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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 02/02/2017 (3487 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
The Great Skate
Winnipeggers love to get out for a good skate in winter, whether it be at a local rink or on one of the two rivers that cut through the city. Anyone who has visited The Forks on a winter weekend can attest to the hundreds who convene where the Red and the Assiniboine converge and take to the ice.
Which is almost certainly one of the reasons the local chapter of the November Project, a group of fitness enthusiasts who meet bright and early for gruelling workouts every Wednesday morning, have organized an event on Sunday, Feb. 5, to help celebrate the season.
The Great Skate is a six-kilometre race that begins on the ice at The Forks and wraps up on the Red River Mutual Trail. Don’t be intimidated — the race is open to skaters of all skill levels. In fact, if you don’t have skates, the rental shop at The Forks will be open beforehand for all your needs.
After the race, participants can stick around for an awards ceremony, as well as a brunch by Nuburger and Tall Grass Prairie at The Common at The Forks. Hey, with Sunday’s forecast looking brisk, nobody will judge you if you tucked into a pint of stout or a hearty glass of red wine from the kiosk at the market, right?
Registration is free, while the brunch costs $12. To register in advance, visit wfp.to/gcE; otherwise, skaters can register in person between 8 and 8:45 a.m. in the atrium at The Forks.
—Ben MacPhee-Sigurdson
BORIS MINKEVICH / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS
Starting From Baroque
Winnipeg opera buffs can get a taste of five famous shows this week, thanks to the University of Manitoba Opera Theatre class.
The annual excerpts show by students from the Desautels Faculty of Music is called Starting From Baroque and debuts Wednesday, Feb. 8, at 7:30 p.m. at the John J. Conklin Theatre at the university’s Taché Arts Complex, 162 Dafoe Rd. W. Two more performances are scheduled: Friday, Feb. 10 at 7:30 p.m. and Saturday, Feb. 11, at 2:30 p.m.
The group will perform excerpts from Claudio Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo; Francesco Cavalli’s L’Egisto; The Marriage of Figaro by Mozart; A Midsummer’s Night Dream by Benjamin Britten and The Seagull by Thomas Pasatieri.
Tickets are $20 for adults and $12 for students, and can be purchased at the Music General Office, Room T319 at the Taché Arts Complex, or with cash at the door.
— Alan Small
Mozart
Cathy Jones
If you’re a fan of CBC satirical news show This Hour Has 22 Minutes, and if a particular source of your laughs is Canadian comedy veteran Cathy Jones, maybe a short highway drive isn’t too much to ask.
Jones is currently touring Canada with her one-woman show, Stranger to Hard Work, and her only Manitoba stop is on Friday, Feb. 3 at 7:30 p.m. at the William Glesby Theatre in Portage la Prairie. The show is a mix of standup comedy and soul-searching confessions that finds Jones discussing a range of topics that includes the aging process, living in the age of social media and dealing with attention deficit disorder.
Tickets for the show are $45, available at the William Glesby Centre.
— Brad Oswald
SUPPLIED
Cathy Jones
Shärt International Comedy Film Festival
Short. Long. In between. From Australia to Sweden, and from Gimli to Transcona. The fifth annual Shärt International Comedy Film Festival has the screen-silliness scene very well covered. The event, which takes place Saturday, Feb. 4, at the Park Theatre and is hosted by local favourite Big Daddy Tazz, features comedy films in three categories — Sharty Shorts (less than one minute in length), Regular (one to 20 minutes) and Longer Laughs (20 to 60 minutes).
SUPPLIED
Director BJ Verot
The well-populated regular-length category boasts entries from Spain, Britain, France, Lebanon, Australia, the U.S. and Canada; among this year’s local selections are Flashkick: A Kumite Revenge Story by Transcona’s BJ Verot; Imitations, a collaborative effort by Winnipeg-based Ian Bawa, Markus Henkel, Milos Mitrovic and Fabian Velasco that screened at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival; and The Audience Choice Runner-up by Trevor Kristjanson, Kevin Tabachnick and Chaz Beaudette of Gimli.
Tickets for the event, which include pre-show cocktail reception and gala screening, are $15, available at the Park Theatre or EventBrite.ca.
— Brad Oswald
Imitations, a film by Ian Bawa, Markus Henkel, Milos Mitrovic and Fabian Velasco.
Soul Sisters
When Danielle Sturk was just 14 years old, she decided to leave the Catholic Church, leading her concerned mother to tell the rebellious future filmmaker that it is always more effective to rock the boat “when you’re still inside the boat.”
Coincidentally, that exact sentiment is expressed by a nun, Sister Darlaene, in Sturk’s documentary Soul Sisters, a multi-faceted look at the Catholic Sisters of Manitoba starting Friday, Feb. 3, at Cinematheque.
Sturk initially took on the subject out of curiosity.
“I have a fairly strong feminist bent and I had been brought up Catholic and this was something I had wanted to look into,” says Sturk, now 49. “What are these women doing there? What is appealing to them in what is, to my mind, a fairly patriarchal construct where women aren’t given a voice, or a place?
