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About Us

SCI Manitoba Inc. is a non-profit organization representing persons with spinal cord injuries (SCI) in Manitoba. We are recognized as a designated external agency that works collaboratively with the provincial government. SCI Manitoba is accountable to a membership of persons living with spinal cord injuries and the people in their support networks. We engage professional staff, committed volunteers and create peer-linkages to represent and support people living with a spinal cord injury

mission, values, and principles

our mission

To assist persons with spinal cord injuries to achieve independence, self-reliance and full community participation.

our goal

To work collaboratively with eligible program participants in order to determine a realistic plan with each unique individual, allowing them to move forward and achieve their life goals.

we commit to professional rehabilitation counselling values and principles:

We are committed to field-validated standards to facilitate delivery of ethical and ‘best practice’ services that impact personal, economic, and social independence of individuals with spinal cord injuries.

These primary values respect, honor, promote, or ensure:

  • human rights and dignity;
  • the integrity of all professional relationships;
  • the alleviation of personal distress and emotional pain;
  • the quality of professional knowledge and its application to increase professional and personal effectiveness;
  • empowerment through self-advocacy and self-determination;
  • diversity of human experience and appreciating culture;
  • emphasizing client strengths versus deficits;
  • serving individuals holistically; and
  • advocating for fair and adequate provision of services.

sci manitoba’s ethical best practices reflect these principles:

Autonomy: To respect the rights of clients to be self-governing within their social and cultural framework;

Beneficence: To do good for others and to promote the well-being of clients;

Fidelity: To be faithful, to keep promises and honor the trust placed in rehabilitation counselors;

Justice: To be fair in the treatment of all clients and to provide appropriate services to all;

Non-maleficence: To do no harm to others; and

Veracity: To be honest.

Additionally, we are aware that all people exist in a variety of contexts and understand the influence of these contexts on an individual’s behavior. We are aware of the continuing evolution of the field, changes in society at large, and the different needs of individuals in social, political, historical, environmental and economic contexts.

We make every effort to provide respectful and timely communication, take appropriate action when cultural diversity issues occur, and be accountable for the outcomes as they affect people of all races, ethnicities, genders, national origins, religions, sexual orientations, or other cultural group identities.

Our primary obligation is to people with spinal cord injuries who receive services from SCI Maniotba’s rehabilitation counsellors. These values and principles are operationalized through a holistic rehabilitation logic model framework.

our history

celebrating over 70 years of service
in 2017, CPA Manitoba became Spinal Cord Injury (SCI) Manitoba

SCI Manitoba has been active in Manitoba since 1946. The Central Western Division of the Canadian Paraplegic Association was formed in 1946 at Deer Lodge Hospital in the form of a 37-member club organized and headed first by Eric Lyle, and then A.T. (Tony) Mann. In August of 1946, the first formal board meeting was held, and over the past 70 years, SCI Manitoba has been hard at work to champion the rights of persons with spinal cord injuries while providing holistic rehabilitation services, information and advocacy for the newly injured and their loved ones.

tribute to tony mann

originally printed in the March 1996 issue of ParaTracks

For its first 30 years, Tony Mann was CPA in Manitoba. For the past 20 years, he’s been its conscience. Now he’s gone, and while the bare statistics provide milestones, they don’t begin to give the measure of this extraordinary Canadian.

A. T. (Tony) Mann was born in Poland in 1920, raised in Camp Morton, Manitoba and graduated from St. Paul’s College with a B.A. in 1941. Wounded in the liberation of Holland in 1945, Tony became a paraplegic and participated in the founding of the Canadian Paraplegic Association. He served as Executive Director of CPA’s Central Western Division and its successor the Manitoba Division from 1946 until his retirement in 1976. Tony was instrumental in the founding of Manitoba Wheelchair Sports, Ten Ten Sinclair, the SCI Unit at Health Sciences Centre, and in the incorporation of barrier-free design provisions in the National and Manitoba Building Codes. He has been awarded the Canada Centennial Medal, the Order of the Buffalo Hunt, the Order of Canada, Honorary Life Member War Amputations of Canada, Honorary Counsellor CPA (MB) Inc., CRCD Award (first recipient), Honorary Doctor of Laws University of Winnipeg. With Mildred, whom he married in 1952, he has raised two daughters, Michele and Monika.

Tony’s C.V. is certainly impressive, but the man himself was a rare and precious individual.

I was privileged to meet Tony in 1975, to succeed him at CPA (MB) in 1976, and to call him a friend. But he was more than a friend, he was also a hero to me and many others who knew him.

At the end of World War II, when the nation was celebrating the victory over fascism, Tony was recuperating in Deer Lodge Hospital with dozens of other spinal cord injured veterans that the system frankly didn’t know what to make of. They had always died before! If Tony had stopped to think about his desperate situation, he might have turned to drink, or worse. Instead, he and a handful of his fellow young vets invented peer counseling and rehabilitated themselves. There was a community out there that they had fought to keep free and they weren’t going to just watch it through a hospital window, thank you very much!

Under Tony’s leadership, those paraplegic vets opened up their association to injured civilians with whom they shared what they had learned. Tony knew he could help the young men and women now surviving their car accidents and falls if he worked long and hard, so he did. When the polio epidemics of the ’50s struck so many Manitoba families, he worked harder and longer to professionalize the association so it could provide the sort of rehabilitation that was called for. Wheelchair Sports, the Spinal Cord Injury Unit, Ten Ten Sinclair, Building Codes, again and again Tony had the vision to perceive a need and the commitment to bring about a solution, always in his quiet, constructive, self-effacing way.

We give medals to heroes for solitary acts of bravery. My medal for heroism goes to A.T. Mann for a lifetime of selfless contribution to make our world a place where paraplegics and quadriplegics like you and I belong.

John Lane, CPA (MB) Inc.
Executive Director 1976-1995