Critter sitters can help with creature comforts

Lifelong friends will now be facing off in WHL

Trent Crane and William Irvine have been friends since before they can remember.

Through good times and bad, a tight bond was forged during their formative years in Morden. The boys went to school together, fought like siblings and were frequent hockey teammates.

They also played dozens of golf rounds together and were teammates on Manitoba's gold-medal winning baseball team at the 2016 Western Canadian peewee championship. They hung out constantly.

Their connection — Trent and William were born 29 days apart in the spring of 2003 — endures to this day.

CFL greats open up about full effects of concussions

He remembers the four Grey Cup wins. He remembers his Hall of Fame teammates. He even remembers single plays he authored that changed the history of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers franchise and which fans still talk about more than 50 years later.

But what Canadian Football Hall of Fame quarterback Ken Ploen no longer remembers is what he did yesterday. The greatest Bombers player who ever lived has been diagnosed — like an alarming number of his aging CFL teammates — with dementia.

“He’s still in great health otherwise. We just had our checkups and the doctors say he has the heart of a 16-year-old,” says Janet Ploen, his wife of 55 years.

“He’s still able to get out and he’s still able to do things. It’s just that he doesn’t remember the experience the next day.”

Carney plays well on the road

Bankers are detail-oriented, pragmatic types. They seek to maximize assets incrementally, without taking big swings or big risks.

Bankers who run central banks — controlling the monetary policy of nations and states — must also think strategically and geopolitically, taking care of the details of national monetary policy, protecting assets and minimizing risk while also positioning and protecting their nations in a global economy fraught with financial and political pitfalls.

Given that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has been head of both the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, it should be no surprise that, since he entered the political realm and became prime minister in 2025, he has governed like a careful national banker — the sort who raises or lowers interest rates a quarter-point at a time while carefully plotting a course through choppy geopolitical seas.

Domestically, Carney’s economic policies have focused on realizing the value of Canada’s assets in a post-COVID, inflationary global economy disrupted by the trade chaos of U.S. President Donald Trump, the U.S. and Israel’s war on Iran and Russia’s continuing war with Ukraine.

When we acknowledge the crimes of colonialism, we're learning history, not erasing it

The first mistake is thinking that history ends. Like a book, like a movie, like a story where one arc is wrapped up and a new one begins. It’s a mistake easily made by those who have enough personal distance from an event to know it only through a page, rather than through a face, a memory, a kinship or a name.

So if it is not your relative whose tiny body might lie in an unmarked grave, far from home, then it’s easy to think that what happened is over. It’s easy to say, as one commentator did earlier this week, that it’s “time to move on.” But you’d be wrong, because history doesn’t end, and those most directly affected by it do not forget.

And when news broke last month that 215 unmarked graves had been found near the former Kamloops Indian Residential School on the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation, the grief that flowed from the discovery was a sorrow not just for a new revelation about history, but for a pain some have always known.

All between the coasts, survivors and their allies planted gardens of empty shoes, arranged in rows.

Olympics overnight: Synchro divers spring to silver, while Penny Oleksiak powers relay team to Canada’s first medal in Tokyo

Here’s what you missed overnight and need to know about the 2020 Tokyo Olympics this morning.