Christians celebrate Epiphany across Europe

Kinew says Manitoba stands with PM in trade war with U.S.

The Manitoba government and business leaders are rallying behind Prime Minister Mark Carney’s plan to fight back, after a sudden collapse of trade talks between the U.S. and Canada sparked a new salvo of U.S. tariffs on some Canadian goods.

On Saturday, after Carney vowed to respond with retaliatory tariffs, Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew said his government stood “100 per cent” behind the prime minister’s plan to respond to what Kinew called U.S. President Donald Trump’s “unjustified and immoral” tariffs.

“History will not be kind to Donald Trump, so we should never appease him,” Kinew said. “We should fight back, which is what Canada is doing today.”

Kinew met reporters for a brief news conference at the legislature on Saturday afternoon, about an hour after finishing a call with Carney and the other premiers. There was a “really strong sense of unity” on that call, Kinew said, and emphasized that he backs the federal decision to “walk away from what would have been a bad deal.”

The trolls inside the Conservative tent

The Conservative Party of Canada has a troll problem. And it’s coming from inside the tent.

Once, trolls existed only in imagination. They were figures of mythical proportion, big and small. They lived solitary lives under bridges, in caves, or forests. They were considered dim-witted and mean. Best avoided.

Today, they are real, unavoidable, and ubiquitous on social media. They are anything but solitary. There are tribes of them out there and tribal is how they think and post. As for dim-witted and mean, others can opine but they are uniformly mean and dismissive.

Mean to anyone who disagrees with their views. Dismissive of any view but their own. They distribute questionable, at best, facts and opinions grounded in hostility towards anything or anyone deemed disagreeable or heretical to their world view.

Frustration mounts as drug raids sweep problems out of downtown, into West End

West End business owners say their neighbourhood has been under siege for months, and some believe downtown police drug sweeps have made things worse by pushing more street disorder in their direction — and pushing customers away.

Results Canada fights for the political will to end global poverty

Sitting at home on a wintry day in March last year, Japneet Singh listened intently as members of grassroots advocacy organization Results Canada began their online presentation on the prevalence of tuberculosis in rural India.

Singh knew all about the reality of the disease. Before he moved to Canada in 2013 he had seen family members affected by the bacterial infection which, in its active form, can damage the lungs, spine, brain and kidneys.

Despite being preventable and curable, TB persists among marginalized groups and is closely linked with those experiencing extreme poverty.

The highly infectious disease spreads quickly through transient populations facing housing insecurity and those living in overcrowded homes.

Senior’s family frustrated by Manitoba Housing’s response to apartment’s bedbug infestation

The family of a senior who left his Manitoba Housing apartment after two years of bedbug infestations is accusing the provincial body of being ineffectual and irresponsible in its treatment of the persistent pests.

The senior had lived at the Columbus Courts building at 253 Edgeland Blvd., since 2011, but when he began getting severe skin rashes all over his body about two years ago, his son began to worry.

They found out the 14-storey building was being sprayed for bedbugs after an infestation had impacted several units. After multiple rounds of pesticide treatments, the problem has not subsided, the son told the Free Press.

“They come in, they spray pesticides and then they leave. And it’s been completely ineffectual,” he said. “My dad keeps seeing the bedbugs even the day after the treatments and continuously, they’ve just gotten worse and worse.”

Conservatives call on government to release U.S. trade offer details

OTTAWA - Federal conservatives are calling on the government to release the full details of the trade offer from the United States that Canada rejected this week.

In a letter to Trade Minister Dominic LeBlanc, Canada-U.S. relations critic Shuvaloy Majumdar said while his party supports the government's decision to reject the deal, Parliament is in the dark on what was on the table.

"If there was a draft text of any agreement that both governments have seen, please release it. The U.S. administration has seen it. Your government has seen it. Canadians deserve to see it," Majumdar wrote.

"Even after addressing Canadians and the media, the public and Members of Parliament still remain in the dark on your government's demands in negotiations with the Trump administration.