Canada gets its chance ‘to go after a giant’ Manager Marsch has been preparing his players for this moment By: Jerrad Peters Posted: 2:49 PM CDT Friday, Jul. 3, 2026 Last Modified: 8:34 PM CDT Friday, Jul. 3, 2026 Updates

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.

Building generational equity

Ayobimpe Omisore is a Winnipeg single mother of four who knows all too well about working just to make the rent.

A little more than a year ago, she was struggling to pay $2,400 a month for a two-bedroom unit in St. Norbert.

She picked up extra shifts whenever she could as a health-care aide to keep up with the costs.

“I was lamenting about it at work one day, and a colleague said, ‘If you’re paying this much on rent, I think you can afford a mortgage,’” says Omisore, who came to Canada four years ago from Nigeria where she worked as a logistics manager.

Frustration on menu as St. James construction drags on

Nearly four months of construction outside the front door of a longtime Portage Avenue restaurant has driven away customers and left its owner struggling to cover operating expenses.

Goalposts to define normal vintage keep moving

The 2026 grape-growing vintage in the northern hemisphere is done and dusted, with producers in most wine-producing countries having to navigate a growing season that was, to put it mildly, volatile.

European producers in particular struggled with a growing season plagued by a lengthy heat wave, wildfires and hail.

Some producers in Bordeaux, for example, started picking wine grapes for both white and red grapes in August, weeks ahead of when the fruit would normally be brought in from the vineyards. Drought-like conditions resulted in the region’s viticultural regulatory body giving permission to wineries in some sub-regions to irrigate, which they’re not normally allowed to do, and a mid-July hail storm wreaked havoc on grapes.

The region was also devastated by wildfires over the summer, which saw thousands flee the region but which mostly spared vineyards, although the effect of smoke may find its way into some wines.

Goblin:Macbeth is a monstrously entertaining show

Screw your courage to the sticking point, for Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre has just unleashed a gaggle of goblins at the Tom Hendry Warehouse in its ghoulishly theatrical Goblin:Macbeth.

The darkly subversive, 95-minute (sans intermission) production is the brainchild of Spontaneous Theatre’s Bruce Horak and Rebecca Northan (also serving as director), with Ellis Lalonde (sound designer).

It stars a trio of larger-than-life, pointy-eared goblins, Wug, Kragva and Moog — fie on anyone seeking to determine their tightly guarded mortal identities — who cavort and kibbitz with audience members before stumbling across The Complete Works of William Shakespeare.

After indignantly declaring “we are not Tolkien goblins,” and sharing a bit of goblin-lore (who knew these demons had 17 genders?) they vow they will attempt to “do theatre” to better understand our culture, choosing the Bard’s superstition-riddled Scottish Play for being the shortest and bloodiest.