community matters to him as a father, entrepreneur, and artist.

We're talking:

• Fast fashion versus intentional, longer-lasting wardrobes
• The "bloodline" signature and its human rights meaning
• Zero waste, repair, and turning old clothing into art

Connect with Lennard or find out about his upcoming sustainability events at LennardTaylor.com

Johise Namwira joins Stuart to talk about what it means to bring the National Black Canadian Summit to Winnipeg, and why she sees it as a movement rather than a moment. Namwira came to Winnipeg as a child after her family fled the Congo War, and later studied African studies at Oxford, a path that shapes how she talks about displacement, memory, and who gets left out of Canadian history.

This is the furthest west the summit has ever travelled, and Namwira is direct about why: Winnipeg has a rich, historically underrepresented Black community, one with its own layered history most residents don't know. She points to a Manitoba mayor who once told Black migrants moving west that they had to leave, part of a longer story that includes the Underground Railroad and Africville, and one she says has to be reckoned with before "solutions" mean anything. That history runs alongside a present she's proud of: organizations like Black History Manitoba and the Congress of Black Women of Manitoba, which was founded in Winnipeg and went on to spark a national movement.

The third summit, held in Halifax, produced a founding document for this whole movement: over 100 calls to action for governments, institutions, and communities, built on three pillars: recognition, justice, and development. It opens with the Sankofa bird from Ghana, a symbol for looking back while still moving forward. Namira calls it required reading before this summit, and this year's panel lineup is built directly on those pillars:

• Systemic justice and community-based reform
• Housing barriers facing Black communities
• AI and technology, and the push for anti-bias systems
• A session pairing Indigenous and Black leaders in direct conversation

Namwira closes with a message aimed squarely at young people: they're not the leaders of tomorrow, they're the leaders of today, and Winnipeg is already proving it, from the African Cup of Nations to local choirs, artist collectives, and creative networks she names one after another.

Tickets are free for anyone under 30. There are 150 volunteer spots open across the weekend, and table sponsorships available for the opening ceremony. Whatever your age, check out the summit September 18-20, 2026, at the RBC Convention Centre.

Register for the summit here. 

Indigenous Tourism Manitoba's work runs in two directions at once: on one side, indigenous business owners who need support getting market ready, connected to funders, and connected to each other. On the other, a public that often can't name a single indigenous-owned business. As CEO, Holly Spence has spent her career building the links on both sides, work she ties directly to what reconciliation actually requires.

We're talking:

• Holly's own experience learning to walk between two systems, from Peguis First Nation to the city, and what that taught her about the barriers other business owners face
• A persistent myth about who pays taxes, and what the numbers actually show
• Tourism as a form of self-determination: who controls the story determines who profits from it
• Her case for why indigenous-led tourism might be the strongest driver of reconciliation in the province

Holly also talks about what it took to get here, including a system that wouldn't count $400,000 in business equipment as collateral because it sat on reserve land. But the throughline of the conversation is bigger than her own path: it's about who gets to tell the story of a place, and who profits when they do.

Learn more about Indigenous Tourism Manitoba

Kate Sjoberg has been calling for more housing in Winnipeg since long before she became Executive Director of Resource Assistance for Youth (RaY). With over two decades in community development and nonprofit leadership, including prior roles at the Wrench, North Point Douglas Women's Centre, the Spence Neighbourhood Association, and Main Street Project, she's seen the city's homelessness response from nearly every angle.

Her assessment of the city's encampment policy is blunt: the map of where people can't go covers nearly the whole city, and the recent sweeps at Main and Logan broke trust in the very place Winnipeg told people to come for help.

In this episode, Kate discusses:

• The city's encampment policy map: nearly all of Winnipeg marked red with places people can't go
• Why housing people faster than "the speed of trust" fails, sometimes within four hours
• The recent sweeps at Main and Logan, and why Kate calls them indefensible
• How decades of government pullback built a sector expected to perform miracles on underfunded budgets
• From the AIDS crisis to the toxic drug supply: the quiet movement keeping Winnipeggers alive

Get involved:

• Get trained on how to administer naloxone - Nahuen Consultation is running community drug poisoning training sessions this summer.
• Learn more about the Right to Housing Coalition
• Support Resource Assistance for Youth (RaY)

What does it mean to "age out" of a support system? For Manitobans with disabilities, it means renegotiating your entire life at 18, at 21, at 65 - arbitrary ages set by government departments that don't talk to each other.

