Ottawa adding $5.4B for child care; provinces, advocates had warned progress at risk

The federal government is giving provinces and territories an additional $5.4 billion over two years for the national $10-a-day child-care program, money the minister is framing as stabilizing the program.

The program that started rolling out across the country in 2021 set ambitious targets for reducing the fees parents pay and creating hundreds of thousands of new spaces by this year, but those targets have not yet been met in many jurisdictions.

Jobs and Families Minister Patty Hajdu said Friday in an interview that she has heard the provinces' calls for more federal money, as many struggle to reduce fees, add spaces and recruit and retain enough early childhood educators in the face of rising costs and demand.

"Certainly, money has been part of the challenge," Hajdu said ahead of a meeting with provincial and territorial ministers.

Luxury tax on planes, cars yielded over $900M. Now it’s been scaled back

MONTREAL - A luxury tax on cars, planes and boats yielded more than $900 million before it was scaled back amid concerns about the negative effect on manufacturers.

In the two fiscal years between 2023 and 2025, the tax on pricey conveyances was pouring nearly $390 million a year into federal coffers — well over double the forecast from the Parliamentary Budget Office — according to figures obtained through an access-to-information request by The Canadian Press.

Backers of the tax say the windfall amounts to an unexpected success that vindicates the full levy and shows that wealthy individuals are more willing to spend on big-ticket items than authorities had presumed, despite the higher price tag. Critics argue that parts of the tax hurt key industries by discouraging purchases and fail to hold up under cost-benefit analysis, calling for a complete rollback.

Taking effect in September 2022, the measure imposed a 10 per cent tax on the full value of cars and planes priced over $100,000 and yachts over $250,000. Its purpose was to “ask those who have prospered ... to do a little more to help those who have not,” the 2021 federal budget stated.

Youth concern powers Futurpreneur applications

Groups offering support to young Manitoba entrepreneurs have clocked an uptick in traffic amid economic uncertainty.

Karen Greve Young is watching the applications roll in at Futurpreneur. The national non-profit offers loans and mentorships to Canadians ages 18 through 39 who are starting businesses.

Greve Young, Futurpreneur’s chief executive, expects a 50 per cent increase in applications this year over last. It follows growth of 15 per cent in 2025.

That year, Futurpreneur worked with more than 1,000 businesses.

Opposition forms to First Nation’s bid for wind farm

A group of residents in southwestern Manitoba is concerned a proposed wind farm could impact their way of life.

RM of Lorne resident Bill Harrison said the Swan Lake First Nation proposal to build 30 to 35 wind turbines would disturb day-to-day life and have adverse environmental and economical impacts.

“Agriculture is a major consideration in Manitoba, it’s a major provider of food. The wind towers, they take up two to three acres a piece just to install. And then the service roads and the actual spot where the towers are planted is more too,” Harrison said Thursday.

The RM of Lorne, located 145 kilometres southwest of Winnipeg, has a wind farm in the St. Leon area that was built in 2006 and expanded in 2011. The 200 square kilometre wind farm has 73 turbines that generate the energy needs of more than 40,000 homes, according to the province.

Flooded-out Interlake farmers call for government action on neglected watershed drainage system

Guiding his side-by-side vehicle over a narrow trail separating hundreds of acres of flooded fields in this rural Manitoba municipality Thursday, local farmer Brian Boonstra said there is little hope of saving his crops.

Carney’s support for controversial sand mine sparks criticism

Prime Minister Mark Carney has thrown his support behind the controversial Sio Silica sand mine in southeast Manitoba before its second, scaled-down proposal has been licensed.

At the G7 leaders summit Wednesday, Carney trumpeted the memorandum of understanding signed by Manitoba’s Sio Silica and solar technology manufacturer RCT Solutions in Germany to extract sand from a large area east of Winnipeg and turn it into solar panels.

In a news readout, Carney said he met with Chancellor Friedrich Merz at the summit in France and that both welcomed “new investment partnerships” between the two nations, including two in Manitoba to “support a high-purity silica project, to extract 99.9 per cent-plus pure silica sand, highly valued for manufacturing solar panels and semiconductors, advanced manufacturing, and defence-related technologies.”

