Grand enhancement for Jeep

Children entering kindergarten are starting school this fall. While the 2.5-hour kindergarten day commonly found in Manitoba schools sounds like a pleasant transition to the school system, in truth it remains one of the biggest missing pieces of the child-care puzzle.

Province-wide, families face a stressful dilemma — if they are lucky enough to have child care, they have to leave work at lunch and shuttle a child from school to child care; if they don’t, they must reduce hours, or forgo working or education, because they don’t have child care for their kindergartener.

The Government of Manitoba has made progress on making child care more affordable and accessible. But we have largely left one enormous piece untouched — part-day kindergarten. Why is publicly funded education for kindergarten still only 2.5 hours a day? To date, British Columbia, Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island have all implemented full-day, publicly funded kindergarten. The Manitoba School Boards Association passed a resolution in 2025 to implement full-day kindergarten programming, but the province has not provided sufficient funding to implement it province-wide.

There are currently 13,600 children in kindergarten in Manitoba. With a coverage rate for licensed child care of 32.3 per cent, roughly 5,000 families with kindergarteners lack access to licensed child care during the part of the day when their child is not in school. That is a precarious position to put any family in.

Hal Turner is correct about the challenges posed by winter and drought to our energy grid (The right plan for reliable energy, Think Tank, Aug. 11). But the ongoing debate is really about how we manage them.

Manitoba Hydro’s chief operating officer wants that debate to stay focused on facts, and his summary is fair. Demand is going up. The toughest times are still the coldest nights, and dry years put the most strain on the system. Wind power is unpredictable, solar is weakest when our days are shortest, and batteries alone cannot get Manitoba through a drought. The province also already buys wind power, is growing Indigenous-led supply and still has one of the cleanest and most affordable grids in North America. We’re not arguing with these points.

The real issue is not whether Manitoba needs reliable winter power. It is about whether building a $3-billion gas plant in Brandon is the only or best way to bridge the forecasted energy gap.

Almost all of our electricity, about 99.7 per cent, already comes from water, wind and biomass. We emit about 1.3 tonnes of carbon per gigawatt-hour. By comparison, the average Canadian utility emits approximately 121, and the American average is ~350.