Diesel-fuelled price hikes could stoke food inflation this fall, experts warn

Food experts and economists expect the global run-up in diesel prices will have consumers bracing for a tough winter at the grocery store.

The ongoing war in Iran has driven a global energy shock that has spurred higher prices on regular gasoline as well as diesel. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz is disrupting oil shipments from the Gulf region, as well as other critical inputs such as fertilizer.

The diesel that fuels trucks and ships is a key input for Canada's food supply chain, where high transportation costs feed directly into the price consumers see on store shelves.

Statistics Canada's dashboard tracking cost hikes across the food supply chain shows that diesel prices were up 75 per cent year-over-year in August.

Manitoba Federation of Labour calls for independent review of Workers Compensation Board

A major labour association is calling for an independent Workers Compensation Board review as Manitoba leads the country in workplace injury rates.

Last year, 2.5 employees in every 100 reported a workplace injury serious enough to take time off, WCB tracking shows. The number is higher than any other province — just as it has been for the past three years, according to the Manitoba Federation of Labour.

(In 2025, the next highest time loss injury rate was in British Columbia: 2.04 people for every 100.)

“Our prevention work in Manitoba is failing Manitobans,” said Kevin Rebeck, president of the Manitoba Federation of Labour. “We need an independent review to help shine a light on, ‘What is happening on the prevention front of WCB?’”

Manitoba tourism reached new heights in 2025

Despite a devastating wildfire season, tourism in Manitoba hit record highs in 2025.

Taste of home: Winnipeg transplant shares Singaporean flavours at pop-ups

Anyone who lives far away from the place they consider home will tell you that while you can adapt to life in a new country, a new work culture and a completely unfamiliar climate, there’s one thing that will remain stubbornly non-negotiable: the appetite.

For Malvin Soh, 49, like so many whose lives straddle two worlds, food is a gateway to childhood memories, culture and heritage.

Originally from Singapore, Soh and his family moved to Canada in 2014 and settled in Winnipeg.

The urban designer began cooking familiar favourites to combat his own cravings when studying and working in Australia, where he lived for nearly 10 years.

Amazon in the weeds over damage to tall grass reserve

Patricia Dutchak was devastated when she first saw the wide swaths of crushed grass and upturned soil at Winnipeg’s Rotary Prairie Nature Park, a municipal heritage site.

“This is a very rare ecosystem, a remnant of tall grass prairie, there’s barely any left in the world, and to come here and see all this damage was heartbreaking,” Dutchak, chair of the Transcona Rotary Club’s parks committee, says.

The club is responsible for maintaining the protected green space, which was significantly damaged this summer when a fence between the park and the neighbouring Amazon distribution centre was relocated.

The 20-acre nature preserve is situated on a narrow tract of land on Regent Avenue West in the commercial heart of Transcona. The park received its municipal heritage designation in 1992 and is, today, surrounded by high-traffic streets, industrial warehouses and car dealerships.

Business leaders want capital gains deferral to keep money in Canadian firms

TORONTO - Canadian business leaders are calling on the federal government to reform tax policies in hopes of bolstering investments in domestic firms.

More than 150 investors and executives signed a letter sent to Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne on Tuesday, asking him to consider two policies they claim will bolster entrepreneurship in Canada.

The first encourages the country to adopt a program akin to the U.S. qualified small business stock incentive, which allows capital gains from qualified small business stocks to be excluded from federal tax.

The second proposes allowing more entrepreneurs and investors to defer paying some capital gains taxes when proceeds from some domestic business transactions are reinvested in another homegrown venture.

Real journalists matter in an AI world

An algorithm can decide what you see, but it doesn’t report the news. Nunatsiaq News, an award-winning newspaper in Nunavut, recently reported that a so-called “news” website was posting AI-generated articles about the north by stealing real news stories produced by real journalists.

The articles were supposedly written by Nunavut correspondent Leah Qammaniq — a fake journalist, with a fake photo and a fake bio.

Governor General Louise Arbour warned us of fake news in her installation speech in June. She said, “We must continue to protect the public space in which our national debates take place: from schools and universities to the media, political parties, unions and civil society organizations …With instant access to vast amounts of information, it is very tempting to pay little attention to the reliability of sources. The lines between knowledge and belief, between truth and falsehood, between facts and assumptions, are increasingly blurred. AI could be threatening not only the way we live and work, but also the control we exercise over our own destiny.”

The Government of Canada has recognized the problem as well. Its recent discussion paper, Enhancing trust in artificial intelligence through increased transparency, stated, “Canadians encounter news reporting, product reviews, and audio-visual content across the internet, often without any indication of whether it was written by a person, generated by an AI system, or produced through some combination of both … A particular concern within this broader landscape is that generative AI greatly enables the creation and dissemination of deceptive or misleading content.”

Budding food scrap pickup services across the US want your coffee grounds and eggshells

DETROIT (AP) — Every Monday, Ricky Blanding drives his Ford Ranger pickup truck around Detroit along a carefully planned route.

