Althea waits in line at a local food bank in Winnipeg. Her youngest son, less than six months old, is bundled up asleep in a stroller and she holds her two-year-old in her arms. Nearby, her oldest son, now four, plays with a toy car.

Manitobans’ trust in businesses — and government’s ability to address corruption — is on a downhill slope, a new Angus Reid Institute poll found.

“I feel like things are getting more and more shifty, especially after COVID,” said Will Houston, as he shopped in a Winnipeg supermarket this week.

Prices across the board have skyrocketed over the past few years, he noted.

“I fully acknowledge that there are supply chains and there’s people who need to be paid all the way back to the producer,” Houston said. “But I think that there are people who are taking a higher cut than they used to.”

What are the social consequences of the gradual, grinding, grim dwindling of public trust in social institutions? For one, the powerlessness of alienation worsens.

People with disabilities have to fight for basic accessibility every day – and it's exhausting! I live with a disability that requires me to use crutches to get around. I work as a dance educator with students that have various disabilities. I’ve learned first-hand that "accessibility" is a word that is thrown around plenty but largely ignored in practice. It’s time this changed.

We live in a society with so much abundance of knowledge and experience to create accessible spaces for all, yet we are still so far behind. Accessibility is a basic right, enshrined in the Accessible Canada Act, adopted in 2019 to create a barrier-free Canada and enable the full and equal participation of persons with disability in all aspects of life.

Canada also joined the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities to protect and promote the rights and dignities of persons  with disabilities “without discrimination and on an equal basis with others.”

Yet I still encounter inaccessible spaces almost every day.

Bell MTS is launching its Wireless Home Internet service for 12 communities across Manitoba, with enhanced broadband access for nearly 40,000 rural and remote locations to come by the end of 2021.

“It’s an exciting chapter for us and for all of Manitoba,” said Ryan Klassen, vice-chair of Bell MTS and Western Canada, in an interview Tuesday.

The new 5G-capable network will offer download speeds of up to 50 megabits per second and upload speeds of 10 Mbps, with no data overage fees on the 3500 MHz spectrum. It’s part of a recent $1.7-billion investment from telecommunications giant Bell Canada, as it expands across the country from province to province over the next two years.

“COVID-19 certainly accelerated the need for something like this, because we’ve all been relying more than we ever have on strong and trustworthy internet service,” Klassen told the Free Press. “But in many ways, it also predates that, because these are communities that haven’t had this kind of access before.”