“I thought it was an opportunity for me to explore that and, at the same time, give voice to a group of people who don’t necessarily have a public voice.”
Even if Sturk herself remains in the camp of the lapsed Catholic, the film is very much a celebration of the women who provide aid, comfort and relief to segments of society most would prefer to ignore.
“It definitely made an impression on me,” says Sturk, whose previous work includes the Rachel Browne dance documentary A Good Madness. “I think for many people who haven’t actually met nuns or haven’t rubbed shoulders with them, they’ll discover highly educated people for the most part, varied people. They’re fascinating and they’re individuals.”
Sturk hasn’t changed her mind about returning to the fold, but she is impressed by the work being done in the name of the church.
“I still feel there’s a lot of raging against the night to do there,” she says. “But what I did see was people who feel that social justice is terribly important.
“If I were to take anything from my background, it’s that early Christianity was about taking care of thy neighbour, which relates to right now with our whole political environment,” she says. “A society should be judged by how they take care of the weak and vulnerable and that’s what these nuns have done.”
Sturk’s 55-minute doc runs with a shorter film from 2012, Les Filles de la Croix, director Dominique Rey’s meditative examination of the lives of a disappearing order of nuns in Winnipeg, Brazil, Argentina and France. Showtimes are at www.winnipegcinematheque.com.
On most days at Health Sciences Centre’s adult emergency department, all 58 treatment beds are filled with sick patients. Another dozen or so brought in by ambulance line the hallways on stretchers, with only one nurse to look after them.
Out in the waiting room, about 30 or 40 people — sometimes more — are slouched in chairs in pain or discomfort, waiting hours to see a doctor. Most have been assessed by a triage nurse, but many will have to wait 10 to 20 hours to be examined by a physician because there’s no room for them in the treatment area.
Some patients leave because they can no longer tolerate the excruciating wait, only to return days later, sicker than they were before.
Welcome to the emergency department at Manitoba’s largest hospital, where some of the highest-acuity patients seek medical care but now face delays that were unimaginable a few years ago.
After a massive water-filled hole on a Sturgeon Creek active-transportation pathway took more than a year to fix, a new sinkhole has opened nearby.
In June 2023, the Free Press reported on a gaping depression stretching seven metres long, three metres wide and up to a metre deep that opened on a pathway leading to a playground on Amarynth Crescent near the Sturgeon Creek active-transportation route. The city finally made repairs in October 2024.
Now, about 12 metres away from that spot, a new crater has appeared. The hole, about three metres long and 2.5 metres wide, has been blocked off using metal rods and plastic netting, but resident Philip Kaban said the opening is getting larger.
“This big hole in the middle is getting bigger and bigger,” Kaban said Thursday.
The Manitoba government recently held public forums to discuss regulations for Bill 51, the Public Sector Artificial Intelligence and Cybersecurity Governance Act. I was able to participate in the meeting in Brandon and there was also a session in Winnipeg.
I was a bit fired up, ready to rail about data centres and phone terms and conditions and generally give it to big tech. The discussion, however, was focused on what the public sector responses should be regarding cybersecurity, data and privacy protections, and AI usage in government.
With all the recent attention on social media bans, the harms of AI, misinformation and the like, I was somewhat disappointed that these would not be tackled directly in this meeting. Those issues may be discussed at future forums.
At this event, as focus groups developed responses, the discussion between private companies and public governance kept getting mixed in, pointing out the reliance of government services on private companies in running their digital operations. As government operations become more dependent on digital infrastructure and towards AI agency and control, rethinking how technology is implemented may be crucial to our democracy.
Chris Kitching6 minute readUpdated: Yesterday at 5:22 PM CDT
Manitoba hasn’t agreed to put American liquor back on shelves despite Prime Minister Mark Carney’s request while his government finalizes a trade deal with the U.S. to avoid new tariffs.
Nicole Buffie4 minute readWednesday, Aug. 19, 2026
Not everyone enters medical school with a built-in study buddy.
Sisters Maya and Dana Jalal joined 135 of their classmates to don white coats and mark the beginning of their journey through the University of Manitoba’s Max Rady College of Medicine Wednesday morning.
Maya, 22, and Dana, 21, were accepted into medical school at the same time.
“Thankfully, we both got accepted in the same area, same time. So we decided we’d rather go together than apart,” Maya said. “It’ll be nice seeing different perspectives during our studies. We are siblings, but we each have our own perspectives, our own lived experiences.”
As on a Sunday night, a certain back-to-school or -work melancholy sets in. The big Manitoba festivals have come and gone. You’re starting to take a reckoning of all the craft beer and food-truck calories you’ve sopped up for two months, without having done as much hiking, canoeing or yard work as you promised yourself.
The wind begins breathing threats of fall, but the golden colours, jack-o’- lanterns and corn mazes aren’t here yet to reassure you of fall’s dusky pleasures. Instead, on a perfect 22 C day, you find yourself having flashbacks of Winnipeg winter nights colder than Mars.
