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Team president locked out, day after speaking out on arena’s closure

A longtime team official in Manitoba’s hockey community says he’s being punished by the City of Winnipeg for speaking out about the poor condition of one of its rinks.

Barry Bonni, president of the River East Royal Knights, has occupied an office at Terry Sawchuk Memorial Arena for more than four decades.

On Friday, he was locked out.

“They’re on the war path,” Bonni said.

Austen adaptation a handsome, delicate cinematic dance

Marianne (Esmé Creed-Miles) can look rather bedraggled in this new version of Jane Austen’s first published novel, which has once again ignited the “loose hair” controversy that has raged among Janeites since the casually coiffed 2005 reimagining of Pride & Prejudice.

Purists might be vexed, possibly even discomfited or discomposed by some of the details in this take on Sense and Sensibility, part of a wave of Austen adaptations and Austen-adjacent material released to mark the 250th anniversary of the writer’s birth.

Would prudent Elinor (Daisy Edgar-Jones) be penning letters to a man to whom she is not engaged? Would even spirited Marianne be running barefoot through the woods?

Possibly not. But if director Georgia Oakley (Blue Jean) and rookie screenwriter Diana Reid don’t adhere to the strict letter of Austen’s work, they catch much of its spirit. This is a vivid and deeply felt examination of the enduring power of sisterhood, which is at the core of not just the 1811 novel, but of Austen’s own life in the profound importance of her relationship with her sister Cassandra.

Manitoba Hydro to replace dozens of electrical substations over 20 years

Manitoba Hydro is promising fewer power outages in Winnipeg once it replaces or converts 41 electrical substations in a project the utility says will last up to 20 years and cost as much as $1.2 billion.

Bayer Canada begins construction on new R&D facility in St. B

Instead of canola on Friday, there was sod.

But in two years’ time, by current estimates, the bare plot of land in a St. Boniface industrial park will hold canola samples and seeds for testing.

Bayer Canada officially broke ground on a 60,000-square-foot research and development facility Friday morning.

“It’s about bringing new and better innovation to farmers,” said Kacy Perry, Bayer Crop Science Canada’s country division head.

Author Emily St. John Mandel’s Exit Party a story of hope in dark times

If Emily St. John Mandel’s new novel Exit Party is in any way prophetic, Americans should be worried.

The B.C.-born, New York-based author’s bestselling fourth novel, 2014’s Station Eleven, chronicled a performing troupe in a post-pandemic world. The novel experienced a second wave of popularity when the COVID-19 pandemic took hold, and when HBO’s Station Eleven miniseries premièred in late 2021.

Mandel launches Exit Party, her seventh novel, at McNally Robinson Booksellers’ Grant Park location tonight, where she’ll be joined in conversation by Winnipeg novelist Joan Thomas.

Published in September by HarperCollins, Exit Party sees Mandel once again working in the near future, in this case in a novel that features two timelines — one (dubbed the A-side in the novel) where the U.S. has fractured into a number of small countries following a civil war, and another (the B-side) where a singular, autocratic surveillance state has tightened its grip over its citizens.

A Life's Story: Musician made great contributions, advocated for fellow artists

When a University of Manitoba dean came to inform Victor Davies that he was booted from pre-med in the late 1950s, it was — to permit a cliché — music to his ears.

“In his mind, what he heard was much more encouraging. He heard, ‘Follow your own dream. Listen to your own melody. Speak with your own voice,’” says Davies’s daughter, Heather.

Davies, who died at 87 from pancreatic cancer and PLS in late September, was nevertheless about to take a major gamble, one that would eventually earn him an honorary doctorate from the University of Manitoba and a nomination to the Order of Canada.

Few careers are as uncertain as music, and at a time when the composition departments were saying au revoir to tonality, embracing the heavily dissonant styles of France and Germany, Davies was about to go against the grain. He would soon find a new home across the border in Bloomington, Ind., where for four years he studied at Indiana University Jacobs School of Music.