Multiple factors add up to difficult harvest

Earlier this month, farmers sent agriculture publications some heartbreaking photos showing how heavy rains across the Prairies had pummelled a promising harvest.

An idled combine up to its axles in a flooded Saskatchewan field, straw bales surrounded by water and field equipment stranded on the far side of a washed-out section told the obvious story.

The Sept. 6-7 event was just the latest in a series of heavy rainfall events that have plagued this year’s growing season. Similar deluges hit different regions July 15-17, Aug. 14, and Aug. 31 — some of which were accompanied by tornadoes.

“What’s made this season challenging is the intensity of these rainfalls,” said Manitoba Agriculture ag meteorology specialist Alison Sass as she reviewed the summer’s weather patterns on an extension webinar.

Winnipeg-produced podcast Careers Under Construction keeps rolling for Pederson Group

It could have been the CEO’s corner office or a boardroom, but instead it’s a media production studio.

Eight storeys above the corner of Portage Avenue and Main Street, the 300-square-foot room in the Pederson Group’s headquarters at 201 Portage Ave. is outfitted with comfortable chairs, a plant and black drapes that block out natural light and control the acoustics.

There are three video cameras, two computers, a few microphones and a variety of portable video lights. All told, the equipment is worth more than $70,000.

It’s here where two of the Winnipeg recruitment firm’s five staff members — Justis Pederson, president and CEO, and Cassie Bezan, director of creative communications — produce Careers Under Construction, a weekly, hour-long podcast featuring interviews Pederson conducts with Manitoba business people.

Well-preserved tooth from Pacific mastodon found in a creek in San Francisco Bay Area

Brigid Lynch was working along a wooded creek in a mountainous part of the San Francisco Bay Area when something that didn't look like the rocks she'd been studying caught her eye. It turned out to be the fossilized tooth of a Pacific mastodon.

“I keep joking it wasn’t hard to find,” Lynch, a geomorphologist at Balance Hydrologics, said Friday. “It was just sitting there in the middle of the creek, halfway in, half out of the water.”

Lynch made the discovery earlier this year while working on a habitat restoration project for the threatened California red-legged frog in a Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District preserve in San Mateo County. The public land management agency that preserves over 70,000 acres of land in the Santa Cruz Mountains region announced the find this week. The fossil has been donated to Stanford University’s Doerr School of Sustainability.

“It’s in great condition,” said Chrissy Garcia, curator and manager of Doerr School of Sustainability’s specimen collections. “So we’ve got both the crown and the root of the fossil. You can even see root canal.”

Downtown no place to be after dark, huge majority of Winnipeggers say in survey

Most Winnipeggers are afraid to walk alone downtown and believe the city needs more police officers, a new survey finds.

Mining, mineral exploration projects ramp up, First Nations training lags

Mark Fedikow hunts for gold. Skilled labour can become a secondary search.

“You can find lots of folks on the reserves that are willing to work and learn, no question about it,” Fedikow, president of Mount Morgan Resources Ltd., said Thursday in Winnipeg.

“They need to get some training, they need to get some education in exploration.”

Fedikow and his team have been surveying roughly 7,400 acres in the Snow Lake area in northern Manitoba. They’re in “early days” of gold exploration. Results over the past two years of work have been promising, Fedikow said.

Canadian Army formally changes divisions as military prepares for future of combat

EDMONTON - Canada's Army formally made one of the biggest changes to its structure in decades Thursday by shifting from divisions based on geography to ones built around specific purposes.

CFB Edmonton held a signing ceremony and parade to stand up the 1st Canadian Division, which will serve as the main force responsible for deploying on large-scale combat operations and responding to crises.

Headquartered in Edmonton, the "manoeuvre division" will bring many capabilities together under one roof, such as tanks and other armour, artillery, light infantry, paratroopers and engineers.

The idea is to prepare the army to rapidly deploy a large force and sustain prolonged operations.

Manitoba-Canada Defence Alliance unveiled

Despite Ottawa’s promises of increased defence spending, Jack Enns has seen slowdowns.

