Family’s archive holds subtle secrets

Family’s archive holds subtle secrets

Every family has its stories, secrets and unconventional relatives. Catherine’s Mennonite, rural Alberta family is no different.

Catherine is the narrator of Dora Dueck’s new novel, All That Belongs. Dueck, who lived in Winnipeg for years but now lives and writes in British Columbia, is a former McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award winner for her novel, 2010’s This Hidden Thing.

In the opening chapter of Dueck’s new novel, Catherine has just retired from the regional archives in Winnipeg where she has spent decades conserving history. Planning to spend her post-employment days volunteering, walking, reading books and trying new recipes, she quickly becomes restless and decides instead to finally turn her attention to her own unexamined family history. As her husband Jim had told her, as an archivist, “she ought to be at home with her past.”

Catherine is particularly interested in finding out more about the events and unspoken emotions surrounding the deaths of her beloved and charismatic older brother Darrell and her eccentric Uncle Must. Uncle Must had farmed with Catherine’s father and lived with Catherine’s family during much of her youth. Strange, foreboding, judgmental and reticent, he had always been a source of embarrassment for her.

ER wait times have hit all-time highs in Winnipeg and are impacting nearly all aspects of hospital operations

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.

The trolls inside the Conservative tent

The Conservative Party of Canada has a troll problem. And it’s coming from inside the tent.

Once, trolls existed only in imagination. They were figures of mythical proportion, big and small. They lived solitary lives under bridges, in caves, or forests. They were considered dim-witted and mean. Best avoided.

Today, they are real, unavoidable, and ubiquitous on social media. They are anything but solitary. There are tribes of them out there and tribal is how they think and post. As for dim-witted and mean, others can opine but they are uniformly mean and dismissive.

Mean to anyone who disagrees with their views. Dismissive of any view but their own. They distribute questionable, at best, facts and opinions grounded in hostility towards anything or anyone deemed disagreeable or heretical to their world view.

Executive exodus continues at Shared Health with three recent departures

Manitoba’s provincial health authority is looking for its fourth chief financial officer since 2023 and additional replacements after the recent departures of three executives.

Canada vows dollar-for-dollar tariff retaliation, suspends trade talks with U.S.

OTTAWA - A last-ditch effort to reach a new trade deal before a midnight tariff deadline failed Friday, as Prime Minister Mark Carney suspended talks with the United States and summoned his negotiators back to Ottawa.

The decision meant new 50 per cent tariffs on billions of dollars in Canadian exports to the U.S. took effect at 12:01 a.m., and Carney vowed Canada would retaliate with equal measures of its own.

"In recent weeks, we made important progress toward improving Canada's position as having the best deal in the world with the U.S.," Carney said in a statement just before Trump's tariff deadline.

"However, that progress has not been enough to meet our objectives for Canadians."