Don’t cave to pressure from ex who dumped you

Colorado low blow: flood fears rise as Manitoba faces yet another weather warning

Forecasters are saying with certainty another Colorado low will hit southern Manitoba this weekend, putting flood-hit municipalities — including four already in local states of emergency — on high alert.

The third such event in as many weeks is set to arrive Friday and linger through Sunday, with the bulk of the rain falling Saturday, said Natalie Hasell, warning preparedness meteorologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada.

“There is agreement to the point where, yes, a Colorado low is coming, but exactly what it will mean for southern Manitoba is unclear,” she said Wednesday. “I hope people are prepared for another uncomfortable weekend.”

As municipalities filled sandbags and pumped standing water, weather models still disagreed on the storm’s track.

The new normal in Canadian politics

“Nothing happening, all at once.”

Welcome to the new normal of Canadian politics, where normality is the new normal. Routine and stable are in; disruptive and excessive are out. Exhibits A and B are the Alberta referendum and the British Columbia election. Voters opted for stability over volatility.

The opposite of being normal is being different from the norm. In politics that means different from where we’ve been and what we’ve come to expect. Two competing trends have dominated our politics for the past decade and a half — progressivism and populism. Think Justin Trudeau and liberal, progressive identity politics in Canada, and Donald Trump and conservative, populist MAGA politics in America. We are now experiencing a swing away from both those trends.

Representing this “new normal” are Prime Minister Mark Carney, for one, and newly elected British Columbia premier, Lorne Doerksen, for another. Both are considered normal because they talk and act like adults in a childish political world. Their political flair is to not have any political flair. They stand out for not standing out.

Taxi and ride-hailing services receive 58 complaints since March

The City of Winnipeg has fielded 58 formal complaints about vehicle-for-hire operations since taking over industry oversight from the province in March.

According to freedom of information request results, the city mostly received complaints about taxi operations, and the two largest companies – Duffy’s Taxi and Unicity Taxi – were the main culprits.

From March 1, 2018 to July 13, 2018, the Winnipeg Parking Authority received 20 complaints about Duffy’s, mostly to do with driver road habits (five complaints), driver conduct (three), service refusal (three) or poor service (three), among other issues.

During the same period, Unicity had 19 complaints, five of them related to poor service and three about driver conduct, plus other misdeeds.

Imperialist crusades: 21st-century style

In the 11th century and lasting into the 13th, the papacy launched a series of at least eight military campaigns we now refer to as the Crusades, or Holy Wars. They were an imperialistic call to arms for Christians to retake Jerusalem, which was at the time under Muslim rule.

Spiritual rewards for participation were implied, and other incentives offered, to dull the extra taxation demanded to fund the campaigns. Over time, the “crusades” morphed to become massacres of not only Muslims but also Jews and Christian dissidents — in other words, any enemies of the papacy. If today’s news sounds like déjà vu all over again, it probably should.

The stories keep repeating themselves in many forms. We now know that two 20th century world wars, global in scope, were caused by imperialistic ambitions, changes in the balance of international powers and corresponding arms races. The first was attributed to the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne by a Bosnian Serb, a kind of “regime change” initiative. The second resulted from rising tensions between Allied and Axis powers, triggered by the rise of European fascism and Japanese militarism. The human toll of both was unimaginable.

In the First World War, 15 to 22 million people, including soldiers and civilians, were killed and another 23 million were wounded. These numbers do not account for those otherwise affected — victims of chemical warfare whose compromised health shortened their lives; of the subsequent Spanish flu epidemic amplified by the displacement of peoples; others who died from other diseases caused by war conditions; and those who were malnourished or starved. Nor do they account for the ongoing trauma and resentments passed on intergenerationally to this day.

Say What?! Sports guys travel to new destination

Say What?! is an email conversation between sports editor Steve Lyons and sports columnist Paul Wiecek. Look for us regularly but intermittently on the Free Press website.

Steve Lyons: Heya. How you doing? How’s 2020 treating you so far?

Few things to get us started: