Read and research, before engaging your rage

It looked like Liberal arrogance of the first degree, deliberately blowing off a meeting of a major Parliamentary committee.

Conservative MP Larry Brock on X: “UNBELIEVABLE. Parliament is back, but Liberal members of the Justice Committee are MISSING IN ACTION. Crime is out of control, Canadians are terrified, but Conservatives are ready to restore safety to our streets.”

Ditto, Conservative MP Roman Babar: “It’s 3:30 pm on a Tuesday. The Standing Committee on Justice is supposed to be meeting right now. Crime is out of control and justice reform is desperately needed. The Committee’s Conservative members are ready to work, but Liberal members refuse to show up. Unbelievable!”

You get the point. Problem is, there was no meeting. No staff. No translators. Just four Conservative MPs.

New session of Parliament, but similar to the past

It might not exactly be business as usual, but this week’s long-awaited restart of Parliament doesn’t give one the impression that a whole lot has changed.

Sure, there’s a new face in the familiar seat reserved for the prime minister, and yes, a familiar face once again occupies the front-and-centre spot in the opposition benches — albeit representing a different seat than the last time he held party leadership in the chamber — but it didn’t take long for all concerned to dispense with the welcome-back niceties and get down to the business of partisan rancour.

The minority Liberal government led by Prime Minister Mark Carney and the official Opposition fronted by newly minted Battle River-Crowfoot MP Pierre Poilievre faced off for the first time during Monday’s question period. The PM struggled at times to make his points in the time allotted, while the Conservative leader quickly shook off whatever rust had accumulated during his brief Alberta-byelection detour and returned to familiar laments about broken promises, out-of-control spending, crime, immigration woes and general Liberal-induced chaos.

The session did start on a cordial note, with all members applauding Poilievre’s return; for his part, the Conservative leader thanked Carney for the prompt byelection call and wondered aloud “if one day he might regret that decision.”

Better protection needed for urban trees

Poet Joyce Kilmer perhaps said it best in his poem Trees — and with brevity, too.

“I think that I shall never see

A poem lovely as a tree.”

While you might have stopped and thought about the poetry of the trees that are a constant in the city of Winnipeg — big and small, sometimes healthy and other times failing, you probably haven’t thought about the value of a tree.

A few Transit tweaks help, but aren’t a solution

Winnipeg Transit has made some adjustments to its overhauled route system, the first since the original summer rollout that has left many riders frustrated.

Officials hope these tweaks will ease some of the pressure points that emerged almost immediately after the new network launched.

The changes are welcome. But they don’t come close to addressing the fundamental problems that continue to plague the system.

The most visible improvements include relocating bus stops at six locations to make them more accessible, adding articulated buses on the F8 Pembina-Henderson Highway route to reduce crowding, expanding on-request service in growing communities, and adjusting timetables on three core routes — the D12 Ellice, D13 Sargent and D16 Academy-Notre Dame — that had particularly poor on-time performance.

Letting the Millennium Library be what it can be

After yet another underwhelming response to a tragic incident, it’s fair to ask whether the City of Winnipeg wants to keep the Millennium Library open.

One man killed himself by jumping over the railing of the fourth floor of the Millennium Library — a railing that overlooks a spectacular glass wall and atrium that runs all the way to the main level — and another attempted a similar act of self harm. The city responded by installing foreboding metal construction fencing near the railings.

The city says the fencing is only a temporary measure until a more permanent safety solution can be found.

However, based on the fact the city has failed miserably to deliver meaningful safety upgrades at Millennium, one has to wonder whether that solution will ever come.

Kennedy poses risk to U.S. health care — and beyond

You may not have heard, but public mistrust in vaccines is growing, per U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

And he should know — he was the one sowing that mistrust before he took the office.

Kennedy, now working as part of the Trump administration, has been a prominent antivaccine advocate, although one whose information is often dubious. He has, for example, claimed that American children receive as many as 92 vaccines between maternity and adulthood — the number is actually about 30, although many of them are combined injections and so children are not actually getting 30 jabs.

He has also linked vaccinations to autism in children, as well as “environmental exposure” because he fails to understand that the reason autism diagnoses are more common now than in his own childhood is because, simply put, fewer children were diagnosed then who could have been.

America’s slide towards authoritarianism

In 2016 or thereabouts, the term “Trump derangement syndrome,” or TDS, entered the popular lexicon and has been used by some on the U.S. political right to describe the left’s deep-rooted negative reaction to, and vociferous criticism of, U.S. President Donald Trump.

The derogatory phrase is intended to delegitimize the comments of those who disagree with Trump’s words and actions by suggesting such negativity is rooted in a “general hysteria” about the president rather than rational objection to his controversial policies and serial provocations.

On occasion, the facetious and decidedly non-clinical phrase has also been co-opted by critics on the left to describe the unwavering nature of Trump supporters’ loyalty in the face of ever-mounting evidence of his character flaws, corruptive behaviour and policy failures.

With the meaning of TDS already muddied in public discourse, perhaps there’s no harm in adding another definition to the mix: as a pointed reference to the deepening madness of the man himself.

Ken Dryden — a man of many talents

Canada has suffered a great loss with the death of Ken Dryden, a man best known as the anchor of a Montreal Canadiens hockey dynasty, but a man who was far more.

His pedigree in sport was unquestionable: a Hockey Hall of Fame member as a goaltender, he was named the top goalie in the NHL five times, named the most valuable player in the 1971 playoffs as a rookie when he won his first of six Stanley Cups. He’s rightly recognized as the absolute gold standard of NHL goalies.