It said the second partnership involves Sio Silica, RCT Solutions and the Southern Chiefs Organization to build a fully integrated solar manufacturing hub in Manitoba.

Climate change demands action, not hope

Hoping against hope may have suddenly, quietly, become the world’s new strategy for addressing climate change.

An ancient biblical concept, hope against hope describes our ability to believe everything is going to be alright despite abundant evidence to the contrary. It’s relevant now because, after two decades of aggressive progress in reducing carbon emissions, we’ve started to retreat.

There has been progress in the energy generation sector, where zero-emission options such as hydro, wind and solar have been increasing at an aggressive rate. However, coal and oil still account for roughly two-thirds of all electricity generation in the world, even as severe weather causes trillions of dollars in damage and lost economic activity around the world.

Manitoba offers a good example of how climate change has been de-emphasized against a backdrop of severe weather. Destructive wildfires and floods have become annual events in Manitoba, but not convinced the NDP government to become more aggressive on carbon emissions.

Potash ‘test shipment’ planned for Churchill

The owner of Manitoba’s sole potash mine plans to send its first shipment to Europe via the Port of Churchill this fall.

Upwards of 200 tonnes of potash will travel to the Port of Antwerp-Bruges in Belgium, said Daymon Guillas, president of the Potash Agri Development Corporation of Manitoba (PADCOM).

From there, it’ll be taken to a client in France.

“This is a test shipment,” said Guillas, who declined to give the customer’s name.

Mayor’s cabinet signs off on proposed 110-acre neighbourhood on Dugald Road

A major development proposes to create nearly 3,000 homes, ample commercial space and a possible school at a mostly vacant industrial park.

The Waters Urban Village project would transform 110 acres (44.5 hectares) of employment and industrial land at 1390 and 1470 Dugald Road in the St. Boniface Industrial Park by creating 2,946 residential units, a commercial town centre, a central park and six business park buildings, pending final city council approval.

The largest high-rise residential buildings would be close to key Winnipeg Transit routes.

The substantial addition of infill homes and businesses fits well with the city’s goals to make use of existing infrastructure, said a proponent of the project.

Ottawa’s new surveillance pricing rules not likely to take effect before 2028

OTTAWA - The federal government wants to be "super careful" as it tackles surveillance pricing, Artificial Intelligence Minister Evan Solomon said after tabling the government's new privacy bill.

Under the plan outlined by Solomon, those rules on surveillance pricing are unlikely to be in place before 2028.

"It's very easy to say just ban using personal information to give personal pricing, because we have to be super careful that we don't want to penalize people who are members of a rewards program," Solomon said Monday in an interview with The Canadian Press.

The government introduced the bill Monday — its third attempt to update decades-old privacy laws covering the private sector.

Competition Bureau to examine food supply chain practices amid high grocery prices

OTTAWA - The Competition Bureau is looking to investigate how competition along the food supply chain affects grocery prices for consumers.

The bureau says it will look for potential issues in three key areas: production and processing, transportation and distribution, and retail pricing practices.

That means tracking competition along the way, as seeds are sown at farms or livestock are raised at ranches, to getting them processed as raw input or ready-to-eat items and loading them onto trucks to reach wholesalers and distributors.

The bureau will also investigate how these items are priced on store shelves and how consumers buy them using tools such as loyalty programs. The retail pricing investigation will include examining algorithmic pricing, shrinkflation, and skimpflation, which refers to reducing the quality for the same price.

Liberal government tables new First Nations drinking water legislation

New legislation tabled by the government on Tuesday will create a legislative framework to protect drinking water in First Nations communities, Indigenous Services Minister Mandy Gull-Masty said.

Ebola stretches weakened global aid system

The WHO has declared the current outbreak an international public health emergency.

Winnipeg musician brings love for the bus to new song with message to province

A new song released this week by John Samson Fellows comes with a clear call to action: “More buses, more routes, more accessible to everyone.”

The tune, titled 50/50 Funding, praises public transportation and calls on the provincial government to reinstate matching transit funding for Manitoba municipalities.

