The Wrap: Changes coming to Balmoral Hotel, inquest into police-custody deaths, Skibicki pleads not guilty, and an op-ed from Rochelle Squires

Three investors have taken ownership of the Balmoral Hotel, a notorious location long plagued by violence.

The hotel will be gutted and renamed Pimicikamak Wellness Centre, complete with a medical clinic, pharmacy, day care centre, and bus depot, and the hotel’s 44 rooms will be renovated.

Local non-profit organization 1JustCity will provide free meals and wellness programming in the building’s basement, and the beer vendor on the site will be turned into a walk-in clinic.

An inquest will get underway Tuesday into the deaths of five men in Winnipeg police custody over the course of about a year, beginning in July 2018.

Each man was experiencing some form of mental health or drug-related crisis and police officers were responding to reports of the person’s bizarre or aggressive behaviour.

Each man was restrained facedown, or prone, by Winnipeg police officers, according to Independent Investigation Unit of Manitoba (IIU) reports into the men’s deaths.

The IIU has determined that police officers played no role in any of the men’s deaths.

Court reporter Dean Pritchard was in a Winipeg courtroom Monday as accused serial killer Jeremy Skibicki pleaded not guilty to four counts of first-degree murder.

Skibicki is charged in the May 2022 killings of Morgan Harris, 39, Rebecca Contois, 24, and Marcedes Myran, 26, all of whom are Indigenous, and a fourth, still unidentified woman killed in March 2022, who Indigenous leaders have given the name Buffalo Woman.

Rochelle Squires, who lost her seat in the electoral constituency of Riel when the Progressive Conservative government was defeated last month, returns to her first love: writing.

“Linking up with the Winnipeg Free Press to become a columnist is an endeavour I not only welcome but also commit to wholeheartedly,” she writes.

“Some readers may argue that as a newly unelected politician, I’m too partisan for the job. Fair comment. But let me say this: very rarely has anyone fairly characterized me as being blindly adherent to ideology.”