Don’t hope for different ending with repeat cheat

Chrysler refines Pacifica and Grand Caravan as buyers return to practical family hauler

BURLINGTON, Ont. — The mighty minivan — relegated to the scrap heap by the rush to crossovers and SUVs — is making a comeback, and Chrysler hopes to lead the way with its top-selling, Canadian-made Grand Caravan and Pacifica models.

While many manufacturers — Mazda, Ford, GM, Hyundai and Nissan — abandoned the once-popular family hauler, Chrysler has continued to play in the segment since it was launched by Lee Iacocca in 1983.

For 2027, the Pacifica gets a cosmetic refresh and the Grand Caravan is a holdover, but new this year are price savings of up to $7,200, Chrysler product planner Mike Szymkiewicz told journalists assembled here for the launch of the two vehicles.

“It’s primarily that we’re taking less margin, but we’re also adding content,” he said. “So less margin but we hope more volume.”

Time-travel mystery a hallucinogenic trip

Here’s a spooky premise: A fishing boat, the Rose of Nevada, that disappeared along with its crew 30 years ago, makes a mysterious return — empty but unchanged — to a small village in Cornwall, on England’s southwest coast.

“She’s back,” the boat’s owner says ominously. Even more ominously, he doesn’t sound particularly surprised. It feels as if this has happened before.

There’s something unsettling going on in this strange and singular film. Cornish writer-director Mark Jenkin (Bait, Enys Men) has crafted a ghostly time-travel tale that collapses past and present, leaving his characters — and the audience — in haunting emotional and moral quandaries.

If the film’s sense of time can be deliberately hazy, its sense of place is very clear. All three of Jenkin’s features have been set in Cornwall, and there’s an intimate, immediate sense of connection to this coastal town, which is depressed and dwindling, its inhabitants beset by economic precarity. The harbour is deserted, the pub is empty, shop windows are boarded up and the young people are leaving. It seems as if the disappearance of that boat and crew broke not just the men’s grieving families but the whole community.

Emergency rooms need help — now

Triage. It’s an interesting, necessary, and bluntly pragmatic concept, but it’s not for the faint of heart.

It’s a method of determining how and when to treat the injured and the sick, and it has a long (and disputed) history. Many historians credit French army surgeon Dominique-Jean Larrey, who, in Napoleonic France, came up with a classification system to help evacuate and treat injured soldiers by quickly dividing their injuries into three different classifications.

“In the Battle of Jena in 1806, the French army used the triage system developed by Larrey. The system involved categorization into three grades based on the severity of the wounds irrespective of the soldier’s rank: dangerously wounded, less dangerously wounded, and slightly wounded,” wrote researchers Hiroyuki Nakao, Isao Ukai and Joji Kotani in the medical journal Acute Medicine and Surgery.

Triage, in fact, means “breaking into threes,” and there’s a dispute over whether it was originally used to classify coffee beans or wool — but we’re not going any further down that particular rabbit hole today.

Ask civic candidates to do the math

As Winnipeg voters prepare for a municipal election this October, a well-worn campaign playbook is already emerging.

Candidates across the city will knock on doors promising lower taxes, fewer potholes, shiny new recreation centres and grand road expansions designed to alleviate congestion.

It is a familiar refrain, but it is also one completely disconnected from the city’s financial reality.

While city council is legally mandated to produce a balanced operating budget every year, they do so only after scrambling to close a seemingly never-ending series of unexpected shortfalls — how many years in a row has the city cited “above-average snowfall” to explain budget pressures?

Transit driver stabbed with syringe by passenger

A Winnipeg Transit driver is recovering in hospital after a passenger stabbed him in the leg with a syringe while riding the bus early Wednesday, the Amalgamated Transit Union says.

The union said the incident occurred shortly before 1 a.m. while the operator was stopped in the northbound lanes of Isabel Street, near William Avenue. A female passenger reached around the driver’s safety shield and stabbed the driver twice before getting off the bus.

The driver was taken to the Seven Oaks Hospital in stable condition, where he is undergoing treatment and further testing, union president James Van Gerwen said in an interview.

“We spoke to the member. He is doing OK, but he is still in the hospital and he is scared — as anybody would be,” Van Gerwen said.

Canad Inns puts Portage Avenue hotel, MET, office building ‘connected campus’ up for sale

Downtown entrepreneurs are watching with wary eyes as a prominent hotel and event centre hits the market.