More provinces preparing to loosen COVID-19 restrictions in coming weeks

No Christmas trees, no Christmas trees — the lots are empty as can be

It might take a Christmas miracle to get your hands on even a scraggly Charlie Brown-style tree this holiday season.

Winnipeg garden centre owners interviewed Monday morning said they are totally sold out and they’ve never seen stock vanish this quickly in all their years in the business.

They likened it to the holiday version of panicked shoppers binge-buying toilet paper when the COVID-19 pandemic first arrived in the province back in March.

“I’m sold out,” declared Ray DuBois, owner of Ron Paul Garden Centre on St. Mary’s Road. “I could see it coming back in August. When we placed our order, I bumped it up by 10 per cent.”

‘Women were shortchanged.’ Why bobsledding’s idea of equality doesn’t add up

When female bobsledders pushed for an Olympic four-woman event, they got a solo discipline instead: monobob. Now they’ll race for the same number of medals as men, but with fewer sledders. Not the progress they were looking for.

Waiting for Cormier verdict the ‘calm before the storm’

As the jury room door closed behind the seven women and four men who are now deliberating on the evidence against Tina Fontaine’s accused killer, Thelma Favel rose from the chair she’s occupied for most of Raymond Cormier’s second-degree murder trial.

Almost every day over the past three weeks, Favel, the woman who raised 15-year-old Tina, has sat right up front, directly across from the jury box, listening, sobbing and soaking in disturbing details of the teen’s last days that have come to light over the course of Cormier’s second-degree murder trial.

On Wednesday afternoon, after Court of Queen’s Bench Chief Justice Glenn Joyal instructed the jury and sent them off to be sequestered until they decide whether 56-year-old Raymond Cormier is guilty of killing Tina, Favel got up and hugged Crown prosecutor Breta Passler. It was one of many moments, this one shielded from jurors, that have long since proven the emotional impact of the case and the lasting power of Tina’s legacy.

Tina’s death sparked a public outcry that renewed calls for a national inquiry into disproportionately high rates of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls across Canada, and the criminal trial for the man accused of killing her hasn’t happened in a vacuum.

World Indigenous Business Forum comes home to Winnipeg for first time, ponders questions for future prosperity

When Nicola Shirley-Phillips imagines what the Indigenous economy in her country might look like 100 years from now, she doesn’t mention social media or artificial intelligence. Instead, she envisions a holistic way of life where people work alongside each other in a way that cares for the planet.

“I see community (and) I see us being more respectful of all the energies around us — our water energy, our climate (and) the soil,” she said. “In all of that, there are opportunities for us to create businesses and opportunities to provide our services.”

Shirley-Phillips, a serial entrepreneur, organic farmer and community economic development specialist from Jamaica, shared her vision Tuesday morning during a panel discussion focused on Indigenous women and prosperity.

The discussion was one of the first items on the schedule during the first full day of the World Indigenous Business Forum at the RBC Convention Centre in Winnipeg.

The landscape that taught us to see

The white pine stood at the edge of the lake, leaning out over the water, its branches bent by years of wind and weather. Beyond it stretched an expanse of blue water beneath a clear sky, a distant tree line and other pines rising along the rocky shoreline. From the deck above, the landscape seemed both expansive and remarkably still.

I had been looking at it for only a few moments when Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven entered the picture. Not literally, of course. But once the association appeared, I could not unsee it. The pine became The Jack Pine and The West Wind. The surrounding rocks, water and sky called up A.Y. Jackson, Arthur Lismer, Franklin Carmichael and Lawren Harris. A landscape I had been looking at all weekend suddenly became part of a visual history Canadians have carried with them for more than a century.

Perhaps that is the Group of Seven’s greatest achievement. They did not simply paint the Canadian landscape. They changed the way we see it.

I was at the lake for a quiet weekend, reflecting on the cultural, community and development projects that occupy much of my work through Civic Muse. Increasingly, I see these pursuits as part of the same conversation — place and identity, how we understand it, care for it and decide what is worth carrying forward.