Tit-for-tat tariffs between Canada and the United States have lessened demand for some of A. Adams Supply (1969) Ltd.’s products, the firm’s general manager said.

The Winnipeg company ships specialized tools to aerospace manufacturers, metalworkers and transport firms.

More clients could be useful — and so would local companies winning defence contracts, Enns said. If that happened, vendors such as A. Adams Supply may get more orders, boosting business.

Manitoba artists in TIFF spotlight as fest begins

Expect Winnipeg film production — and Manitoba talent — to grab its share of the klieg lights at the 2026 edition of the Toronto International Film Festival, which starts today and runs to Sept. 20.

Why our democracy depends on your vote

I think that fining people who don’t vote and paying people who do isn’t a bad idea. Because people who don’t vote aren’t participating in our democratic system of governance, and we all pay for that.

Online harms now top threat to Canadian children, new report says

OTTAWA - Online harms now constitute the top threat facing children in Canada, ahead of bullying, poverty and child abuse, Children First Canada said Tuesday in a new report.

It is the first time online harms have been in the top 10 list of threats, the report said.

"We've seen how now it's permeating the lives of every kid in Canada, from birth all the way through adolescence. This is no longer a conversation just about teens on social media," said Sara Austin, CEO of Children First Canada.

"In the past year alone, we've seen particularly the rise of AI-amplified harms," she added.

Education student designs lesson plans to take a bite out of food marketing

Instead of apples, Emma Caronte is handing out lesson plans on local food history to Manitoba teachers this back-to-school season.

The undergraduate researcher spent her summer break creating a social studies unit that investigates food guide evolution, marketing tactics and how honey dill sauce became a pantry staple on the Prairies.

“I want students to develop a greater interest in food and what outside influences affect their choices and what we consider ‘healthy,’” said Caronte, a final-year education student at the University of Manitoba.

She is advertising her 112-page project as a user-friendly resource for classroom teachers and “a fun sub plan” targeted at Grade 6, 7, 8 and 9.

Back to school means increased costs for parents, post-secondary students

In the words of advice for students from Thornton Melon: “It’s rough out there. Move back in with your parents.”

As comedian Rodney Dangerfield’s character alluded to in the 1986 comedy Back to School, it is indeed a tough financial environment as students head back to the classroom in 2026.

A Capital One Canada survey found families are struggling with costs, with nearly six in 10 parents surveyed stating back-to-school expenses are higher than expected.

It’s not just tuition, new clothes and supplies. Extracurricular activities — like hockey, figure skating, ringette, soccer, dance, etc. — also ramp up, involving tuition-sized payments.

Discourse we’d rather avoid

We have all been there. A colleague says something that bothers us. A manager is not addressing an issue everyone can see. An employee’s behaviour is becoming increasingly difficult. A misunderstanding has taken on a life of its own. Or perhaps we simply need to have a conversation that we know is going to be uncomfortable.

Our first instinct is often to avoid it.

Honestly, that instinct is understandable. Difficult conversations can make us nervous. We worry about upsetting someone, damaging a relationship, saying the wrong thing or making a situation worse.

Sometimes we tell ourselves the problem will resolve itself. We decide to wait for a better time. We send the email instead of having the conversation. We hope if we give it a little more time, somehow it will become easier.

Learn to make natural plant dyes and more at the Manitoba Fibre Festival

“I like to grow plants with purpose,” Bethany Booy said as we sat in her backyard in St. Vital on a warm day in August.

Booy is a fibre artist who gardens and forages locally grown plants for projects that she makes such as clothing items and baskets. She made a vest, for example, out of yarn she dyed using the indigo plant (Persicaria tinctoria) which she grows in her garden. She has also made her own natural dyes for yarn using onion skin, coreopsis (tick seed), and dock, a common perennial weed, as well as sumac and the bark and leaves from apple trees.