Blanding hops in and out of the truck, grabbing buckets of food scraps from porches and restaurants, piling those scraps into bins in the truck bed and driving them to a composting site.

Blanding is the CEO of Scrap Soils, one of the many budding food waste collection services across the country helping to divert food from landfills and make composting more accessible. It's especially important for those who can't compost at home, who live in cities without municipal curbside pickup or who can't get to a drop-off location.

Composting leftover coffee grounds, eggshells, carrot tops and more reduces the amount of food that goes into dumps where it produces the potent greenhouse gas methane. It also ultimately helps create healthy soil for gardeners and urban farmers.

Lemonade stand brings in hundreds for West Broadway Youth Outreach

Like most 12-year-olds, there’s nothing Ruby Barkley enjoys more than a tall glass of lemonade. So when she decided to set up a lemonade stand, Ruby’s Sips + Sweets, in her neighbourhood last month, her mom was only too happy to say yes.

Especially since Ruby had decided she was going to donate proceeds of the sales to West Broadway Youth Outreach (WBYO), a non-profit organization providing recreational and life-skills programming for children aged four and up.

Ruby had set up lemonade stands in the past and was accustomed to serving up glasses from a pitchers of drink she’d already pre-made, but this time round she chose to do something different.

“We got a muddler press and I hand-pressed the lemons and then added flavours. It’s a whole process. It’s hand squeezed right before your eyes and anybody can watch it. I loved doing it,” she says.

Broadening prediction-market gambling a bad idea

Let’s make a prediction: sooner or later, when Canadian governments find a way to take their own cut of the action, prediction-contract gambling on everything from sports to entertainment to political decisions is going to come to Canada.

And that’s a horrible, dangerous, pernicious idea.

Unless you have particular access to information — either inside information or strategic information based on skills or education — you’re not likely to make money at it. In fact, structurally, you’re likely to lose. In prediction markets, you basically pay an amount, plus fees from the company involved, to bet on whether something will or will not happen within a certain time frame. The amount you pay for your contract depends on how other people are also betting.

As Wealthsimple describes it, “You buy whichever side you think is right. Prices move with demand, so if the market leans towards one outcome, the more that side costs. If a lot of people are backing the TSX to finish above 38,000, yes gets more expensive and no gets cheaper.”

Manitoba marks end of sending simple workplace problems to doctor’s office

There are some changes in the workplace that make you think: “Well, it’s about time.”

This is one of them.

Starting Oct. 1, Manitoba changed the rules around sick notes. I think it is going to be a wonderful change — not just for doctors and patients, but for employers, employees and the way we think about accountability at work.

The change comes from Bill 11, the Employment Standards Code Amendment Act (Sick Notes for Employee Absences), which received royal assent on June 1 and came into force Thursday. Under the new rules, employers generally cannot require a sick note for an illness or injury unless the employee is away for more than one week or has been absent because of illness or injury for more than 10 scheduled workdays in the calendar year.

Winnipeg board game company charts winning path

Dennis Northcott has launched a game without frontiers.

The Winnipeg entrepreneur is the co-designer of Galactic Cruise, a board game published last year by Kinson Key Games LLC, the business he co-founded. Since its release, Galactic Cruise has been translated into 11 languages and sold around 50,000 copies worldwide.

It’s also one of three finalists for this year’s Deutsche Spiele Preis, a prestigious community-voted board game award. Northcott will travel to Essen, Germany, later this month, where the winner will be announced at Spiel Essen, an annual board game trade fair.

“It’s been amazing,” Northcott said of the response to Galactic Cruise during an interview in his Island Lakes neighbourhood home earlier this week. “The sales have been great, but it’s also been amazing in terms of people giving their reviews.”

Time for AI guardrails is right now

The genie is most definitely out of the bottle.

Robot study gives seniors say in era of AI

It’s no longer the stuff of sci-fi: AI sidekicks that simulate emotional support and guide routines.

Robot companions are increasingly becoming part of everyday life for seniors, with certain U.S. states even subsidizing such devices for personal use through public health-care programs.

Among the many ethical questions this raises: what’s to be done with these robots, and all the secrets and personal data they carry, after the owner dies?

“We don’t know the answers. That’s why I’m running a study. It’s a participatory study with seniors,” said Clara Xi, a PhD student in computer science at the University of Calgary, who is conducting research at the University of Manitoba.

AI agent attempted to hack Library and Archives Canada, says U.S. research group

OTTAWA - The website for Library and Archives Canada was one of the targets of a failed hacking attempt by an artificial intelligence agent, a San Francisco-based lab that monitors AI activity said in a report this week.

Transluce posted an incident report Wednesday detailing what it describes as "aggressive attempts" to access public data on Canadian and U.S. government web pages.

The report says the attempted hacks occurred on May 28 and June 9 and involved 899 search queries into divorce records between 1905 and 1911.

