A few special touches can conjure connection

Selkirk Avenue resident misses sound of silence

Selkirk Avenue resident Gail Allard sits on her front steps, looking at a row of tree stumps.

Until last fall, Allard would have opened her front door to a lush canopy of mature trees. Now, she has an unobstructed view of a freight terminal — the Canadian Pacific Kansas City Ltd. intermodal yard.

Although the residential street is quiet on this August afternoon, the steady beeping of machinery moving shipping containers carries throughout the neighbourhood.

It’s the first summer since Manitoba Hydro cut down 262 mature trees — most of them Siberian elms — along Selkirk Avenue between Keewatin and Railway streets.

Mayor honours pair who rescued little girl, father from Red River in August

A “proud and thankful” Mayor Scott Gillingham honoured two Winnipeggers Friday who rescued a young girl who fell into the Red River last month.

Gillingham said he was humbled to meet Jayclyn Morrissette and Brady Saunders before he presented them with the Mayor’s Award of Valour for saving the child and her father, who jumped into the water in an attempt to help his daughter and nearly drowned.

“These are the kind of people who we have in our city,” he said. “When someone is in need, they’ll step up, risk their own lives, to help someone they’ve never met in their life.”

Morrissette and Saunders were at St. John’s Park in the evening on Aug. 24, when they saw the man and child in the river.

The end of the road

St. Louis and the end of the trade route

Northern First Nation calls for voluntary ban of moose hunting as numbers dwindle

A northern Manitoba First Nation is calling for a voluntary closure of moose hunting in its traditional territory to protect the declining population and respond to what it sees is a lack of provincial intervention.

On Friday, Misipawistik Cree Nation issued a plea urging hunters to abstain from harvesting moose in provincial Game Hunting Area 10 — a 10,000-square-kilometre region of boreal forest north of Grand Rapids. The request applies to this year’s moose-hunting seasons, which open Monday.

According to the province’s 2025 aerial big-game survey, an estimated 281 moose reside in the area, roughly 60 of which are bull moose. That’s down from an estimated 346 moose in 2013, which the survey describes as a “relatively stable population” over the past decade.

This year, 124 licences and 62 bull moose tags were made available in the region during Manitoba’s annual hunting draw.

Folklorama unites Canadians of all ethnicities

On Wednesday night, I found myself sitting at a cafeteria table with a bunch of strangers in an elementary school gymnasium, watching a high-octane tae kwon do demonstration set to Korean pop music.

Where else but Folklorama could you have such a surreal experience?

First, a confession: before I finagled my way onto Wednesday night's VIP bus tour -- which is kind of like a pub crawl for the older set -- I hadn't been to the festival since I was a teenager. Back then, it was mostly obligatory. I dutifully supported the pavilions friends were representing as proud and vaguely embarrassed youth ambassadors, decked out in resplendent cultural dress so far removed from the jeans and T-shirts I saw them in every day.

But once I got there, I was always struck by the strong sense of community. And I always had fun. I loved seeing the fruits of the dance classes they spent their evenings and weekends in. I admired how connected many of them were to their roots; it made me want to learn more about mine. Like many third-generation Canadians, I have roots in many countries: Italy, Austria, Ireland, Scotland and England, to name a few.