When the moon hits your eye, it must be La Pizza Week

Thousands are still without power in Winnipeg after high winds and thunderstorms knocked out power lines Sunday.

About 4,000 Manitoba Hydro customers were still dealing with outages this morning after crews worked to restore power in the Westwood and River Heights areas, Hydro spokesman Peter Chura said. On Sunday, Hydro reported outages affecting approximately 6, 700 customers.

The high winds and heavy rain brought down trees and broke power poles, causing "very severe damage," in River Heights, one of the hardest-hit neighbourhoods, while some of the damage in the Westwood area appeared to be caused by lightning strikes, Chura said.

Thunderstorms rolled in at about 6 p.m. Sunday and brought heavy rain and high winds to some areas of the province. Winnipeg received about 35 mm of rain, while some areas got almost double that. More than 62 mm was recorded at The Forks and 68.8 mm was recorded at Portage Southport, according to Environment Canada.

Children entering kindergarten are starting school this fall. While the 2.5-hour kindergarten day commonly found in Manitoba schools sounds like a pleasant transition to the school system, in truth it remains one of the biggest missing pieces of the child-care puzzle.

Province-wide, families face a stressful dilemma — if they are lucky enough to have child care, they have to leave work at lunch and shuttle a child from school to child care; if they don’t, they must reduce hours, or forgo working or education, because they don’t have child care for their kindergartener.

The Government of Manitoba has made progress on making child care more affordable and accessible. But we have largely left one enormous piece untouched — part-day kindergarten. Why is publicly funded education for kindergarten still only 2.5 hours a day? To date, British Columbia, Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island have all implemented full-day, publicly funded kindergarten. The Manitoba School Boards Association passed a resolution in 2025 to implement full-day kindergarten programming, but the province has not provided sufficient funding to implement it province-wide.

There are currently 13,600 children in kindergarten in Manitoba. With a coverage rate for licensed child care of 32.3 per cent, roughly 5,000 families with kindergarteners lack access to licensed child care during the part of the day when their child is not in school. That is a precarious position to put any family in.