Back in The Bigs

As wildfire season rages, new book explores the frontlines of battling Canadian blazes

Mother Nature’s talking but we haven’t been listening, according to Jesse Winter, author of Wild Fire: Dispatches from a Country Ablaze, a book, released earlier this summer detailing Canada’s wildfire woes.

Currently, almost 1,000 wildfires across Northwestern Ontario, British Columbia, the Prairies, Northwest Territories and eastern provinces are burning in Canada. Forest fires also continue to wreak havoc in France, Spain and other European countries, and in the U.S. states of Oregon, California, Florida and Texas. While 2023 still rates as the world’s worst wildfire season, 2026 is hot on its heels.

Winter, a Vancouver-based, award-winning climate disaster photojournalist, spent more than two years on Wild Fire, his first book. In-depth research included working with firefighting crews and environmentalists as well as talking to researchers, politicians and evacuees. He says we need to rethink our views on wildfires or be prepared to watch more land go up in flames.

Canada, Winter writes, is “a country almost perfectly designed to burn.” At least 70 per cent of boreal forests, which cover one-third of the country, are stuffed with highly flammable spruce, fir, pine and tamarack trees as well as aspen, poplar and birch. With a wealth of available fuel, it’s no surprise, he writes, that an area twice the size of Vancouver Island burns every summer in Canada.

Nemat’s novel chronicles grandmother’s harrowing life in Russia and Iran

Mistress of the Persian Boarding House is the most enjoyable book I have read in the more than 15 years since I began reviewing books for the Free Press.

Author Marina Nemat’s prose, inspired by her paternal grandmother’s life, flows smoothly, like a babbling brook down a mountain.

Nemat is an Iranian-born Canadian writer and human rights activist known for her bestselling memoirs Prisoner of Tehran and After Tehran: A Life Reclaimed. Arrested at 16 for opposing Iran’s post-revolution regime, she endured torture and forced marriage in Evin Prison before emigrating to Canada in 1991.

Nemat’s grandmothers were both Russian, and she was brought up in a Russian Orthodox Christian family in Tehran. With their Iranian husbands, whom they had married before the Russian Revolution of 1917, both grandmothers fled from Russia to Iran as part of a massive wave of migration.

On eve of Folklorama, Ghana pavilion scrambles to replace stolen outfits

Volunteers from Folklorama’s Ghana pavilion scrambled to replace cultural costumes for about 40 young dancers after the outfits were stolen in Winnipeg days before the annual festival begins.

Two plastic storage bins containing the costumes, to be worn by children and teenagers, were taken from the trunk of a parked car on Banning Street, near Notre Dame Avenue in the West End, likely late Wednesday or early Thursday.

“I felt sad that this has happened. I felt completely devastated for the mother who had them in her car,” said pavilion co-ordinator Abigail Larson. “The initial feeling of sadness changed to, ‘OK, how do we make this a positive?’”

The costumes belong to the Ghana Union of Manitoba Dancers, whose members have rehearsed for months for Folklorama, which begins Sunday.

Hydro scrambling to restore power to remaining 4,500 customers after storm; some outages will continue into Saturday

Power outages could stretch into a third day for some Manitobans — mainly in and around Winnipeg — while crews continued to repair widespread damage caused by powerful thunderstorms.

About 4,500 Manitoba Hydro customers were still without electricity at 2:30 p.m. Friday, after more than 30,000 lost power while powerful winds brought down trees and power lines Wednesday night and early Thursday.

The Crown corporation said it is aiming to have all outages with greater numbers of customers restored by Friday night, but some customers may remain without power into Saturday.

“The challenge is just the sheer scale of this thing — hundreds of different outages spread across a large part of the city,” Hydro spokesman Peter Chura said. “Just getting to all of them in a timely fashion is very difficult.”

Downtown Keg closes… to reopen nearby

Downtown Winnipeg is without a Keg restaurant — for a couple of months, anyways.

The Keg Steakhouse and Bar vacated 115 Garry St. on Wednesday, after more than five decades at the location. It will open in a new Donald Street apartment tower this fall.

Its move comes after years of waiting. The DSM, at 185 Donald St., sat as a partially started apartment block after its developer stopped operating and sought creditor protection in April 2023. The developer began the project in 2019.

Carrington Real Estate took over in 2024. Part of the 14-storey site’s initial plans — pre-Carrington — was for the Keg to occupy the main floor.

Culture minister’s pledge sends officials on hunt for money to fix Islamic centre after apparent hate crime

Government officials were left scrambling Friday to explain why the province is paying for repairs at a mosque recently targeted in a potential hate crime after a $1 million security enhancement fund was fully allocated in June.