Tangled up in blue

Premier sold transparency, but he’s delivering truculence

It is a well-known fact in certain political circles that Premier Brian Pallister loves going to movies. And when possible, he likes to go alone.

A voracious consumer of the cinema, Pallister has a long tradition of attending movies by himself. Not exclusively, but certainly more than the average movie buff. It's a fascinating bit of personal detail about a man who is otherwise a very private individual.

Here's the thing: I have some pretty solid intel about the theatre the premier visits most regularly on his solo movie nights, but I'm not going to include it in this column because I believe that would be an invasion of his privacy. The fact Pallister attends movies on his own is a great bit of personal trivia; where he attends movies is really nobody's business but his.

Although politicians live very public lives, there are things about them the rest of us simply don't need to know. Over the years, I have come into possession of troves of very sensitive, very personal information about very public people: failed marriages, family illnesses, tragic deaths, substance-abuse problems and all manner of generally bad behaviour. In most instances, I have been very comfortable with a decision to leave these details out of my columns.

With great horsepower comes great responsibility

Like many Winnipeggers, I was once an elementary school patrol.

In the morning and after school in the mid-1990s, you could find me holding it down on the corner of Brock Street and Kingsway Avenue with my orange flag, which I snapped closed with a flourish.

As a junior bossypants, I loved the gig; the rules and routine of it, but also the responsibility I was entrusted with. I felt, for the first time in my life, responsible for something larger and more important than myself.

Plus, at the end of the year, you got to go to Fun Mountain.

Tent settlement remains a home for street family

Desirae has a pair of lungs on her. “Don’t stare at the zoo animals!” she screams, as people walk down Henry Avenue, past the encampment, just off the Main Street strip, where she lives. The world around her is chaos.

Legacy of denial

Philip Katz was not an emotional man, his daughter Jennifer Katz says. Through her life, she saw him weep only once, which was when his mother died. But there was another time where he came close, where his eyes teared up and his voice welled with emotion, and that was when he spoke about his visit to a residential school.

Some of the details of the story have been lost to time. Katz, a prominent Winnipeg child psychiatrist who died in 2017 at age 86, is no longer here to tell them. But what he witnessed at the school in 1969 shook him for the rest of his life, and even changed the course of his professional practice.

“It haunted him,” says Jennifer, now an associate professor of education at the University of British Columbia. “He used that word: ‘it haunted me.’”

His story, passed down from father to daughter, also casts a damning light on the apathy that allowed residential schools to persist, even as countless people, from Indigenous parents and leaders to visiting doctors, rang alarm bells about the trauma and mistreatment children were suffering in the system.

Knowledge is profitable

It’s been stated many different ways throughout history that knowledge is power.

That is true with respect to finance today.

What’s more, information is not just a powerful tool to navigating money matters: knowledge can be profitable.

Well-informed consumers are often the most financially healthy or, at least, they’re less stressed.