Events in the long life of Britain’s Prince Philip

City emergency crews to administer drug that stops opioid withdrawal symptoms

Winnipeg Fire Paramedic Service crews will soon give out a medication that stops withdrawal symptoms after someone is treated for an opioid overdose.

Emergency workers will be administering a drug called buprenorphine, after Health Canada granted WFPS permission to use the controlled substance.

“Buprenorphine is a medication that offers people who are in active addiction — so those people who have received naloxone as a result of an overdose and those that are experiencing significant and, at times, dangerous withdrawal symptoms — just a bit of a reprieve … (It) reduces cravings and prevents those immediate withdrawal symptoms, which allows more time to connect those patients to further care,” said Michelle Long, WFPS assistant chief of paramedic operations.

The treatment option is in response to a persistently high number of WFPS opioid calls.

Festival riffs off Main Street’s storied past

Fifty years later, Billy Joe Green can still remember one of the biggest breaks of his career. It was 1971, and his band was asked to become the house band at the Brunswick, an old Main Street hotel and bar.

People would line up around the block to see them, and for a while Green, who was barely out of his teens, could really feel as if he’d made it.

“That was like the high-end place to play for our people,” he says, with a nostalgic smile.

Oh, if the walls of the Main Street strip could talk, they would tell a million stories, and Green would be in a bunch of them. An Ojibwa man and member of Shoal Lake 40 First Nation, Green is one of Winnipeg’s most iconic blues guitarists; back then, he was jamming on the Main Street circuit, slinging out country and rock hits.

Khan’s abrupt departure presents desperate Tories with a valuable opportunity

If the Manitoba Progressive Conservatives are serious about getting out of the political wilderness, they should start by electing a progressive conservative leader.

Not a louder conservative and not a more combative conservative — a genuinely progressive conservative.

Obby Khan’s abrupt departure as party leader last week has given the PCs something they desperately need: an opportunity to reset.

The party has become increasingly divided between its far-right conservatives and those who still believe the “progressive” in the party’s name actually means something.

Klein claims PCs offered him party position to exit 2022 mayoral race to help Gillingham win

Mayoral candidate Kevin Klein said he was offered a position with the provincial Tories if he pulled out of the 2022 mayoral race that saw then-city councillor Scott Gillingham defeat former mayor Glen Murray.

Klein made the revelation on Monday as he and Mike Vogiatzakis swapped accusations of offering an inducement to leave the current mayoral race. Both candidates allege that they were offered a position at city hall by the other — if victorious in the Oct. 28 election — in exchange for withdrawing.

“When I ran for mayor last time, a person with the (Progressive) Conservative Party of Manitoba came to my office and sat me down and said, ‘Look, we would like you to pull out of the race. There’s two weeks left. We would like you to pull out of the race, we’ll get you something in the party, but we need to open the door so that Glen Murray doesn’t win and Scott (Gillingham) does,” Klein told the Free Press.

“They didn’t really offer a lot. How it was described to me, and we’re talking four years ago now, so it’s memory, was that (they said) ‘Kevin, you’re only splitting the vote, so let’s find a place for you with the (Progressive) Conservative party. Back out and throw your support behind Scott. That would be the best thing for you to do’… I disagreed.”

Events in the long life of Britain's Prince Philip

With the latest COVID-19 stay-at-home order in Ontario preventing theatre companies from even rehearsing or recording content, organizations are cautiously planning late spring or summer shows, including the outdoor production ‘C-O-N-T-A-C-T.’

RCMP charge 11 people with weapons offences after investigation into northern First Nation violence

RCMP investigators have laid nearly two dozen weapons charges against 11 people in a lengthy probe into a drug and gun trafficking organization tied to repeated acts of violence and arson meant to stoke fear in Bunibonibee Cree Nation.

The new arrests and charges come 10 months after the initial takedown of Project Derry, in which 27 suspects were arrested on drug charges and $1.2 million in illicit substances were seized.

The project dismantled a trafficking network that funnelled drugs, including cocaine, oxycodone, fentanyl and carfentanil, into the remote northern First Nation via Winnipeg and Thompson.

Police say the crime group was behind an escalation in violence, arson and intimidation of community members and band leaders in Bunibonibee (Oxford House), approximately 950 kilometres northeast of Winnipeg.