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Kinder, gentler drug crackdown finds support, tempered expectations in Main Street area

Drawing a lighter from his pocket, a shirtless man perched on a concrete wall outside United Way Winnipeg’s Main Street headquarters heats a substance in a glass pipe and moves the tube toward his mouth.

Lac du Bonnet slowly healing from devastating fire

LAC DU BONNET — Fifteen months after devastating wildfires ripped through Lac du Bonnet, claiming two lives and destroying more than a dozen homes, residents are trying their best to build back better.

Along the winding gravel path that is Wendigo Road outside Lac du Bonnet, new timber peeks through patches of charred forest. Homes and cottages are beginning to take shape after fire raced through the neighbourhood at record speed and levelled at least 18 homes on the road.

Table saws and nail guns ring in the distance while Brian Curtis plots out where his new cottage will go. Curtis bought his previous cottage 19 years ago and had recently levelled the foundation.

He and his wife, Pam, had been thinking about long-term renovations when the May 13, 2025 fire swept away all their work and memories.

50 years of rare tall grass prairie celebrated

Kristin Bestvater is always glad when she heads to Winnipeg’s St. James neighbourhood and visits the Living Prairie Museum.

“It’s beautiful,” Bestvater said of the 13-hectare site, which is one of the last remaining tall grass prairies in North America. “I don’t know how many other cities would have something like this.”

The Island Lakes resident and her nine-year-old son were among the hundreds of people who gathered at the museum on Saturday to celebrate its 50th anniversary.

Designated a park in 1974, it officially became the Living Prairie Museum in 1976 with the opening of an interpretive centre which houses a gallery of exhibits, a gift shop and an observation deck.

Vibrant Norwood apartment garden a labour of love to honour green thumb’s late partner

St. Vital resident Rob Duncan can’t pinpoint when he first noticed an award-winning garden blanketing the grounds of a two-storey St. Mary’s Road apartment block, near Coniston Street.

Perhaps he was on his way home from work and caught a glimpse of it out of the corner of his eye. Or maybe he was running errands in the Norwood Flats area and paused to admire the array of annuals, perennials and potted plants that extends from the block’s doorway to the front curb.

What Duncan does know for certain is that after spying the urban oasis, twice fêted in Take Pride Winnipeg’s annual Winnipeg in Bloom competition, he couldn’t unsee it.

“First of all, the pink building really stands out,” Duncan says, referring to the brightly painted California Apartments complex at 268 St. Mary’s Rd. “But then you have the pergola, the rock garden, the flowers and trees… a sea of colour on a very busy street.”

Suspension upheld for teen hockey player involved in hazing

A high school hockey player who was found to have been involved in sexualized hazing of rookie teammates lost his suspension appeal.

The youth player was barred from Hockey Canada-sanctioned activities. He was handed the four-year and nine-month suspension from sanctioned hockey after an interim ban issued in March 2024.

He appealed his suspension late last year to the Sport Dispute Resolution Centre of Canada, an independent conflict tribunal, but the centre upheld the youth’s suspension, according to a written decision issued earlier this year.

An independent investigator who probed the hockey player’s actions described the youth as a veteran player who both participated in and co-ordinated the “assigning” of rookie team members to veteran players to perform tasks for them. He himself was “assigned” a rookie, the decision said.