Tallest Man on Earth not playing folk fest

An opportunity for corporate good

Re: Giant Tiger to close downtown store (July 31); Giant Tiger decision creates giant void for desperate population downtown (Aug. 1)

The recently announced November closing of the Giant Tiger store at Donald Street and Ellice Avenue is cause for some alarm. As a self-described community-focused, family discount store, the grocery and clothing chain has become an important part of Winnipeg’s downtown fabric, catering to, in Niigaan Sinclair’s words, “… people living less-privileged lives: people working low-paying jobs; those with no fixed address and the homeless population…”

Other existing downtown shopping options have anecdotally been described as too expensive and unaffordable.

It’s outrageous. You’re at your hobby farm in the country, just pottering around, so you stuff the $580,000 in your pocket under the sofa cushions temporarily, just to get it out of the way. Then you forget it when you are gathering things up to go back to the city. It could happen to anybody.

However, thieves break into your country house while you’re away and steal the money. You consider reporting it to the police, but you know they are struggling to keep up with the crime wave, so you decide to forget about it.

Even though it was foreign currency, you don’t report it to the tax authorities, either, because you never got to spend it. Or something like that.

But then events take a turn decidedly for the worse. A man called Arthur Fraser sends a dossier to the police reporting that you got the money and that it was not actually $580,000 but a whole $4 million. And since Mr. Fraser was the country’s former chief spy, they take him seriously and come to you looking for answers.