Coming up roses: City gardeners put ‘petal’ to the metal every spring to help Winnipeg blossom

They get little recognition, but the work they do every summer is admired by thousands across Winnipeg.

As the overnight frost clears for the season, flower beds and pots across the city will be filled and refreshed. Behind the effort is a team of 40 gardeners, injecting splashes of purple, gold, yellow and red into the cityscape.

David Domke, the city’s manager of parks and open space, said like the gardens they tend to, the team of green thumbs is diverse.

“It’s really a mixture of experienced and inexperienced people. A lot of the time, we’ve got some pretty serious gardeners,” he said. “We get them all over the place really, but they all have one thing in common; and that’s a real love of plants.”

Fight by Manitoba politicians over bill process could delay promised tax cut on food

WINNIPEG - Manitoba’s governing NDP and Opposition Progressive Conservatives are at odds over who will be to blame if a planned sales-tax cut on food is delayed beyond Canada Day.

The dispute centres on parliamentary protocols.

Experts appear to offer differing opinions. And the government is relying on a one-page legal analysis with a typo.

At play is the government's plan to eliminate the provincial sales tax from more food items as of July 1, announced in the March budget.

Dobes ‘bounces forward’ to help Canadiens take Game 7 over Sabres

BUFFALO - Jakub Dobes had a familiar name ringing in his ears.

The Canadiens goaltender was the focus of a rabid KeyBank Center crowd after his team's lead shrank from 2-0 to 2-1.

The catcalls got louder when the Buffalo Sabres tied Game 7 in the third period.

The fiery Dobes embraced the moment Monday — and Montreal is off to the NHL's Eastern Conference final.

Building community through volunteering

Andrea Castro was prepared to start from scratch when she decided to move to Canada.

The 42-year-old, who is from Ocana, in northern Colombia, moved to the capital city Bogota at 21, where she lived for 17 years. She had a good career at the United States embassy and was in a relationship. Then the COVID-19 pandemic struck.

“I started thinking about what I really want in my life. I was tired of the same routine. In the embassy I met people who had been travelling and living in different places. I wanted to challenge myself in a new place with a new language. I wanted to follow my dreams,” she says.

She left her family, friends and her partner. “He didn’t want to come so I came by myself,” she says nonchalantly. Castro arrived in Winnipeg on a frigid December day in 2021 determined to create a fulfilling life for herself.

Blanche will face questions from lawmakers over a nearly $1.8B fund to compensate Trump allies

WASHINGTON (AP) — Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche will appear on Capitol Hill Tuesday for his first congressional testimony since taking the reins at the Justice Department as the law enforcement agency faces intense scrutiny over its plans to create a $1.776 billion fund to pay allies of the Republican president who believe they were targeted politically.

Blanche's testimony before a Senate appropriations subcommittee follows Monday's announcement about the creation of the “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” which critics decried as an illegal abuse of power designed to line the pockets of Trump supporters with taxpayer dollars.

In the weeks since assuming control of the Justice Department, Blanche has moved aggressively to advance the president's priorities — pushing forward cases against Trump's political foes, cracking down on leaks to media outlets and establishing the new fund to compensate those who believe they were mistreated by the Biden administration Justice Department.

Tuesday’s hearing is meant to address the Trump administration's budget request for the Justice Department but is likely to delve into other controversies that have escalated concerns about the erosion of the law enforcement agency's tradition of independence from the White House.

Minnesota not-so-nice

British director Ben Wheatley has always been adventurous in his penchant for traversing genre boundaries, including hardcore horror (The Kill List), the big-budget monster movie (The Meg 2), the cerebral art film (High-Rise), and his own invention, the acid-trip period piece (A Field in England).

U.S. slaps duties on fresh Canadian mushrooms over subsidy claims

WASHINGTON - The United States has put countervailing duties on fresh mushrooms grown in Canada following a U.S. Department of Commerce investigation which the Canadian industry has called "deeply flawed."

The change, posted in the federal register on Monday, will slap most fresh mushrooms with tariffs of 2.84 per cent.

Two companies received separate duties: Champ's Fresh Farms Inc. was hit with a tariff rate of 1.62 per cent and Farmers' Fresh Mushrooms Inc. was hit with a tariff rate of 4.97 per cent.

Separate anti-dumping duties are expected to be added later this month.

U.S. says it’s pausing long-standing military board with Canada

WASHINGTON - The U.S. undersecretary of defence for policy said Monday that the United States is pausing a long-standing military board, claiming "Canada has failed to make credible progress on its defense commitments." 

In a post on social media, Elbridge Colby said his department is pausing the Permanent Joint Board on Defense "to reassess how this forum benefits shared North American defense."

The board was established in 1940 and is an advisory forum for U.S.-Canada bilateral defence co-operation.

Colby said the United States "can no longer avoid the gaps between rhetoric and reality" in the post, where he shared a link to a transcript of Prime Minister Mark Carney's January speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Renowned composer, cellist Derksen dead after car crash

Award-winning Cree composer and cellist Cris Derksen, who had strong ties to Manitoba’s arts community, has died following a car crash in northern Alberta. They were 45.

Niverville Nighthawks defeat Summerside Western Capitals 4-1 to take Centennial Cup

SUMMERSIDE, PEI — For just the fourth time in history, the best junior A team in Canada comes from Manitoba. The Niverville Nighthawks joined the Portage Terriers (1973, 2014) and Selkirk Steelers (1974) in lifting the Centennial Cup, defeating the host Summerside Western Capitals 4-1 in the 2026 final Sunday evening in P.E.I.

Niverville began play in the Manitoba Hockey League in 2022, needing just four seasons to go from expansion to national champions.

“Words can’t describe the feeling of how proud I am of these young men,” head coach Dwight Hirst, who took control of the franchise mid-way through the 2024 season but was involved with the team from the beginning, said after the game.

The Nighthawks took a 2-1 lead into the third period and calmly wound down the clock, with Marlen Edwards nabbing an insurance goal and Tyler Bernier icing the game with an empty netter. Hirst, who is from Lac du Bonnet, said the message to the team after 40 minutes was to break the final period into five-minute segments.

People for Education explore convergence of public education and truth and reconciliation

A national charity is putting Manitoba’s school system under the microscope as it develops a plan to protect and bolster publicly funded classrooms across Canada.

“Winnipeg is a site of a lot of learning for the rest of the country on reconciliation in the school system and more broadly,” said Paris Semansky, co-executive director of People for Education.

“That doesn’t mean it’s perfect. That doesn’t mean it’s done, but there’s clear and demonstrable progress that — really critically — seems to cross partisan lines.”

People for Education, founded by a group of Toronto parents in 1996, has typically focused on research and policy-making initiatives in Ontario. The non-partisan organization’s latest project broadens its scope while acknowledging that education is under provincial jurisdiction.