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Conservatives tell Carney to show ‘backbone’ as trade team heads back to Washington

OTTAWA - Canada's top trade negotiators are heading back to Washington this week for more meetings with the Trump administration as the Opposition Conservatives urge Prime Minister Mark Carney to stop making concessions in pursuit of a tariff-free deal.

Negotiations between Canada and the United States have ramped up in recent weeks ahead of an Aug. 19 deadline that would see a range of Canadian exports hit with 50 per cent tariffs.

Canada-U.S. Trade Minister Dominic LeBlanc and Janice Charette, Canada's chief negotiator, will be back in Washington this week for another round of talks, LeBlanc's spokesman Gabriel Brunet told The Canadian Press on Sunday.

Canada's trade team has met with U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer twice in the past two weeks. Brunet said talks have broadly covered the newly threatened duties, existing sectoral tariffs and renegotiations of the Canada-U.S.-Mexico agreement, or CUSMA.

Memories of East Selkirk evoked on Zoon Monkman’s new album

At the dawn of the MP3 era, an adolescent Zoon Monkman didn’t have the money for an iPod or a Microsoft Zune, the short-lived competitor to Apple’s revolutionary personal-listening device.

What the recording artist from Brokenhead Ojibway Nation did have in his backpack was the catalogue for the Scholastic Book Club, where only one product demanded attention: an AM-FM radio pen that scoured the airwaves for connection with every click.

For Monkman — a Polaris Music Prize-nominated musician who records as Zoon and pioneered the “moccasingaze” genre, which blends the dreamy textures of shoegaze with the rhythms and energies of Indigenous song — his mother’s gift of the ballpoint pen was a means of both self-discovery and the development of his musical taste.

During lonely days as an elementary student at East Selkirk’s Happy Thought School, the device was also a recess-hour tether to distant worlds, where artists such as Feist, Avril Lavigne and Broken Social Scene were introduced by the enthusiastic voice of a man who called himself Ace Burpee.

As the world watches, Haiti’s hopes continue to fade

I wish that I had something uplifting and positive to say about the circumstances in Haiti today.

South Osborne: doing it right

Every year, Time Out, which publishes listings magazines, websites and apps for 333 cities around the world, creates a list of the world’s coolest neighbourhoods.

Vibrant Norwood apartment garden a labour of love to honour green thumb’s late partner

St. Vital resident Rob Duncan can’t pinpoint when he first noticed an award-winning garden blanketing the grounds of a two-storey St. Mary’s Road apartment block, near Coniston Street.

Perhaps he was on his way home from work and caught a glimpse of it out of the corner of his eye. Or maybe he was running errands in the Norwood Flats area and paused to admire the array of annuals, perennials and potted plants that extends from the block’s doorway to the front curb.

What Duncan does know for certain is that after spying the urban oasis, twice fêted in Take Pride Winnipeg’s annual Winnipeg in Bloom competition, he couldn’t unsee it.

“First of all, the pink building really stands out,” Duncan says, referring to the brightly painted California Apartments complex at 268 St. Mary’s Rd. “But then you have the pergola, the rock garden, the flowers and trees… a sea of colour on a very busy street.”