Replay: New Country Rehab performs live in the News Café

Fringe reviews #1: Choose your fighter, then your venue

Absolutely not a cult, Afeni, #Black Eye, Chekov Shorts, Fakespeare, The Ghost of a Flea, A Sexy Pigeon Show, The Shelter, Things That Go Bump, Viento.

The next Duff’s Ditch must be medical

A runaway rail trolley hurtles towards five people tied to the tracks. You stand at the switch lever. If you pull the lever, the trolley veers onto a sidetrack, where one person is tied down. Do nothing and five die. Pull the lever and one dies by your hand.

A health minister needs no introduction to the weight of that choice. Every budget season, governments confront this dilemma with one cruel modification — the lever switches between today and tomorrow. Down the near track sits this year’s emergency, a crowded emergency department, a surgical backlog, a crisis demanding a decision by Friday. Down the far track, in the distance, over the horizon, waits a geriatric demographic that has not arrived yet. Each year’s budget cannot simultaneously rescue both.

Philosophers treat the trolley scenario as a thought experiment. A health minister calls it Tuesday.

The actual choice is crueller, because both tracks hold real people. The stroke patient in today’s hallway deserves rescue, as do the patients down the line. Two scholars, Guido Calabresi and Philip Bobbitt, analyzed such allocations as tragic choices — scarcity forces a society to preserve one value by sacrificing another. Their darker observation concerned method. Societies rarely make these choices in the open. The lever keeps directing traffic away from the immediate noise, toward the far track.

‘Historic day’: two-year demolition of Arlington Bridge begins

The first pieces of the Arlington Bridge, a long-deteriorating Winnipeg landmark, were removed Thursday morning, nearly 115 years after it was built.

PCs cleared of election violation for ‘intimacy coach’ invoice

Manitoba’s elections commissioner has cleared the Progressive Conservatives of wrongdoing after a $3,800 expense for a car rental appeared on an invoice from a company offering “intimacy coach” services.

The findings from the commissioner bring an end to a complaint raised by the NDP in October 2024, when it was alleged the PCs violated the Election Financing Act by forging financial documents related to the previous year’s election campaign.

“I am satisfied that the expense was indeed for a car rental, as the invoice described,” Bill Bowles wrote in a letter addressed to both parties Wednesday.

Concerns over the invoice to Lucid Vitality were first raised by a former PC staffer, whose internal emails with party officials were published in the Winnipeg Sun.

Winnipeg Fringe Festival: 2026 show reviews

Not sure what to see at this year's Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival? All of the Free Press’s reviews will be published here.  Find a show and click to read its review.

Replay: New Country Rehab performs live in the News Café

Half of the Canadian quartet New Country Rehab arrived in Winnipeg and performed at the Winnipeg Free Press News Café this afternoon. Champagne James Robertson and John Showman made it into town, while band mates Ben Whiteley and Roman Tome were held back by an overbooked flight. All four will be live at Times Change(d) High and Lonesome Club tonight.

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The Toronto-based foursome has turned heads and pricked up many ears since forming six years ago as devotees of the music of the original Hank Williams.

Since that time, the band has developed its own, genuinely infectious sonic motif, sparked by the fiddle and voice of John Showman, the guitar and banjo of Champagne James Robertson and rooted in the standup bass of Ben Whiteley and the earthy rhythms of drummer Roman Tome.