Eight years after Shared Health was created, the revolving door in its executive ranks should prompt a more fundamental question than who gets the next job.

The real question should be: why does Shared Health exist at all?

The provincial health authority has been plagued by an exodus of senior executives in recent years, including CEOs, vice-presidents and chief financial officers. It’s now looking for its fourth CFO since 2023.

There may be perfectly reasonable explanations for the departures.

This is not a column about my minor medical woes, but it does begin with one.

In the summer of 2022, I noticed a small lump growing in the middle of my arm. It was the size of a large pea, and hard and uncomfortable to the touch. Thankfully, my general practitioner had good news: the growth was quite benign, just unsightly. He froze it off with liquid nitrogen; it left a small, flat scar.

But three years later, the growth had come back. Early this year, I arranged a referral to a dermatologist for that lump and another concern; I was booked in for six months later. I tacked the appointment letter on my fridge, and checked it almost every day.

Many Canadians are all too familiar with the fear of forgetting a specialist appointment still half-a-year or more away.

Mayor Scott Gillingham, with the first pledge of his re-election campaign, has promised to create a level playing field for local businesses to compete with national and multinational bidders on city contracts for goods and services.

It’s not a bad pledge, per se. There are a lot of Winnipeggers who are keenly interested in seeing government do business with other Winnipeggers and Manitobans.

But Gillingham’s newest campaign policy fails to answer two key questions: what, exactly, is a “local” company? And it is beneficial to give government business to local companies over those headquartered elsewhere?

Two recent controversies illustrate the difficulty in obtaining definitive answers.

The prospect of a Super El Nino on the horizon has figured prominently in the media, but its impact on farmers depends on which side of the world they live.

As the harvest equipment starts chewing through the first fields of the season here, the phenomenon ranks low on farmers’ worry list.

If anything, warming sea-surface temperatures in the central Pacific could support higher crop prices due to its impact on production in export competitors such as Australia.

While not a key driver behind the recent rallies that have brightened the price outlook for this year’s harvest, the Super El Nino one of the underlying fundamentals that could help keep prices buoyant through the winter months, says Bruce Burnett, a weather and markets analyst with Glacier Farm Media.