“Breathe deeply, calm down, and don’t go running to stock up on food and matches,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told Ukrainians one month before the Russian tanks rolled across the border on Feb. 24, 2022. The American and British intelligence services knew the Russians were going to invade and told him so, but neither he nor his generals believed it.

Most of the European NATO members didn’t believe it either. That was partly because they still remembered the lies that the CIA and MI6 told them 20 years before to trick them into invading Iraq, but mainly because they couldn’t believe the Russians were that stupid.

Looking back much later, one European intelligence official explained that “We didn’t believe it would happen, because we thought the idea that (the Russians) would be able to walk into Kyiv and just install a puppet government was completely insane.” After a pause, he added defensively: “As it turned out, it was indeed completely insane.”

That was my mistake too. Right down to few days before the invasion I went on insisting that the intelligence must be wrong, because Russian President Vladimir Putin could not be that stupid. But he was. He had been surrounded and insulated by people desperate not to displease him for so long that he had no personal contact with external reality.

Manitoba was built through hard work, collaboration, and community. Every hospital, school, road, and bridge reflects the dedication of our construction industry. Today, the sector employs more than 57,000 Manitobans, contributes $4.2 billion annually to the provincial economy, and supports businesses in every region. We are proud of the role we play in building Manitoba’s future.

We are speaking out about the Manitoba Jobs Agreement (MJA) not to oppose the government’s goals, but to ensure public policy delivers real value, respects worker choice, and protects taxpayers. The practical consequences of the MJA are clear: fewer bidders, reduced competition, increased administrative burden, and higher project costs. When competition narrows, prices rise. When compliance complexity grows, risk premiums follow. All of this lands on a provincial budget already facing structural deficits.

The MJA imposes a specific labour relations structure on provincially funded projects exceeding $50 million. Successful bidders must hire union card-holding workers first if their own workforce is insufficient. Union membership becomes the deciding factor — not skill, experience, or performance. If the goal is to ensure Manitobans work on these projects, there is a simple solution: require contractors to certify that their workforce consists of Manitoba residents. A union card should not determine who is entitled to work on taxpayer-funded infrastructure. The agreement also introduces entirely new costs. All employers must pay 85 cents per hour worked to the Manitoba Building Trades Council; an unprecedented charge in Manitoba construction. On a typical school project, this payment alone can exceed $250,000, with no measurable benefit to taxpayers.

Open-shop contractors face additional costs, including compulsory union dues, numerous union fund contributions, and payments to third parties. Taken together, these requirements will add millions of dollars to publicly funded projects. It’s money that could otherwise be invested directly in classrooms, hospitals, and infrastructure.

Festival du Voyageur, which wrapped up its 57th annual run this past weekend, is hard to pin down.

It is Western Canada’s largest winter festival and francophone event. It celebrates Indigenous history and culture. It used to hold staged gunfights or “skirmishes” and a casino.

It can be easy to forget that Festival du Voyageur is at its core a celebration of Canada’s fur trade history. Without the fur trade, there would be no Canada as we know it. Among other things, it was the engine of French settlement in North America and gave birth to the Metis Nation. At the same time, the fur trade had profound and lasting negative impacts on Indigenous communities and devastated local populations of beavers and other animals. Any event that commemorates a history as deeply contentious as that of the fur trade — especially one that draws tens of thousands of people each year — must do so responsibly.

Festival du Voyageur agrees.

Fidel Castro and his communist band of brothers have had a good long run in power (66 years), but they have run out of road.

Most of the relatively small Cuban middle class fled to the United States after the 1959 revolution, but the new regime certainly had mass popular support for at least the next quarter-century. Then it began to erode, but only quite slowly at first.

The Castro brothers and their allies always faced huge economic problems because of the U.S. trade embargo, but things got much harder after the old Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, eliminating about 85 per cent of Cuba’s foreign trade.

The ensuing “Special Period in Time of Peace” spanned the 1990s and brought great hardship to ordinary people — rationing, blackouts, even severe food shortages — but the economy stabilized (at a permanently lower level of prosperity) by 2000.

A Winnipeg couple has been charged and sentenced for heinous acts of animal cruelty that took place in a Lord Roberts-area apartment in 2024.

Irene Lima and Chad Kabecz were sentenced earlier this month to 12 years in prison for torturing and killing small animals including kittens, hamsters and a frog, in so-called “crush” videos and photos posted online.

Reaction to the case has been as expected.

Animal-lovers countrywide and beyond have expressed anger, disgust and horror over the abuse, and mixed emotions about the sentencing. Taking to social media, many demand the couple be held longer behind bars, while others call for street justice.

Regulation represents, in microcosm, the role of government in society, which makes it controversial. Simply put, regulation involves the imposition of constraints mainly on the behaviour of private individuals and organizations, but sometimes also on other parts of government, such as the Public Utility Board regulation of Manitoba Hydro. In simple terms, legislation makes law, and regulations are the rules that put those laws into practice.

Politicians of all stripes stridently declare their opposition to the “red tape” of regulation and other administrative requirements and promise to eliminate it. This is disingenuous. Governing complicated, interdependent and dynamic societies cannot happen without regulation. And more often than not we get the red tape we demand when we insist that governments address serious problems.

A balanced, smart approach to the assessment of regulation is required. It starts with a recognition that many rules support economic activity and advance important environmental, health and safety, and consumer-protection objectives. And of course there are also some regulations that are poorly designed, duplicative, unduly complex or outdated. There is both an objective factual dimension to regulation and a psychological dimension which involves how organizations and individuals perceive such rules.

Both of Manitoba’s two main parties talk about “regulatory reform,” a phrase which sometimes refers to the removal of unnecessary constraints on businesses and individuals, and other times refers to greater transparency and accountability in the regulatory process.

One of the main projects on Mayor Scott Gillingham’s list of goals is an extension of the Chief Peguis Trail. Whether necessary or not, this is an extension the city simply cannot afford and which city council and the mayor should not proceed with.

The first reason why is fiscal. The mayor touts this project as being important to the economic future of Winnipeg, as per the CBC. The argument seems to come from the net present value (NPV) of the project (a metric which compares the costs of a project to how much income it will bring in the future). However, the NPV of the project just got downgraded from $98 million to $42 million, per a Deloitte assessment.

While this might seem like a good thing for the city, and while there is a report from city staff detailing an NPV of $280 million, the cost paid is enormous: $900 million, an amount that the city does not even have on hand, and would have to go further into debt for.

The repayment of this debt, plus any interest that accrues, will easily surpass the $42 million in benefits the city gets, with a different article on the subject by CityNews stating that this project would put us above our debt ceiling.

Every year at this time the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the world’s most powerful alliance for the past 77 years, holds a conference in Munich to examine its state of health.

The one just past was really a wake, but it played out more like the immortal Dead Parrot sketch from Monty Python, in which a customer (John Cleese) enters a pet shop with a cage containing a dead parrot (a Norwegian Blue) and says:

“This parrot is definitely deceased, and when I purchased it not half an hour ago you assured me that its total lack of movement was due to it being tired and shagged out following a long squawk.”

Shopkeeper: “Well he’s…he’s, ah…probably pining for the fjords.”