But he had a bigger view of hockey that his own unquestionable athletic prowess — there was also his fight to raise awareness and to try to reduce the risk of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in hockey.

In 2017, he talked to the CBC about the need to stop hits to the head: “Whether they are intentional or accidental, whether they are incidental or significant, whether they are from an elbow or a fist or something else, it doesn’t matter,” Dryden said. “The brain doesn’t distinguish. … It’s about the injury. It’s about the brain. It’s about the player being hit. It’s about the effect of it — not the cause.” It was a fight he took to the top of the NHL, hand-delivering the first copy of his book Game Change: The Life and Death of Steve Montador, and the Future of Hockey to NHL commissioner Gary Bettman.

Editorial

More Crown prosecutors needed — now

Manitoba’s justice system is facing a problem that cannot be wished away or endlessly pinned on the past. The province does not have enough Crown prosecutors, and the consequences are becoming too severe to ignore.

The Manitoba Association of Crown Attorneys has filed a formal grievance, saying the office requires at least 20 per cent more prosecutors to keep up with the rising number of criminal cases and the increasing complexity of prosecutions.

That is not a small adjustment. It represents a fundamental shortfall in the staffing needed to keep the system functioning effectively.

Manitoba has one of the highest violent crime rates in Canada. Police and courts are grappling with firearms offences, organized crime, large-scale fraud, repeat offenders, sexual assaults and ongoing bail applications.

Great potential in Churchill port project — but…

It’s a big job, but one which has to be done.

Prime Minister Mark Carney, seeking to bolster Canadian economic power at a time when its closest ally and trading partner is becoming increasingly hostile, wants to get started on some nation-building projects. Among them, he has indicated, is one to make some serious upgrades to Churchill’s port, funding for which is expected to be announced soon.

There’s plenty of merit to the idea — but doing it right will involve a great deal of work to more than just the port itself.

New port infrastructure will provide Canada with superior export capabilities to what it can presently manage, enabling us to improve our trading relationships with Europe. (Premier Wab Kinew has also suggested it could open up new opportunities with South America.) At present, Churchil’s port is mostly used to export grain.

Transit analysis shows poorest riders hurt most

It’s an unsettling piece of analysis about a big plan and its impacts on its smallest customers.

Looking at the recent changes in Winnipeg Transit routes and stops, a Free Press/Narwal review showed that Transit’s massive new route plan took stops and route coverage from poorer areas of the city, areas that depend on transit more than outlying regions of the city.

At the same time, outlying parts of the city — which use Transit less — saw growth.

“The old system’s 87 routes and 5,100 bus stops have been stripped down to 71 routes and about 3,800 stops. Despite adding a few hundred new stop locations, particularly in fast-growing neighbourhoods along the city’s outskirts, Winnipeg Transit ultimately cut a quarter of the locations where passengers can board a bus.

The Alberta government and ‘vicious compliance’

If she accomplishes nothing else with her hamfisted campaign to impose her government’s ideological will on school libraries across her province, at least Alberta Premier Danielle Smith will have invented a pithy new snippet of terminology: “vicious compliance.”

That’s what Smith accused the Edmonton Public School Board (EPSB) of engaging in when it followed, to the letter, a directive from Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides that local school authorities must ensure school libraries do not include or make available to students “materials including explicit sexual content.”

The ministerial directive, which required all such materials to be removed from school libraries by Oct. 1, referred to “detailed and clear” depictions of numerous specifically described sexual acts, and defined “depiction” as written passages, illustrations, photographic or digital images, video or audio files.

The EPSB’s response to this broad-brush banning of materials from school libraries was to scour its catalogues and, as instructed, remove anything that met the criteria set out in the order. It subsequently released a list of 200-plus titles that would necessarily be removed from library shelves, and to say what was included caused a stir would be an understatement of epic-novel proportions.

U.S. tariffs meet the rule of law

In a way, it’s trying to claim that the end justifies the means — no matter how outlandish the means happen to be.

There is a current court case where a U.S. company claimed it shouldn’t have to pay authors for taking their copyrighted works to train AI — because if it had to pay authors for its work, the company would be bankrupted. Therefore, taking the works should be allowed.

It’s a little like saying you shouldn’t pay an apple farmer for apples you’ve stolen and sold, because you’d end up losing money in the process.

Well, enter U.S. President Donald Trump, who is now preparing to fight for his global tariff regime before the U.S. Supreme Court, after losing twice in lower courts. The lower courts determined that Trump couldn’t legally use the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, to levy tariffs.

The convoy — from dangerous to ridiculous

‘The wheels of justice move slowly, but grind exceedingly fine.”

It’s a proverb about justice in general, and about the way that it arrives for those who break the law: it doesn’t happen quickly, but instead, carefully. The proverb has been credited to both Greek and Chinese sources, and has been around for centuries.

It seems particularly apt for criminal charges. After all, years after the fact, the leaders of the 2022 Ottawa convoy and occupation are still wending their way through the just system: Pat King, one of the loudest organizers, was given a 12-month conditional sentence in February — reduced by nine months for his time spent in jail before his trial — for five charges, including mischief, counselling to commit mischief, counselling to obstruct a public or peace officer, and two counts of disobeying a court order.

Two other central figures in the convoy, Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, are still awaiting their sentences after being convicted of mischief in April. They will be sentenced Oct. 7. Prosecutors have asked for a seven-year sentence for Lich and eight years for Barbour.