Tuesday was definitely not a good night for the Republican Party.

But it was an especially painful night for U.S. President Donald Trump, who has now lost control of both chambers of Congress. Without sufficient numbers of Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate, he can no longer dictate the terms for his legislative agenda.

More significantly, the Trump administration will effectively lose congressional control over the “power of the purse.” In a divided U.S. government, it is much harder for the executive branch to secure funding for its various programs, departments and agencies — along with discretionary policy initiatives, tax measures and supplemental wartime requests.

On the positive side, divided government can lead to greater oversight or scrutiny by the legislative branch over the executive — or vice versa. These checks and balances are integral to the U.S. democratic process and can incentivize both branches of government to find compromises.

Government action on poverty reduction is losing its place on the political agenda at the exact moment affordability pressures are seriously threatening the well-being of many more Canadians.

The upcoming federal budget is an opportunity to reverse this trend by investing in concrete measures that ensure everyone can afford the basics.

The newly released 2026 report of the National Advisory Council on Poverty, Too Many Left Behind, warns that Canada is not on track to meet its legislated target of cutting poverty in half by 2030. This confirms modelling in the Canadian Centre on Policy Alternatives’ 2026-2027 Alternative Federal Budget, which indicates that Canada will miss the 2030 target by 4.4 percentage points. A roadmap for action exists, but governments must act.

As the tariff war and cost-of-living squeeze affect more people, fighting poverty is as important as ever. You don’t have to be poor to be affected by poverty. When millions of Canadians can’t find or afford housing, food, child care or other necessities, public services are under greater pressure, communities are more precarious, health outcomes decline and families that are one unexpected expense away from trouble are stressed.

Aluf Benn, the editor of the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, has been a steady voice of moderation and common sense for a long time amid the dogmatism and extremism of so many other observers, but he is about to give up. This is what he wrote after last Tuesday’s election.

“Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bloc does not command a majority of the Israeli public, but no stable government can be formed without Likud (Netanyahu’s party). Voting is driven by identity and by tribal loyalties, not by voters’ reactions to external events or by their desire to reward or punish the outgoing government for its policies.”

Israel has reached a dead end, in other words. The country has gotten so tangled up in its own fears and fantasies that it literally cannot respond intelligently to real-world events, however striking they may be. Benn continued:

“Israel has experienced upheavals, each of which would have been difficult to imagine separately, let alone in such rapid succession: a judicial coup initiated by the prime minister to establish unchecked rule; mass protests against the government; Hamas’s invasion and the Oct. 7 massacre; hundreds of Israeli hostages held in tunnels…”

Have you ever gone to pick up a prescription only to discover you have no refills left? The pharmacy must contact your doctor for authorization before it can fill the prescription again. You may then wait days for a response before receiving your medication.

In community pharmacies, this is a very common occurrence. Pharmacists must rely on physicians to respond to their requests in a timely manner. Within the already busy and complex workflow of a pharmacy, these delays create challenges. Patients may understandably become upset or even go without important medication.

From my experience working as a pharmacy assistant, I understand, first, what care pharmacists can provide and, more importantly, that a disconnect of care exists between pharmacists and primary care physicians.

This fragmented care, shaped by limitations in pharmacists’ scope of practice and ineffective communication systems, creates challenges for patients and pharmacy teams. This disconnect affects the stability of the health-care system in Manitoba, as these limitations can flow upward to other issues.

Transit riders have a love-hate relationship with our “people’s limousine.” For many, it’s their only means of mobility. Others ride because they believe urban life is better when people use public transit rather than choking the roads with single-occupancy cars.

At the same time, one of life’s mid-sized stressors is peering into the distance on a cold, snowy Winnipeg morning to see whether your late bus is yet on the horizon and, when it appears, whether it’s full to capacity and going to roll past. It’s the kind of thing that pushes you back into the car, if you have access to one.

We could make a big dent in this daily anxiety, help pay transit workers fairly and do our part to stave off climate disaster by restoring a tried-and-true funding scheme: the 50-50 model. This shared-cost model, in which the provincial government pays half of transit operating costs over and above service revenues, was brought in when I was a kid waiting to board the bus with my parents in the 1970s.

The Progressive Conservative government of Gary Filmon initially ditched it in 1993. New Democrats reinstalled it in 2007, with then-Lt.-Gov. John Harvard announcing in the 2006 throne speech: “Manitoba is committed to increased provincial funding for transit operating costs in Thompson, Flin Flon, Brandon and Winnipeg, restoring the 50-50 funding partnership that was in place prior to the cutbacks of the 1990s.”

Computer technology has become the dominant force in the modern world. New technology subsuming older technology is the raison d’être of modern capitalism.

Pioneers of this new digital age took advantage of the profound difference between what they were building and what came before, advancing their influence and predominance. Little by little, the advantages ate away at the influence of non-digital technology, until the snake consumed most of modern information technology.

