Insurance costs have been surging due to extreme weather brought on by climate change — and it’s likely to get more expensive

Floods, hail and wildfires are increasingly common features of North American summers.

Adding to collective dismay, these natural disasters are the common denominator behind sticker price shock for homeowners seeing insurance premiums jump higher annually.

“Home insurance has steadily been rising since 2019,” says Matt Hands, vice-president of insurance at Ratehub.ca.

A recent report from Statistics Canada shows home and mortgage insurance premiums have risen 45 per cent on average over the last six years. That is more than double overall inflation over that span.

Measure twice… and try not to hurt yourself

Changing speeds. It’s a hard thing to do. A hard thing, because it’s also an admission that the speed you once had just isn’t really there anymore.

Manitoba Hydro’s energy plan set to be scrutinized

Manitoba Hydro is set to face questions and concerns over its plan for the province’s future energy needs, which includes proposed natural gas-powered turbines in Brandon and Indigenous-owned wind farms.

The Public Utilities Board, an arm’s-length regulator, will begin six weeks of hearings Monday into the 10-year blueprint and potential ways to satisfy electricity demand, while Hydro grapples with a projected energy shortfall, debt of $25 billion and aging infrastructure.

“The development plan reflects the best available information and analysis of how Manitoba Hydro can meet growing energy demand, while balancing factors we know are important to our customers, including cost, reliability and the environment,” Peter Chura, a spokesman for the Crown corporation, told the Free Press.

“We are confident in our analysis and that we’ve appropriately balanced reliability, affordability, safety and risk.”

Gordie Howe bridge opens to cars after months of cross-border controversy

The Gordie Howe International Bridge opened to motorists Monday after months of controversy over financial aspects of the project.

Officials announced in a post on social media just after noon that the Howe family had crossed first, in honour of the bridge's Canadian-American hockey namesake.

Minutes later, another post marked the crossing of the first commercial truck, a vehicle from a trucking company in Tecumseh, Ont., that was carrying auto parts to Michigan.

As the sunny afternoon went on, cars and transport trucks brought a stream of inaugural crossings.

An eroding Winnipeg neighbourhood looks to new foundations

The lot Jesse Bettcher lives on in Winnipeg's North End used to be a pile of burnt rubble. Same with the one next door. And the one across the street. But he's now the proud owner of a two-storey house with blue-grey siding and white trim.

Creating a home in Highland Pointe that will be a joy to live in every day

As important a role as imagination plays in the design of a new home, it isn’t advisable to get carried away.

When that happens, a home’s design can quickly go from inspired to impractical.

With that in mind, Spencer Curtis and his design team at Hilton Homes reined in their desire to go all-out in creating a home that was filled with a host of unique design features.

“This is a cool home, but not so cool that it loses its function,” says Curtis, the company’s owner/designer.

Court orders Alberta prison to take steps to protect inmates from extreme heat

OTTAWA - As the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal prepares to hear a separate case about extreme heat in prisons, the Federal Court has directed an Alberta prison to take steps to install air conditioning to protect inmates.

The court said Correctional Service Canada has failed to put an effective solution in place at the Edmonton Institution for Women's secure unit, despite complaints about extreme heat that go back two decades.

"The excessively high temperatures have caused inmates to suffer panic attacks, psychological distress, and sleep deprivation. It is a long-standing problem: CSC has known of design problems with the temperature regulation equipment in Secure since as early as 2012," Justice Meaghan Conroy wrote in the July 16 decision.

One affidavit from an inmate housed in 2018 in a corner cell nicknamed "the oven" said a maintenance worker recorded a temperature of over 40 C in her cell.

Hydro’s planned outages turn out the lights for thousands across province

Business owners in the East Beaches area of Lake Winnipeg hauled out generators Wednesday after a planned Manitoba Hydro outage left thousands of residents and cottagers without power.

Lise Bourassa, who runs several stores in Grand Beach, had to rent generators to accommodate the eight-hour blackout, which affected the area from Beaconia to Victoria Beach as well as Sagkeeng First Nation, while Hydro crews fixed a pole that was damaged by fire in May .

Despite the spare power source, she was only able to open one of her stores during the outage and said it came at a bad time.

“I understand the importance of what Manitoba Hydro is doing, the problem all the businesses in this area are having is that our season is very short and to be shut down for a full day has a fairly big impact, plus they added cost of getting generators,” she wrote in a message to the Free Press. “We also had less than one week to make arrangements, find electricians and generators to be able to keep all the food safe.”

