Bard’s secondary characters at centre stage

A chance to reimagine road safety

Drivers have killed 11 pedestrians on Winnipeg streets in 2022.

Inappropriate late-night texts to students costs teachers their jobs

Manitoba’s independent teacher commissioner has cancelled two certificates this month because of inappropriate late-night messaging with minors.

Robert Gregoire is no longer permitted to teach in the River East Transcona School Division or elsewhere in the province after he was found to have called a student “my beautiful” and “princess,” among other pet names he used in online communications over multiple years.

Brady Nurse, who became the subject of a workplace probe after RCMP contacted the Portage la Prairie School Division about his actions, was also recently stripped of his licence.

New consent resolution agreements — public documents outlining agreed-upon facts and consequences in disciplinary cases — reveal the men in both cases repeatedly engaged in boundary-crossing behaviour.

Bullet to the face nets 7.5 years behind bars

Calling it “intimate partner terror,” a judge sentenced a Winnipeg man to seven-and-a-half years in prison for firing a loaded handgun held to his partner’s head causing her life-altering injuries.

The woman, who the Free Press is only identifying as A.W., watched as Machuor Akau sat silently and stared at the ground as Manitoba Judge Sidney Lerner read his ruling Monday.

Akau, 28, who pleaded guilty to aggravated assault, possession of a prohibited weapon, pointing a firearm and criminal negligence causing bodily harm, didn’t speak during the sentencing or look at his victim or her family members as court progressed.

At a previous proceeding, Crown prosecutor Ari Millo had requested a sentence of eight years, while defence counsel Saul Simmonds argued for between five and six.

Feds hold back on stable health funding

The federal government wants provinces to improve health care, expand treatment services and find better ways to deliver care. But it’s refusing to provide provincial governments with the one thing they need most to plan for the future: stable, predictable funding.

That’s not a serious way to manage public health care.

Provincial and territorial health ministers gathered in Winnipeg last week hoping to secure long-term federal funding commitments to help manage mounting pressures on their health-care systems. They left with little more than a promise to keep talking.

Ottawa agreed to extend a $1.2-billion annual funding agreement for mental-health and substance-use treatment, home care and community care by one year. That’s welcome, but it hardly provides the certainty provinces need to maintain existing programs, never mind expand services to meet growing demand.

Driver guilty of ‘mistake’ that killed three men in train collision

MINNEDOSA — Joseph Sinclair told a courtroom packed with grieving loved ones that not a day goes by when he doesn’t think about his dead co-workers, as he accepted responsibility Tuesday for a collision with a Canadian Pacific train that killed the three men in 2020.

“I can’t imagine what you guys went through and are going through,” he said. “All three of them were like family.”

He pleaded guilty to three counts of failing to stop the van he was driving at a marked railway crossing east of Strathclair, in western Manitoba, on Sept. 8, 2020. The van was hit by two locomotives that were joined together.

Passengers Phil Houle Jr., 45, Trevor Bone, 25, and Layne Catcheway, 19, who was Sinclair’s brother-in-law, died at the scene. Sinclair, who is from Dauphin, was injured. The men were employed by Russell Redi-Mix Concrete.