Explosion forces residents to evacuate Kennedy Street Manitoba Housing complex

Residents of an inner-city high-rise say they were forced to evacuate Monday afternoon after explosions blew out a window on the eighth floor.

Darrell Klassen, who lives on the top floor of the 16-storey Manitoba Housing apartment complex at 444 Kennedy St., said he heard several blasts before noticing the smell of smoke.

“The elevators were shut down, so we had to take the stairwells,” Klassen said. “Both stairwells were full of smoke, so I had to mask up and put a wet cloth over my face.”

Klassen said the incident marks the seventh fire in as many years, adding that many are linked to drug activity.

Database issues cloud city homeless numbers

The head of End Homelessness Winnipeg says she has no confidence in data about the city’s homeless population due to problems with the federal system that tracks those numbers.

Jennifer Rattray, the organization’s chief executive officer, told the Free Press Thursday it continues to work with the federal government to resolve problems with the Homeless Individuals and Families Information System, which keeps tabs on people who access homelessness services.

CBC has reported it obtained an internal memo from EHW that shows that as of the end of March, the number of chronically homeless Winnipeggers had fallen to 436 from about 4,400, as a result of efforts to correct the database.

Earlier this year, the organization had reported more than 8,000 people were accessing services.

Journey north with the Grey Cup

The Grey Cup spent eight days on the road, travelling through northern Manitoba to promote Grey Cup game in Winnipeg Nov. 29.

Resumé fib creates unnecessary distraction

Here’s the thing about closets: if they’re of the literal variety — in other words, those tiny rooms in your home in which clothing, linens and assorted household items are stored — they can usually be securely locked so the contents therein are protected.

But if they’re the figurative sort of “closet” in which the embarrassing secrets from your past are concealed, there is very little chance in the current era of cyber-snoop scrutiny that those skeletons will remain behind closed doors.

The discomfiting truth of this 21st-century reality was brought into focus — again — when it was revealed that Conservative party Leader Andrew Scheer was less than truthful in his career resumé’s description of private-sector work experience he accumulated before entering politics.

The profile posted on his party’s official website stated that “Before entering public life, Andrew worked in the private sector as an insurance broker.” The trouble is, he did not. When confronted with fact-checked inconsistencies between the resumé and reality, Mr. Scheer was forced to admit he was never actually a credentialed broker in Saskatchewan, but instead worked in a support role in an insurance office while “the licensed brokers finalized all the transactions.”

First Nations should not have to defend truth of residential schools

The truth about residential schools should never have been this difficult for Canada to acknowledge. And it should never be this difficult to defend.

For generations, survivors have carried the memories of children taken from their families, the abuse they endured, the languages and cultures they were forbidden to practise, and the children who never came home. They have told their stories, often at tremendous personal cost, so Canada could no longer claim it did not know.

How many times must survivors tell their stories before the responsibility shifts from those who suffered to those who have a duty to listen and act?

On Oct. 9, Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew said residential school denialism should not be criminalized, arguing that continued education and efforts to combat misinformation are the answer.