China floods leave at least 12 dead, thousands evacuated

Mayoral candidate Vogiatzak criticized for living outside Winnipeg

A mayoral hopeful took heat from other candidates Friday for living outside Winnipeg while running in the civic election.

Mike Vogiatzakis’s primary residence is in the Rural Municipality of St. Andrews, about 25 kilometres north of Winnipeg — a community with its own mayor and councillors.

But the funeral director said he owns a home in Winnipeg where he divides his time, and he would move to the city full-time if elected mayor.

“It doesn’t matter where a person lives. Why are we dividing St. Andrews and Manitoba and Winnipeg? I’ve met the criteria to run for mayor,” Vogiatzakis said Friday morning.

A day on the campaign trail: Winnipeg's mayor, seeking a second term, does double duty

In the weeks leading up to the civic election, Scott Gillingham has been performing a juggling act: he’s running to be Winnipeg’s 45th mayor, while still serving as its 44th.

“If someone asks me about the campaign, I’m going to answer them. But I think for most people, I’m the mayor of Winnipeg, even if I’m showing up as a candidate,” Gillingham, 57, says. “I try to do all I can to maintain that distinction.”

The Free Press joined Gillingham on a recent rainy September Saturday on the campaign trail, where he served in both roles during an event-laden day. City council’s final meeting before the Oct. 28 election was days earlier.

In Winnipeg, it’s rare for an incumbent to be defeated. But Gillingham knows his win in 2022 wasn’t exactly a landslide — he won with 27.5 per cent of the vote — and he’s been thinking about his second term ever since.

Dynacare workers provide essential services that must be maintained during strike, labour board rules

The Manitoba Labour Board has ruled Dynacare workers are essential employees and their services must be maintained during a labour dispute.

Clock ticks down on destruction of records documenting residential school abuses

In less than a year, a private company is set to destroy the largest cache of records detailing the widespread abuse of Indigenous children at residential schools in Canada.

The destruction, which was ordered by an Ontario court in 2014 and later upheld by the Supreme Court, is set to take place on Sept. 19, 2027.

This countdown is igniting emotional conversations that seek to balance the immense historical value of the records alongside the confidentiality survivors were promised as part of the process of providing detailed testimony about abuses they’d suffered.

The records were created as part of the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, a class-action settlement stemming from survivors who began suing the federal government in the late 1990s over the harm they’d been subjected to at residential schools.

Netminder no stranger to heavy workload as Jets new No. 1 readies for regular-season start

Stuart Skinner is quick to admit that he wasn’t always wired this way.

As the Winnipeg Jets new starting goalie prepares for his fifth NHL season, Skinner conceded that the accountability aspect that is now synonymous with his character took some time to build up.

“As I grew up and got older, you go through certain things in life that either build character or make things worse for you. It depends on your choice and your decision,” Skinner said during a recent conversation with the Free Press. “I learned it through trial and error. I learned that, sometimes, it’s hard to get honest with yourself… For me, it’s definitely been a road for me to get to a place like this.

“It definitely is one of my pillars. Accountability is so important because that brings you into a spot of what you’re going to do next. It’s easy to let yourself off the hook. I’m more in the business of putting myself on the hook.”

Software glitch caused multi-provincial 911 outage: Bell

A 911 outage that affected Manitoba and four other provinces for about 90 minutes last month was caused by a software failure, according to Bell Canada’s report to a federal regulator.

An abridged version of the report, which was made public Friday, did not say how many callers were affected when Bell’s next-generation 911 platform stopped receiving new calls and transferring new calls to local 911 communications centres due to the glitch.

The outage, which lasted from 2:13 a.m. to 3:40 a.m. central time, was not caused by a cyberattack or any change activity, Bell said.

“Rather, the outage was caused by a latent software issue that triggered an unexpected condition in certain network components within the (next-generation 911) network,” Philippe Gauvin, Bell’s assistant general counsel, wrote in the report, which was published on the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission’s website.