Tracking Winnipeg’s bedbug problem

Would you want to know if there was a bedbug infestation in the apartment building you’re about to move into, or at your child’s daycare? Winnipeg city councillor Harvey Smith certainly thinks so.

Smith is working on tabling motion at city council next week to create a bedbug registry for the public.

The registry would include all city-run facilities, such as libraries and community centres, but also reach into the private realm, placing the onus on business and home owners to report infestations and treatments.

“Anywhere within the city of Winnipeg, wherever there is an infestation, let’s have it out in the open,” Smith said.

Part of the motion will include bylaw enforcement, but the details of that aspect of the plan have yet to be worked out.

Councillor Gord Steeves has “concerns” about Smith’s motion, as the Province just rolled out a strategy to deal with the bedbug problem late last week.

“We don’t want to take on the responsibility of something that is not our responsibility to deal with from an overall government perspective,” Steeves said.

“I know Councillor Smith, and God bless him, he does have sort of a tendency to take social services issues and bring them into the city of Winnipeg as if they are something that we have the capacity to deal with.”

But Smith argues that the provincial strategy isn’t doing enough for Winnipeg residents.

“I can’t think of why the Province would not want to do (a registry).”

Smith isn’t the only person who thinks the City should be tracking the bedbug problem.

“The bedbug registry was an idea that we put out there as an element for debate,” Chris Broughton, president of the Paramedics’ Union, said in an interview last week.

But he’s willing to settle for a private registry that only emergency responders would have access to.