Keeping the monsters at bay

Every few years, a sword over the baby

On Oct. 19, people in Alberta will answer 10 referendum questions. Nine are about things such as immigration, voter ID, judges and the Senate. The other asks if Alberta should remain in Canada or begin the legal steps toward a binding vote on leaving.

I want to share a perspective, as a patriotic Canadian, which I feel is lacking from the discourse.

Many of us who read those nine complaints can understand where Alberta is coming from. Ottawa kept control of the Prairies’ Crown lands and resources until 1930, allowing the East to grow at the West’s expense. The national energy program of the 1970s is still a sore spot west of Kenora, nearly 50 years later. Ontario and Quebec have almost 60 per cent of the seats in the House of Commons, so you can win everywhere from the Lakehead to the Pacific and still not change anything. Decisions are made about us, not with us. That frustration is real and being a Manitoban shouldn’t mean having to be Ottawa’s lawyer in this case. We are the original West, born in 1870 from Métis resistance to the same kind of treatment Alberta is protesting now.

So yes, we can understand how truly frustrated they are with the state of things in this country. But what bothers us even more is seeing someone threaten our children’s future every few years and call it leadership in their province.

Tenants battling landlords find help in short supply from province

For nearly three years, Quincy Houdayer and Avery Helm repeatedly pressed their landlord to address plumbing failures, water damage and other maintenance problems at their West Broadway apartment, with records showing some issues persisted until the couple turned to the Residential Tenancies Branch.

Emails and text messages between the tenants, Clearwater Management and the RTB reviewed by the Free Press document recurring leaks and flooding, periods without heat or hot water, concerns about mould and basement conditions and repeated followups from the couple seeking repairs.

“Most of the experiences we’ve had with them can be boiled down to, like, they either are very dismissive about it, they act like it’s not their problem… or they will just fully, blatantly ignore you,” Helm said, adding that the only way to get Clearwater to respond was to threaten going to the RTB, a provincial government agency.

RTB data obtained by the Free Press also shows 13 orders involving the three-building complex at 193-197 Furby St. in 2026 alone. All but one favoured the tenant, while the remaining order ruled in favour of both the tenant and landlord on different items.

Developer ‘anxiously’ awaits judge’s decision on Granite Curling Club construction

The developer of a hotly debated project that would add 110 housing units to the Granite Curling Club’s parking lot has begun investigative work at the site while awaiting a judge’s decision on construction.

While some digging took place at the city-owned property last week, its developer said construction has yet to begin.

“I would call (the digging so far) investigative site work. It’s not preparing in any way for construction, other than to ensure that the reports that are required for any site have been completed,” said Jeremy Read, chief executive officer of UWCRC 2.0 Inc.

A heritage resources impact assessment will determine if the site has archeological significance. That work will check for everything from fossils to unmarked graves, said Read.

Letters, Oct. 13

The major assumption Manitoba Hydro undertakes is the weather. Hydro projected a $214 million profit for the 2025-26 fiscal year. On Sept. 29, it reported a $446 million loss. It took on additional debt due to $751 million in operating losses. In addition, Hydro stated the fiscal results for 2025-26 were “significantly influenced by circumstances largely beyond Hydro’s control.”

Man pleads guilty to five sex assaults at, near HSC

A Winnipeg man previously found not criminally responsible for a violent assault on his father has pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting four women and a teen girl in and around the Health Sciences Centre last year.

Donovan Mohammed, 29, admitted responsibility for the attacks, on Friday in Winnipeg court. He remains in custody and will be sentenced at a later date following the completion of a court-ordered pre-sentence report.

Mohammed admitted to sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl and four women — all strangers to him — within the span of an hour on July 2, 2025.

Court heard three of Mohammed’s victims were nurses and three of the assaults were captured on security video.

Creepy, poignant graphic novel a small-town coming-of-age horror story

If you’ve been to Sackville, N.B., you might have wondered what’s inside the huge, windowless, white steel cube on the edge of this small town of 6,000.

The fact that “the Sackville Cube” is a huge cold storage facility for frozen fruit, and has the unremarkable name of the Atlantic AutoCold facility, does little to diminish the strangeness of this landmark that seems straight out of a science fiction movie.

So when Jon Claytor’s creepy and poignant new graphic novel, Nowhere, begins with the arrival overnight of a giant white cube on the edge of a small town called Beauséjour, it is natural to assume this is a thinly disguised version of his hometown, and that this coming-of-age horror story bears some resemblance to his own experiences of the weirdness of small town life.

Claytor is a U.S.-born, Sackville-based painter, illustrator, graphic novelist and writer and one of the founders of Sackville’s acclaimed SappyFest independent music and arts festival.