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RCMP are seeking the public’s help to identify a person of interest after an all-terrain vehicle and other belongings were stolen from a cottage in southern Manitoba.

The theft happened near near Provincial Road 440 in the Rural Municipality of Louise, about 150 kilometres southwest of Winnipeg, on Aug. 11.

Police said surveillance video showed a man walking onto the property at about 2:30 p.m. while covering his face and holding power tools.

A grinder was used to open a locked shipping container, where a 1982 Honda ATC200 all-terrain vehicle, a Honda EU2000i generator and a Stihl FS90 trimmer were among the items stolen, RCMP said. One of two Spypoint trail cameras was also reported stolen.

If you spend any amount of time having deep conversations on sensitive subject matters, you will undoubtedly encounter patterns of thought and speech peppered into the discourse as if certain people were helpless but to utter them.

Perhaps you are trying to get to the heart of a complicated matter and the disagreement with your conversational partner starts to get a little heated. Often somebody will dust off the old diplomatic gem of “let’s agree to disagree” to extinguish further argument.

Or perhaps you are trying to console a grief-stricken person who has gone through a traumatic event. People in such a state will often rail against the state of the universe with powerful philosophical sentiments, demanding to know how such injustice could be permitted. You would not be the first person to misguidedly try to soothe them with something like “everything happens for a reason.” Or, less secularly, “God works in mysterious ways.”

These are known as thought-terminating clichés. Pithy little sayings that sound like folksy wisdom but serve mostly to sever a train of thinking, often because it is either uncomfortable or more complicated than the person is willing to engage. Admittedly, they often come from a good-natured place of keeping the peace, though it could easily be argued that they mostly serve to preserve to comfort or indulge the intellectual laziness of those who speak them.

Imagine a Manitoba in which our lives are powered by clean, affordable electricity that Manitobans own and which doesn’t pollute the air and water we depend on.

That future is within reach and, as doctors, we know it would protect people’s health now and for many generations.

Instead, Manitoba Hydro wants to spend $3 billion on three new gas-fired turbines in Brandon.The Public Utilities Board is now considering this proposal, before our provincial leaders make a final decision that could lock us into burning harmful fossil fuels for decades.

Every day doctors witness the toll of air pollution, hotter summers and smokier skies on our patients — the child struggling through an asthma attack in the emergency room, the senior dangerously overheating during a heat wave. These health crises are not inevitable. They are the consequence of decisions, by governments and corporations, to keep burning fossil fuels.