Opinion

B.C. puts the brakes on power exploiters

Editorial 4 minute read 6:48 AM CDT

Regulated electrical power is a little bit like, well, socialism.

Generating power and delivering it through a grid is an expensive process, and the way it all happens involves spreading the costs, and the benefits, across the entire rate base. You don’t pay for the entirety of a Keeyask hydro project: you pay your share, relative to the amount of electricity you use, spread out over years.

The regulators oversee that utilities spending is kept in check, that empires are not built on the ratepayers’ backs and that those same utilities make money, within a reasonable rate of return.

When more power is needed, more generating capacity (or more purchased power from other sources) has to be found. That’s an ever-more expensive process, but regulated power systems still share much of that cost across all customers, building construction and maintenance costs into rate increases.

The art of neighbourhood life

Stephen Borys 6 minute read Preview

The art of neighbourhood life

Stephen Borys 6 minute read 2:01 AM CDT

Most mornings when I step outside my door at Philips Square, I look across the street and see something that makes me quietly grateful to live where I do. It isn’t just the park or skyline view — it’s the steady rhythm of people coming and going through the doors of the Forum Art Centre at the corner of Eugenie Street and Taché Avenue.

Children clutching sketchbooks. Teens balancing portfolios under their arms. Adults with aprons dusted in clay or paint. Seniors greeting one another before class. Newcomers stepping into their first art lesson in Canada. Almost every day, in every season, this little building fills with people ready to make art — and in doing so, they make community.

The Forum Art Centre has been part of Winnipeg’s creative landscape for more than 60 years, offering art instruction and inspiration to thousands. Founded in 1964 by a group of artists and educators, it has survived relocations, funding challenges and the changing tides of art education. Its mission has remained remarkably consistent: to make art accessible, to foster creativity and to build connections through shared expression.

Housed today in a former city library on Coronation Park, the centre feels perfectly at home. On warm days, artmaking may spill outside — easels under trees, sketchbooks open on park benches, students painting in the open air. It’s art and nature in easy conversation. Inside, the hum of creativity continues with drawing, painting, sculpture, ceramics, printmaking and mixed media. Many of Winnipeg’s most celebrated artists have taught here, passing along their craft, discipline and love of art to the next generation.

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2:01 AM CDT

Stephen Borys

The Forum Art Centre — an anchor in St. Boniface’s Norwood Grove.

Stephen Borys
                                The Forum Art Centre — an anchor in St. Boniface’s Norwood Grove.

A few special touches can conjure connection

Maureen Scurfield 4 minute read 2:01 AM CDT

DEAR MISS LONELYHEARTS: You may think I’m crazy, but I’m going to a Halloween party as a glamorous witch to run into this special guy and put my spell on him.

He’s co-hosting it with his housemate and it’s a big bash. You can’t get into this party unless you’re wearing a full-on costume. I don’t want to wear a complete Halloween mask, though, because I want him to recognize me and be attracted.

Can you give me any magical ideas?

— Need to Bewitch Him, West End

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Why the rule of law matters

Leah Kosokowsky and Anik Bossé 4 minute read 2:01 AM CDT

How do you defend something most people rarely see, but rely on every single day?

It’s called the rule of law — the principle that lets us speak freely, breathe clean air and live without fear of unchecked power. It’s the foundation of our democracy: an invisible framework that ensure disputes are judged impartially and that our rights will be protected.

Right now, it’s under threat.

Released this week, the latest World Justice Project Rule of Law Index, produced by a non-partisan, multi-disciplinary organization that independently evaluates 143 countries and jurisdictions worldwide, marks the eighth consecutive year of global decline for the rule of law — including in Canada.

Advocacy in the age of Wi-Fi

Bella Luna Zuniga 5 minute read 2:01 AM CDT

When the internet first arrived in the mid-1990s, it screeched. Literally.

It screamed its way into our homes through the telephone lines, a metallic cry that sounded like the future forcing its way through. We waited through the static, convinced that life was about to get easier. People said it would save us time, let us work from home and give us more hours with our families.

No one mentioned that it would also move into our bedrooms, our pockets and our dreams. No one could have imagined that it would change how we fight, how we march, how we plead for justice. That the fight for justice itself would become a digital labyrinth where truth moves slowly and attention moves fast.

Back then, when a heroine from a popular early-2000s television show was dumped with nothing but a handwritten note, it became a cultural tragedy. There was nothing noble about writing your cowardice on a Post-it. A few years later, a company fired hundreds by email and it made national news. Today, we “quietly quit” through apps without blinking, edit our grief into reels, add the music the app suggests and call it closure.

