Comic relief

Winnipeg high school football coach subject of hazing investigation

Manitoba’s independent teacher commissioner is investigating the head coach of the Grant Park Pirates football program amid allegations of team hazing.

The AAAA varsity team is at the centre of a probe into allegations student-athletes who played for Doug Kovacs during the 2025-26 school year drew blood while carrying out a locker room ritual.

Multiple sources confirmed Kovacs was put on leave from Grant Park High School in the spring in response to a complaint about his coaching style.

“There’s a lot of different red flags here,” said one parent of a football player who was recently contacted about the case by the office of commissioner Noni Classen.

Manitoba Tories can learn from Poilievre’s mistake

Among the many errors made by Pierre Poilievre since becoming leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, his decision to attempt to persuade supporters of Max Bernier’s People’s Party and other right-wing groups to return to the Tory party ­— as opposed to adopting policies that would make the CPC more attractive to moderate Canadians — may be his greatest mistake.

Late lawyer Sid Green’s tenacity changed lives

The Free Press tribute to Sid Green (Man of conviction, July 4) captured so much of the man I knew: his intelligence, his tenacity, his independence and his willingness to say what he believed, whether or not it was popular.

But I would like to add something about the difference those qualities could make in the life of another person.

In 1996, at the age of 23, I was in an automobile accident after hitting a moose. I became a complete C4 quadriplegic, paralyzed from the neck down.

I was in deep trouble.

What can you do with $200 million?

Let’s see if I’ve got this right. In the article Carbon capture project gains support (June 30). Julia-Simone Rutgers writes that the direct carbon capture facility proposed by Deep Sky for construction in southwestern Manitoba will cost $200 million to build.

The company claims the facility will scrub 30,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year and inject it 1,000 metres into the ground. To do this, it will need to draw up to 15,000 megawatts of power from the Manitoba Hydro grid for the first stage of the project. The project will be financed by selling carbon credits.

To put this into perspective, the Canadian industrial carbon price is set at $130 per tonne. At that price, Deep Sky will have to sell more than 1.5 million tonnes of carbon just to cover the upfront cost of building the plant. That’s over 51 years’ worth of carbon credits. And that doesn’t even cover the everyday operating costs, such as the electricity needed to run the plant.

Some studies suggest it requires about 2,000-2,500 kilowatt hours to electricity to capture one tonne of CO2 and inject it into the ground. To capture 30,000 tonnes, that’s about 60 million kWh. Even if Manitoba Hydro sells it to the facility for only $0.035/kWh, that’s an additional $70 per tonne.

Comic collection chronicles fear, uncertainty and hope amidst COVID-19's early days

As we move into a possible third wave of COVID-19, the early days of the pandemic in spring 2020 are starting to feel like a distant past, when everything was in flux and there was neither an old nor a new normal. Wondering whether to wear masks, leaving groceries in the garage for three days and searching high and low for toilet paper all seem like experiences of another era.

These early days of pandemic uncertainty, anxiety and disruption are captured in all their rich diversity and strangeness in COVID Chronicles, an exquisite anthology of 64 original short comics from around the world that document the emergence of the virus and its effects, alongside the rise of Black Lives Matter and other social justice movements.

Most of the comics are six pages or less, and there are stories and styles for all tastes, from black-and-white indie comics to watercolour memoirs to brightly coloured superheroes smashing the virus. The artists and writers range from well-known indie creators to mainstream comics artists to first-time cartoonists, and the diversity of hand-drawn and digital styles make this an excellent compendium of 21st-century cartooning in itself.

Some of the comics situate COVID-19 in a longer history of pandemics, others depict the experiences of patients and doctors, and many focus on individual stories of adults and kids adjusting to lives narrowed to the home and transformed through the internet. Economic precarity and inequality is an important theme alongside the medical narratives, and the initial focus on the virus itself expands to comics about evictions, layoffs, political corruption and racism as crucial experiences of the pandemic.