Group calls for Facebook, Instagram boycott on Aug. 23 and 24

Province orders ban on private teacher-student messaging

Manitoba teachers are no longer allowed to text or use social media to contact a student – regardless of whether they coach a school sports team or supervise other activities outside typical instruction times.

Group calls for Facebook, Instagram boycott

TORONTO - An advocacy group is calling on Canadians to boycott Facebook and Instagram later this week.

The Friends of Canadian Broadcasting group began asking people Monday to stop posting content on Meta's platforms on Aug. 23 and 24.

The group is planning the boycott to show that Canadians won't be pushed around by Meta, which decided to pull news from Canadian publishers from its platforms in response to federal legislation.

The Online News Act requires tech giants Meta and Google to make deals with news publishers whose work they link to or repurpose on their platforms to compensate them for their work.

Opening of Portage and Main shows even seemingly insurmountable impasses can be overcome

There are places in a city that become more than places. Portage and Main is one of them. For generations of Winnipeggers, the intersection has represented downtown, traffic, development and civic identity. Its reopening to pedestrians in 2025, after 46 years of closure, was about more than crossing a street. It was a reminder that decisions made by one generation can shape the choices available to another — and that even seemingly permanent decisions can be reconsidered.

I have spent much of my professional life thinking about Winnipeg as a planner, working in public, private and non-profit settings. My PhD research gave me an opportunity to examine Portage and Main differently: not simply as a debate about cars and pedestrians, but as a window into how power operates in a city. I reviewed 569 archival documents spanning the 1960s to the present, interviewed 48 planners with experience in Winnipeg, and mapped the relationships between planners, politicians, developers, engineers, residents, businesses and advocacy groups.

What emerged was a story about how planning decisions become embedded in a city’s institutions, agreements, infrastructure, professional practices and political expectations — shaping not only what gets built, but who gets to influence what gets built.

The closure of Portage and Main in 1979 did not remain a decision confined to a particular political moment. Over time, it was reinforced by development agreements, physical infrastructure, property relationships, traffic-engineering practices, administrative routines, and public narratives about mobility and downtown revitalization. The people who made many of those original decisions eventually left office. The arrangements they created remained. Later planners inherited them.

Connor Hellebuyck breaks silence after trade from Jets

It took until the very end of his introductory news conference Saturday — right around the 15-minute mark — before Connor Hellebuyck was finally asked the question that hockey fans back in Winnipeg were likely waiting for.

“Is there anything you’d like to say to Jets fans?” a reporter who covers Hellebuyck’s new team, the New Jersey Devils, put to him during the session held inside the Prudential Center in Newark.

A short pause followed.

“I mean, there’s a lot. There’s a lot that I need to say,” Hellebuyck began, no doubt raising plenty of eyebrows around here and the hockey world in general.

A life's story: From wartorn Poland to Winnipeg’s streets, Kazimierz Patalas worked to help others

Kazimierz Patalas left Poland in the late 1960s to make a new life for him and his family elsewhere, but he never forgot the lessons he learned as a young man in the country of his birth.

Perhaps no one lesson stuck with him more than the importance of giving back to the community. It was something he first endeavoured to do as a teen in his native Poland and continued to do for many decades after arriving in his adopted home of Winnipeg in 1967.

“He was always trying to do good for the community. I guess that was sort of ingrained in him from Poland,” says son Jacek, one of three children born to Patalas and his wife Józefa.

“Everything you did you kind of did for the community, for making sacrifices. Your life was geared towards or focused on helping society or the community where you live.”