Man charged with setting fires at Manitoba political offices

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WINNIPEG — Winnipeg police have charged a man in a months-long series of break-ins and intentional fires that infuriated business owners, politicians and others.

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Jesse Robert Shawn Wheatland, 35, faces 22 charges including breaking and entering, arson and arson with disregard for human life in connection with causing damage at 11 locations since June.

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The sites included restaurants, bars, a school district office building, a drug treatment center and the constituency offices of two Manitoba cabinet ministers.

“The last few months have certainly not been very pleasant,” Nahanni Fontaine, the province's minister of family affairs, said Wednesday.

The Fontaine constituency office, located in a small one-story building on Main Street, has been closed since the arson in September and is not expected to reopen for several months.

“Nobody agrees to do this job… only to have your office come under fire and be firebombed.”

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Fontaine is considering moving her constituency office, a place where residents go to solve the province's problems, to a safer location above street level in a different building.

Bernadette Smith, the minister for housing, addictions and homelessness, saw fires outside her constituency office four times over the summer. She said business owners and other residents in her area are concerned.

“They came to us and thought, 'Could my business be the next target? Is my restaurant going to burn down?'

Overnight restaurant fires in Winnipeg often made headlines, although police did not say which of the 11 locations had fires or sustained other damage.

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Investigators were relieved of duty after months of working on the case, Insp. Jen McKinnon, chief of the Winnipeg Police Service's major crimes unit.

“The longer it goes on, the more it weighs on them, so to come to this conclusion I think will be exciting, but also a relief,” she said.

CCTV footage from the businesses helped the investigation and investigators worked to establish links between the crimes. The accused was not previously known to police and was arrested Tuesday after the fire, McKinnon said.

McKinnon would not comment on a possible motive. Fontaine said she believes there was some political motivation behind the fires, given that her office and Smith's office, which are in different areas, were damaged.

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A Facebook account under the name Jesse Wheatland posted comments on the Point Douglas community group page about the area Smith represents.

The comments indicate opposition to a planned supervised consumption facility for the area, of which Smith is the lead minister. The government backed down from the plan earlier this year after public criticism of the proposed site and is now eyeing a new site nearby.

The Manitoba Restaurant and Catering Association said it hopes to bring an end to the fires and damage.

“We're just hoping to move forward and support these restaurants to get them back up and running now that there's a little less concern about the future state of their businesses,” said Sean Jeffrey, the group's chief executive.

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