Hawkins’ latest dives into deadly mystery

Navigating Manitoba’s disability services is difficult under the best circumstances. For Indigenous families, access is further constrained by geography, poverty, jurisdictional confusion, and culturally-inappropriate systems that do not reflect Indigenous approaches to raising and supporting children. Culturally-insensitive intakes, assessments, and treatments in Manitoba also contribute to misunderstanding, misdiagnosis, and inappropriate service responses across the province.

The consequences for Indigenous children with disabilities and their families are profound — they are forced into a system that does not recognize who they are, how they are understood in their communities or what they need to thrive.

Many First Nations families, particularly in remote and northern communities, are faced with the choice of living in their home community with limited or no resources for their child with a disability or relocating to an urban centre to access necessary supports. This further disconnects families from family and community support, connectedness to shared values and teachings and a child’s right to a sense of belonging.

Additionally, First Nations families living with a disabled child experience significant over-involvement with the child welfare system compared to non-Indigenous Manitobans. This is due to a couple of key factors, namely the differing perspectives regarding disabilities between the Western clinical and many First Nations world views and the prevailing systemic default that families be pressured to surrender their disabled child to child and family services care in order to access resources that are otherwise unavailable.

Charge highlights need for action

The recent reporting regarding a Winnipeg Fire Paramedic Service employee accused of violating a protection order, following previous convictions related to criminal harassment and breaches of court orders against former partners, raises concerns that extend beyond a single individual.

I believe this case highlights important questions about how public institutions assess and respond to risks associated with intimate partner violence, stalking, coercive control and repeated violations of court-imposed conditions.

Gender-based violence is a public safety issue. Survivors are encouraged to seek protection orders and to call emergency services for safety and support. When those orders are breached, organizations have a responsibility to carefully consider workplace safety, public safety and survivor safety in their decision-making. Manitobans deserve confidence that public institutions have clear, consistent processes to assess risk and respond appropriately.

Most every author, including me, wants to be noticed by the reading public, media and book world. The perceived wisdom is that a strong social media presence raises an author’s profile and sells books. In the past 15 years or so, authors have been pressured by publishers, editors and agents to maintain a website and regularly post about their work on Facebook, X and Instagram.

Whether this online activity actually increases book sales is debatable. But this much is certain — all of this visibility makes authors easy targets of scam artists and fraudsters.

Literally every day over the last 12 to 15 months, perhaps longer than that, I receive emails — often three or four a day — from editors, podcasters, movie producers, marketing promoters and book club presidents. They all want to make me famous and my books international best-sellers. What more could an author want?

The trouble is they are all — to paraphrase Elaine Benes on Seinfeld, commenting on another personal issue — fake, fake, fake. Generated by AI in workshops in Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines and other distant locales, they offer effusive praise of my “brilliant” writing and supposed extra-special story telling skills.