Bear spray incidents in Winnipeg jumped by nearly 35% in 2022, police data suggests

Winnipeg is seeing a troubling increase in bear-spray incidents, with more than 1,100 incidents of the powerful aerosol used as a weapon in 2022 alone.

Data obtained from the Winnipeg Police Service suggests 2022 was a five-year high for bear-spray incidents with at least 1,141 cases, Const. Dani McKinnon from the public information office said in an email on Thursday.

That's a 34.6 per cent increase over 2021, when 848 incidents were reported, and a 71.2 per cent increase over the five-year average, she said.

Daniel Hidalgo, who co-founded Sabe Peace Walkers and CommUNITY 204, two safety initiatives in Winnipeg, says the growing use of the spray, especially among young people, is concerning, especially in light of a series of random attacks in the downtown area on the weekend.

"They often associate possession of bear mace with some sort of form of respect and toughness and certainly to be feared," he said in an interview with CBC News on Thursday. 

"It's meant to take down a 400-pound ferocious animal and they're using it on civilians. I don't think the severity of what they're doing really registers."

He's especially concerned that bear spray is easily accessible.

Sven Jordt, a U.S.-based expert in the use of pepper and bear sprays on humans, agrees some people underestimate the effects of the aerosol. 

"There is this misconception that it might only hurt for some time or cause pain for some time but doesn't cause any serious injuries, so some people use it actually as a prank," the associate professor of anesthesiology, pharmacology and cancer biology at Duke University said in an interview on Thursday.

However, bear spray is more powerful, under greater pressure, sprays a greater distance than standard pepper spray and is readily available at outdoor stores.

"These are serious weapons and should be treated as such," Jordt said.

Being pepper- or bear-sprayed is "excruciatingly painful" for the average person, Jordt says, but can also cause serious problems for people with underlying health concerns.

Sometimes people need to be hospitalized after being sprayed, he says. There have also been cases where asthmatics died when they were pepper-sprayed in a prison setting and weren't decontaminated quickly enough.

"Since there's a quite high percentage of people with asthma in the population, exposing them to pepper sprays is very risky, and that could lead to further complications or asthma attacks and worse," Jordt said.

MLA Matt Wiebe (NDP Concordia) says the regulations regarding bear spray are outdated and need to be addressed as many other communities outside of Winnipeg are seeing these incidents as well.

"It's about making sure that [laws] are enforced, that retailers aren't left on their own and, ultimately, that any information that they could collect that would be useful for law enforcement is made available to them," the NDP's newly appointed justice critic said in an interview on Thursday.

"I think there's a lot of ways that we can strengthen these regulations right away, and that's why I'm calling on this government. I think they should act swiftly to deal with this problem because it's happening right now in our communities."

Neither Winnipeg police nor the Manitoba RCMP track the serial numbers on bear spray.

The Manitoba government says vendors are required to get people who buy bear spray to read and sign a declaration of purchaser form. Those must be sent annually to Manitoba Agriculture, a government spokesperson said.

The spokesperson says the government is open to hearing from law enforcement and other partners on ways to make it tougher for criminals to obtain weapons.