A look at the details of the new COVID-19 related travel restrictions

Brandon manufacturer says Canadian steel in demand, but high costs, long delivery times hit hard

Something’s different in a Brandon plant.

Building envelope panels — or shells for homes and commercial buildings — keep being produced at Greenstone Building Products.

But the galvanized steel used by workers has been arriving later and the price is constantly increasing, according to company leadership.

“It’s just a little bit nerve-wracking for us to hear the opposite narrative,” said Tilda Fortier, Greenstone Building Products’ business manager.

Canada tops Dominican Republic in pre-qualifier

EDMONTON - Canada's women's basketball team put its depth on display Sunday in a dominant 110-60 victory over the Dominican Republic in the final game of the FIBA Olympic pre-qualifying tournament.

All 12 players hit the scoresheet, including six in double digits, to help the Canadians finish 3-0 at the tournament and advance to the next Olympic qualifier in February.

Sami Hill led the way with 16 points, three rebounds, two assists and three steals, while 20-year-old Shaina Pellington recorded 14 points. Bridget Carleton and Jamie Scott had 13 points each and Ruth Hamblin had 11 points and five rebounds.

"We got to roll our whole lineups through, and it was fun when we got going," said Canada's coach Lisa Thomaidis. "It was nice to see different lineup contributing and building chemistry.

SNC planned U.S. move if no deal: documents

OTTAWA - SNC-Lavalin warned federal prosecutors last fall about a possible plan to split the company in two, move its offices to the United States and eliminate its Canadian workforce if it didn't get a deal to avoid criminal prosecution, newly obtained documents show.

The documents, part of a PowerPoint presentation obtained by The Canadian Press, describe something called "Plan B" — what Montreal-based SNC might have to do if it can't convince the government to grant a so-called remediation agreement to avoid criminal proceedings in a fraud and corruption case related to projects in Libya.

Under that plan, SNC would move its Montreal headquarters and corporate offices in Ontario and Quebec to the U.S. within a year, cutting its workforce to just 3,500 from 8,717, before eventually winding up its Canadian operations.

“The government of Canada needs to weigh the public interest impact of the prosecution of SNC-Lavalin," the presentation reads.

Say What?! Sports guys travel to new destination

Say What?! is an email conversation between sports editor Steve Lyons and sports columnist Paul Wiecek. Look for us regularly but intermittently on the Free Press website.

Steve Lyons: Heya. How you doing? How’s 2020 treating you so far?

Few things to get us started:

Winnipeg novelist's latest offering a riveting fictional account of missionaries' plight

In 1955, five American missionary couples set out to evangelize the Waorani, an Indigenous people group of the Ecuadorian rainforest that had never had contact with the outside world. They dubbed their mission “Operation Auca.”

After a few months of airdropping gifts, the five men — Jim Elliot, Peter Fleming, Nate Saint, Ed McCully and Roger Youderian — opted to set up camp on a beach near a Waorani settlement. Just a few days later, they were all speared to death. Thanks to the swift arrival of a Life magazine photographer, the brutal conclusion to Operation Auca became global news.

In her new novel, Five Wives, Winnipeg writer Joan Thomas tells this story again.

“In the missionaries’ memoirs, ‘God’s leading’ explains almost every impulse,” Thomas writes in a postscript. “I set out to peer behind that, to explore in human terms actions that astonished me.”

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.