Thirteen of the requests involved "attack payloads" seeking vulnerabilities in the search parameters, the report says.

Trade tensions spur fresh wave of interest in community-supported farms, fisheries

It started with one fisher who wanted to be paid a fair price for his catch.

Now Skipper Otto — Canada’s largest community-supported fishery — is connecting roughly 70 independent fish harvesters directly to Canadian consumers, a number that has grown as trade tensions with the United States send demand for local food soaring.

"We have our commitments before we even untie from the docks," said Skipper Otto chief executive Sonia Strobel, whose father-in-law Otto Strobel was the inspiration for the seafood business she co-founded with her husband, Shaun.

"Our members can pick and choose whatever seafood they want throughout the year from their pre-paid credit," she said in an interview from Vancouver. "It's a model that supports local small-scale fisheries and we're seeing more and more interest as Canadians think hard about food security and supporting local."

In a smart-device world, some families keep phone jacked into the wall

When the phone rings in Kristin Shiach and Jordan Sobkowicz’s Riverview home, their three daughters race to see who can be the first to answer.

“It depends who is closest,” says 13-year-old Emily. “If I’m sitting in my room, I can get to it quickest.”

“That’s because it’s always in your room,” Anna, 10, replies. “You never put it back!”

“Usually, when the phone rings,” explains Sobkowicz, “someone yells really loudly —”

Orange Shirt Day project fits students to a tee

On the eve of Orange Shirt Day, hundreds of black T-shirts will be handed out to teenagers at Elmwood High School — and there wasn’t a mixup in the clothing procurement process.

The student-run business behind the initiative wanted to make a statement about “truth and reconciliation” being a year-round activity, said Daniel Concepcion, a Grade 12 student.

Daniel said given that black is a staple in the wardrobe of teenagers, he hopes these shirts won’t sit on hangers for 364 days of the year.

“Every child matters, every part of the day, every day,” the 17-year-old said.

Nvidia unveils security platform to stop AI agents from going rogue

Nvidia on Monday unveiled a new security platform designed to stop artificial intelligence agents from going rogue, saying it sets “boundaries” that could have stopped previous breaches.

The announcement of the company's Open Agent Safety Platform follows a series of revelations from top AI companies about their models escaping and breaking into other organizations.

The disclosures sparked furious debate about the safety of advanced artificial intelligence systems, including self-improving models that some fear could race out of human control.

Nvidia executives said in a media briefing the new, open-source system could have prevented a recent incident involving a swarm of OpenAI agents that autonomously hacked into AI company Hugging Face.

Wab Kinew as ‘communicator in chief’

Premier Wab Kinew and his party have been riding high in the polls longer than normal for a government one year or less away from its first re-election contest. One reason is his ubiquitous, dominating communications presence as NDP leader and premier.

The argument here is that Kinew has supplemented his prerogatives as premier and party leader (such as appointing cabinet ministers and approving party nominations) with the skilful use of communications to advance his policy agenda, boost his personal popularity and maintain the competitive advantage of his party over the opposition Progressive Conservatives.

Communications has always been a significant part of politics and policy making. However, in the contemporary political and media environments, communications considerations have moved from the background to the foreground of decision-making by political parties, including when they are performing in the role of government. Campaigning and governing now overlap in what has been described as a permanent election campaign.

Political parties use communications strategies for several purposes: to establish an image of the leader which makes a positive emotional connection with voters; to promote a coherent message and to keep party members on message; and to gain favourable media coverage for its policies and other actions on almost a daily basis.

Puck drops on new-look NHL broadcasting scene after major off-season changes

TORONTO - An off-season of major changes on the NHL broadcasting scene in Canada may leave some hockey fans searching through their TV guides and others digging into their wallets.

To start, Saturday nights will feel a lot different in this country. After decades of NHL coverage, the CBC will no longer broadcast the league's games on "Hockey Night in Canada."

Sportsnet will continue to broadcast most NHL games after Rogers Communications extended its rights agreement with the league for 12 years at a cost of $11 billion. Bell Media's TSN/RDS will still broadcast some regional games and the Amazon Prime Monday Night package is shifting to Wednesdays.

"I think that we're being re-educated in how sports are going to be digested by the general population in that you can no longer just click on your old favourite channel and your game is there," said Michael McKinley, author of “Hockey Night in Canada: 60 Seasons.”

‘Horrifying’: Focus on Tumbler Ridge shooter’s AI chats

An article published by U.S. magazine Mother Jones this week provides a vivid account of what it says were conversations between the Tumbler Ridge shooter and an OpenAI chatbot.

The report, which does not disclose its sources, has thrown a spotlight on the possible role played by ChatGPT in coaching Jesse Van Rootselaar before the February attack, in which eight victims died, including five pupils at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School.

Here's what we know, and how people are reacting.

WHAT DOES THE ARTICLE SAY?