If it works in Ontario, why not in Manitoba?

Grid-scale battery storage has fundamentally changed the global energy landscape — and Manitoba needs to get on board.

Battery systems store large amounts of excess electricity for when it’s most needed. While they can be charged from any generation source, they are especially beneficial for integrating wind and solar power, which vary with weather and time of day. Batteries allow electrical grids to meet the need for firm, dispatchable and affordable capacity using renewable energy, rather than relying on coal, nuclear and fossil gas. They also provide numerous other benefits, including reducing overloading of transmission infrastructure and helping to regulate the grid’s frequency and voltage.

Average costs for grid-scale batteries plummeted by more than half between 2023 and 2025 and installations have skyrocketed in China, the U.S., Australia and Europe. Texas now has 16,500 megawatts (MW) of battery storage, while California has 15,200 MW. Closer to home, Ontario recently awarded 640 MW of contracts to three battery storage projects in a competitive auction, with batteries beating out fossil gas-fired power plants on cost every time. One of these projects will be built near Dryden, only four hours east of Winnipeg.

Each battery system will provide eight hours of capacity but will cost considerably less than Ontario’s previous battery procurements, which provide only four hours of capacity. With this latest auction, Ontario has now secured 3,600 MW of battery storage capacity, including the operational Oneida (250 MW), Hagersville (300 MW) and Napanee (250 MW) projects. Almost all have significant Indigenous participation, with the latest procurements boasting 50 per cent First Nations ownership.

Pristine Roofing nears 30 years with focus on making difference

More than 25 years after the dramatic film Pay It Forward inspired moviegoers to engage in acts of goodwill, serial reciprocity is alive and well at Pristine Roofing and Siding.

Natural disasters, accidents or wear and tear can put a roof in rough shape, risking the overall well-being of a home. Since not everyone can afford the repairs needed to feel safe and secure in their own house, staff at the Winnipeg company decided to do something about it.

Last year, Pristine launched its “Pay It Forward Project.” Manitoba residents can nominate someone who’s fallen on hard times and is in dire need of a new roof. The company chooses one recipient annually and does the repair work for free.

“We’re always looking at ways that we can help our community out,” says Don Fata, sales manager, who, along with Ash Boyd, started Pristine in 1998.

Westman residents fear power project’s wind turbines will sully their idyllic landscape

POLONIA — Leonard Kaspick can list just about every household in the valley.

“There’s someone living right across the northeast, someone living behind here, about a quarter mile there’s a house there, then a half mile there’s another house there, I’m here, and then on top of the hill there’s someone else there,” he says, standing in the heart of the hamlet — a community hall just off the main drag.

Besides the hall and the smattering of homes, there’s a historic (though out-of-commission) church next door and a single general store further down the road.

“There’s less people here now than there was in 1885,” Kaspick, 83, jokes as he wraps up a condensed history of the western-Manitoba community.

Play for all: story time inspires students to fight for accessible playgrounds

Concerned about injustice on their school jungle gym, St. Vital students spent months researching upgrades to make playgrounds more accessible for children in Manitoba.

Darwin School is dismissed for the summer, but one of its teachers plans to resume an advocacy project after the break.

“It’s not fair,” 12-year-old Selena Wei said about the fact one of her classmates — along with other children who use wheelchairs — can’t fully experience the pea-gravel playground at 175 Darwin St. and others like it.

“A playground is a really big part of a child’s life. It’s where they experience most of their outside time and where they’re the most social,” Selena said.

John Deere owners will get the right to repair their own equipment under a new FTC settlement

It looks like John Deere owners can soon feel free to fix their own machines.

The Federal Trade Commission and attorneys general from several states secured a right-to-repair settlement Wednesday with agriculture equipment giant Deere & Co. — commonly known as John Deere — that requires the company to let farmers and independent shops fix their own equipment.

The Illinois-based manufacturer has faced complaints for years for withholding the software needed for repairs and forcing customers to use authorized dealers instead of independent ones.

This marks the second right-to-repair settlement Deere has reached this year, following a separate $99 million class-action settlement with farmers in April. Though the class-action compensated consumers, the FTC's settlement instead requires Deere to make its repair services available to equipment owners and independent shops.

