Almond cookies melt in your mouth

The Wawanesa Mutual Insurance Company has gotten regulatory approval to acquire Ontario-based Everest Insurance Company of Canada.

The deal, first announced in March, is expected to close by the end of 2026. Once complete, Everest Canada will operate as a “distinct entity” within Wawanesa’s group of companies, a news release says.

Everest’s portfolio includes cyber and aviation insurance, among other special commercial insurance products. It will add roughly $305 million in Wawanesa’s annual commercial lines premiums, the Manitoba-based company previously told the Free Press. Details of the transaction weren’t disclosed.

— Free Press staff

‘EL NIÑO is being supersized before our eyes,’ United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said last week.

“The science leaves no room for doubt: the planet is in uncharted waters, and those waters are heating up. The world is in the danger zone of extreme weather.”

He’s right — we are in even deeper trouble than we thought on the climate front.

Zeke Hausfather, a leading American climate scientist, warns that 2027 is almost certain to be the hottest year. It will be, he said, “a climate time-machine, temporarily driving global average temperatures to levels not normally expected until the late 2030s.” (Note the “temporarily.” We’ll get back to that.)

Children entering kindergarten are starting school this fall. While the 2.5-hour kindergarten day commonly found in Manitoba schools sounds like a pleasant transition to the school system, in truth it remains one of the biggest missing pieces of the child-care puzzle.

Province-wide, families face a stressful dilemma — if they are lucky enough to have child care, they have to leave work at lunch and shuttle a child from school to child care; if they don’t, they must reduce hours, or forgo working or education, because they don’t have child care for their kindergartener.

The Government of Manitoba has made progress on making child care more affordable and accessible. But we have largely left one enormous piece untouched — part-day kindergarten. Why is publicly funded education for kindergarten still only 2.5 hours a day? To date, British Columbia, Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island have all implemented full-day, publicly funded kindergarten. The Manitoba School Boards Association passed a resolution in 2025 to implement full-day kindergarten programming, but the province has not provided sufficient funding to implement it province-wide.

There are currently 13,600 children in kindergarten in Manitoba. With a coverage rate for licensed child care of 32.3 per cent, roughly 5,000 families with kindergarteners lack access to licensed child care during the part of the day when their child is not in school. That is a precarious position to put any family in.

Some years ago, I did some pretty in-depth research on ancient Athens and its democratic system of government as part of a documentary film I was pitching. It was actually a lot of fun, because I was looking at ways their democratic beliefs and practices were both similar to and different from ours.

Some of the differences were quite striking, such as the fact that only Athenian-born males 18 years of age and over could participate. Or the fact their executive branch was selected by a totally random lottery system — a system one expert described as akin to picking names out of a phone book.

Then there was the practice of ostracism, a procedure I found particularly attractive. Essentially, every year the citizens of Athens chose a political figure who was becoming too powerful or pushing for a more authoritarian regime and voted to banish him from the city for 10 years.

Needless to say, I can think of quite a few politicians I’d like to see subjected to that procedure.