City needs to find its soul, mayoral hopeful tells church meeting

Cancelled KXL won't lessen oil dependency: experts

CALGARY - Cancelling the multi-billion dollar Keystone XL pipeline expansion would not only jeopardize thousands of jobs in Alberta, it would also mean the loss of billions of dollars in corporate income taxes, carbon taxes and royalties, according to energy experts.

TC Energy Corp.'s 1,947-kilometre project would carry crude oil from Hardisty, Alta., to Steele City, Neb. From there it would connect with the company's existing facilities to reach the U.S. Gulf Coast – one of the world’s biggest oil refining hubs.

Scrapping the pipeline expansion could threaten the security of supply for those refineries, said Richard Masson, an executive fellow and energy expert at the University of Calgary's School of Public Policy.

Without a pipeline to move bottlenecked bitumen from Canada to U.S. coastal refineries, they'll be forced to import from countries like Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Russia, he said.

Today’s horoscope

MOON ALERT: Tricky. Avoid shopping (except food and gas) until 6:30 a.m., then again, after 9:45 p.m. The moon is in Virgo.

ARIES (March 21-April 19)

Your work routine might be interrupted, or something related to your health or even your pet might create an unexpected hiccup. Nevertheless, this is a productive day. Review your values and guard against impetuous actions.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20)

New artistic director ready to get to work at Sick + Twisted

After a months-long national search for its next artistic director, Winnipeg’s Sick + Twisted Theatre has found who it’s been looking for in Mandy E. MacLean.

A Maritimer who studied theatre and performance at the University of New Brunswick and at Toronto’s Humber College, MacLean has served in recent years as the artistic and access producer for Toronto’s Crossroads Theatre — a low-barrier, youth-focused company — and as accessibility producer for Ontario’s renowned SummerWorks Festival.

MacLean, who arrived in Winnipeg last month, has long appreciated Sick + Twisted’s core philosophy, developed by former artistic director Debbie Patterson and a strong community of advisers and fellow artists. The company’s overarching goals include changing the way we think about disability in society and to create safe, supportive environments for artists to bring their “full selves” to the work.

MacLean, who was chosen by Sick + Twisted’s selection committee from a field of over 30 applicants, says the new position was intriguing, especially since she worked as an assistant director on the company’s 2025 production of Neither Here nor There, a personal, group-devised exploration of ability and difference that blended mythology, fantasy and reality.

City needs to find its soul, mayoral hopeful tells church meeting

Shaun Loney wants to be mayor of a city “with soul.”

A guide to some of television’s greatest Christmas sitcom episodes

Many of us return to the well-loved holiday specials every year — your Rudolphs, your Charlie Browns — but the Christmas Episode is also tradition.

Most sitcoms do them; in the days before streaming, they aired in the weeks leading up to The Big Show.

Encountering a Christmas episode in reruns in July or during an unseasonal series binge watch is a bit like eating a candy cane in April, but it’s no accident that many holiday episodes end up being the classic, well-quoted ones. The holidays, with their pressures and relatives and parties, are loaded with comedic potential, sure, but they’re also a chance for a sitcom to show its heart.

Thanks to streaming, you can pretty much watch anything, anytime, so we’ve assembled a little advent calendar of seasonal episodes to get you into the spirit.

Veterinarian petitions Ottawa to consider four-legged patients in legal cannabis regime

An Ontario veterinarian has launched a formal petition asking the government to include animals and the physicians who care for them in Canada's cannabis regulations.

"What we're hearing repeatedly from Health Canada... is that the entire framework surrounding cannabis legalization was focused on human consumption," said Sarah Silcox, who practices palliative and hospice care for companion animals in Ajax, Ont., and serves as president of the Canadian Association of Veterinary Cannabinoid Medicine.

"And so they hadn't even considered animals being involved in this, or veterinarians being involved in the medical side of things. And what that's left us with is this catch-22, because now it's perfectly legal for a Canadian adult to go out and purchase cannabis, and to give it to their animal, and yet veterinarians have no legal pathway to authorize its use... Therefore we're really limited in terms of the education and support that we can give our clients to ensure that they're doing that safely."

The online petition on the House of Commons e-petitions website was launched May 27, and already has more than 500 signatures — enough to require the government to table an official response in Parliament.