I’ve heard recently from four longtime friends; all of them are concerned about how the world seems to be falling apart. Our discussions wavered between a solutions-based ‘can do’ attitude and a complete sense of giving up. What, we wondered, can be done?

Building a civil society in which we make positive change in basics like education, human rights, homelessness and polarization is possible, but it feels overwhelming to tackle on our own.

Here are a few ideas to make change.

1) Say hello and greet people on the street and in your life. Acknowledge others in person. Put down your phone. See the humans in front of you. Dehumanization begins when we aren’t seen. It makes a tangible difference. These micro-contacts can be good for our health and safety, too. At a neighbourhood meeting I attended, the police indicated that crimes decrease when people feel seen and see others reaching out.

The recent street census conducted by End Homelessness Winnipeg reports that the number of unhoused — 2,469 — is higher than ever. A majority are chronically unhoused and many are sleeping in encampments.

This is not a problem unique to Winnipeg. Homelessness has doubled across Canada over the past six years. Those sleeping unsheltered, including in encampments, represent the “fastest-growing segment,” according to the federal government’s 2024 nationally co-ordinated homelessness survey. What can be done to turn the tide on accelerating homelessness?

EHW’s report makes important recommendations that housing and anti-homelessness advocates here and across Canada have been urging governments to act on for years. These include better income supports and access to services addressing mental health and substance-use disorders. But EHW’s report fails to adequately address two essential policy interventions to end homelessness: the desperate need for a robust social housing supply and stronger rent regulations to prevent runaway rent increases.

Reflective of national trends, there is a significant lack of affordable for-profit housing for lower-income renters in Winnipeg. What exists is rapidly declining. Vacancy rates across the board are low, particularly in the least expensive units. New for-profit supply won’t help. According to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp., new supply takes 20 to 30 years to become affordable for lower-income renters. The CMHC’s Fall 2024 Rental Market Report highlighted that in Winnipeg “affordability worsened despite strong growth in rental supply,” a national trend, and called for policies to address the lack of affordable housing for low-to middle-income renters. This must include expanding social housing.

Canada is at an inflection point. The job facing the federal government, the provinces, and the private sector is to urgently restructure Canada’s economy — a need driven by new tariffs and ongoing tariff threats from the U.S., our biggest trading partner. We need to quickly become more independent, resilient, and sustainable.

The challenge is huge, but the moment is also a window of opportunity.

The political will to unleash major development projects and leverage our natural resources for opportunities in new markets has never been better. It’s a bold vision, full of potential. It’s also a goal that cannot be realized without meaningful Indigenous participation. And Indigenous participation benefits all Canadians.

Make no mistake, Indigenous communities are open for business. We have worked hard to gain a foothold in the mainstream economy after being separated from it by the Indian Act. Across Canada, major economic development projects are taking shape and building prosperity because of impactful Indigenous participation, including equity positions.

Empathy, the ability to feel and see another’s suffering, not just through understanding what they are going through but by being able to put themselves in another’s shoes, is on the decline.

Elon Musk said that “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” The late Charlie Kirk stated that, “I can’t stand empathy, it is a made-up new age term that does a lot of damage.”

Traditionally the perception has been that empathy lends itself to strategic thinking, bringing people together and creating strong connections. Not so for Kirk and Musk. They prefer the term compassion. Compassion is supposed to be a natural next step beyond empathy, recognizing a person’s pain and involving the desire to alleviate suffering and to provide helpful action.

What that helpful action should be is open to debate.

Good old Canada Post has not turned a profit since 2017. Like many small business owners who use their service to move goods on the cheap, I’m mired in a moral quandary.

Do I patiently forgo profit, like the current model of Canada Post, and support the 55,000 unionized workers? Or demand that Canada Post be privatized?

For just $7.19, I can ship my book, Media Brat: a Gen-X Memoir, as oversize lettermail anywhere in Canada.

What if I didn’t have to suspend my sales program until the intractable labour dispute is resolved?

The Brandon Police Service (BPS) recently announced plans to launch a crisis response unit which will pair Brandon police officers with mental health professionals to assist with responding to mental-health calls. Winnipeg launched a similar program in 2021.

In his announcement of the crisis response unit, BPS Chief Tyler Bates, indicated that police have historically “responded to mental health calls for service alone.” Bates is correct. Since deinstitutionalization, the movement during which mental-health patients were discharged into the community, there has been a decline in mental-health spending over time, and people with mental-health issues have been left with few community resources.

Communities across Canada have since become saturated with people experiencing mental-health crises and without adequate infrastructure, care and treatment. These program delivery issues have created conditions whereby police have become the primary responders to mental-health calls for service.

The outcome of police as the default first responders to persons in crisis (PIC) has joined together assumptions about mental illness with risk and danger. In turn, public concern about mentally ill persons as potentially dangerous, and thus threatening to public safety, has ensured that police remain the “necessary” first responders to mental-health calls.

A few months ago, when King Charles III became the first reigning British monarch to deliver the Throne Speech in Canadian Parliament, an Ipsos poll conducted at the time indicated that 66 per cent of Canadians believed that Canada’s historic connection to Britain was “useful.”

That was high number, given that in the past few decades, most Canadians attitude toward Britian has been indifferent, other than, perhaps, paying passing attention to the various antics of the Royal Family. Canada’s current antagonistic relationship with the U.S. likely accounted for the sudden enthusiasm for the old mother country.

If today, Britain was under attack by a dangerous enemy, how many of these same Canadians would support deploying Canadian soldiers to defend it?

What about ramping up the Canadian economy to a wartime mode in which factories and plants are taken over the federal government to produce needed munitions and supplies?

In the interest of assuring the public, particularly those with complaints in queue, that the concerns they raise with the CPSM about the care or conduct of physicians are heard and valid, it is worth providing details excluded from recent reporting.

The past 14 months have been transformative at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Manitoba (CPSM), led by an entirely new leadership team that is deeply committed to innovation in regulatory practices.

The historical system of addressing complaints brought to the CPSM has not kept up with changing trends in the broader health system. Societal expectations of increased accessibility and transparency of processes administered by government and medical regulators have fundamentally shifted. At the same time, the delivery of health care is more complex than ever. The CPSM is responding to this by re-engineering how it handles complaints, so it can tackle complex investigations involving multiple providers and sites in a way that is accountable to the public.

This trend is not unique to Manitoba — medical regulators across the country are facing similar challenges and are at various stages of renewing their own complaints systems. These are not quick fixes and require thoughtful system engineering to achieve the desired outcomes.

It all feels a little too familiar, doesn’t it?

Maybe you have a long-awaited purchase stuck in limbo. Or a care package to a loved one trapped in a warehouse. Or your passport, finally about to be renewed before your first vacation in how many years?

This is what charities want you to know. For charities, a postal strike is more than an inconvenience. It rings alarm bells. It marks the beginning of uncertainty. Yes, your tax receipts are caught up in the mail, but so is your donation to us. And when (or if) the strike ever ceases, there is a risk it won’t reach us at all.

Fundraisers are used to “the long game.”