Pals may envy your marriage’s level of trust

Across Manitoba, we’re rapidly moving toward a more electrified future, as homes, businesses, industries, and transportation increasingly turn to electricity. This transition offers a significant opportunity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but it also requires us to rethink how we plan for and participate in our energy future.

Manitoba Hydro’s 2025 integrated resource plan (IRP), currently under review with the Public Utilities Board, projects that our province will need significant additional capacity over the next decade to meet growing electricity demand. Much of the public discussion following the IRP has focused on how to meet that growing demand and what new generation sources may need to be built.

These are important conversations, but I believe there’s another question that deserves just as much attention.

How much of that growing demand can we address by using energy more efficiently?

On the same morning, the Free Press carried two pieces written from opposite vantage points, arriving at the same locked door.

Charles Bernstein, writing as a gastroenterologist, described a nurse-practitioner program at Health Sciences Centre that gave patients with inflammatory bowel disease somewhere to turn before their illness forced them to an emergency room. It was then not funded to continue, and it ended. A service that had been approved, put in place, and shown to work was allowed to lapse.

Tom Brodbeck, writing as a columnist, described Shared Health, an organization created eight years ago as a fourth layer of administration added to the three the system already had — Manitoba Health, the regional authorities, and hospital administrations. He asked what this layer has done for patient care that those three could not, found no one able to answer, and concluded that the province should either make the case or let the structure go.

One writer watched something that worked disappear. The other watched something no one can justify persist. Their accounts are two symptoms of one disease.

DEAR MISS LONELYHEARTS: I’m a married woman who went to the Winnipeg Folk Festival with my ex-boyfriend from my hippie days, and it was great! All evening, it felt like being magically transported back to a simpler time.

So why was going together considered sleazy by some people? I just had lunch with two old girlfriends who said their husbands would never trust them to go on a “date” with an old ex-boyfriend. Why did they have to make a dating inference like that?

Yes, this guy and I have partners we love in our lives, and we each have grandchildren. So, our folk fest get-together was just a fun exchange of memories from the past, as well as stories about our present mates and children. We listened to music and talked for hours — we both loved it.

At the end of the lunch, one of my girlfriends poked me in the ribs, and said, “So, confess — when are you going to see him again?” It was like she was salivating and could hardly wait to hear Chapter 2 of an affair in the works!

Don’t settle for being ‘reasonable facsimile’

DEAR MISS LONELYHEARTS: I always fall in love when the leaves start turning to fall colours. But, this year I have a big problem that could get me in terrible trouble. My heart is burning for a guy I can’t have — because he used to be married to my older sister. My sister is “possessive for life” and would divorce me as a family member if I took up with him.

Still, he’s been calling me at night to talk about her and I have been giving him advice during the long calls. You know what that means — a lot of things are being said in conversation after midnight, especially when both of us have been drinking wine!

The trouble is I know deep down I’m only a substitute for my older sister. I even look like her! He was crazy about her, but he wasn’t true to her, and she can’t forgive him for that!