I had a foggy idea of Winnipeg from childhood. A middle-aged niece of my maternal grandmother lived there, and she would visit us in Toronto for family occasions. Her dry and tepid humour, no-nonsense approach and sensible shoes gave me the impression that Winnipeg must be a very cold place — with no joie de vivre.

Ironically, when I moved to Winnipeg in 2002 after a courtship with my future husband, I could finally and positively confirm my childhood assumptions. Yes, I did experience many winters at -32 C, but the latter conjecture was far from the truth.

To uproot oneself from your place of birth and to start life anew in another city is not easy. Once I settled into matrimonial bliss, moved to the ’burbs, and secured a fulfilling job, the goal before me was clear: make new friends. And I did. I made new lifelong friends who I cherish dearly. While age is indeed a number, I often wondered about the genesis of one intergenerational friendship.

As fate would have it, I landed a fundraising job at The Manitoba Museum. Soon after starting, I was tasked with overseeing a tribute dinner for George T. Richardson. In the execution of the gala, I had a chance meeting in the elevator with Tannis: statuesque, elegant and impeccably dressed. It was just the two of us.

As many people in Canada gathered around their tables during the recent Easter weekend, sharing warm meals with family and friends, there was a quieter, far less comfortable reality unfolding behind closed doors across the country.

For many people with disabilities, this holiday was not defined by abundance, but by impossible choices — between paying rent or buying groceries, between keeping the lights on or filling a prescription.

The rising cost of living in Canada has become a dominant national concern, but its impact is not felt equally. Inflation has driven up the price of basic necessities — food, housing, electricity and medication — at a pace that far outstrips income supports for the most vulnerable. Among those hit hardest are people with disabilities, many of whom rely on fixed or limited incomes that have not kept up with this rapid escalation in costs.

About 27 per cent of people in Canada live with a disability. And they are more than twice as likely to live in poverty compared to those without disabilities.

Climatology is driven by scientific research, but climate change is caused by intersecting forces that exist far beyond science. And that’s a problem. Because if no one field of study constitutes the ‘truth of climate change,’ then it renders everyone working in climate studies a non-expert about the phenomenon.

Many scientists are uncomfortable tackling the intersecting causes of climate change. But there are brilliant exceptions.

Since the 1980s, the climatologist and former NASA scientist James Hansen has doggedly engaged with politicians and popular media to warn us about climate change. And in 2020, the physicist Mike Lynch-White and astrophysicist Tim Hewlett started a coalition of concerned scientists, modelled on Extinction Rebellion, called the “Scientist Rebellion.”

It has taken science activism to the next level: civil disobedience. In May 2023, Lynch-White was given a 27-month sentence in the U.K. for peacefully protesting the production of military components used to kill Palestinians.

Summer in Winnipeg brings sunshine, BDI ice cream, the Winnipeg Folk Festival and a renewed sense of joy.

For us, it also brings another rent increase and another struggle.

Every July, we receive a new rental lease agreement for the coming year from our landlord, and with it, three questions to reflect on: will we be able to afford our home for another year? Can we keep saving for a house? Can we afford to save right now? For the past three consecutive years our new rental agreement has come with a notice that our landlord is trying to raise our rent above the provincial rent increase guideline. The first year it was an eight per cent increase, then another 16 per cent the next year, and this past fall it was an additional seven per cent demand.

Each year, the Residential Tenancies Branch (RTB) sets a guideline percentage that landlords are allowed to increase rent-controlled units by. However, a landlord can apply to the RTB for an above the guideline increase if they can show that the guideline won’t cover their cost increases.

“When you’re up to your ass in alligators, it’s hard to remember that your original goal was to drain the swamp,” goes a not-very-old folk saying.

Eighty years ago we set out to drain the swamp because we feared that otherwise we would all be pulled under. At least 50 million people were dead after the greatest war in history, around half the cities in the northern hemisphere had been smashed flat, and the first nuclear weapons had just been dropped on Japanese cities.

People were in shock. They hadn’t known how destructive war could get, and now they realized that the next big war would be incomparably worse: nuclear war. So they decided that in the future the goal must be not to win wars but to end war.

Don’t think they were naive. They were having this conversation standing hip-deep in the wreckage of the last war. Many of them had fought in it, and almost all of them had lost people close to them. So between 1945 and 1948, they wrote new rules that made war illegal.

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta and co-founder of Facebook, has been under increased scrutiny in past months after being forced to testify in a Los Angeles courtroom over allegations that Meta-owned Instagram is designed to be addictive, especially when it comes to kids.

The death of Stephen Lewis brought tears to my eyes.

I have never met Lewis, I have not followed his career particularly closely, I was not even aware that he had been living with terminal cancer in hospice care. I had, however, admired his oratory for many years but more importantly his commitment to humanitarian causes, in particular to the suffering caused by HIV/AIDS in Africa.

Lewis was not somebody who just believed in alleviating the suffering he saw in the world, he was somebody who rolled up his sleeves (I recall images of him still wearing his tie, with sleeves rolled up in the heat of sub-Saharan Africa) and acted on his beliefs.

As the United Nations Ambassador for HIV/AIDS to Africa, he had a profound impact reducing the suffering caused by the lack of treatment, at the time available in high-income countries, but too expensive to be used in Africa.

If it feels like we are racing towards the end of the world, you are correct. If it feels like you have lost all hope in the future, it is completely understandable. If it feels like our technology is out of control and will kill us all, you would be right. These are some of the ideas in The AI Doc, a prescient documentary on the current state of our latest doomsday technology, artificial general intelligence (AGI).

I grew up in the age of apocalypse. In fact, if you were alive any time after the bombing of Hiroshima, you might consider that would be the start of the anthropogenic end times, where civilization has the ability to destroy itself.

It gets even better. Our ability to create civilization-ending catastrophes of our making has only improved. There are global problems so consequential that any one of them may very well end humanity: nuclear war, climate change, and the new kid on the block, AGI. AGI is the holy grail of AI development, immensely more powerful than the current AI models which are used commonly as chatbots and assistants. AGI would have agency and independence (or take it), be able to modify its own actions, and be smarter than all humanity.

Like a human treats an ant, AGI could reach a point where it no longer needs humans and can operate independently, potentially making decisions that are beyond human understanding or control. Its intelligence could mean the obsolescence of all human labour, destabilizing societies by mass manipulation of information and disruption, while concentrating power into the hands of the obscenely wealthy.

Earlier this year, construction began on three schools in Winnipeg under a Manitoba Jobs Agreement (MJA), a policy introduced in last year’s provincial budget. Construction of a new school in Brandon, also under the school MJA, is set to begin soon. The government has announced that from now on, all public projects worth $50 million or more will be built pursuant to an MJA.

I congratulate Premier Wab Kinew and his colleagues for moving forward with this important initiative.

Project labour agreements have been around for decades in other regions of the country and in the United States. As noted in a study from the Ontario Construction Secretariat, some of Ontario’s “largest and most successful manufacturers — NOVA Chemicals, ArcelorMittal Dofasco, General Motors Canada, and Toyota Canada — have regularly and repeatedly relied on PLAs to oversee billions of dollars in new construction over the past 25 years.”

A report issued by the American government in 2024 states that project labour agreements “are an effective tool to ensure the efficiency, quality, and timeliness of large-scale construction projects.”