Time for ex-hubby to drop grudge, grow up

Housing-first initiative aims to offer city’s homeless dignity, understanding

Ken St. George has dedicated the last 20 years to taking care of people in the community-health sector. Now he will enact the Housing First model in Winnipeg for the first time.

Winnipeg actor Djouliet Amara has always known she’d follow a creative path

The first thing Djouliet Amara does when she gets home to Winnipeg is go for a walk.

She puts on her headphones and heads out for a stroll around the St. Vital neighbourhood she grew up in.

“I liked to go to my favourite swing set and just swing,” she says, laughing.

“There’s a comforting sense of belonging when I come back... I kind of miss how homey Winnipeg feels; I miss the Prairie vibes.”

Beyond Bond, Connery characters funny, fierce

When I was a kid, many of my peers collected sports cards. I collected movie cards, starting with the 1965 run of James Bond 007 cards put out by the good folks at Fleer.

At that point, only three Bond movies existed: Dr. No (1962), From Russia with Love (1963) and Goldfinger (1964). (Thunderball would be released later in 1965.) The cards were basically productions stills of Sean Connery’s Bond in action, with appropriate captions: “Hunted by a Helicopter” as seen in From Russia With Love, or “The Incredible Laser Ray” or “Oddjob’s Deadly Derby” from Goldfinger.

So the news of Sean Connery’s death over the weekend had a kind of visceral effect, as it would on those of us who valued movie heroes over champions of the gridiron or baseball diamond. Connery, who lived to the ripe age of 90, presented a different kind of hero than the TV do-gooders of the era, a fact announced in an early scene from Dr. No when Bond cold-bloodedly kills a would-be assassin after he’s emptied his own pistol. “That’s a Smith & Wesson, and you’ve had your six.”

Connery played Bond a total of seven times, and while he was undoubtedly the best of the Bonds, only a few of the movies hold up. Connery is certainly phoning it in in Diamonds Are Forever (1971), for example, letting his character devolve into self-parody. But his quest to escape the Bond brand resulted in a few interesting roles, including The Anderson Tapes (1971), in which he played a career criminal with a conscience (sans toupée), or Zardoz (1974), a delirious post-apocalyptic fantasy in which his primitive warrior goes up against a race of immortal intellectuals.

‘There’s another Kamloops coming’: Here are some Canadian sites believed to hold more unmarked graves of Indigenous children

A network of more than 130 institutions would eventually spread across the country. The last shut its doors in the mid-1990s.

Tory government betting on wrong numbers

It is often said, in the heat of political battle, combatants have the right to their own opinions but they do not have the right to their own version of the facts.

When it comes to the debate over the future of Manitoba Hydro, that essential principal seems to have eluded the Progressive Conservative government.

For several years, the Tories have attempted to severely limit Public Utilities Board authority over Hydro rate applications. Former premier Brian Pallister and current Premier Heather Stefanson both introduced legislation that would essentially gut any hope of an independent review and give cabinet new authority to control rates.

When asked why, both Pallister and Stefanson and their ministers have repeatedly claimed the cost to Hydro for a PUB rate application hearing is $10 million annually, an expense that was, in and of itself, driving up electricity rates.