It was written in support of the Next Stop campaign led by Climate Action Team Manitoba and the Amalgamated Transit Union, which aims to restore the long-standing cost-sharing agreement scrapped by the former Progressive Conservative government in 2016.

Getting on board with a transit-improvement campaign was an easy decision for Samson Fellows.

Alberta separatists can’t see economic future through their blinding rage

It would be easy to dismiss the threat of Alberta separation as the delusions of a misguided and greedy minority. Easy because the concept does not have much traction.

Opinion polls show that a solid majority of Albertans do not want to leave Canada. Yes, more than 300,000 of the province’s voting-age citizens signed a petition demanding a referendum seeking a departure from the federation. But more than 400,000 other Albertans signed a petition telling the separatists to get stuffed.

That is not a good excuse to ignore what is happening in Alberta. It’s a serious threat but right now, it’s easy to ignore because it’s being pursued by people who are decidedly unserious.

The demands uttered by Alberta separatists are not designed to give its citizens more fairness and equality within the federation; this is about getting more from Canada than any other province has a right to expect.

New First Nations water bill changes mention of ‘right’ to clean water access

OTTAWA - A new First Nations clean water bill set to be introduced by Prime Minister Mark Carney's government changes a provision in a previous bill that would have recognized First Nations have a human right to clean drinking water.

The Canadian Press has obtained a draft of the bill labelled "for consultation until June 11, 2026." It's not clear if any changes were made since the consultation period ended.

Some First Nations leaders had expected the bill to be introduced as early as Monday, but that didn't happen. It's now expected on Tuesday, and Indigenous Services Minister Mandy Gull-Masty is scheduled to hold a news conference.

The House of Commons is expected to rise by Friday for the summer break, which means the legislation likely won't be debated or voted on until the fall.

‘It’s all going to be OK’: Canada’s U.S. ambassador tries to ease CUSMA anxiety

TORONTO - Canada's ambassador to the United States is trying to lower the temperature around the Canada-U.S.-Mexico agreement with the renewal date for the North American trade pact just a few weeks away.

"Everybody take a deep breath, relax, it's all going to be OK," Ambassador Mark Wiseman told a business crowd in Toronto on Monday.

Wiseman was interviewed by Darryl White, the Bank of Montreal's CEO and a member of the advisory council on Canada-U.S. relations, at the Canadian Club Toronto.

Looming in the background of Monday's talk was the Canada-U.S.-Mexico agreement on trade, better known as CUSMA, which enters a renewal period starting July 1.

Rainy day fund, meet climate change costs

On May 28, Winnipeg city council voted 14-1 to move over $18 million into the city’s rainy day fund. That same week, Mayor Scott Gillingham said the city’s chief financial officer is considering lowering the minimum amount the fund must hold.

Weighing profits against transforming ‘beautiful country’ of wind-turbine proposal south of Brandon

A major wind-turbine project has been proposed for the Carroll area south of Brandon. Innergex Renewable Energy has made preliminary agreements with landowners on roughly 12,000 acres and is looking to install 30 to 35 turbines.

Inflation hitting Canadians where it hurts

Inflation bites. That’s especially true for a key element of a budget that’s challenging to go without: food.

Higher prices always eat away at spending power, but food price increases have devoured household budgets in recent years, Statistics Canada’s Consumer Price Index (CPI) data show.

Food cost increases may have peaked in Manitoba in 2022 at nearly 14 per cent, year over year. But even recent data shows prices rising 4.8 per cent, among the highest in Canada.

Households have little choice but to endure higher food costs, given they cannot go without, or they are increasingly turning to food banks and other community supports. Since 2020, the province’s food banks have logged a 150 per cent increase in use, a 2025 Harvest Manitoba report found.

Mondetta unveils expansion amid ScaleUP week

Scratch the kitchenette — Mondetta’s new RV is stocked with suits and gas for cross-country sales.

The Winnipeg-based clothier has spent $500,000 renovating an RV to take its menswear brand, Modern Ambition, to cities throughout Canada.

It’s also slated new stores for Toronto, Vancouver and Calgary.

“We are very proud that a Canadian brand is … expanding and getting that recognition,” said Georgi Gvakharia, Mondetta Clothing’s senior vice-president and global head of retail.