Cold days, warm memories

Planned Elmwood Hub project combines 115 mixed-income housing units, social supports, programs

A long-awaited project will aim to add 115 new homes in Elmwood, with on-site social programs to support some of its more vulnerable residents.

Scottish thriller writer muses on childhood winters in entertaining new memoir

For Scottish crime writer Val McDermid, January’s short and often gray days are the perfect time to conjure up tales of dark deeds. When bleak winter weather keeps all but the hardiest souls indoors, she huddles in her cozy home, deciphers scribbled words in her notebooks and creates her next novel.

“I don’t think that it’s any coincidence that the places where the shortest days last longest have such rich veins of noir fiction. Noir, after all, speaks of the physical dark as well as the psychological,” she writes in Winter: The Story of a Season.

McDermid has written over 30 novels, many of which fall under the “tartan noir” genre as coined by American writer James Ellroy. Her bestselling novels have won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller and the Crime Writers’ Association’s Gold Dagger and Cartier Diamond Award for outstanding achievement. Her Karen Pirie novels have been adapted into an Edgar Award-nominated ITV/Britbox show.

In her slim memoir, McDermid recounts stories from her childhood growing up in Kirkcaldy on Scotland’s East Coast. She includes personal stories and tidbits on the history of traditional autumn and winter celebrations in Scotland.

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.

Low-income residents of 114-year-old downtown block staggered by proposed rent hikes

Marcel Blanchette’s life has not travelled down a smooth road.

In 2014, he was violently assaulted in his home, an unprovoked attack that left him with severe injuries, including permanent brain damage. He underwent months of hospitalization and rehabilitation. During that time, he learned his possessions had been sold off when the Office of The Public Guardian and Trustee took over his affairs.

Twelve years later, he finds himself in another fight. This time, it comes in the form of a proposal from the new owners of the Conway Court apartment block that would nearly double his monthly rent. While he’s been able to live in the Kennedy Street unit with the support of disability income assistance for nearly five years, the sudden spike, he said, could leave him homeless.

“To go through that, and now I’m going through this, it’s another obstacle,” Blanchette told the Free Press. “I fought the Public Guardian and Trustee, and I’ll fight this too, with whatever I have.”

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.

Summer flooding sinks some fall harvest hopes

A number of Manitoba farmers say they are expecting this year’s harvest to be one of the worst they’ve seen after major flooding decimated fields at the start of summer.

Bob Elliot, who has been farming east of Stonewall for 43 years, said he’s expecting the operation’s 5,500 acres to produce roughly half their normal yield.

Stonewall has logged the most precipitation this summer, with 523 millimetres of rainfall between May 1 and Aug. 16, according to Manitoba’s weather conditions report.

Elliot said the amount of rain has created a “unique” situation for farmers. “This is something that I don’t think anyone around here has ever seen.”