Summer music-fest announcements nice break from winter

Planned Elmwood Hub project combines 115 mixed-income housing units, social supports, programs

A long-awaited project will aim to add 115 new homes in Elmwood, with on-site social programs to support some of its more vulnerable residents.

Demolition ordered after fire in vacant city home

A Winnipeg firefighter was assessed by paramedics and an emergency demolition was ordered after a vacant house caught fire Thursday morning for the second time in less than three months.

The two-storey home, at Argyle Street and Disraeli Freeway, in South Point Douglas, was boarded up following a blaze that occurred June 1.

Firefighters returned to the house after flames were reported shortly after 6 a.m. Thursday. The house was engulfed when crews arrived.

“Due to heavy fire conditions, crews were unable to enter the structure,” a Winnipeg Fire Paramedic Service spokesperson wrote in an email to the Free Press.

Chronic blame game festers

Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara doesn’t mince words when describing how bad things are in the province’s emergency departments and urgent-care centres.

“The wait times that we are seeing in Manitoba are unacceptable,” said Asagwara in an interview with the Free Press. “I hear from families, I hear from providers, I hear from Manitobans who are concerned about the wait times that they’re seeing, that they’re experiencing, and those concerns are valid — I share those concerns.”

So what is the NDP, who promised voters nearly three years ago it had the answers to bring down wait times, doing about it?

A lot, according to Asagwara, who has been the province’s health minister since the NDP was sworn into office in October 2023.

Doctor speaks out, raises alarm over gas plant expansion plans

A retired doctor is raising red flags on Manitoba Hydro’s proposed gas plant expansion in Brandon and the health-related consequences of climate change.

City blames weather for creating new sinkhole on Sturgeon Creek path

After a massive water-filled hole on a Sturgeon Creek active-transportation pathway took more than a year to fix, a new sinkhole has opened nearby.

In June 2023, the Free Press reported on a gaping depression stretching seven metres long, three metres wide and up to a metre deep that opened on a pathway leading to a playground on Amarynth Crescent near the Sturgeon Creek active-transportation route. The city finally made repairs in October 2024.

Now, about 12 metres away from that spot, a new crater has appeared. The hole, about three metres long and 2.5 metres wide, has been blocked off using metal rods and plastic netting, but resident Philip Kaban said the opening is getting larger.

“This big hole in the middle is getting bigger and bigger,” Kaban said Thursday.

ER wait times have hit all-time highs in Winnipeg and are impacting nearly all aspects of hospital operations

On most days at Health Sciences Centre’s adult emergency department, all 58 treatment beds are filled with sick patients. Another dozen or so brought in by ambulance line the hallways on stretchers, with only one nurse to look after them.

Out in the waiting room, about 30 or 40 people — sometimes more — are slouched in chairs in pain or discomfort, waiting hours to see a doctor. Most have been assessed by a triage nurse, but many will have to wait 10 to 20 hours to be examined by a physician because there’s no room for them in the treatment area.

Some patients leave because they can no longer tolerate the excruciating wait, only to return days later, sicker than they were before.

Welcome to the emergency department at Manitoba’s largest hospital, where some of the highest-acuity patients seek medical care but now face delays that were unimaginable a few years ago.