Tread lightly when it comes to floating your fetish

Mark Carney’s campaign for middle powers

“You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose,” said former New York Governor Mario Cuomo forty years ago. Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney is now in the poetic phase of his campaign to create an alliance — maybe just a loose alliance — of middle powers who can resist the brutal strength of the great powers.

Carney knows how the world used to work, and how it is changing as the ‘rules-based international order’ fades away under the impact of the three great autocrats, Putin, Trump and Xi. “Middle powers must act together,” he told the Davos conference last January, “because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.”

“The old order is not coming back,” he told them. That should have been obvious to all of them, but many countries in Europe and beyond still clung to the belief that somehow, one of these days, maybe after Trump relinquishes power or dies, the old order can be resurrected.

In a single speech that catapulted him into the de facto position of leader of the middle powers, he disabused them of that fantasy and offered them a path to resistance instead. They gave him a standing ovation, a very rare thing at Davos — and he managed to convince them without mentioning any of the problematic powers by name. So I will.

Manitoba students able to opt out of classes with sensitive lessons on sex, drug use

Manitoba’s premier pledges to continue allowing parents to pull their kids from health class if content — be it related to human sexuality, substance use or otherwise — clashes with personal beliefs.

Wab Kinew said Tuesday the government’s overhaul of phys-ed and health curriculum in Manitoba schools won’t impact the ability for parents to opt-out of a lesson and deliver material as they see fit.

“As a parent, you are your child’s first and most important teacher and that will always be the case,” Kinew said, surrounded by hundreds of teenagers on the football field outside Kelvin High School during an announcement Tuesday.

More than 100 schools are taking part in a voluntary pilot project this fall. It’s the first systematic review of this curriculum in decades. The changes to kindergarten-to-Grade 12 courses will be mandated to all schools in September 2028.

Revealing statements by Trump about courts

Analyzing the utterances of U.S. President Donald Trump may seem like the ultimate sort of mug’s game — they are varied, contradictory, rambling, pugilistic, sometimes wheedling and the list goes on.

Safety officers responded to three assaults in first 4 1/2 months at downtown Hydro HQ

Manitoba Hydro Place beefed up its security after an employee was assaulted in the main-floor gallery while leaving work in January leading the Crown corporation to close the building to the public for several weeks while it hired and trained institutional safety officers.

Health Canada suspends plasma collection at Grifols Taylor Avenue clinic

Health Canada has suspended all plasma collection at Grifols’ Taylor Avenue facility while the private company continues to face scrutiny after two people died following donations at its Winnipeg clinics.

The suspension began Wednesday, although Grifols paused plasma collection in Canada on Aug. 14, two days after the federal department gave the Taylor Avenue site a non-compliant rating.

“Health Canada issued the suspension because Grifols had not effectively implemented some corrective and preventive actions and, overall, it failed to demonstrate that the Taylor Avenue site has implemented an effective quality management system,” the department said in a statement.

The penalty was first proposed Aug. 13. The site’s operating licence was partially suspended, Grifols said in a statement.

Manitoba budget reveals province underspent on crucial departments related to justice, public safety

While concerns about homelessness and public safety continue to make headlines in Manitoba, the two government departments mainly responsible for addressing them came in under budget last year.

The 2025-26 public accounts, released Monday, show Housing, Addictions and Homelessness underspent its budget of $869 million by $18 million. Manitoba Justice underspent its budget of $994 million by $34 million.

The 247-page public accounts report attributes the underspending in justice mainly to “reduced impacts of contingency liabilities,” such as a court ruling or legal settlement.

The report did not explain how and why Housing, Addictions and Homelessness underspent its budget last year as the province addresses those critical issues.