Guilbeault praises CBC’s plans to boost local news coverage

Seven years sought for serial harasser

Alexander Beaton finished serving a two-year jail sentence for criminally harassing six women and didn’t last two days in the community before he was back at it, sending unwanted obscene messages and videos to a dozen women.

Now prosecutors are seeking a seven-year prison sentence for the 30-year-old Winnipeg man, whose latest string of victims includes a police officer who investigated his earlier crimes.

“He essentially continued (offending) unabated,” Crown attorney Brett Rach told provincial court Judge Malcolm McDonald at a sentencing hearing Friday. “It caused more than a nuisance to these victims — it caused them to fear for their safety.”

Beaton pleaded guilty to 14 charges of criminal harassment, sending indecent communications and breaching court orders for a campaign of harassment waged between 2015 and 2025.

Wind and batteries the best bet

For years, Manitoba Hydro has claimed that we can’t rely on wind turbines during multi-day or even multi-week cold snaps. Although turbines can be equipped with cold-weather packages to operate down to –30 C, as at the St. Leon and St. Joseph wind farms, Hydro routinely warns of the possibility of a lengthy winter wind drought at the same time as electricity use peaks due to high heating demand.

This concern is largely why Hydro is pushing to build a 750 MW fossil gas-fired power plant in Brandon, rather than building more wind farms.

But new analysis by Alexander Hogeveen Rutter, a former energy modeller for Manitoba Hydro, shows that wind-generation reliability well exceeds assumptions and that, if combined with battery energy storage, it could meet even the most bullish load growth forecasts. (These findings were presented to the Public Utilities Board on Aug. 31, and the full report can be found on Climate Action Team Manitoba’s website.)

Hydro’s low estimate of wind generation stems from its erroneous assumption that all new wind farms will be built in the same locations as Manitoba’s two existing wind farms (St. Leon and St. Joseph). Because these two wind farms are only 100 kilometres apart, they have highly correlated wind speeds; when wind conditions are low at one site, they likely are at the other as well. This is not how new wind farms will be built in Manitoba. Instead, they will be located in different areas and use much taller turbines with higher generation potential than the existing wind farms.

Guilbeault praises CBC’s plans to boost local news coverage

OTTAWA - Culture Minister Steven Guilbeault is praising CBC/Radio-Canada’s plans to increase local news coverage as part of its new five-year strategy.

"I think there's lots of really good elements in this plan. I really like the fact that the public broadcaster wants to invest more in local news across the country," he told reporters on Parliament Hill Tuesday.

While Guilbeault pointed to the Liberals’ promised funding increase for the CBC, he would not say whether it will be included in the upcoming federal budget.

The Liberals promised an initial $150 million boost to the broadcaster's annual funding during the spring election campaign. They also said they would make the CBC’s federal funding statutory, which would make it harder for future governments to eliminate it.

Nothing wrong with planting trees, but it won’t get province very far on path to net zero

Manitoba’s new plan to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050 is a lot of things. It’s detailed. It’s certainly comprehensive in scope. But when it is all said and done, it is still very much a work in progress.

Food literacy curriculum on the menu

Manitoba has a new recipe for health class and “food literacy” is a key ingredient.

The in-class portion of phys-ed has historically involved lessons about puberty, the risks of consuming drugs and dissecting Canada’s food guide.

A new pilot program asks teachers to expand their nutrition units and include in-depth discussions about how everything from diet culture to food insecurity affects eating habits.

“This is really moving beyond a conception of food as only fuel, where you just boil down food to its calories, its vitamins,” said Sarah Elvins, a food historian at the University of Manitoba who researches popular culture and marketing.

Winnipeg, police and downtown crime

A safer downtown is not much use if people are still afraid to walk there.

That is the uncomfortable message from Winnipeg’s latest police citizen survey, and one city council should take seriously.

Downtown crime has fallen this year, according to the most recent police statistics. Violent crime is down even more. But for most Winnipeggers, the downtown still feels like a place to avoid, particularly after dark.

Only 44 per cent of survey respondents said they feel very or reasonably safe walking alone downtown during the day. At night, that number plunges to just eight per cent. Among women, it is an appalling three per cent, compared with 14 per cent of men.