Chameleon connecting

Sheriff who died in train collision ‘loved everybody’

Brett Matheson-Maytwayashing was a loving father, hard-working sheriff and proud First Nations man who helped lead traditional ceremonies for a decade before he died in a collision with a train near Portage la Prairie.

Matheson-Maytwayashing, 27, died in the Tuesday morning crash, which occurred on a rural road west of Portage while he and another member of the sheriff’s service were on their way to attend court in Amaranth, his mother, Alissa Matheson-Maytwayashing, told the Free Press.

It was Matheson-Maytwayashing’s first day back at work after taking time off to participate in a sun dance ceremony in northern Saskatchewan last week, his mother said.

“Brett didn’t judge anybody, he would give people chances,” she said, her voice breaking. “He didn’t care what colour you were, he didn’t care your nationality — Brett just loved everybody.”

PCs cleared of election violation for ‘intimacy coach’ invoice

Manitoba’s elections commissioner has cleared the Progressive Conservatives of wrongdoing after a $3,800 expense for a car rental appeared on an invoice from a company offering “intimacy coach” services.

The findings from the commissioner bring an end to a complaint raised by the NDP in October 2024, when it was alleged the PCs violated the Election Financing Act by forging financial documents related to the previous year’s election campaign.

“I am satisfied that the expense was indeed for a car rental, as the invoice described,” Bill Bowles wrote in a letter addressed to both parties Wednesday.

Concerns over the invoice to Lucid Vitality were first raised by a former PC staffer, whose internal emails with party officials were published in the Winnipeg Sun.

Outreach centre rife with drug use, needles, but daycare, community members say safety concerns go unheard

Children at an Osborne Village daycare are routinely exposed to discarded needles, human feces and drug use, prompting growing safety concerns from parents, residents and business owners.

The concerns centre on Augustine Centre at River Avenue and Osborne Street, where SPLASH Child Care shares the building with Oak Table, a drop-in operated by 1JustCity that provides meals, wellness and addiction supports, along with programs that help people build skills, and secure housing and employment.

The daycare looks after 132 children, from just a few months old to age 12.

Lesley Massey, executive director of the daycare, said parents fear for their children’s safety.

Plains Cree artist McMaster creates works to link to her ancestors and the land

To call Meryl McMaster just a photographer sells the Plains Cree artist terribly short.

Her new show, As Immense as the Sky, which is on display at Urban Shaman gallery until April 17, shows she is also a costumer, a props-maker, a poet and a storyteller.

McMaster is also the focus of her photographs, portraying characters interacting with grand vistas of the Canadian Prairies or the rocky shores of Newfoundland and Labrador. She says she tries to use her artworks to connect with ancestors as a way to introduce herself to the land where they lived.

“The character I portray in my photographs is always changing, depending on the idea behind them,” McMaster, who lives in Ottawa, writes in an email. “I am sometimes exploring unanswered questions I have of myself and the world and sometimes I am embodying a character in a story I have been told.”

Winnipeg Fringe Festival: 2026 show reviews

Not sure what to see at this year's Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival? All of the Free Press’s reviews will be published here.  Find a show and click to read its review.

The next Duff’s Ditch must be medical

A runaway rail trolley hurtles towards five people tied to the tracks. You stand at the switch lever. If you pull the lever, the trolley veers onto a sidetrack, where one person is tied down. Do nothing and five die. Pull the lever and one dies by your hand.

A health minister needs no introduction to the weight of that choice. Every budget season, governments confront this dilemma with one cruel modification — the lever switches between today and tomorrow. Down the near track sits this year’s emergency, a crowded emergency department, a surgical backlog, a crisis demanding a decision by Friday. Down the far track, in the distance, over the horizon, waits a geriatric demographic that has not arrived yet. Each year’s budget cannot simultaneously rescue both.

Philosophers treat the trolley scenario as a thought experiment. A health minister calls it Tuesday.

The actual choice is crueller, because both tracks hold real people. The stroke patient in today’s hallway deserves rescue, as do the patients down the line. Two scholars, Guido Calabresi and Philip Bobbitt, analyzed such allocations as tragic choices — scarcity forces a society to preserve one value by sacrificing another. Their darker observation concerned method. Societies rarely make these choices in the open. The lever keeps directing traffic away from the immediate noise, toward the far track.