Your forecast
Mainly cloudy, with a 30 per cent chance of showers this afternoon. Wind becoming northwest at 20 km/h gusting to 40 this morning. High 21 C. UV index 4 or moderate.
Tanner Lemieux wasn’t surprised to learn the violent winds that tore through River Heights and reached their peak near his home Sunday night have been classified as a tornado.
While driving back to his Lindsay Street home from a shopping trip with his wife Sunday, it became clear they were not in the middle of an ordinary thunderstorm when rain and wind started coming from every direction and hit every side of their truck.
The forceful wind made it impossible for him to open his door after they had parked. He climbed through the window, over the top of his vehicle, and the couple struggled to fight the whipping winds to make it into the house. Malak Abas has more here.
Tanner Lemieux and his wife Cassidy Lemieux in their backyard, surrounded by damage from Sunday’s storm. (Ruth Bonneville / Free Press)
What’s happening today
“Today, as the world marks the 25th anniversary of 9/11, there will be many words devoted to recalling the day’s destruction,” writes Melissa Martin, in a look at the life of the lone Manitoban killed in the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York City. “We live in a world transformed by that horror, a legacy that still casts a shadowy chill over our lives. There were the massive increases in surveillance, encroachments on civil rights, the fear and anger and wars that came after.
“But Christine Egan left a legacy, too: first and foremost here in Manitoba, where she lived the last decade of her life, and in the North, where she poured her heart into improving health care for Inuit people. In a way it’s an act of defiance — and of hope — to remember her life just as vividly as the terror that stole it.” Read the full story here.
Christine Egan, left, with Ellen Judd in Rankin Inlet. (Supplied)
Today’s must-read
Jennine Krauchi calls them the “grandmothers.”
“They speak to you very silently. You never hear a word, but they speak,” Krauchi says, referring to the antique pieces of Métis needlework she’s carefully studied for years — a craft passed down across generations, with the pieces themselves sometimes serving as the instructive elders.
But there’s few precedents for her latest art project: a 85-foot-wide by 32-foot-high chain curtain of Métis needlework — teeming with wild flowers, infinity symbols, berries and other motifs paying tribute to Métis heritage and renewal — that drapes over the historic Bank of Montreal’s neoclassical facade.
That building, at 335 Main St., will soon bear another title: Red River Métis National Heritage Centre or La Plas Taanshi kaa-Ishipamachihoyaahk, its Michif name. Conrad Sweatman has the story.
Métis beadwork artist Jennine Karachi with her large-scale, chain-link Métis public artwork that now graces the outside of MMF’s Bank of Montreal building at Portage and Main. (Ruth Bonneville / Free Press)
On the bright side
For now, the patch of land just east of the Victoria Hospital doesn’t look like much: just a field of rocks, mounded dirt, and concrete piles driven into the earth. Yet when Scott Oake looks over the site, he can already imagine how it will look in just over a year’s time, when the new Anne Oake Family Recovery Centre is expected to open.
It’s easier to picture this time around. In 2020, when the recently-retired CBC sportscaster and his late wife, Anne, were building their first labour of intermingled grief and love, the Bruce Oake Recovery Centre for men, it was hard for him to wrap his mind around how a raw construction site could transform into a welcoming addictions treatment facility.
When that centre opened in 2021, Oake found it looked “almost identical” to the architect’s renderings. So it’s easy to hope the Anne Oake Centre will be the same. It will be the first facility of its kind, its founders believe, not only in Canada but in North America: a place where 50 to 70 women can pursue sobriety while staying with their children.
Scott Oake is confident of reaching its fundraising goal for the Anne Oake Family Recovery Centre even after it rose to $35 million due torising costs. (Ruth Bonneville / Free Press)
“At Bruce Oake there’s a culture of love, and most of all a culture of hope,” Oake said, speaking at the site Thursday after a media conference to announce the final push of the centre’s fundraising campaign. “I can feel it every time I walk into that building. And I know it will be the same here.” Melissa Martin has more here.
On this date
On Sept. 11, 1950: The Winnipeg Free Press reported in Washington, D.C., U.S. president Harry Truman approved “substantial increases” in U.S. military forces in Western Europe and called on the Atlantic Pact allies to match his actions. Canada’s minister of defence forecast a possible shipment from Canada to Atlantic Pact nations of enough arms and equipment for a division.
Today’s front page
Get the full story: Read today’s e-edition of the Free Press.
|
