Census data does much more than determine population

The children of families who live in public housing in Tuxedo are more likely to graduate from high school, go to college or university, and less likely to need income assistance when they become adults than their counterparts who live just off Main Street in the North End.

How do we know this? The national census.

Officially known as the Census of Population, in the next few weeks, an estimated 41 million Canadians will receive this year’s census to fill in the boxes that reflect their lives. Most will receive the short form, which census officials say should take only five to 10 minutes to fill out. But 25 per cent of Canadians will receive the lengthier long-form census, which includes more demographic questions, and takes about a half-hour or so to complete, depending on the size of the household.

It’s only when the numbers are tallied that we will know exactly how many people there are in the country.

Community tip line making difference, but funds about to dry up, organizer says

Six months after launching a community-run crime tip line in William Whyte, the group behind the initiative is preparing to ask the province for additional funding to keep the program alive.

Darrell Warren, president of the William Whyte Neighbourhood Association, said $20,000 provided through the provincial property crime forfeiture fund last year will dry up in May.

“It’s a big asset. I didn’t think it would be as popular as it is,” Warren said Monday.

“There are a lot of good people in these neighbourhoods who are affected by this stuff and they do want to get involved. This gives them the tools they need. The police are stretched to the limits right now and we need to be those eyes and ears out in the neighbourhood.”

Antisemitism on the rise, becoming normalized, B’nai Brith warns

Canada is in the throes of a national antisemitism crisis, says B’nai Brith Canada.

The organization’s annual audit of antisemitic incidents reports 6,800 in 2025, 6,248 of which involved online hate.

That is a 9.3 per cent increase over 2024, when the total was 6,219, and it represents the highest total since 1995, said B’nai Brith, the country’s oldest human rights organization dedicated to eradicating racism, antisemitism and hatred.

The biggest spike in antisemitism occurred in 2023, when the number of incidents rose from 2,769 in 2022 to 5,791 following the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel.

Shortage of housing for Indigenous seniors in city raising concerns ahead of northern flood, fire evacuations

A small group of women elders is expressing concerns about a lack of urban housing for Indigenous seniors, warning the crisis will only worsen as flood and wildfire evacuations uproot more from their communities.

Report on state of rural Manitoba’s economy ‘exciting work’

Declining municipal populations and workforce-bound immigrants are highlighted in a first-of-its-kind report detailing Manitoba’s rural communities.

Military hits 30-year recruitment high but still falls short on key trades

OTTAWA - The Canadian military just had a banner year for recruitment — but not enough for the defence minister to declare an end to what his predecessor called a personnel "death spiral."

Military recruitment hit a three-decade high when the Canadian Armed Forces brought in 7,310 new members over the past year, Defence Minister David McGuinty said Monday.

That's 600 more than the previous year, when the military brought in 6,710 recruits.

McGuinty touted a surge in enlistment applications Monday morning — just hours before a House of Commons committee heard testimony about how the Canadian Armed Forces has struggled to keep applicants from dropping out of the recruitment process.

In praise of the deliberately slower lane

Before I begin this story, I should first confess that I once suffered from a serious affliction — that nasty urban disease known as road rage.

Long-term data lacking about the religiosity of Gen Z

There’s been lots of media attention recently about the idea of youth religious revival — that young people, especially those from Gen Z, are flocking to church.

It all started in April last year, when the Bible Society in the United Kingdom shared the results of a poll it commissioned from YouGov, a prominent online marketing organization. That poll showed a 16 per cent increase in church attendance in the U.K. by young people ages 18-24.

This was, the Bible Society contended, “dramatic” proof of a “quiet revival” among youth in that country.

Skeptics quickly pushed back. The reason it was “quiet,” they said, was because there was no other poll, including those done by the U.K. Anglican and Catholic churches themselves, that had found anything like the Bible Society’s results. Not only that, they pointed out that anyone who visited most any church on a Sunday morning could see for themselves how few young people were in attendance.

Indigenous Winnipeggers undercounted, underserved: report

Winnipeg’s First Nations and Métis population may be vastly undercounted, raising questions about how governments fund services for Indigenous communities, a new report says.

