It’s the end of Winnipeg as we know it, but only time will tell if we’ll feel fine.

News that Canwest Global Commu-nications Corp. filed for bankruptcy protection last month hardly came as a surprise to anybody watching the situation: the media giant had been missing interest payments on its monster debt load for months. But that didn’t make it any easier to take.

The move effectively kills Canwest founder Izzy Asper’s dream of having the country’s largest media player based in the Manitoba capital, a couple of thousand kilometres away from the Toronto headquarters of virtually every other media company of note.

It’s also a significant blow to Winnipeg’s psyche because of how much the Aspers have done for the city over the years. The family has donated millions of dollars to education, medicine and the arts, and they have their names on buildings around town to prove it.

The Aspers are going to retain some role in the company, but exactly how they will be involved remains to be seen. The Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act plan allows them to reinvest up to $15 million in new capital, almost one-quarter of the $65 million in new equity that will be raised. That will probably give them somewhere in the neighbourhood of a 10% stake in the recapitalized company — a far cry from the controlling interest they formerly had in Canwest. (The family’s former 56% stake in the company, which was once worth more than $1 billion, will net them less than 2% in the recapitalized firm.)

Some observers predict that when Canwest’s parts are inevitably sold off, the Aspers will pick up Global Television and a number of specialty TV channels, leaving the family in a similar position to where they were prior to buying Hollinger International Inc.’s newspapers in 2000 for $3.5 billion.

Few people expect Leonard Asper to remain as CEO when the dust has settled. The company had been growing in a booming market a decade ago when he took over from his father; now, many observers believe a different leader is required to deal with the new realities of the media marketplace.

The Aspers, until last year anyway, were one of Winnipeg’s two royal families — the Richardsons remain the other — with the Aspers’ net worth climbing above $1.1 billion in 2005. Of course, we don’t need to pass the hat for the Aspers. Canwest isn’t their only business venture. They also have a real estate firm, Creswin Properties, which owns Canwest Place, one of the three towers at the corner of Portage and Main, as well as a number of other private businesses.

Despite the financial difficulties at Canwest, the Aspers are still going to be major players in Winnipeg. Gail Asper, the company’s corporate secretary, continues to lead the way for the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. The $310-million project is scheduled to open in 2012. On the heels of the CCAA announcement, she issued a statement that the museum and Canwest were completely different entities and had nothing to do with each other.

David Asper, executive vice president at Canwest, intends to buy the Canadian Football League’s Winnipeg Blue Bombers and build the team a new state-of-the-art stadium. His plans, which are being run through Creswin, recently hit a bit of a snag when it was revealed he was having difficulty getting a pair of high-end U.S.-based anchor tenants for an adjoining retail complex to commit due to the recession in the U.S., pushing the final handshake back for another year.

By then, David will be an executive in a vastly different media company. Or not. IE