Celebrating Prairie art at TIFF

The plane truth about a dangerous president

U.S. President Donald Trump has crossed firmly into cutting-off-your-nose-to-spite-your-face territory.

‘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.

Many movers and shakers were spotted at annual Manitoba Party at TIFF

TORONTO — The annual Manitoba Party at the Toronto International Film Festival was short this year of local filmmakers whose work actually had a slot in the festival.

But those filmmakers did show at the fete at the Drake Hotel, which is held every year on the first Sunday of the fest. Conor Sweeney and Milos Mitrovic, co-directors of the short film homer_b, spent much of their time modestly sitting in a corner of the chic, second-floor patio venue.

homer_b is a dark, experimental film featuring live actors wearing Simpsons masks. It’s a companion piece to another short, homer_a, an even more dark short in which a masked Homer is killed by kids in Bart and Millhouse masks. Describing it as “The Simpsons meets Harmony Korine,” Sweeney says he was surprised the less violent homer-b was the one to end up in TIFF’s Short Cuts program.

But both filmmakers were happy to be there, especially since it gave them the opportunity to leave the party at 11 p.m. to catch the Midnight Madness screening of the French film Revenge. (As a member of the Astron-6 collective who made the 2014 Midnight Madness entry The Editor, Sweeney’s departure was especially understandable. Midnight Madness, a program devoted to the more extreme realms of cinema, is where Sweeney lives.)

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.

Letters, Sept. 10

So, Coun. Browaty, do tell, when should we start to panic? What is your magic number? Is there one?

Is ‘tornado alley’ moving north?

There’s a famous fictional story in which a ruby-slippered, tornado-tossed traveller takes a wide-eyed look around and declares, “I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”

There are probably some residents of south River Heights, on the other hand, who looked out their windows last Sunday and felt as if Kansas — the U.S. state that lies smack-dab in the middle of meteorological maps outlining the area known as “tornado alley” — was exactly where they’d somehow ended up.

There is now confirmation of a tornado touching down within Winnipeg, after several residents reported seeing funnel-shaped clouds during the intense thunderstorm, and the magnitude and extremely localized nature of the damage — including felled trees, snapped hydro poles, scattered fences and the deposit of a random automobile on one resident’s front lawn — certainly shows forces more formidable than strong wind gusts were at play.

As Manitoba Hydro and City of Winnipeg crews continued the days-long effort to clean up the mess and restore power to thousands of homes affected by the long-weekend weather blast, some of the conversation related to the storm focused on how extreme events such as this have become more commonplace in a region where tornadoes were long considered a rarity.