Pompeii movie an eruption of clichés

Manitoba has recorded 15 tornadoes this year, roughly twice the annual average

It’s been a whirlwind year for tornado researchers in Manitoba.

“It’s the busiest we’ve ever been, by far,” John Hanesiak, a professor in the department of environment and geography at the University of Manitoba, says.

Hanesiak is a collaborator with the Northern Tornadoes Project, a national research program based at Western University in London, Ont., that aims to better understand tornadoes in Canada.

Since late May, Hanesiak and his team have spent 43 days in the field surveying damage caused by tornadoes and severe weather events across Manitoba and Saskatchewan. Previous seasons have required a maximum of 19 days on the road.

Mining, mineral exploration projects ramp up, First Nations training lags

Mark Fedikow hunts for gold. Skilled labour can become a secondary search.

“You can find lots of folks on the reserves that are willing to work and learn, no question about it,” Fedikow, president of Mount Morgan Resources Ltd., said Thursday in Winnipeg.

“They need to get some training, they need to get some education in exploration.”

Fedikow and his team have been surveying roughly 7,400 acres in the Snow Lake area in northern Manitoba. They’re in “early days” of gold exploration. Results over the past two years of work have been promising, Fedikow said.

Councillors say Main Street Project scuttles other agency’s efforts to house homeless

A Winnipeg outreach agency that’s been largely shut out of government funding says it has found housing for more people in the last five months than Manitoba’s homeless strategy that began last year.

‘We’ll get there’: retired sportscaster Scott Oake determined as fundraising for women's addictions treatment facility enters home stretch

For now, the patch of land just east of the Victoria Hospital doesn’t look like much: just a field of rocks, mounded dirt, and concrete piles driven into the earth. Yet when Scott Oake looks over the site, he can already imagine how it will look in just over a year’s time, when the new Anne Oake Family Recovery Centre is expected to open.

It’s easier to picture this time around. In 2020, when the recently-retired CBC sportscaster and his late wife, Anne, were building their first labour of intermingled grief and love, the Bruce Oake Recovery Centre for men, it was hard for him to wrap his mind around how a raw construction site could transform into a welcoming addictions treatment facility.

When that centre opened in 2021, Oake found it looked “almost identical” to the architect’s renderings. So it’s easy to hope the Anne Oake Centre will be the same. It will be the first facility of its kind, its founders believe, not only in Canada but in North America: a place where 50 to 70 women can pursue sobriety while staying with their children.

“At Bruce Oake there’s a culture of love, and most of all a culture of hope,” Oake said, speaking at the site Thursday after a media conference to announce the final push of the centre’s fundraising campaign. “I can feel it every time I walk into that building. And I know it will be the same here.”

‘Dynacare sucks’: premier muses about bringing lab services back into public system

Premier Wab Kinew says Manitoba may bring Dynacare’s diagnostic lab services back into the public system rather than continue to sign contracts with the for-profit company.

“Dynacare sucks. They’ve made an absolute mess of this situation,” the premier said Wednesday, the day the company’s 350 employees reported back to work after the labour board halted their strike after just one day.

Kinew first made the remark about Dynacare in a CBC radio interview Wednesday morning and added he is “not happy with them.”

Dynacare performs the majority of non-emergency blood and urine tests in the province.

U of M students call for ban on far-right group

Some University of Manitoba students are calling on their school to ban a far-right group from campus after posters promoting mass deportations were found during the summer break.

More than 50 people rallied on Wednesday, the first day of classes, to make known their concerns about a group called the Dominion Society of Canada.

The protest was organized after a supporter of the self-described nationalist group posted a video over the Labour Day weekend that shows him putting up flyers in Fort Garry.

“Canada is a really beautiful country and I have been welcomed here by a lot of beautiful people and it’s been amazing, but when I see harmful rhetoric online and now, on campus, it gives me a lot of anxiety,” said Ela Ancheta, an arts major at U of M.