Don’t immediately discount canine’s qualms

Uncertainty bakes costs into CUSMA chain

Despite all the melodramatic hype and handwringing leading up to it, the July 1 timeline for renewing the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement on trade passed without a U.S. commitment to extend its 2036 sunset.

The sun still rose the next day. Trucks and trains are still crossing the border carrying Canadian commodities (albeit not on that new bridge named after a famous hockey player). Grocery stores still carry imported fruits and vegetables from the south, and Canadians in several provinces still can’t buy American liquor.

Nothing changed, except everything.

We must now accept the certainty of continued uncertainty as Canada, along with the rest of the world, considers how to deal with the increasingly erratic leadership at the helm of the world’s largest economy.

Wawanesa moving to new office tower at True North Square

Wawanesa Mutual Insurance Company will be the newest resident of True North Square with the announcement Thursday of a new 19-storey, 300,000-square-foot building on the southwest corner of Carlton Street and Graham Avenue.

It will become the new North American headquarters for the Winnipeg insurance company’s 1,100 employees, who currently work out of six different locations in the city.

The new development becomes the fifth tower of the True North Square Development that will now total 1.5 million square feet of space.

With a 17-storey office tower open for a year (which is about 70 per cent leased), a 25-storey apartment building about to open at the end of this month and a five-star Sutton Place Hotel and accompanying condo tower under construction on the west side of Carlton Street, the announcement of construction of another tower in the complex will bring unprecedented density to the city.

Vaxxed and at your service

Eve Rice’s Instagram is a flurry of colour.

She’s a hairstylist with 100 clients, give or take. Many of the cuts and colours she shares online are bright pinks, purples and blues, balanced with more subdued hues. She works with Vincenzo Shampoo salon on Pembina Highway, but she manages her own clientele through social media.

Beyond the theatrical hairstyles she posts, Rice now sticks out from her fellow Winnipeg stylists through a simple addition to her bio.

“All welcome,” it reads, and then, in parentheses, “second dosed” — with emojis of a flower and a needle.

City roars love for its champions

Twenty-nine years is a long time in the life of this city, and yet not so long at all. Things changed, but the portrait of the place stayed mostly the same. The cycle of life here remains familiar: skies haze into grey. Summer slides into fall, and then into the long, dark sleep of a wind-battered prairie winter.

And Winnipeg endured many things in those 29 years, because it had to, because it is a place where painful things are just as slow to change as any other. Where the accumulated sadness of years builds up in drifts on most of our civic conversations, swirling over broken streets, whispering of many and varied disappointments.

That is what nearly three decades in Winnipeg has looked like, sometimes. But then, on Tuesday afternoon, there is suddenly a new picture, captured in just a few hours on streets thronged with people and closed to traffic. This image tells the same story as the first, but from a more hopeful vantage, and it starts with chant from 10,000 people.

"Here we go Bombers, here we go!"

Banned drunk driver in crash charged with getting behind wheel again

A Winnipeg man who served time for drunkenly slamming a minivan into an off-duty police officer riding a motorcycle in 2023 is accused of getting behind the wheel, despite court orders.

Braedon Lee Gordon, 25, is charged with one count of driving while prohibited for an incident on March 2. His next court date is later this month.

Dan Léveillé, a veteran Winnipeg Police Service constable who was left with life-altering injuries in the June 14, 2023, collision, said he was not surprised to learn of the new charge.

“This is just another one of those stories, where a habitual, repeat offender is charged for the same offence. After having served time, his behaviour continues,” said Léveillé.

Widow on mission to improve mental-health supports for law-enforcement officers, families

Stacia Franz is honouring her late husband’s life and legacy by seeking to ensure no law enforcement officer suffers in silence and no other spouse is widowed at 36.