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Originally Posted by CoryB
Indigenous organizations are one of the few areas that seem to be able to leverage federal funding which is going to be needed for the Bay building redevelopment.
As others have suggested, a national museum is likely to happen somewhere in Canada for Indigenous culture, language and history.
Winnipeg is on Treaty 1 land. Treaty 1 being the first to be signed by the modern Canadian government.
Winnipeg is said to have the highest percentage of Indigenous people of the major Canadian urban centres. There are also five distinct Indigenous groups that have significant representation in Winnipeg already.
There is also something to be said about the symbolism for the former HQ of Hudsons Bay becoming a national museum of this stature.
The challenge is while the back of a napkin pitch of the idea has a lot of merit in the current societal context it very much is an idea that needs to have significant Indigenous leadership and cooperation behind it to get moving forward. I am not sure if that is there.
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As an Indigenous person born in Winnipeg, I do have to say that I personally don't think this is a great use of space for the building.
If you really want to make an indigenous museum, it needs to be architecturally significant like the Human Rights Museum and probably located at The Forks (the grounds we gathered for thousands of years).
HBC has a very frayed relationship with indigenous peoples in my opinion. They "sold" Rupert's Land to Canada (literally European-to-European-only transactions without indigenous knowledge) and there a bunch of other difficult histories that have never been reconciled.
To me, HBC is an ugly corporation and I'd never want to be associated with them knowing their deeper histories.
Not only that, but Winnipeg has a lot of racists and they're usually expressed from downtown crowds (mainly because of all the homeless).
When it comes to building a business case for revenue for an indigenous museum, you'd rather prefer to piggyback your marketing onto CMHR and be in its vicinity to encourage a theme of space for The Forks.
That itself would become more of an attraction imho.
I think for this downtown building, the better use of it would be mixed-use. I live in California now and there's a place called 8th and Grand in LA that I love. I think that should serve as inspiration for the 1st floor for the old HBC building.
Imagine the front of Portage Avenue serving as open restaurants in the summer and indoor cafe-like seating by winter.
The top 2-3 floors can be lofts/residential (because there's a hipster market for these kinds of conversions). I've seen some in Toronto with similar widths to HBC. They're not the prettiest (like unpainted wood frame stairs) but people were paying $3K/mo for them just because they had a 2nd floor/lofty/trendy space.
I even believe the renovation happening on Smith street is following this loft model and creating 2-floor residential suites where they floor once separated them.
I think Manitoba needs more of the right tech accelerators, more fostering of non-traditional businesses and create a new space for entrepreneurship. I think the mid floors there should be a 'We Work' like company.
A We Work-like space IS AMAZING IF YOU HAVEN'T ALREADY TRIED IT!
As an entrepreneur myself in the tech industry, it was honestly the best networking and working experience in general I've had being self-employed.
I truly understood why millennials just ate it up like hotcakes!
The bookable meeting spaces, floating workspaces, secured work desks and access to office supplies/equipment are just some of the perks.
Such a 24/7 space could also serve students in the nearby area.
If Manitoba wants to retain tech talent, they need to foster it. When you really look at the big picture, all these tech opportunities are arising but Manitoba is still stuck on banking/financial and agribusiness as its primary industries.
Otherwise people like myself move-out of Manitoba and pay 6-figure taxes to other governments.
And as much as we want to say Manitoba is a manufacturer, let's just say the provincial government is stretching their words at this point in my opinion. That CanadaPort project is basically complete, but we didn't see the building spree we hoped for. Companies like Boeing are just there for $60M in tax breaks.
Tech is where its at! We will only likely see an explosion in online entrepreneurialism in the Prairies over the next generation as Elon Musk's Starlink begins connecting more hundreds of thousands of Manitoba/Sasks to higher speed internet where there was little-or-no coverage before.
Santiago, Chile is an amazing example of how building space combined with government changes could lead to purposeful growth in the tech industry. Their accelerator programs there are amazingly ace!
Budding entrepreneurs and startups are often short in capital and really there is no other cheaper/better Canadian city than Winnipeg. Capitalizing on that is a must.
Anyway, thanks for coming to my TedTalk.
tldr; Diversify, reinvent and reorient this space towards tech.
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I wonder if anyone's told them there's a 650,000sqft. building downtown that has space if they need it?
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