The battle for Warner Bros. has become a case study in how media consolidation decisions are made in 2025 America, and it should alarm Canadians.

Netflix’s $83-billion bid to acquire Warner Bros.’ studios and streaming operations has set off a Hollywood corporate cage match. In response, Paramount Skydance has launched a hostile takeover attempt, backed by Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison, offering more cash up front but a shakier set of potential investors.

But the real source of drama isn’t the boardroom battle, it’s U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to insert himself into what should be an independent regulatory review.

In 2025, American antitrust looks less like the West Wing and more like the Sopranos.

How long will the Granite Curling Club last?

Contrary to what has been stated in the recent letters to the editor, press releases from the city and editorials in the media, the Granite is not opposed to affordable housing. In fact, they fully support it, although not at the expense of its own survival.

The Granite is the oldest curling club in Western Canada originating in 1880. It’s internationally known as the Mother Club. Ask any curler or someone who knows something about curling, worldwide, and they will know of the Granite Curling Club. It’s entrenched in the culture of curling and the culture of the City of Winnipeg. The Granite Curling Club is one of the reasons we are proud to live in Winnipeg, to be from Winnipeg. It is truly an international icon.

The building that houses the Granite Curling Club was built in 1912 and is still being used for its intended purpose.

Our Manitoba public education systems are promptly responding and adapting to the upcoming technological revolution spurred by artificial intelligence.

Adult basic education is a provincially funded program that reduces poverty, promotes reconciliation and improves the school performance of the children of adult learners. It is effectively cost-free to the provincial government. In fact, it produces a net fiscal benefit for our fiscally challenged province, as demonstrated in a recent study titled Fiscal Benefits of Adult Basic Education in Manitoba.

Adult basic education includes adult learning centres that offer the mature high school diploma to adults who had not previously finished high school, and adult literacy programs that bring adults up to high school entry level.

In the first four months of 2025, I led a cost/benefit study of adult basic education in Manitoba, working with Fran Taylor, long-time adult educator, Mary Agnes Welch, partner at Probe Research, a professional market and public opinion firm in Winnipeg, and Niall Harney, senior economist and Errol Black Chair in Labour Issues at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives-Manitoba.

We surveyed adults who had graduated two, three, four and five years ago at five adult learning centres in different parts of Manitoba — two in Winnipeg, one in The Pas, one in Altona and one in Boissevain/Killarney — and asked about what they were doing before starting at their ALC, and what they were doing now that they have graduated. We surveyed 1,005 graduates and 292 responded, a strong response rate of 29 percent. This was a census-style survey, for which every graduate had an equal opportunity to participate. The profile of those who responded was largely consistent with that of the total population of adult learners.

AS the Carney government announces a raft of nation-building projects ranging from new oil and gas pipelines to critical minerals to port expansion, one obvious economic opportunity is missing from the list: expansion of our recreational chemical industry.

Others disparage the product as illegal drugs, but the industry consortium, the Earthways Alliance, promotes the term recreational chemical. Just like “tar sands” creates negative brand equity for the fossil fuel industry (hence oil sands), so too do the tired, old terms “illegal” or “illicit” drugs. It casts a bad light.

With economic development at the fore, one must look at all opportunities, especially now that Mr. Carney allows ministers of his government to ignore existing laws and regulations standing as roadblocks. So we should look south to Colombia, a country only slightly larger than Canada (51 million versus 41 million population) where 4.3 per cent of its GDP is derived from the export of cocaine, compared to just 3.2 per cent of Canada’s GDP derived from oil and gas.

Canada could easily become a recreational chemical superpower, providing “clean” cocaine for the rest of the world. Our state-of-the-art facilities would meet every green standard using organic coca plants raised in greenhouses heated by natural gas, a boon to the fossil fuel industry. The finished product would be made not in clandestine makeshift laboratories, but in safe, government-licensed manufacturing plants, providing high paying jobs.

The Russian word “derzhavnost” is usually translated as “great power status,” but the real meaning is closer to the gangland concept of “respect.” The word was beyond the reach of my feeble Russian vocabulary until I heard it about 20 times in 20 minutes while interviewing an ultranationalist ideologue called Aleksandr Dugin about 20 years ago.

He was then popularly known as “Putin’s brain,” although his role was always to provide philosophical justifications for what the Russian dictator wanted to do anyway, not to give him policy guidance. Vladimir Putin already had the attitudes of somebody who grew up poor and short on the mean streets of Leningrad, where “respect” meant everything.

Dugin is still around, although he is probably no longer in close touch with Putin. But he’s still in play, and CNN interview last March, he claimed that Trump’s America has a lot more in common with Putin’s Russia than most people think: “The followers of Trump will understand much better what Russia is, who Putin is and the motivations of our politics.”

Well, yes, of course. As the Kremlin spokesman said of Trump’s new National Security Strategy, published two weeks ago, “The adjustments that we see correspond in many ways to our vision.” That vision is a deeply traditional version of nationalism which includes the conviction that the great powers have the right to command all the others.

While I was on a vacation in Victoria a few years ago, I was told to check out the home of my friend’s family member on Trutch Street.

British Columbia has recently taken significant steps to improve public protection and patient safety in their health-care system.

Over the past few years, British Columbia has turned its attention to how the professional health regulatory system can be more attuned to patient safety issues. A report by the British Columbia ombudsperson found that regulatory college boards “do not appear to have fully accepted or understood what it means to act in the public interest.”

In 2018, Harry Cayton, an expert in health profession regulation, identified several problems with the B.C. regulatory framework including “the construction of college boards, a lack of relentless focus on patient safety, and secrecy into the complaints, among other things.”

Cayton’s findings align with Ontario’s Goudge report which concluded that their medical complaint system provided “little apparent benefit to the public in terms of better or safer patient services.”

The U.S. has dominated the rules-based global order for the past 75 years. But now, Washington “has chosen to walk away from the international system,” Ian Bremmer, head of the Eurasia Group, said recently in his annual state-of-the-world speech. “Not because it’s weak, not because it has to — because it wants to.”

It’s a bizarre historical precedent. And the implications for the global balance of power will be profound.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine approaches its fourth year shrouded in uncertainty. A corruption scandal has rocked Ukraine’s government, forcing President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s chief of staff to resign. Kyiv is meanwhile scrambling to stall White House negotiators from brazenly tilting ceasefire talks in Vladimir Putin’s favour. The Russian leader refuses to compromise, convinced he is winning on the battlefield.

Indeed, Russian forces are advancing but at glacial speed. The Kremlin is achieving this partly through strengthening drone capabilities. But also, maintaining a grotesque disregard for its troops, mindlessly throwing them into the buzzsaw of Ukraine’s AI-powered defences. Ukrainian authorities say Russia is now losing 1,000 soldiers a day to gain less than five kilometres of territory per month.