Abstract

Increasingly since 2020 public transit systems (PT) across Canada have been plagued by declining ridership, economic challenges, and claims of rising violence and disorder. In Winnipeg these economic, political, and social forces conjoined with other longstanding movements to produce what was widely understood by 2022 as a safety crisis for Winnipeg Transit (WT). This thesis examines political struggles over WT during a moment of conjunctural crisis, showing how WT became a site of struggle over public space and carceral geographies. It uses relational comparison as a framework for a conjunctural analysis of this supposed crisis. The thesis examines the political economy and discourse surrounding WT using municipal budgets, planning documents, reports, press releases, and a systematic scan of two decades of news media covering WT. These documents are supplemented by stakeholder interviews with several actors involved in the topic. Ultimately this thesis argues that between 2017 and 2022 WT was reimagined as a cornerstone of urban development in Winnipeg and a public space that would require a new quasi-police force with an explicit socio-spatial mandate to patrol transit and ensure the exclusion of vulnerable people from the service. This thesis contributes to literature on urban governance, transportation, criminology, and abolition geographies by offering a critical case study of how a specific constellation of actors and forces came together to expand carceral geographies through the adoption a novel form of police humanitarianism on WT.