Province announces $5-M program to help restaurants with code-red delivery costs

Health Canada suspends plasma collection at Grifols Taylor Avenue clinic

Health Canada has suspended all plasma collection at Grifols’ Taylor Avenue facility while the private company continues to face scrutiny after two people died following donations at its Winnipeg clinics.

The suspension began Wednesday, although Grifols paused plasma collection in Canada on Aug. 14, two days after the federal department gave the Taylor Avenue site a non-compliant rating.

“Health Canada issued the suspension because Grifols had not effectively implemented some corrective and preventive actions and, overall, it failed to demonstrate that the Taylor Avenue site has implemented an effective quality management system,” the department said in a statement.

The penalty was first proposed Aug. 13. The site’s operating licence was partially suspended, Grifols said in a statement.

Revealing statements by Trump about courts

Analyzing the utterances of U.S. President Donald Trump may seem like the ultimate sort of mug’s game — they are varied, contradictory, rambling, pugilistic, sometimes wheedling and the list goes on.

Mark Carney’s campaign for middle powers

“You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose,” said former New York Governor Mario Cuomo forty years ago. Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney is now in the poetic phase of his campaign to create an alliance — maybe just a loose alliance — of middle powers who can resist the brutal strength of the great powers.

Carney knows how the world used to work, and how it is changing as the ‘rules-based international order’ fades away under the impact of the three great autocrats, Putin, Trump and Xi. “Middle powers must act together,” he told the Davos conference last January, “because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.”

“The old order is not coming back,” he told them. That should have been obvious to all of them, but many countries in Europe and beyond still clung to the belief that somehow, one of these days, maybe after Trump relinquishes power or dies, the old order can be resurrected.

In a single speech that catapulted him into the de facto position of leader of the middle powers, he disabused them of that fantasy and offered them a path to resistance instead. They gave him a standing ovation, a very rare thing at Davos — and he managed to convince them without mentioning any of the problematic powers by name. So I will.

Ensuring an EU deal is as sweet as it sounds

“What’s in a name?,” wrote the famous playwright, as one of his characters pondered the pitfalls of a potentially perilous entanglement.

The meaning behind Shakespeare’s Romeo-focused rumination is that the name of someone (or something) is not as important as the substance and character of the person/thing in question. And so it is with Prime Minister Mark Carney’s recent relationship-fostering foray abroad and the invitation for Canada to become the first “associate member” of the European Union.

During her Sept. 16 State of the Union speech in Strasbourg, France, EU president Ursula von der Leyen said she hopes to enhance Canada’s relationship with Europe “to the highest level possible,” and then rather unexpectedly proposed the creation of a special status for Canada within the European Union.

She cited the need to “urgently reimagine our partnerships” and “build global coalitions for our resilience and democracies” — a clear reference to the need for united action in response to U.S. President Donald Trump’s ongoing disruption of previously solid relations among traditionally like-minded western democracies.

Disgraced former law dean arrested, facing extradition to Canada

Jonathan Black-Branch, the disgraced former dean of law at the University of Manitoba, has been arrested in Europe and is awaiting extradition to Canada on fraud charges, Winnipeg police say.

Black-Branch, who failed to defend himself in a lawsuit filed by the U of M and his disbarment proceedings, was ordered in May 2025 to repay more than $682,000 in misspent expense funds.

Winnipeg police confirmed his arrest and pending extradition Wednesday morning. “The extradition process is ongoing,” police said.

Black-Branch left the university in 2020 amid allegations he had misspent public dollars and schemed to evade oversight while running Robson Hall from 2016 to 2020.