And now it is eating itself.

The beginning of the modern era of computing began with the Graphical User Interface (GUI, pronounced “gooey”). Back in the ’80s this was a new commercial technology exclusive to Apple’s Lisa computer and, later, the MacIntosh.

On Monday in Ottawa, Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew called for the Indian Act to be abolished. Prime Minister Mark Carney said he was open to working with First Nations to reform or repeal this law, calling it racist.

The act was created in 1876 and still controls Indian status, reserve lands and band governance. It’s understandable why many people want a better relationship.

But repealing a law and building a new relationship are not the same. What would replace the act’s protections? Who decides? How do governments ensure removing federal authority gives First Nations power while the Crown keeps its promises?

Manitoba has faced these questions before. In 1971, First Nations created a document called Wahbung: Our Tomorrows, in response to then-prime minister Pierre Trudeau’s white paper on assimilation. More than 45 years later, elders and knowledge keepers met at Turtle Lodge, north of Winnipeg, to continue the conversation. Manitobans Dave Courchene Sr. and his son, Dave Courchene Jr., are generational links to the broader movement, and their story should be part of this discussion.

It has been quite a week. First we had “Lula” – Luiz Inácio da Silva (as nobody but his mother ever called him) – defying everybody’s expectations. After winding up two million votes behind his challenger, Flávio Bolsonaro, in the first round of the Brazilian presidential election, he made a “miraculous” comeback in the second.

It was like a man going into a revolving door behind you and coming out in front. At the end of the first round, Lula was two million votes behind; at the end of the second round on Oct. 25 he was four million votes ahead. So how did he win a fourth term without cheating?

That’s what Bolsonaro claims he did, having fled to the United States; Trump, Flávio’s mentor, hints at the same. But Lula’s victory was not miraculous. He only learned to read when he was 10, and at 80 he still refused to have a mobile phone. His team finally made him get one and use it.

He wouldn’t do social media videos, so they created a WhatsApp channel called Lula’s Army, and made him appear on it at least daily. The channel went from zero to 10.8 million viewers in two weeks, and Lula won.

Well, another civic election season has come and gone, and I have to say it was a doozy. The most surprising event was the steady climb in support for young mayoral candidate Noah Redden, who started out with just four per cent public support in September but had reached a solid 14 per cent support in October.

On election day, Redden nearly came in second, less than one percentage point behind Kevin Klein, an experienced politician.

Indeed, the 27-year-old’s accomplishment was nothing short of astonishing. Particularly given that his shoestring campaign was given very little coverage — largely, according to one pundit, because he didn’t send out any press releases.

This when Redden’s unwritten press releases were there for everyone to see on Instagram, as he popped up in locations across the city, posting videos about what he hoped to achieve as mayor.

Ottawa is betting that billions of taxpayer dollars spent on steel, asphalt and concrete will secure Canada’s economic future and prosperity. Through the $51 billion Build Communities Strong fund, the federal government is paying for roads, bridges, water systems and transit to boost productivity and attract capital from Europe and Asia.

As the shovels hit the ground from Halifax to Vancouver, Canadians should be asking themselves: What good does it do to build a stronger country if we are not building healthier Canadians?

The fund’s $5 billion allocation for health infrastructure is welcome news, as many of our hospitals and long-term care homes across the country are showing severe signs of aging, and modern care centres are much needed. But pouring concrete for new facilities is not the same as building a healthy population.

A ribbon-cutting at a modern hospital does not guarantee you see a family doctor when you need one, keep a rural emergency department open overnight, or shorten the wait for a knee replacement keeping someone off the job or robbing a retiree of independence.

When Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew declared Sept. 17 that the province would remain on permanent daylight time, he suggested it was a historical moment people would share with their “great-great-grandkids.” But, while Sunday, Nov. 1 has been heralded as the date many Canadians will stop changing their clocks, there are rumblings behind the scenes suggesting this will actually cause more trouble than ever before.

There are, of course, the warnings from chrono-biologists and sleep scientists about the damage permanent daylight time will do. The lighter evenings will mean many more dark mornings. But there is another set of problems in the offing in the critical infrastructure that underpins our digital lives.

While it used to be common to spend the Sunday morning after a time change going around our homes updating the clocks, we now wake up to devices that have already adjusted to the new time. These automatic updates occur regularly for daylight time, as well as when we travel to new time zones.

Our clocks are able to change by themselves owing to the hard work of a group of volunteers who were recently named in a list of the people who hold up the internet. This group, led by Paul Eggert, a computer scientist at UCLA, maintains a little-known tool called the Time Zone Database. Since the 1980s, it has kept track of regional, national and international debates about clock time and provided an up-to-date table of what time it should be on our walls.