Iit was still light when the attacks occurred. In just forty-five minutes, police say, a slender, dark-haired man wearing a Jets T-shirt raped three nurses and a teenager in and around Winnipeg's largest hospital, the Health Sciences Center (HSC).
While police searched for the suspect, hospital workers finished their shift and returned to their cars, unaware that a predator was on the loose. Police later said a third woman was attacked by the same man in the area that night. The staff learned about what had happened only the next day.
For HSC staff, these attacks were not an aberration. They marked a turning point after years of rising violence against hospital staff. In the 2024 survey, a third of HSC physicians reported that they experienced an average of eleven safety incidents in the previous year, nearly double the provincial rate. A security episode may include threats, violence, sexual assault and harassment. HSC alone accounted for nearly half of all reported attacks on Manitoba doctors. Doctors described how they were punched, kicked, spat on and verbally abused. Danger follows them outside the hospital, into the aisles and parking lots, where some are followed and attacked on their way to and from work.
This summer, members of the Manitoba Nurses Union took the rare step of voting to gray list HSC, a powerful public warning issued only five times in the last forty-five years. The greylist alerts nurses that HSC is considered unsafe, signaling that they should reconsider their decision or exercise caution when applying or taking a job there. This does not force current employees to resign, but it does send a clear signal to the public and government about the operating conditions of the business. In November, the union gray-listed a second Manitoba facility, Thompson General Hospital, due to unsafe working conditions.
For some health care workers, attacks can have consequences that last months or even years. Winnipeg nurse Jennifer Noon suffered a serious concussion after one of these episodes. She told CBC that when she arrived at work, she felt her backpack being pulled. The tall man then slammed her into the doorframe and wall. No one resisted, he struggled just enough to slip through the locked door and out of his reach. Safe inside, she was left with a head injury and post-traumatic stress disorder that forced her to take leave. It took her two years before she could even begin to gradually return to work.
This violence is part of a broader provincial and national crisis. Across Canada, health-care workers report threats, attacks and harassment on a daily basis. In north-central Manitoba, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police are called out almost daily to remove violent patients in Thompson. In 2024, the police visited there 557 times. On Christmas Eve 2024, a thirty-three-year-old man with a .22-caliber shotgun locked himself in the Thompson Hospital Chapel, pointed the gun at staff and fired through a window before being arrested.
And in Moncton, New Brunswick, then-nurse Natasha Poirier was cornered in her office at the University Hospital Center Dr. Georges-L-Dumont and beaten by Bruce Randolph “Randy” Van Horlick. Furious that his wife had been moved to another room, the sixty-nine-year-old man yanked her off her chair by the hair, punched her several times in the head and threw her against the wall. A nurse who rushed to help was also attacked before two men finally stopped Van Horlick. He was sentenced to six months in prison and two years probation. Poirier told National Post six years later, she still suffers the consequences: traumatic brain injury, post-traumatic stress disorder, long-term problems with memory, speech and sensory overload.
Poirer was attacked in 2019, but even then nurses were sounding the alarm about their experiences on the job. That same year, Linda Silas, president of the Canadian Federation of Nurses' Unions, told the parliamentary standing committee on health that 61 per cent of nurses reported being abused, harassed or assaulted at work in the past year. That number has risen sharply during the pandemic, reaching 93 percent in 2021. At the Toronto University Health Network, incidents at two emergency departments—Toronto West and Toronto General—increased by 169 per cent, from 0.43 to 1.15 events per 1,000 visits, between 2019 and 2022. In British Columbia, the province's nurses union reported a 49 per cent increase in injuries, WorkSafeBC reports, from 1,653 incidents between 2013 and 2017 to 2,458 between 2018 and 2022.
Nurses say staffing shortages are partly to blame. Overcrowding and long wait times have also become hot spots for patients and their families. And in 2018, unions representing Winnipeg hospital workers and administrators linked the increase in incidents to the province's ongoing meth crisis.