NDP trying to solve the problem, Tories just want it to go away

Dan Lett 5 minute read Preview

NDP trying to solve the problem, Tories just want it to go away

Dan Lett 5 minute read Yesterday at 1:30 PM CDT

It’s all so predictable and disheartening.

This week, the opposition Progressive Conservatives tabled a series of amendments to a bill that would give the province the ability to hold people suffering from addictions for up to 72 hours at a detox facility to be established at 190 Disraeli Fwy., on the northern edge of the Exchange District.

According to legislative rules, each of the amendments would require debate, and that would delay the passage and proclamation of this law by Saturday, the government’s self-imposed deadline for the commencement of sobering detention.

Quite frankly, missing the deadline won’t prove to be that big a deal. Given the NDP’s majority in the legislature, the facility will open in the near future after the new law allowing for three days of medically supervised detention is enacted.

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Yesterday at 1:30 PM CDT

MIKAELA MACKENZIE / FREE PRESS FILES

The proposed facility on Disraeli Freeway will save lives and put the vulnerable in direct contact with social, health and housing supports, Dan Lett writes.

MIKAELA MACKENZIE / FREE PRESS FILES
                                The proposed facility on Disraeli Freeway will save lives and put the vulnerable in direct contact with social, health and housing supports, Dan Lett writes.

Learning life lessons from trees

Pam Frampton 5 minute read Preview

Learning life lessons from trees

Pam Frampton 5 minute read Yesterday at 2:01 AM CDT

I saw a leaf fall from a maple tree and watched as it slowly drifted towards the ground, occasionally buffeted by the light breeze. Dazzlingly bright yellow blending to burnt orange, with slightly upturned edges, it eddied down lazily, gracefully, like a parachutist or a flying squirrel, with the weighted petiole — the red leafstalk — leading the way.

Then, it made a final Trudeauesque pirouette before it settled on the grass, joining its compatriots.

Before long the wind will come and send the leaves whirling in a mad dance, spinning and tumbling over one another, the gusts driving them into heaps in garden beds and gutters and bird baths, their damp layers creating a groundcover, a winter refuge for all manner of insect life.

On fine days, the leaves precede you on the sidewalk, skittering ahead with a dry, hollow rustle, their stems like keels scratching mysterious messages onto the cement, like the planchettes that came with Ouija boards.

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Yesterday at 2:01 AM CDT

Pam Frampton photo

If only we could let go of emotional baggage the way that trees shed leaves in the fall.

Pam Frampton photo
                                If only we could let go of emotional baggage the way that trees shed leaves in the fall.

More Opinion

Is a lasting peace finally possible for Haiti?

Peter McKenna 5 minute read Tuesday, Oct. 28, 2025

Now that a tenuous Israel-Hamas ceasefire deal has been cobbled together, will the world community finally be able to expedite the prospects for peace and security in crisis-ridden Haiti?

There is reason to be cautiously optimistic about recent developments. While things can quickly go off the rails in Haiti, there does appear to be a growing international consensus on a viable path forward.

Let’s not forget that Haiti is a country in constant crisis, unrelenting internal violence and institutional decay. It is nothing short of a humanitarian catastrophe.

There is no credible government in place, and no legitimate national elections have been held for almost a decade. The current governing authority — the so-called Transitional Presidential Council — is thoroughly inept, ineffective and woefully inadequate.

A job not everyone will do

Kevin Birkett 5 minute read Tuesday, Oct. 28, 2025

“I couldn’t do what you did,” people would say.

And what we did, as police officers do every day, was take another routine call (as much as any call is “routine”).

Essentially, we were to remove an unwanted visitor who broke into his sister’s home and refused to leave.

Computer checks provided some information about him. Even after talking to her, there were no red flags, which isn’t unusual.

Don’t give any more time, energy to ‘friend’

Maureen Scurfield 4 minute read Tuesday, Oct. 28, 2025

DEAR MISS LONELYHEARTS: This week I got a real kick in the face! It came from someone I thought was a great young friend. It turned out, she just liked hanging out with me for what she could get in terms of influential friends and invitations.

I thought this new friend liked charming old me for myself, but all she wanted was to jump over my head, to be buddies and hang out with bigger “players” in the charity world. She wanted to get deeply involved in this upcoming charity season’s dinners and parties, and obviously saw me as a person to use for that.

This week I heard what she really thinks of me, from a close female buddy. Ouch, that hurt! Now I’m really angry. I don’t want to let this young “friend” get away with using me and hurting me! What can I do?

— High Heel in My Face, Charleswood

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