The new estimate, contained in the “Our Health Counts First Nations & Métis Winnipeg” report, says the population could be four times larger than what was recorded by the 2021 census. The report pegs the population of First Nations and Métis people in Winnipeg at between 248,000 and 379,000 people based on its survey of 1,090 adults and 306 children, most of whom identified as First Nations or Métis.

In contrast, the 2021 census recorded 90,000 Indigenous people in the city.

The study was produced by a partnership of the Aboriginal Health and Wellness Centre of Winnipeg, the Well Living House Action Research Centre, and Indigenous health organizations.

U.S. leads spike in applications for Canadian citizenship by descent

OTTAWA - Interest in Canadian citizenship by descent among citizens in a handful of countries — especially the United States — surged after the federal government passed a new law clarifying the rules.

C-3, which took effect on Dec. 15, 2025, allows someone born outside Canada before that date to a Canadian parent who also was born outside Canada to file a citizenship claim. Anyone born or adopted on or after Dec. 15, 2025 can make a claim as long as the parent, who was also born or adopted abroad, spent at least three years in Canada before their child's birth or adoption.

The law was drafted and passed in response to a 2023 Ontario Superior Court order that found a law on citizenship by descent passed by Stephen Harper's government was unconstitutional.

That Harper-era law said Canadians who were born abroad could only pass down their citizenship if their children were born in Canada.

‘Desperately missed’ victims honoured as B.C. marks 10 years of toxic drug emergency

VICTORIA -

Paula Beardy said her grandson Sheldon Beardy was a good kid.

He would have turned 28 on Monday. But his mother died last year, and after attending her memorial service in August, Sheldon also died of a drug overdose.

Paula Beardy said Sheldon used to stay with her a lot and she misses his happy smile.

Statistics Canada reports wealth and income gaps grew in 2025

The gap between Canada's richest and poorest grew last year as financial markets gained while interest payouts declined and the job market softened, said Statistics Canada on Monday.

The agency says the income gap, measuring the difference in the share of disposable income between households in the top 40 per cent and those in the bottom 40 per cent, reached 46.7 percentage points in 2025.

The result compared with a gap of 46.4 percentage points a year earlier.

The wider gap came as the lowest-income households saw wages rise slower than the overall average, and saw their investment income fall because of lower interest payments on savings, the agency said.

Survey reveals widespread support in province for LGBTTQ+ community’s rights

More than seven out of 10 Manitobans believe the rights of people in the province’s LGBTTQ+ community should be protected by law, new poll results reveal.

Manitoba small-business owners post second-highest rate of concern about rising crime

When Fiona Zhao thinks about the rising cost of safety when running her business, it’s not just dollars and cents — to her, it’s a societal issue.

Zhao began Unique Bunny in 2014 in Winnipeg, an early adopter of South Korean and Japanese skincare retail in the city, before expanding to 10 locations around the country. But Unique Bunny’s longest-running Winnipeg storefront, on Osborne Street, closed after eight years in 2023, with the company citing crime growing out of control in the area.

Data released by the Canadian Federation of Independent Business on Wednesday found 61 per cent of surveyed business owners in Manitoba believe crime in their respective communities has increased over the past year — the second-highest rate in the country.

The news doesn’t surprise Zhao.

A project to save rural synagogues grows from Maine to Montana

WATERVILLE, Maine (AP) — Rabbi Rachel Isaacs spent the days leading up to Passover overseeing the preparation of ceremonial foods at Beth Israel Congregation, a synagogue in central Maine where membership has quadrupled over the last 15 years.

These days, growing congregations is very much on Isaacs' mind, as she's leading a movement to strengthen rural synagogues and Jewish communities around the country. They've reached dozens, and they're hoping for many more.

“Rural Jewish life is important for the Jewish people and it’s important for rural America,” Isaacs said. “Those people deserve to be served and shepherded.”

Isaacs is executive director of the Center for Small Town Jewish Life at Colby College, a liberal arts school in Waterville, Maine. The center began a decade ago with a goal of supporting Jewish congregations that are far from big cities and it has grown to run programs for more than 60 communities in 22 states.

