More than 100 apply to operate Manitoba marijuana stores

Owners, agents reviewing bids to purchase Fort Garry Hotel

Downtown Winnipeg’s Fort Garry Hotel is a step closer to a potential sale.

Motion seeks to remove longtime head of Southern Chiefs’ Organization due to ‘behaviour’ concerns

For the second time in a year, the leadership of Southern Chiefs’ Organization Grand Chief Jerry Daniels is being called into question.

A motion obtained by the Free Press calls “immediately” for a special summit of the 33 SCO chiefs to consider removing Daniels, who’s been at the helm since 2017.

The Aug. 17 motion, put forward by Lake Manitoba First Nation Chief Cornell McLean and Bloodvein First Nation Chief Lisa Young, cites concerns about “governance, leadership, accountability, transparency, organizational decision-making and confidence of member Nations in the current leadership of the organization.”

McLean would not provide specific examples Wednesday but said the “behaviour” of Daniels is a concern.

Of frogs, roses, kings and a Great Lake

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, as the saying goes. Basically, if you change something’s name, you don’t actually change the nature of the thing.

That being said, if even 15 years ago an American president had called an entire news conference to announce he was renaming one of the Great Lakes by writing on a map with a red pen and issuing an executive order purporting to rename Lake Ontario as “Lake America,” all and sundry would question his mental health.

Maybe, after witnessing so much from Donald Trump, we’ve all just been hardened off and the foolish is now expected daily. Perhaps it’s the political equivalent of the fable of the boiling frog.

As the fable goes, drop a frog into a pot of boiling water and it will jump right out. But put the frog in room temperature water and bring the pot to a boil, the frog will stay until its death. (It’s unlikely the frog would actually wait.)

Late founder of Canad Inns celebrated with honorary street name

The founder of Canad Inns will be remembered through an honorary street name, alongside his homegrown hotel chain’s Garden City location.

As camp fees increase, Sunshine Fund delivers another summer of adventures

Dana Moroz is on the other end of the line and the manager of the Sunshine Fund can hardly contain her enthusiasm.

With the summer winding down and school on the verge of being back in session, Moroz was asked about the 46th season of the program that sent children in need to 31 accredited camps across the province and northwestern Ontario.

Although the final numbers are still being calculated, it was a banner year for the program, which benefited from the Free Press Sunshine Fund campaign that ran throughout the past several months.

“We had over 700 kids that we supported to go to summer camp,” said Moroz, noting the cost of doing so eclipsed $300,000.

Kusama embraced dots which crowded her vision

In 2012, just as I was leaving the Tate Modern in London, I noticed an exhibition that I had nearly missed: The Obliteration Room by Yayoi Kusama, the famed Japanese artist with the bright-red bob known for her use of repetition and polka dots.

I had read about this exhibition but had no idea it was on while I was in the U.K. Conceived as an interactive exhibition for children and first put up at the Queensland Art Gallery in 2002, it begins as a monochromatic white room, furnished with all-white furniture and objects that visitors are then encouraged to cover with the multi-coloured dot stickers they are given on entry.

The idea is that, over weeks, the pristine room becomes “obliterated” by dots of colour.

Obviously, I beelined for it. I was handed my sheet of stickers, all different sizes of circles, and sent to add to a work that hundreds of people had already contributed to.