A back-to-nature birchbark-basket warming hut

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s pledge to build faster — “Build, baby, build” — helped propel the Liberals to victory, but his government’s push to fast-track major development projects by cutting environmental oversight is sharply out of step with Canadians’ priorities.

It is a political miscalculation that could come back to haunt the Liberals at the ballot box.

New polling, commissioned by Nature Canada and conducted by EKOS Research Associates, shows strong support among Canadians for protecting nature and endangered species while building the economy.

Canadians soundly reject the notion that they must sacrifice conservation protections for economic development.

Four teenagers have died in a highway crash near Winnipeg Beach.

Manitoba RCMP are investigating the two-vehicle collision, which happened at about 9:15 p.m. Sept. 6. A vehicle travelling west on Highway 229 was struck while crossing Highway 8, RCMP stated in a news release Monday.

Everyone inside the westbound vehicle died at the scene, including the driver, an 18-year-old female from Winnipeg, and three passengers: an 18-year-old male from Gimli, an 18-year-old female from Sandy Hook and a 17-year-old male from Ear Falls, Ont.

The intersection is controlled by stop signs for westbound and eastbound traffic. Both vehicles went into the southwest ditch, with one vehicle rolling and landing on its roof, RCMP stated.

Children entering kindergarten are starting school this fall. While the 2.5-hour kindergarten day commonly found in Manitoba schools sounds like a pleasant transition to the school system, in truth it remains one of the biggest missing pieces of the child-care puzzle.

Province-wide, families face a stressful dilemma — if they are lucky enough to have child care, they have to leave work at lunch and shuttle a child from school to child care; if they don’t, they must reduce hours, or forgo working or education, because they don’t have child care for their kindergartener.

The Government of Manitoba has made progress on making child care more affordable and accessible. But we have largely left one enormous piece untouched — part-day kindergarten. Why is publicly funded education for kindergarten still only 2.5 hours a day? To date, British Columbia, Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island have all implemented full-day, publicly funded kindergarten. The Manitoba School Boards Association passed a resolution in 2025 to implement full-day kindergarten programming, but the province has not provided sufficient funding to implement it province-wide.

There are currently 13,600 children in kindergarten in Manitoba. With a coverage rate for licensed child care of 32.3 per cent, roughly 5,000 families with kindergarteners lack access to licensed child care during the part of the day when their child is not in school. That is a precarious position to put any family in.