AP says it will offer buyouts as part of pivot away from newspaper-focused history

The Associated Press, one of the world's oldest and most influential news organizations, said Monday it is offering buyouts to an unspecified number of its U.S.-based journalists as part of an acceleration away from the focus on newspapers and their print journalism that sustained the company since the mid-1800s.

The News Media Guild, the union that represents AP journalists, said more than 120 of the staff members it represents received buyout offers on Monday.

The news organization is becoming more focused on visual journalism and developing new revenue sources, particularly through companies investing in artificial intelligence, to cope with the economic collapse of many legacy news outlets. Once the lion’s share of AP’s revenue, big newspaper companies now account for 10% of its income.

“We’re not a newspaper company and we haven’t been for quite some time,” Julie Pace, executive editor and senior vice president of the AP, said in an interview.

Canada in the European Union? Poll suggests broad openness to the idea

OTTAWA - New polling suggests a majority of Canadians think Canada should explore joining the European Union at a fraught time for geopolitical relations.

A survey of 4,000 people conducted by Spark Advocacy's polling arm in March found that one in four respondents thought it would be a good idea for Canada to formally join the economic and political bloc of European nations.

A further 58 per cent indicated it was a proposal worth considering further, while the remainder said it was a bad idea.

The Spark poll cannot be assigned a margin of error because it was conducted online.

Tailors age out of the workforce even as demand for their skills grows

NEW YORK (AP) — Hunched over a sewing machine, Kil Bae is hemming a dress inside his Manhattan tailor shop when a new customer stops by with a vintage Tommy Hilfiger jacket he wants taken in.

The modeling agent paid $20 at a thrift store for his reversible bomber style that's plaid on one side and red on the other. He's willing to spend $280 to have it slimmed down. Alteration requests with such a price disparity would have seemed odd a few years ago, the tailor says, but are helping to keep the bobbins bobbing at his one-man shop, 85 Custom Tailor.

Bae carefully examines the cotton jacket before moving in to pin it, circling the customer like a sculptor with a chisel. He started training as a tailor at age 17, in his native South Korea. Now 63, he's part of a shrinking breed in the U.S., where professional sewers, dressmakers and tailors are aging out of the workforce as their services find fresh demand.

Shoppers who grew up on disposable fast fashion are enlisting tailors and seamstresses to give off-the-rack purchases a custom fit or personal flair, to revive secondhand finds or to extend the lives of their wardrobes, according to fashion industry experts. Weight-loss drugs like Zepbound and Wegovy mean more Americans are seeking adjusted waistbands, tapered sleeves and other types of resizing, Bae said.

U of M researchers recommend better chlamydia screening after analysis of Prairie infection rates

Researchers at the University of Manitoba are recommending improved chlamydia screening and wider data collection after a study analyzed significant spikes in reported infection rates.

West Broadway drop-in offers supports, programs, safety for people with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder

West Broadway has become home to the first drop-in centre in the city to support people with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder.

Invasive species on the march, threaten city’s ash, elm trees

Winnipeg’s tree canopy is under siege.

The emerald ash borer has made a resurgence — after nearly a decade of minimal spread — and another invasive insect is bearing down on elm trees, which are already at risk of Dutch elm disease.

The Latest: Artemis II astronauts reach orbit on historic mission to the moon and back

Four astronauts embarked on a high-stakes flight around the moon Wednesday, humanity’s first lunar voyage in more than half a century and the thrilling leadoff in NASA’s push toward a landing in two years.

NASA's launch team loaded more than 700,000 gallons of fuel into the 32-story Space Launch System rocket early Wednesday, setting the stage for blast off in the evening at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Artemis astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen are on board. They’ll hurtle several thousand miles beyond the moon, hang a U-turn and then come straight back. No circling around the moon, no stopping for a moonwalk — just a quick out-and-back lasting less than 10 days. NASA promises more boot prints in the gray lunar dust, but not before a couple practice missions.

Unlike the Apollo missions that sent astronauts to the moon from 1968 through 1972, Artemis’ debut crew includes a woman, a person of color and a Canadian citizen.