Celebrities join Prince William for Earthshot Prize award

Chief medical officer quits, cites work environment ‘challenges’

Manitoba’s provincial chief medical officer is resigning from his position at Shared Health, citing the role’s demands and work environment challenges in an email viewed by the Free Press.

Dr. José François, who’s held the executive position since April 2024, sent an email to provincial medical specialty leads that said his final day will be Jan. 17, 2027, after he submitted his resignation Wednesday. Several other senior leaders have departed the provincial health authority in recent months.

“Serving in this role has been a privilege,” François, a longtime family physician from Ste. Anne, wrote in the email.

He said his “greatest pleasure” was working alongside and supporting an “exceptional group” of provincial medical specialty leads and chief medical officers.

Rich get richer as NDP policy shifts leave opponents in dust

Last week, Finance Minister Adrien Sala made two announcements that showed why the NDP will remain the party to beat in the next provincial election.

Gillingham says Portage and Main underground should stay open

Scott Gillingham said he hopes to keep the circular concourse beneath Portage Avenue and Main Street open, if he’s re-elected mayor next week.

“I would like to find a way for it to stay,” said Gillingham during the mayoral debate hosted by CJOB Wednesday.

The downtown intersection reopened to pedestrians at street level in June 2025.

When he first supported that hotly debated reopening in 2024, Gillingham called for the underground mall to be closed. At the time, the city estimated it would take $73 million and up to five years of traffic-snarling construction to repair the leaking membrane under the street that protects the properties below.

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.

Alberta sees its way through the fog

“The owls are not what they seem.”

It was a confusing line in a confusing television show, back when television watchers had to wait a week, or sometimes more, for a new episode of a show.

What the owls were — or weren’t — was one small element of the astounding panoply of events in Twin Peaks.

In case this is all flying right over your head, Twin Peaks was a surrealist television show, a mystery/horror/something that premiered in 1990. It had an amazing ability to leave viewers both entertained and, well, hanging.

Outbreak should never have happened

The headline offered a vague sense that something had been accomplished, but it most certainly did not describe anything worth celebrating:

“Manitoba declares measles outbreak over.”

The news item in the Oct. 17 Free Press noted provincial public health officials had confirmed Manitoba’s last laboratory-confirmed case of measles was identified in August, and that the absence of any new cases since had allowed for the aforementioned declaration.

The end of the outbreak — which began in February 2025 and included a significant stretch this year during which Manitoba experienced more measles cases than any other province — is certainly worth noting. But it bears reminding that the real story here is that this province, and others across Canada, experienced a resurgence of this highly communicable but successfully eradicated disease in the first place.