Southern areas hit by winter storm thaw and power slowly returns

Manitoba Hydro is pressing ahead with its proposed $3-billion gas-turbine project in Brandon as though approval was a foregone conclusion. Six weeks of Public Utilities Board hearings exposed serious doubts about the need for three turbines, their escalating cost and whether more affordable alternatives have been adequately examined. Yet before the PUB has delivered its recommendations and the government has authorized the investment, Hydro applied for an environmental license on Oct. 8.

Starting the environmental review early may save time but proceeding before the premier and his cabinet have made a decision risks reducing regulatory scrutiny and political approval to mere formalities. Has the government already given Hydro the green light?

Few dispute that Manitoba will need more capacity as demand grows. Daymark Energy Advisors, the PUB’s independent consultant, concluded that Hydro had established a need for additional capacity by 2030. However, Daymark questioned the size of the projected shortfall, Hydro’s load forecasts and its turbine cost assumptions. Hydro itself acknowledged that its planning costs were based on 2024 information, and that surging North American demand for gas turbines has since put significant upward pressure on prices. Then there’s the impact of Trump’s trade war. These are not minor details, but updated costs have not been obtained.

The bigger problem is how Hydro has framed the alternatives. Interim CEO Hal Turner recently argued that wind and battery storage alone cannot reliably carry Manitoba through prolonged extreme cold. Fair enough. However, critics are not proposing wind and batteries alone.

Police officers stopped a sexual assault in progress on Stanley Street on Wednesday evening.

A member of the public called 911 after they spotted a suspect assaulting a woman shortly after 7 p.m. on the 300 block of Stanley, the Winnipeg Police Service said.

Patrol officers responded almost immediately and found a suspect in the process of sexually assaulting an unconscious woman just after 7:10 p.m.

Police took the suspect into custody, while paramedics took the woman to hospital in stable condition.

DEAR MISS LONELYHEARTS: I came home alone in my own car after a first date with a great new guy I met through my work. Unfortunately, I found my ex-boyfriend in the driveway of my new rental house. He’d fallen asleep in his car, waiting there.

I just lost it! I banged on his window, and yelled, “What are you doing here? Get out of here, and go home!”

He finally sat up, rubbed his eyes and two minutes later he backed out, yelling crude names at me out the window. Then he took off like a shot!

I found out today that somebody we both know told him I was out on a date. That’s why he was drunk and jealous! I want to get rid of him for good, but now he’s not taking my calls, so I can’t even tell him that and re-ditch him!

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When Canada’s health ministers left Winnipeg on Oct. 16, they took with them a promise to keep talking. The federal health minister did not commit to long-term funding. She offered one-year extensions for programs that were about to run out, and asked officials to begin work on “the next 10 years.”

The provinces, in the words of Manitoba Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara, wanted to avoid “fiscal cliffs” and needed “predictable, stable, sustainable funding.”

Both sides have a point. And both are talking almost entirely about money — how much, for how long, under what formula.

Missing from the conversation is the question that decides whether any of it works — once the money flows, who must answer for what it does, or does not, achieve? We have been here before. In 2002, a Senate committee chaired by Michael Kirby warned that new federal money “must be used to buy change, not merely to support the system as it is presently structured.” It proposed an independent national health care commissioner, reporting every year to the public on how the system and the health of Canadians were faring.