TV series put on pause by the Hollywood writers strike

Reversing Manitoba’s moose decline

As Manitoba’s retired provincial moose manager, I have watched our moose population plummet from historic highs to a state of systemic vulnerability. Reversing this decline, which has seen numbers drop from 45,000 during the 1960s to fewer than 20,000 today, will require balancing the conservation needs of moose, Section 35 constitutional treaty rights, licensed hunter expectations and economic development.

To avert further attrition, all stakeholders, including Manitoba Natural Resources, must accept responsibility for their part in this decline, with industrial and recreational development acting as the primary drivers.

This long-overdue discussion must not devolve into a debate over competing hunting rights; instead, it must focus entirely on building long-term population resilience. Wildlife management must evolve alongside the changing landscapes and dynamics that development brings. We can no longer practise the same methods and hope for a better result. Immediate action is required.

As long as moose are legally managed as a “natural resource,” they will inevitably be viewed through the lens of a commodity rather than a vulnerable species in need of protection. For any population to remain stable or grow, total mortality cannot exceed recruitment — the survival of calves to breeding age. If mortality outpaces recruitment, decline is inevitable.

Serial arsonist gets more jail time, community ban

A serial arsonist who believes controlled burning is his “calling” was sentenced to nine months in jail and barred for two years from a southwestern Manitoba community after he deliberately set multiple grass fires during a fire ban in May.

Kinew won’t budge on opposition to criminalizing residential school denialism

Premier Wab Kinew stood by his opposition to the proposed criminalization of residential school denialism Wednesday, after some First Nations leaders criticized his earlier comments and asked him to reconsider.

Kinew said he doesn’t think Canada should make residential school denialism a crime, nor does he think it’s feasible to do, and he’d prefer to see it combated with education.

“When somebody has a question or wants to make a statement from a place of ignorance, the response isn’t to try to criminalize,” he told reporters.

“The response should be to try to heal whatever is going on with them that would cause them to say something hurtful, to try and educate whatever they lack in terms of knowledge about the true history of our country, and ultimately to find a way for us to all live together.”

Database issues cloud city homeless numbers

The head of End Homelessness Winnipeg says she has no confidence in data about the city’s homeless population due to problems with the federal system that tracks those numbers.

Jennifer Rattray, the organization’s chief executive officer, told the Free Press Thursday it continues to work with the federal government to resolve problems with the Homeless Individuals and Families Information System, which keeps tabs on people who access homelessness services.

CBC has reported it obtained an internal memo from EHW that shows that as of the end of March, the number of chronically homeless Winnipeggers had fallen to 436 from about 4,400, as a result of efforts to correct the database.

Earlier this year, the organization had reported more than 8,000 people were accessing services.

Capital punishment as macabre theatre

There was already enough to write about the question of capital punishment when the State of Tennessee attempted to execute Christa Pike.

Pike would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years, but her execution on Sept. 30 did not go as planned — she survived, despite two lethal injections of pentobarbital, and was taken to hospital in critical condition.

Pike was released from hospital and sent back to the same prison where she has been incarcerated for the last 30 years, ever since she was convicted — as an 18-year-old — of the murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer in 1995.

Pike faces a long recovery, and an uncertain one. Tennessee assistant attorney general Will Ayers has not said if the state will attempt to execute Pike again, but Gov. Bill Lee has halted all executions this year and ordered an independent review of what went wrong.