During last year’s brutal wildfire season, our children inhaled toxic smoke. Children, with their growing lungs, are especially vulnerable. Experts say inhaling smoke is comparable to chain smoking cigarettes, or worse.

It increases the risks of: cancer, asthma attacks, lung diseases, and even early death. Toxic smoke can inflame the brain and contribute to mental health challenges like anxiety.

What’s less known is that children aren’t only exposed outdoors, but also indoors where there is inadequate air filtration. Without proper filtration, it seeps indoors into homes, schools, and childcares.

I witnessed this last summer. As a climate planner working on wildfire preparedness, I thought indoor air quality would be safe. I was wrong. On smoky days, we measured the air quality in my daughter’s daycare. It was consistently poor.

Of the thousands of bits of information that we are bombarded with each day, some are retained in our memory because of who said them or what was said.

Occasionally, a bit of information will trigger a thought and other memories will join it to manifest themselves in a revelation. I had such a revelation while listening to Prime Minister Mark Carney speak about how the middle nations would have to unite to keep them from being exploited by the superpowers.

My father was born in Canada to parents who had recently immigrated from Poland. He didn’t learn to speak English until he attended school and he quit school after Grade 9, not his choice but his father’s.

He went to work at the local steel mill at the age of 15. My father told me how he and the other workers would gather in front of the steel mill every morning. He relayed a memory of a typical winter morning and how a big black car would pull up and a man in a fur coat would get out and mount a raised platform.

In the recent budget, the government of Manitoba announced it will remove provincial sales tax from prepared meals sold in grocery stores, while continuing to apply it to the very same meals sold in restaurants.

This change is presented as an affordability measure. However, if the goal is to make food more affordable, then tax policy should reflect a simple principle: food is food.

Food is not a luxury, it is a necessity.

With just one per cent of restaurants classified as high-end or luxury dining, the reality is that the vast majority operate in the mid-market — serving as an essential part of Manitobans’ daily routines and busy lives. In fact, low-income Canadians spend a greater proportion of their income on restaurants than those with a higher income, so a tax on restaurant food disproportionately affects them.

In today’s contested, turbulent public opinion environment, governments increasingly use carefully selected words as a way to shape positive public beliefs about proposed legislation. The public needs to look beyond the symbolism of political language in bills in order to understand what will actually happen as a result of proposed policies.

Bill 27, The Declaration of Principles for Patient Health Care Act, is a showcase bill of the Kinew government in the health-care field. Bill 27 was promised in the throne speech in November last year, and is now before the legislature for debate and potentially for public hearings before a legislative committee.

The intention of the bill is to improve the patient experience, which is a laudable goal. My concern is how much positive change its provisions will produce. The throne speech promised a “charter of patient safety” and in an article on Dec. 2, I raised concerns about whether that phrase might lead to the public belief that the intention was to create legally enforceable rights for patients in their interactions with the different parts of the health-care system.

It is now clear that it does not go that far.

We don’t have to look very far to find a useful historical analogy for the current crisis in the Middle East. In 1967 Egypt closed the Strait of Tiran to Israeli ships, and Israel replied with a surprise air attack that destroyed almost the entire Egyptian air force on the ground.

Israel followed up with a ground offensive that reached the Suez Canal — which then remained closed for the next eight years. Could something like this happen at the Strait of Hormuz now? Of course it could. In fact, at this point in the confrontation in the gulf, it will require a great deal of forbearance on both sides to avoid it.

Unfortunately, forbearance is a virtue conspicuously absent on either side. U.S. President Donald Trump let himself be talked into a surprise “decapitation” attack on Iran by his partner, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanhyahu, but it did not deliver the promised results. Dozens of Iranian leaders were killed, but the regime did not collapse.

So now Trump is desperately looking for a way to get out of the war he started without losing face, but his only available method for putting pressure on Iran is endless escalation. Israel, meanwhile, is determined to press on until the entire Iranian regime — or if necessary Iran’s whole economy — is destroyed.

Global warming is getting a cold shoulder these days; it’s a hoax according to the official policy of the United States of America, now the world leader in oil and gas production.