David Kron, executive director of the Cerebral Palsy Association of Manitoba, joins Stuart Murray to talk about “Equality, Dignity, and Belonging: Building a Better System for People with Disabilities in Manitoba” - the landmark report he helped steer through a five-year pilot project born from a human rights complaint that started a decade ago. The report's conclusion is blunt: Manitoba's disability support system is failing many of the people it was designed to serve.

David, who has cerebral palsy himself, doesn't frame this as a funding fight. It's an access fight - and a human rights problem.

In this episode, David shares:

• How an IQ score of 70 became the gatekeeper for support in Manitoba, and why David argues you shouldn't test for services based on IQ, period.

• The difference between a resource problem and an access problem - and why David refuses to have the funding conversation until people can even get on the list.

• Charity versus rights: what changes when disability supports stop being something you have to prove you deserve.

• What happens after December 16, 2026: the deadline that decides whether this report becomes generational change or a human rights hearing.

Nearly 29% of Manitobans identify as having a disability. As David puts it, if we all live long enough, we're all going to join the club - and services shouldn't depend on how well you or your parents can advocate.

Read the report

Learn more about the Cerebral Palsy Association of Manitoba

\When Harvest Manitoba opened in 1985, it was meant to be temporary. A stopgap for a rough economic patch. Today, they serve 1,200 families a day, and 30% of them have jobs.

Stuart Murray sits down with Vince Barletta, President and CEO of Harvest Manitoba, to talk about what that shift means, and what it would actually take to build a Manitoba where the food bank isn't a permanent fixture.

In this episode, Vince shares:

• Why 30% of people coming to food banks in Manitoba today are employed, and what that shift means for how we understand food insecurity
• Harvest Manitoba's journey toward indigenous reconciliation, including serving nine remote fly-in First Nations communities and a new indigenous-led urban food bank coming soon in partnership with the Ma Mawi Wi Chi Itata Centre
• The scale of Canada's food waste problem ($50 billion annually) and the Manitoba Food Transformation Centre Harvest is working to build

As Vince puts it: "It takes a province to feed a province."

Get Involved:

• Visit harvestmanitoba.ca to volunteer, donate, or learn more about partnering with Harvest Manitoba.
• Read Harvest Voices, Harvest Manitoba's annual community survey on food insecurity.

When governments can override the Charter before a court even looks at it, who's left to protect the people who can't protect themselves at the ballot box?

Winnipeg labour and human rights lawyer Dayna Steinfeld joins Stuart to break down one of the most consequential constitutional debates in Canada right now: the expanding use of the notwithstanding clause, and what Manitoba's Bill 4 is trying to do about it.

Provinces like Alberta and Saskatchewan are invoking Section 33 to push through so-called "parental rights" legislation: restricting access to gender-affirming care, controlling names and pronouns at school, limiting sports participation. Legislation that physicians say causes measurable harm. And some governments aren't waiting for courts to weigh in. They're invoking the clause preemptively, with the argument that courts aren't even allowed to look at it afterward.

Manitoba's Bill 4 is a direct response to that. It would make court review mandatory any time the province invokes the override, keeping the judiciary in the conversation even when government has the last word.

We're talking:

• What the notwithstanding clause is and how its use has shifted dramatically since 2018
• Why Alberta's "parental rights" legislation almost certainly violates the Charter — and why the government invoked the clause anyway
• Why this isn't only a trans rights issue
• Why "just vote them out" fails when the people most affected are children, or minorities without electoral power
• What Bill 4 does, and why it matters that a future government could repeal it

Dayna also shares how growing up in Winnipeg and studying the General Strike — particularly the role of immigrant and Jewish communities, and the women who helped sustain it — set her on the path to labour and human rights law.