She grows a range of flowers such as Hopi Red Dye Amaranth, Rudbeckia black-eyed Susan, black hollyhock (Alcea rosea Nigra), Scabiosa Black Knight, marigolds and Cosmos sulphureus (sulphur cosmos) which she harvests and dries, and then uses for natural dyeing.

Booy also grows a dainty flower called Dyer’s chamomile. “It’s not used for making tea. It dyes a beautiful bright yellow,” she says.

Former MLA details early years, struggles with alcohol and his path forward in earnest new memoir

Kevin Chief, the former two-time MLA for Point Douglas, is very unusual for a politician. In casual conversations with Manitobans of various voting flavours over the past decade and change, this reviewer can’t recall one single person ever saying they didn’t like the guy. On two occasions, acquaintances mused that they would cross party lines (in opposite directions) to vote for Chief if he ever ran for office in their riding.

Granting that these observations are anecdotal, how does one account for such broad appeal?

It’s not charisma so much as sincerity. When Chief speaks about his experiences and his hopes for the world (and, as a public speaker and presenter, he has given a lot of speeches both in and out of office), it comes across as both heartfelt and thoroughly ruminated upon. The same is true, as it turns out, in his new book.

With a Name Like Chief, co-written with Stu Slayen, is not a political memoir. While Chief’s political career did the most to put him in the public eye, the five years he spent in the Manitoba legislature starting in 2011 make up only a small percentage of his life, and receive a commensurate page count. Instead, two of the major throughlines of the book are the intertwined roles of alcohol and Canada’s horrific colonization project, and how they impacted his life experiences.

Transcona's Flamingo car wash promises 'soapy disco' for your ride

For Kyle Thompson, foam is where the heart is.

As a high school student at Winnipeg’s Transcona Collegiate, one of his classes required him to create a business plan. He was cleaning vehicles part-time at the Chamois Car Wash and Detail Centre, so he used the assignment to envision a car wash of his own — one with a Regent Avenue address.

Fast forward some 25 years later and that dream is a reality. Thompson is the co-owner and general manager at Flamingo Express Car Wash.

Located at 868 Regent Ave. West — east of the row of car dealerships that call the thoroughfare home and across the street from an Amazon distribution hub — Flamingo opened last month.

Complex dual production 'R+J: Closing Night' brings theatre audience in on panicked process of putting on a show

Theatre Projects Manitoba will attempt to pull off an extraordinary feat of live performance next week with a metatheatrical experiment that walks the tightrope between on-stage drama and backstage chaos.

St. Malo’s summer hot spot relies on dedicated community to make sure park-goers can kick back and relax

It’s shaping up to be a hot late-August Friday in southern Manitoba; the forecast warns of a thunderstorm in the late afternoon, but that won’t stop Manitobans from flocking to savour one of the last great beach days of the summer.

Manitoba expanding rent control threshold to $2,000 a month

WINNIPEG - The Manitoba government says it's following through on a commitment to expand rent control in the province.

It says renters paying up to $2,000 per month will be included in the province's rent-control program starting next year, up from the existing threshold of $1,670.

It says the expansion should mean at least 2,000 additional rental units will be covered by the program.

Landlords can only increase rents by three per cent next year for rent-control units, while the limit is 1.8 per cent this year.

Scientists studying cockroach milk and nose-blowing win Ig Nobel prizes for quirky science

Ten research teams were honored last week at a satirical science awards ceremony that was hosted outside the U.S. for the first time due to travel concerns.

Province announces free daycare for low-income families

Eligible parents will have their child-care fees waived come Sept. 13.

Designer building following making models of everyone from celebs to ordinary Winnipeggers

Kevin Takatch was getting groceries in Los Angeles when he stumbled into an art sale celebrating 25 years of Jackass.

The Winnipeg designer behind BeLove suddenly found himself surrounded by famous faces, carrying one of his own jackets and wondering who he could get to wear it.

Then he spotted comedian Eric André, who appears as himself in the reality stunt/prank franchise, and asked him to model the jacket.

“I knew I couldn’t (wimp) out, like I did with the first celebrity I saw,” says Takatch, who declined to give his age.