If the scientific community is alarmed, they aren’t shouting very loud. The World Meteorological Organization has released a report — you can read about it in your favourite news feed by scrolling past sports and celebrity items — that documents the alarming warming of the oceans and its likely effects. Coverage on major news networks merited a minute, maybe; you will probably have to wait a while before getting much more climate change coverage.

The secretary-general of the United Nations reacted with: “every key climate indicator is flashing red.” No kidding. The UN’s annual Conference of the Parties brings together its 198 member states to attempt to reach consensus on actions to combat climate change. Consensus on anything meaningful in a group that includes failed states, criminal states, autocracies, absolute monarchies, theocracies and several whose economies rely heavily on oil and gas revenues is not difficult — it’s impossible. The 30th instalment — COP 30 held last November in Brazil attended by tens of thousands of delegates — received coverage commensurate with its results; almost nothing. Perhaps the corpse will materialize again next November — after all it’s become a mini-industry — but the process lacks any credibility and is dead.

If the U.S. has any rational strategy at all, it is to become the world’s energy superpower, opening up markets in India, Europe and Africa, while controlling competing sources like Venezuela and Iraq and destabilizing others like Iran. This, of course, depends upon extending the fossil energy era indefinitely; the U.S. won’t be exporting windmills or solar panels.

In the 1976 film classic, Network, news anchor Howard Beale during his evening broadcast shouts into the camera: “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.” It was his protest against inflation, corporate greed and crime.

It so resonated with viewers that people around the country, as prompted, opened their windows and shouted the same. His ratings soared (Donald Trump would be proud). A half-century later, there is an eerie sense of deja vu.

The folly of Canada’s addiction to oil and gas has never been more clear. With the price of crude rising at record speed, the fossil fuel industry is profiteering from war in the Middle East. Prices at the pump are soaring, to be soon followed by supercharged inflation across the economy.

And Scotiabank now predicts that the Bank of Canada will raise rates three times in 2026, so the cost of your mortgage is going up. And for what?

Asked Wednesday if he would reconsider his decision to pull the United States out of NATO, President Donald Trump said “it’s beyond reconsideration. I just think it should be automatic.” So that’s a definite “maybe.”

He’s very cross at the moment, because not one of NATO’s 31 other members has agreed to support his illegal surprise attack on Iran. He didn’t tell them he was going to do it and Iran is totally out of the area covered by the NATO treaty, but he feels betrayed. And he’s probably quite surprised that they are not begging him to stay.

Trump is a slow learner, so he is only now being confronted with the fact that the “North Atlantic” aspect of the alliance actually went dead about a year ago. Canada will remain a NATO member if it dares, but other than that it is now in practice a strictly European alliance.

This is a major shock to the system, but it is long overdue.

There is a common denominator between America’s Epic Fury, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s trade trip to India and Premier Doug Ford’s energy plans for the future of Ontario.

They all revolve around a substance that is highly paradoxical.

Enriched uranium is coveted for certain types of reactors, and for bomb building, and is primarily extracted by chemical means or through a centrifuge process. This separation of different elements increases the level of fissile material essential for nuclear chain reactions.

It can also produce, albeit at lower enrichment levels, the fuel for small modular reactors, part of Ontario’s extravagant electricity future. Chemical enrichment is an especially toxic undertaking and leaves behind toxic radioactive waste. Enriching uranium is dirty, dangerous and deleterious to our planet.

The Manitoba Government released Budget 2026 on March 24. While the NDP government made important progress on housing and homelessness in its first two budgets, this year required bolder action to meet the scale of the crisis.

Instead, Budget 2026 slows that progress, leaving Manitoba further behind. Because the government has repeatedly underfunded housing for many years, future budgets will now need to be even larger to catch up to the level of housing low-income Manitobans need.

In 2024, the Right to Housing Coalition identified the need for 10,000 new social housing units over 10 years. Social housing includes public, non-profit and co-operative housing, with rents set at no more than 30 per cent of household income. The government typically combines social housing with affordable rental housing in its commitments. However, affordable rents are more broadly defined and can include units with rents upward of the median market rent, which are not affordable to low-income households.

Three budget priorities must be met to address continued housing precarity and homelessness in Manitoba. These include expanding the supply of social housing, investing in maintenance to preserve the existing supply and allocating sufficient funds to ensure that tenants with complex needs are sufficiently supported so that they and other tenants are safe and sustainably housed.