Winnipeg police charge man with setting fires at businesses and politicians’ offices

WINNIPEG — Winnipeg police have charged a man in a months-long series of break-ins and deliberately set fires that had business owners, politicians and others on edge.

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

The sites included restaurants, bars, a school division administration building, an addiction treatment centre and the constituency offices of two Manitoba cabinet ministers.

“It certainly hasn’t felt great the last months,” Nahanni Fontaine, the provincial minister of families, said Wednesday.

Fontaine’s constituency office, in a small one-storey building on Main Street, has been closed since it was set ablaze in September and is not expected to reopen for several months.

“Nobody signs up to do this work … to then have your office targeted and firebombed.”

Fontaine is considering moving her constituency office, a place where residents go to get concerns about provincial issues addressed, to a more secure location above street level in a different building.

Bernadette Smith, the minister for housing, addictions and homelessness, saw fires set outside her constituency office on four occasions in the summer. She said business owners and others in her area were worried.

“They’ve reached out to us and they’ve been feeling, like, ‘Is my business going to be targeted next? Is my restaurant going to go up in flames?'”

Overnight fires at restaurants have frequently made headlines in Winnipeg, although police did not specify which of the 11 locations had fires set and which had been hit with other damage.

Investigators were relieved after months of working the case, said Insp. Jen McKinnon, head of the Winnipeg Police Service’s major crimes unit.

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

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

McKinnon would not comment on a possible motive. Fontaine said she feels there was some political motivation behind the fires, given that her office and Smith’s office, which are in different neighbourhoods, were both hit.

A Facebook account under the name Jesse Wheatland has posted comments in a Point Douglas community group page, covering an area represented by Smith.

The comments include opposition to a supervised consumption site, for which Smith is the lead minister, that was planned for the area. The government backed down on the plan earlier this year after public criticism over the proposed location, and is now eyeing a new site a short distance away.

The Manitoba Restaurant and Foodservices Association said it’s looking forward to putting the fires and damage behind it.

“We’re just hoping to move on and support these restaurants, to get them back up and running, now that there’s a little bit less anxiety on the future state of their business,” said Shaun Jeffrey, the group’s executive director.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 19, 2025.

Steve Lambert, The Canadian Press