Winnipeg author Van Rooy dies in Montreal

Hip-hop artist ready to release meticulously constructed album

The techniques of digital music production today are finicky.

Dizzingly so: a little surgical EQ to make your hi-hats less shrill, the subtle boost in the 30-Hz range to get your kick drum thumping just so, drawing out a reverb swell with a visual artist’s meticulousness.

If the artist is visually impaired, the challenge might seem next to impossible.

“It’s so tough. Spending hours on a little piece of audio, or, like, I want the delay on the word ‘home’ exactly — not the syllable after or before,” says Winnipeg-based musician Matthew Monias, whose stage name is Mattmac.

Retired sportscaster Scott Oake determined as fundraising for women's addictions treatment facility enters home stretch

For now, the patch of land just east of the Victoria Hospital doesn’t look like much: just a field of rocks, mounded dirt, and concrete piles driven into the earth. Yet when Scott Oake looks over the site, he can already imagine how it will look in just over a year’s time, when the new Anne Oake Family Recovery Centre is expected to open.

It’s easier to picture this time around. In 2020, when the recently-retired CBC sportscaster and his late wife, Anne, were building their first labour of intermingled grief and love, the Bruce Oake Recovery Centre for men, it was hard for him to wrap his mind around how a raw construction site could transform into a welcoming addictions treatment facility.

When that centre opened in 2021, Oake found it looked “almost identical” to the architect’s renderings. So it’s easy to hope the Anne Oake Centre will be the same. It will be the first facility of its kind, its founders believe, not only in Canada but in North America: a place where 50 to 70 women can pursue sobriety while staying with their children.

“At Bruce Oake there’s a culture of love, and most of all a culture of hope,” Oake said, speaking at the site Thursday after a media conference to announce the final push of the centre’s fundraising campaign. “I can feel it every time I walk into that building. And I know it will be the same here.”

Lone Manitoba 9/11 victim's legacy lives on helping Inuit students become nurses

On the night before the morning that everyone remembers, Ellen Judd spoke to her partner, Christine Egan, several times on the phone. Egan was in New York, where she’d gone to look after her nephews so her beloved brother, Michael, and his wife, Anna, could treat themselves to an anniversary vacation.

Usually, Judd would have been there, too. The couple had been together for more than 15 years, and loved sharing all the good parts of life. But at the time, she was an anthropology professor at the University of Manitoba, and the school year was just starting; she had classes the next day. Staying connected by phone would have to suffice.

In their calls that night, Judd remembers, Egan was happy. Christmas was the main topic. They were planning to spend the holiday with Judd’s family in Ontario, and talked about when to book flights. Egan was looking forward to that visit; Judd’s family “loved her to bits,” the now-retired professor says, and the affection was mutual.

The next day, Egan said, she planned to go into Manhattan with Michael. He was an executive at Aon, a global risk, retirement and health services corporation, and had an office on the 105th floor of the World Trade Centre’s South Tower.

Canadians loving Carney’s decision to stand tall against floundering U.S. bully

It’s hard to imagine a more dramatic political contrast than the one unfolding on opposite sides of the Canada-U.S. border.

Mark Carney is fighting a trade war with Donald Trump, taking the occasional verbal punch from the American president and imposing retaliatory tariffs on U.S. products.

And the prime minister is being rewarded for it politically.

Trump, meanwhile, is fighting pretty much everyone he can find — including some of America’s closest allies — and his own voters are increasingly giving him the political equivalent of a raised middle finger. That’s quite a tale of two leaders.

The plane truth about a dangerous president

U.S. President Donald Trump has crossed firmly into cutting-off-your-nose-to-spite-your-face territory.