You both have plenty to bear — without scale spat

Winnipeg-raised adventurer chronicles 6,400-km paddling expedition

There are people who live life filled with curiosity and wanderlust in their hearts. Those two traits can lead a person into adventures, challenges and journeys the average person can only dream about. Winnipeg-raised photographer and adventurer Jillian Brown is one such person.

On April 28, 2018, she and fellow Canadian Martin Trahan set out on a 210-day, 7,600-km expedition to paddle across America by canoe, starting from the Pacific coast off Astoria, Ore., and finishing in the Florida Keys.

The expedition, dubbed Coursing Through America, was the result of Canoe & Kayak’s 2017 Dream Adventure Contest. It originally started as a four-person team with Trahan as its leader. But due to work complications for members of the original team, Trahan invited Brown, whom he had only known through her own paddling adventures via Instagram, to form a two-person paddling crew to tackle the expedition. They met in person for the first time three days before the start of the trip.

But 104 days into the journey, the Canadian duo parted ways to continue the expedition on their own. She arranged to have a kayak waiting for her in St. Louis and carried on travelling down the Mississippi River. Trahan followed the Atchafalaya River.

Manitoba reports 427 new COVID infections, four deaths

Manitoba’s COVID-19 caseload grew by 427 new infections Thursday, as the province reported four more pandemic deaths.

The triple-digit bump pushed the province to 7,177 total cases since March. It also entrenched the province as having the most new cases per capita in Canada in the past 14 days.

Of the four deaths announced by officials, three contracted the novel coronavirus while receiving unrelated care in hospital: a woman and man — both from Winnipeg and in their 70s — were patients of Victoria General Hospital; a Winnipeg woman in her 80s was a patient at St. Boniface Hospital.

A woman in her 50s from the Southern Health region also died from COVID-19, raising the number of Manitoba pandemic fatalities to 91.

Pimicikamak lockdown lifted after fatal shooting

Pimicikamak Cree Nation Chief David Monias said an arrest has been made and the community-wide lockdown has now been lifted after a shooting Friday that left one person dead.

RCMP were called by local First Nations Safety Officers about a seriously injured person at around 9:30 p.m. Friday on Main Road in Pimicikamak Cree Nation. Officers found two men at the scene. A 42-year-old man with a gunshot wound died at the scene. The other person was not injured.

The community went into immediate lockdown as the RCMP sought the suspect. An advisory posted by Monias Saturday had asked residents to stay inside their homes, lock doors and windows, keep children inside and not to open their doors to anyone they did not know.

In a statement on social media Sunday afternoon, Monias said the RCMP had arrested one person.

For singer-songwriter Scott Nolan, poetry is the path to grace

Words mean everything to Scott Nolan. After all, they saved his life.

Overhaul of police training is long overdue

You can’t do a job properly unless you’ve been adequately trained. And according to an advocacy group calling for sweeping change, it has been a long time since police training prepared law-enforcement personnel for the realities they face in their day-to-day duties.

“People have this idea of policing as dealing with crime and laying charges all day long. And we really don’t,” police constable Lisa Deveau, speaking for the Coalition for Canadian Police Reform (CCPR), told the Globe and Mail. “We deal with homelessness, we deal with addictions, we deal with mental health. And we’re not equipped for it.”

She makes an interesting point, whose validity is doubtless reinforced in interactions between police and the public in Winnipeg every day.

Ms. Deveau, who is currently on leave from a large municipal police force, is among the current and retired police-force members, academics, community organizers and physicians who have formed the CCPR in hopes of successfully lobbying for an overhaul of police training to make it better reflect the conditions officers face in 21st-century Canada.