On the same morning, the Free Press carried two pieces written from opposite vantage points, arriving at the same locked door.

Charles Bernstein, writing as a gastroenterologist, described a nurse-practitioner program at Health Sciences Centre that gave patients with inflammatory bowel disease somewhere to turn before their illness forced them to an emergency room. It was then not funded to continue, and it ended. A service that had been approved, put in place, and shown to work was allowed to lapse.

Tom Brodbeck, writing as a columnist, described Shared Health, an organization created eight years ago as a fourth layer of administration added to the three the system already had — Manitoba Health, the regional authorities, and hospital administrations. He asked what this layer has done for patient care that those three could not, found no one able to answer, and concluded that the province should either make the case or let the structure go.

One writer watched something that worked disappear. The other watched something no one can justify persist. Their accounts are two symptoms of one disease.

I write as a proud Canadian-Australian who is experiencing something I never imagined possible — watching Canada’s sovereignty, economic security and national identity being repeatedly challenged by the country it has long regarded as its closest neighbour and ally.

This is not an abstract diplomatic disagreement to me. Canada is my beloved country. To witness its name, dignity and independence treated as though they may be diminished, negotiated away or simply disregarded is profoundly painful.

Any one of the events that has occurred might be dismissed as another dispute between governments. Taken together, however, three developments provide unmistakable evidence that a red line has been crossed.

First came the tariffs affecting Canadian steel, aluminum, automobiles and softwood lumber. These measures were introduced despite the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement — CUSMA — intended to provide stability, predictability and largely tariff-free trade across North America.

There has been much talk lately about how Manitoba can strengthen its economy and improve its general well-being. Adding a third component to our education system, one that would be equal in funding and recognition to K-12 and post-secondary education, would do just that.

That third component, adult basic education, already exists, but with inadequate funding and little recognition.

Adult basic education includes adult learning centres that offer mature high school diplomas to those who have not previously completed high school, and adult literacy programs that bring adults up to high school entry level.

Adult basic education works well. Since 2003, some 25,000 Manitobans have earned their mature high school diplomas. Enough graduates move off employment and income assistance, saving the provincial government money, and into full-time employment, increasing the government’s tax revenue, so that over a 10-year period the government makes more than it spends on adult basic education. The system pays for itself.

On Sunday, Aug. 30, a Falcon Heavy rocket delivered the Nancy Grace Roman space telescope onto a direct transfer trajectory to its permanent home at the Lagrange Two Point (L2), 1.5-million km from Earth. In 100 days it will reach its station, power up, and start observing the universe.

Astronomers will use it to try to understand the nature of dark matter, which makes up most of the mass in the universe (but some say may not even exist).

It is expected to find up to 100,000 new exoplanets circling other stars, and may be able to spot ones even smaller than Mars. Current methods can only see much bigger ones.

It will test a new technology called a coronagraph, which may one day be able to detect life on some of those planets by analyzing the light reflected from them. It would be nice to have a better answer to scientist Enrico Fermi’s famous question: “Where is everybody?”

When we talk about barriers to education, what usually comes to mind are tuition, cost of books or access to technology.

But, after years of listening to Indigenous students, families, elders, communities, and organizations across Manitoba, we heard something else. For many, the biggest barrier to post-secondary education is having a safe place to live, where their culture is honoured and resources are accessible.

Jordan was living in a tent in downtown Winnipeg for the first few weeks of his time at RRC Polytech.

Before attending Pathways to Business, he had been progressing in his journey to sobriety for a while. He knew he needed to keep that momentum going, and the opportunity came when he saw a poster for the program. Jordan saved up money from social assistance to apply, and was accepted for the 2024 fall term.

History is messy. On one hand, it offers uplifting stories of success, courage, human achievement, invention, ingenuity, compassion and kindness. Think of Dr. Jonas Salk and his development of the first successful polio vaccine. Or Viola Desmond, who asserted her civil rights against racial segregation in Nova Scotia.

On the other hand, history is also dark, ugly, mean-spirited and a catalogue of hardships, tragedy and brutality. Consider slavery, the Holocaust, the First and Second World Wars and residential schools — to list only a very few examples of the bloodshed, cruelty, death and depravity that has frequently defined history.

Anyone who has extensively studied history or read a history book knows that the past is complex and rarely black and white; that men and women, whether they are politicians, activists, businessmen, journalists, lawyers and judges, have their good and bad sides. Human perfection is elusive and there are few saints.

Most of us understand this except, it seems, U.S. President Donald Trump and his White House officials. They don’t like presentations of U.S. history, for example, that highlight slavery and the slaughter of Indigenous peoples, key elements of the American past for hundreds of years.

In 1818, Percy Bysshe Shelley, inspired by the shattered statue of the most powerful Egyptian Pharaoh, Ramses II, wrote the sonnet Ozymandias as a comment on human hubris and impermanence. It provides a fitting epithet for the imperialistic forays of the current United States’ president and would-be autocrat, Donald J. Trump.

What Ramses and Trump have in common is unrestrained hubris and unlimited delusion.

Ramses says: “My name is O, King of Kings. Look at my works you Mighty and despair.”

Trump’s hubris and bluster on limits to his power: “There is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” On Truth Social, Trump declared himself the “most powerful person that has EVER walked this planet.”

Canada’s “trade war” with the United States, ignited on Aug. 21 when Prime Minister Mark Carney walked out of trade talks with the Trump administration, is not the foredoomed David vs. Goliath struggle it seems.

It’s really about sovereignty, not trade, and Canada stands a fair chance of winning.

“Winning” in this context, of course, can be defined as surviving with as little damage as possible despite the tenfold superiority in population and wealth of its giant neighbour. Canada has had more than two centuries of practice at that. If Carney can keep his nerve, it can do it again.

The tariffs that Trump has imposed on some Canadian products (and the precisely equal tariffs that Canada has slapped on some American imports) will cause some job losses and considerable economic pain in both countries. However, they only affect about five per cent of the US$872 billion of annual trade between the two countries.