Ian Astbury’s collaborations all come back to the Cult

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.

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.

Ian Astbury’s collaborations all come back to the Cult

The Cult’s Ian Astbury can be as fiery on the phone as he has been on the stage for the past four decades.

Another strong outing from Skinner, but Jets unable to lock down lead

DALLAS — Stuart Skinner did everything in his power to ger the Winnipeg Jets back in the win column.

A 35-save effort included plenty of highlight-reel moments, but the Jets were unable to lock down a lead late in the third period and lost 3-2 in overtime to the Dallas Stars on Thursday at American Airlines Center.

“Stu kind of got us a point there, to be honest with you,” said Jets forward Gabriel Vilardi. “They were better than us. Their structure, they played a really tight checking game, and we couldn’t really get much going offensively. They obviously outplayed us, and when you give up that many chances, eventually, Stu can’t stop everything.”

Both of the goals the Jets allowed in regulation came with Stars goalie Jake Oettinger on the bench in favour of an extra attacker — once on a delayed penalty call during the third period and then with two minutes to go in the third period when Mikko Rantanen found Roope Hintz alone in the slot.

Processing potential long way from reality

There are times in life when you want to be wrong — like when you walk into the doctor’s office believing your ailment will be the death of you.

It’s the same sort of feeling I get wading through the pile of newly released reports extolling the unrealized “potential” for more value-added processing in Canadian agriculture. There’s this little voice inside my head saying: “I’m from Manitoba. Show me.”

There are jaw-dropping numbers bandied about in various reports from Food and Beverage Canada, the Canadian Chambers of Commerce/PwC and the Canadian Agri-Food Policy Institute. For example, more processing could add $75 billion on top of the $188 billion the sector already generates, create hundreds of thousands more jobs and a bigger domestic market for farmers. The list goes on.

Not to discount the solid analysis behind these efforts. Overall, it all sounds great, although notably missing is any mention of the growing concerns over ultra-processed foods and how that might affect future market growth.