In response, governments and hospitals are turning to airport-style security. Anyone entering the emergency department at Halifax Infirmary Hospital must go through a metal detector and may be searched. This year, the London Health Sciences Center in Ontario introduced artificial intelligence-enabled weapon detection systems. Visitors do not need to empty their pockets and bags. Instead, they walk between poles of detectors that can distinguish between potentially dangerous objects, such as knives or scissors, and harmless objects, such as keys or coins.
In August, the Nova Scotia government announced that artificial intelligence metal detectors would eventually be rolled out across the province. Following a trial run in May, Colchester East Hants Health Center in Truro tested 7,400 people and flagged forty-nine prohibited items, mostly pocket knives and box cutters. Items were confiscated and returned after the patrons left. Windsor Regional Hospital in Ontario said it recovered more than 3,100 weapons, including 1,834 knives, in one year after installing similar technology in 2023.
Back in Manitoba, the province's nurses union has been demanding improved security for years, particularly at HSC, which is located in one of Winnipeg's highest crime areas and has seen several serious incidents. In 2018, employees were issued personal alarms that emit a high-pitched scream when activated (they can serve as a deterrent, but do not stop an attacker from causing physical harm). Earlier that year, at HSC's forensic psychiatric unit, a correctional officer escorting a prisoner was attacked by another patient with surgical scissors. While responding to the scene, a Winnipeg police officer was bitten by a second patient. The following year, the Manitoba government announced that hospital security guards would be trained and reclassified as institutional security officers with the power to detain violent individuals. But years passed before those officers were assigned to HSC, according to a CBC report.
In November 2023, the Manitoba Nurses Union filed a complaint with Shared Health, the provincial health care watchdog, arguing the changes were not enough. According to CBC, just three months later, the day before the final arbitration hearing between Shared Health and the union, a standoff broke out at HSC in the emergency department while more than forty patients were in the waiting room. The man threatened the employees, reached into his pocket, allegedly looking for a weapon, and was grabbed by a security guard. During the fight, the security guard was stabbed.
In 2024, five years after the government's initial promise, the first departmental security officers finally began patrolling the HSC. Similar staff were later added at St. Boniface and Victoria hospitals in Winnipeg, Selkirk Mental Health Center and Brandon Regional Health Centre, with plans to expand to Thompson. In 2025, artificial intelligence weapon detectors were installed at three entrances to VSK. Despite all these changes, nurses felt that it was not enough. They were right: despite the presence of security officers, sexual assaults still occurred, and gun detectors cannot prevent hospital staff from being punched and kicked.
The vote to greylist HSC in August came hours after staff learned of a sixth sexual assault on campus in just a couple of weeks, according to HSC. Winnipeg Free Press. Security found the woman and took her for treatment. Shortly thereafter, police arrested a thirty-nine-year-old man. On the same day, a patient who was transferred from the HSC Crisis Response Center to the emergency department reported that he had a bomb, prompting a police response. Both incidents confirmed the union's warning that the hospital had become dangerous. Shared Health met with labor leaders and government officials. In its statement, the organization pointed to steps it has already taken over the years, such as hiring more security officers, adding artificial intelligence weapon scanners and installing 100 new cameras. The Manitoba Nurses Union has also demanded new measures: swipe card access to tunnels, secure entrances that are always staffed and notification as soon as a dangerous criminal is known to be operating in or near a facility.
The gray list caused a political storm. Opposition Progressive Conservative leader Obbie Khan accused Manitoba's New Democratic Party of leading the health crisis while the government responded that it was addressing problems caused by years of Conservative neglect. By September, the Manitoba government announced further actions: two Winnipeg police officers would be stationed 24 hours a day at HSC's emergency department, at a cost of $1.6 million per year; Five additional gun detection scanners, costing approximately $750,000, will be installed at public entrances; and fourteen more security officers will be hired, bringing the total number of campus employees to eighty-one.
It is unclear whether these additional measures help. Last month, during the first weekend of 24-hour police patrols at HSC, a doctor was attacked by a patient. The facility remains greylisted and under scrutiny, a stark symbol of a national health system grappling with violence, fear and the urgent need to protect both patients and staff.
