You’ll move on faster if you confront heartbreak

Carney’s ‘counterweight’ summit strategy

Modern summit diplomacy had very inauspicious beginnings. Winston Churchill is widely credited with coining the phrase “summit” in 1950 to describe a conference of global leaders. But it was another British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, who initiated the first actual summit meeting 12 years earlier — with Adolf Hitler, no less.

It didn’t go well.

Over a one-month period, the two leaders met three times over the fate of Czechoslovakia. Hitler threatened war. Chamberlain threatened appeasement. Guess who won?

Chamberlain was so desperate for a peace deal and so convinced he alone could convince Hitler, that he swallowed his inhibitions and flew in an airplane for the very first time in his life. “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again” he told reporters, explaining his tenacious summit activity. Skeptical of the spectacle, British Foreign Office wags quietly amended it to, “If at first you don’t concede, fly, fly again.”

New chapter for Yellowquill University College

Sometimes, a milestone is about much more than a degree. It is about opportunity, recognition and the doors that open for the people who come next.

Yellowquill University College reached a historic milestone on Oct. 1, when new Manitoba legislation came into effect formally recognizing the institution within the province’s post-secondary education system and granting it authority to award degrees.

Established in 1984, Yellowquill is now Manitoba’s first fully recognized First Nations-owned and operated post-secondary institution with degree-granting authority.

It is an achievement worth celebrating, not only for Yellowquill and the communities it serves, but also for what it represents about education, career development and the future of Manitoba’s workforce.

Health ministers meeting ends without long-term funding commitment from Ottawa

Canada’s health minister failed to deliver the promises of long-term funding increases that her provincial and territorial counterparts, who were gathered in Winnipeg this week, had been seeking.

Instead, Marjorie Michel reiterated the federal government’s commitment to working collaboratively towards renewing bilateral funding agreements and to meet again before the end of the year to discuss long-term funding.

“The decision we all agreed on is to have our public service… start the work on what will be the next step for the next negotiation on Canada Health Transfer and other agreements,” Michel said Friday at a news conference after meeting with the other health ministers.

When asked why the federal government couldn’t commit to maintaining funding levels geared, at a minimum, to the rate of inflation over the long term, Michel said that it’s time to update agreements signed a decade ago.

On the night table: Carol Off

Carol Off: Author, True Patriot Love

I’m about to start On Treason By Patrick Lennox. I recently finished reading Margaret Atwood’s memoir Book of Lives and loved it; I came to understand, from her point of view, all the things that made me fall in love with Canadian literature as a young person. Now I understand how difficult it was to actually get published in this country from the points of view of those writing, and all the wonderful, wacky stories Atwood has about culture in Canada.

Carol Off launches True Patriot Love on Wednesday, Nov. 25 at 7 p.m. at McNally Robinson Booksellers’ Grant Park location.

City’s Kenaston plan won’t work, outside consultant told Crown land authority in October

The consulting firm hired to redesign the former Kapyong Barracks property agrees with area residents who believe the plan to widen Kenaston Boulevard is flawed and will negatively impact surrounding neighbourhoods.

A letter sent from B.C.-based Urban Systems to Canada Lands Company says the City of Winnipeg is intent on turning Kenaston into an “urban freeway” — an approach that fails to mesh with CLC’s proposed development of the Kapyong property.

“Developing Route 90 into an urban freeway will create disruptions through significant acquisitions of the Kapyong lands by the city as required to meet right-of-way requirements for an urban freeway,” a principal of the firm says in the later dated Oct. 23, 2017.

The letter was obtained by the Winnipeg Free Press through an Access to Information request. The letter-writer's identity had been blacked-out.