A new sweet spot

Hutterite colonies embrace the manufacturing business – while staying faithful to their way of life

Tucked away at Oak Bluff Hutterite Colony, past rows of communal housing and farm buildings, Aaron Maendel tinkers in a laboratory.

Black-and-white sheets smeared with grey-test formulas cover a counter. A Thermotron — a refrigerator-looking machine — is powered off but standing by to simulate any desired temperature.

Maendel moves to a worktop littered with partly full mixing cups. He pulls out a small, rectangular sample — a sheet showing the drying time of his new fixation, floor coatings.

“Very simple, actually. Very simple machine. Drags a stick through the mud,” Maendel says.

‘Tough part of the business’

Relief? Regret? Rage?

How are the Winnipeg Jets feeling following Friday’s Connor Hellebuyck trade — particularly those with deep roots and strong bonds with the franchise goaltender who now finds himself a member of the New Jersey Devils?

“It was a bit of a cloud hanging over our heads,” captain Adam Lowry admitted on Saturday. “It’s nice we can look forward now. We don’t have to keep talking about it. We’ve got guys that want to be here.”

That was a bit of a common theme around the room following an outdoor practice at Princess Auto Stadium ahead of Sunday’s Heritage Classic game against the Montreal Canadiens.

Opening of Portage and Main shows even seemingly insurmountable impasses can be overcome

There are places in a city that become more than places. Portage and Main is one of them. For generations of Winnipeggers, the intersection has represented downtown, traffic, development and civic identity. Its reopening to pedestrians in 2025, after 46 years of closure, was about more than crossing a street. It was a reminder that decisions made by one generation can shape the choices available to another — and that even seemingly permanent decisions can be reconsidered.

I have spent much of my professional life thinking about Winnipeg as a planner, working in public, private and non-profit settings. My PhD research gave me an opportunity to examine Portage and Main differently: not simply as a debate about cars and pedestrians, but as a window into how power operates in a city. I reviewed 569 archival documents spanning the 1960s to the present, interviewed 48 planners with experience in Winnipeg, and mapped the relationships between planners, politicians, developers, engineers, residents, businesses and advocacy groups.

What emerged was a story about how planning decisions become embedded in a city’s institutions, agreements, infrastructure, professional practices and political expectations — shaping not only what gets built, but who gets to influence what gets built.

The closure of Portage and Main in 1979 did not remain a decision confined to a particular political moment. Over time, it was reinforced by development agreements, physical infrastructure, property relationships, traffic-engineering practices, administrative routines, and public narratives about mobility and downtown revitalization. The people who made many of those original decisions eventually left office. The arrangements they created remained. Later planners inherited them.

A new sweet spot

Leave it to an ice-cream shop to serve up a “soft” opening.

Dug & Betty’s Ice Creamery (309 Des Meurons St.) is the latest in a wave of ice-cream spots to open throughout the city, including Chaeban in late 2017 and Milksmith on Corydon Avenue earlier this year.

Currently serving up 16 flavours of ice cream, Dug & Betty’s is the brainchild of the Kirouac family, best-known for InFerno’s Bistro, located just across the street from the ice-cream shop. “We’ve been using the soft opening for a good testing period to see which flavours are really popular,” says general manager Chris Kirouac, adding they’ve been experimenting with ube (pronounced “ooo-bay”), a yam-based frozen dessert of Filipino origins, which has been “flying out the door.”

Named after Chris’ father Fern’s two basset hounds, Dug & Betty’s is serving up its frozen treats from the takeout window while work is completed on a 20-plus person parlour and a patio that can seat as many. Fern continues making the desserts at InFerno’s, while taking on more of a management/advisory role at the bistro, entrusting the kitchen team to head chef Sean McGillivray. Once desserts are done, he’ll pop across the street to work on ice-cream flavours at Dug & Betty’s. “My little brother (Zack) and my dad are the ones making all the ice cream,” Chris says.

Province orders ban on private teacher-student messaging

Manitoba teachers are no longer allowed to text or use social media to contact a student – regardless of whether they coach a school sports team or supervise other activities outside typical instruction times.

Final legal judgment rendered in Canadian Wheat Board saga

A judge has thrown out a class-action lawsuit that sought damages for certain grain farmers in relation to the end of the Canadian Wheat Board monopoly by the federal government.

It’s the last of extensive litigation over the dissolution of the board.

Manitoba Court of King’s Bench Justice Chris Martin, in a decision this month, dismissed farmer Edward Andrew Dennis’s 2017 civil claim against the federal attorney general and G3 Global Grain Group, the successor to the wheat board.

The wheat board was created in 1935 as a voluntary marketing program and transformed into a compulsory marketing agency in which farmers were required to sell their wheat and barley to it.