Premier Wab Kinew has been coyly and cleverly dancing around building new infrastructure in Hudson Bay so oil and gas guys can profit. The purported leaders suggesting we ship LNG out of Churchill are publicly sacrificing their values for a big oil pipe dream.

In Manitoba’s coming budget, we’ll see how far gone to the dark side our elected officials are.

Putting fossil fuel exports through Hudson Bay would be a catastrophe. We’re experiencing pain and horror around the world right now from reliance on big oil, and it’s sickening to see war as a rationale for increasing our fossil fuel addiction. Shipping fossil fuels seems to be the only thing CEOs and premiers in Alberta think about, but we don’t have to fall for the con.

Kinew having private conversations with Shell is supposed to be fine because they’re “just friends,” but everyone knows fossil fuels are a losing game that’s deadly to perpetuate.

In 2019, a group of concerned Winnipeggers came together to form Safe Speeds Winnipeg, a grassroots effort dedicated to making our streets safer by lowering the default speed limit in Winnipeg to 30 km/h.

One of our founding members, Dave Elmore, has written recently about how safer speeds make it easier and far more inviting for people, especially children, to move through their neighbourhoods with confidence.

As a parent, a teacher, and a community leader, I wholeheartedly agree that getting more kids walking and biking to school is one of the simplest, most meaningful ways we can support their mental and physical wellbeing. And it isn’t just children who benefit; pedestrian fatality rates rise sharply with age, and seniors 70 and older are the most at risk, underscoring how vital safer speeds are for all members of our community.

Last week, the City of Winnipeg released its long-awaited report on lowering speeds in our communities. It recommends establishing a default 40 km/h speed limit wherever no other speed limit is posted. While 40 km/h is still not truly a safe speed for residential streets, it represents an important step in the right direction.

The old saying goes that you don’t appreciate what you’ve got until it’s gone. That’s particularly true for things like your health. We take it for granted until we can’t do the things we’re used to doing and lose our freedom and independence.

The same can also be said about our Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

We act as if they always were, are, and always will be there for us. Until they aren’t.

That is the state of our Charter rights across the country, as more and more provinces use the notwithstanding clause to suspend Charter rights. Section 33 of our Charter can be used to suspend sections 2 and 7-15 of our Charter rights, which includes pretty much everything that you’d consider to be our basic human rights.

Manitoba has something many mining jurisdictions would like to have: real mineral potential.

Nickel, lithium, copper and other critical minerals are present across the province. Geologically, Manitoba should be well positioned in Canada’s exploration economy.

Yet investment decisions are not made on geology alone.

The 2025 Fraser Institute Annual Survey of Mining Companies highlights the importance of clear policy and engagement processes in attracting exploration investment. While Manitoba’s mineral potential remains strong, investors also look closely at how consultation, permitting and land access processes are understood and communicated.

Harry Huebner in his letter to the editor (Vanishing limits, March 7) was, in my opinion, bang on in his analysis of where the world now finds itself because of the U.S. Operation Epic Fury attack on Iran. Like him, I am skeptical of the possibility of a just war, generally believing that just wars exist only in theory, never in reality.

This war has already shown no American inclination toward reasonable justification, international legality, judicious destruction and commensurate violence, and anticipation of desirable outcomes — the determinants of just war. As in all wars, the first casualties are truth, reason, morality and humanity.

The language of war is deliberately deceitful, meant to divert our attention from its real agenda and its human consequences.

The pretense that this was a defensive move necessitated because all diplomatic channels had been exhausted simply does not stand up as more details about the preparation for war are revealed. The evidence regarding Iran as a nuclear threat — nuclear buildup and capacity — is unsubstantiated, by now a well-known falsehood. The reluctance to call it war, instead depicting it as a “targeted major combat operation” seems clearly intended to appease MAGA folks incensed with U.S. participation in foreign wars.

No war was ever started because a country built too many wind turbines. No leader was ever kidnapped because solar panels produced too much cheap energy. Western economies have never been brought to their knees by renewable energy cartels. Quite the opposite.

Clean, renewable energy brings stability and affordability. The technology already exists to free ourselves from the stranglehold of fossil fuels. What, then, stands in the way of the renewable energy transition?

The all-powerful fossil fuel cartel.

It is oil, gas, coal and pipeline companies that provide almost unlimited funding for lobby groups to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt about the benefits of clean renewable energy. Those same lobby groups execute a full court press on our political class, using their deep pockets to purchase influence. Their aim?

From Britain and Denmark to blue state America, calls for new levies on the top 0.01 per cent of society are growing louder. In simple terms, it seems like a clear solution for cash-strapped governments and voters drowning under never-ending price hikes. But major backlash is brewing.

The gilded class meanwhile, keeps getting richer. The world’s wealthiest 500 people raked in another US$2.2 trillion just last year, ballooning their collective net worth to nearly US$12 trillion. They are also finding ever more ways to shape public policy and influence the media in their interests.

But political organizers are now drawing global attention by trying to advance a ballot initiative in California to have voters decide in November whether to apply a one-time, five per cent tax on the state’s wealthiest residents. The goal is to raise US$100 billion to compensate for the Trump administration’s deep cuts to Medicaid.

Progressive Senator Bernie Sanders and Democratic congressman Ro Khanna — who represents Silicon Valley — are aiming even higher. They’ve proposed federal legislation to enact a five per cent annual wealth tax on all U.S. billionaires. The two lawmakers claim it would raise US$4.4 trillion over a decade to be redistributed to working and middle-class families.

Why not choose safety first?

At the recent City of Winnipeg public works committee meeting, the decision was made to request the Province of Manitoba to amend the Highway Traffic Act to permit the City of Winnipeg to change the default speed limit in our city from 50 km/h and 40 km/h.

It needs to be made clear this would only apply to residential streets and some feeder routes, not the main thoroughfares.

While this is being regarded as a win by some for safer streets, it needs as well to be made clear that it is only a half measure, and to some degree, a compromise on safety. Assuming that the province agrees to allow the default speed limit to be changed — which the premier has already balked at — a default speed limit of 40 km/h is not the truly “safe speed.”

I’m a time zone and time change veteran.

I spent almost two years living in Saskatchewan, where the clocks never change from Central Standard Time, and you just learn to live with it.

I also spent many years living in a province knocked askew from the top of the clock, where, when everyone else was celebrating New Year’s at midnight, we were already at 12:30 a.m.

I’ve lived in the Newfoundland time zone, along with Atlantic, Eastern, Central and Mountain zones, along with every one of their spring-forward, fall-back time changes.