Taxi and ride-hailing services receive 58 complaints since March

The City of Winnipeg has fielded 58 formal complaints about vehicle-for-hire operations since taking over industry oversight from the province in March.

According to freedom of information request results, the city mostly received complaints about taxi operations, and the two largest companies – Duffy’s Taxi and Unicity Taxi – were the main culprits.

From March 1, 2018 to July 13, 2018, the Winnipeg Parking Authority received 20 complaints about Duffy’s, mostly to do with driver road habits (five complaints), driver conduct (three), service refusal (three) or poor service (three), among other issues.

During the same period, Unicity had 19 complaints, five of them related to poor service and three about driver conduct, plus other misdeeds.

The long and winding road

As theatre goes, it sent a strong message.

Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew, standing in front of microphones and television cameras, holding up his Indigenous status card and saying that he didn’t feel Canada should have “a race-based form of identification in this country, but that is a reality,” adding that it was time to abolish the Indian Act.

“I think it’s time to abolish the Indian Act, get rid of the Indian Act, move past the Indian Act, and it needs to be done with First Nations people and First Nations governments, of course. I think it’s long overdue that we have a relationship with Indigenous Peoples in Canada that reflects who we are as Canadians today,” he said.

The Indian Act — the name alone suggests how out-dated and out of place the law has become. Originally dating from 1876, the law was put in place to “amend and consolidate the laws respecting Indians” and gave the Minister of the Interior the responsibility to “control and management of the reserves, lands, moneys and property of Indians in Canada.”

Court ruling concludes Canadian Wheat Board saga

It remains to be seen whether the recent court ruling in a lawsuit filed after Canadian Wheat Board’s dissolution in 2012 puts the whole debate to rest, as some no doubt hope.

But either way, the dust has settled on the post-CWB world. The sun still rises and a new generation of farmers on the land only knows by name an institution that for generations influenced every aspect of Prairie grain farming.

The first Rural Revival column I wrote for this newspaper more than 30 years ago was about a thousand farmers from Western Canada demonstrating in support of the Wheat Board. It was in the aftermath of the Western Grain Marketing Panel report, one of several efforts that eventually included a plebiscite to help the federal government decide what to do about a vocal minority of farmers who wanted marketing “freedom.”

The polls at the time suggested about two-thirds of farmers were comfortable enough with the single-desk system for food wheat and barley to keep it around. It served as a counterbalance to canola, which they sold on the open market. They essentially had a dual market.

Colorado low blow: flood fears rise as Manitoba faces yet another weather warning

Forecasters are saying with certainty another Colorado low will hit southern Manitoba this weekend, putting flood-hit municipalities — including four already in local states of emergency — on high alert.

The third such event in as many weeks is set to arrive Friday and linger through Sunday, with the bulk of the rain falling Saturday, said Natalie Hasell, warning preparedness meteorologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada.

“There is agreement to the point where, yes, a Colorado low is coming, but exactly what it will mean for southern Manitoba is unclear,” she said Wednesday. “I hope people are prepared for another uncomfortable weekend.”

As municipalities filled sandbags and pumped standing water, weather models still disagreed on the storm’s track.

Clarification: Climate-Extreme Heat and Homelessness story

PHOENIX (AP) — In a story published June 20, 2022, about the growing dangers to homeless people of heat fueled by climate change, The Associated Press mischaracterized how a seasonal forecast map is produced by the International Research Institute for Climate and Society at Columbia University. The climatologists involved are not volunteers and the forecast is produced by, not for the institute.