Meta to build $13B data centre north of Edmonton, its first in Canada

CALGARY - The tech behemoth behind Facebook and Instagram says it plans to make Alberta home to its first artificial intelligence data centre in Canada and its largest outside the United States.

Meta announced Wednesday that the $13-billion-plus project is to be built in Sturgeon County, in the Industrial Heartland region north of Edmonton.

The one-gigawatt, nearly 270,000-square-metre data centre would be powered by a natural gas-fired plant to be built by a consortium that includes Calgary-based Pembina Pipeline Ltd.

It takes about 1.4 gigawatts to power Edmonton, and the proposed data centre campus could fit 33 Canadian Football League fields.

Ottawa tabs $10.2M for AI development, use in Manitoba

Drones will replace books in Manitoba’s newest government-funded library. Ottawa has slated $1.14 million for the Manitoba Construction Sector Council, who will oversee the project.

Feasibility study planned for arena on former Kapyong Barracks site

A First Nations development group is hoping to pull in prospective sports teams with plans to build an arena in south Winnipeg.

The Treaty One Development Corp. is exploring the feasibility of a 6,000-person arena in Naawi-Oodena, the former Kapyong Barracks site, on the southeast side at Taylor Avenue and Kenaston Boulevard.

The hope is to give aspiring athletes a large space to practice, and possibly even bring a junior or professional sports team to Winnipeg, said chief development officer Cody Mercer, who listed the Western Hockey League or National Lacrosse League as examples.

“Not just working for Treaty One, but also in our membership of the seven communities, there’s a ton of athletes, and really we see that when they’re getting to that higher level of hockey or anything like that, they’re having to move away,” he said. “We thought this is an idea that we can try to bring (in) a team.”

Environnement et communauté

“Il y en a plusieurs des entreprises qui font du greenwashing, ils se peinturent dans le développement durable, l’affichent sur le site web: Écologique! Nous, on l’est pour vrai,” c’est ce qu’affirme Éric Gosselin, directeur général de Sun Certified. La Liberté l’a rencontré dans l’atelier de sa compagnie, un vaste espace de travail garni de matériaux en bois, de maquettes et de murs de maisons.

Cette société de construction de logements a des méthodes bien particulières, notamment pour l’isolation des maisons. Les travailleurs utilisent des matériaux organiques pour créer une épaisse couche d’isolation à base de papier et de carton. “La première chose qu’on fait, c’est utiliser des matières organiques, alors du bois et de la fibre cellulosique. Et il y en a beaucoup dans l’enveloppe du bâtiment, pour renforcer l’isolation,” explique Éric Gosselin.

La compagnie privilégie les matériaux renouvelables, ce qui la démarque des autres sociétés dans le domaine. “Pour l’isolation, quand on utilise du bois, c’est renouvelable. On pourra toujours planter d’autres arbres et ça va repousser. Chez les constructeurs standards, c’est de la mousse ou du rockwool, fait à base de pétrole ou de minéraux.”

Cette volonté d’accorder plus d’importance à l’environnement dans le domaine de l’habitation, c’est ce qui a mené à la création de Sun Certified.

Plan for 24 Sussex Drive makes sense

It has, for more than a decade, been this country’s highest-profile vacant dwelling.

Prior to 2015, however, 24 Sussex Drive in Ottawa had been the official residence of Canada’s prime ministers for more than 60 years, an address whose mention conjured notions of prestige and distinction akin to those associated with 10 Downing Street in London or the White House in Washington, D.C.

After years of deferred maintenance and, one might argue, outright neglect, the 35-room mansion that was home to every prime minister from Louis St-Laurent to Stephen Harper is no longer fit for human habitation. Among the concerns that led Justin Trudeau to opt not to live at 24 Sussex — choosing instead to dwell at nearby Rideau Cottage — were a leaky roof, cracked windows, failing plumbing, faulty wiring and the presence of asbestos in the structure’s 160-year-old construction materials.

Current Prime Minister (and non-Sussex resident) Mark Carney thinks it’s time for 24 Sussex to reclaim its status as the PM’s official residence. Last Friday he unveiled plans for a massive redesign and renovation plan and a fundraising campaign that will invite Canadians to contribute to the project.

Green light for Greenlight: Pembina, partners go ahead with gas plant for data centre

CALGARY - Pembina Pipeline Corp. and two partners have given the go-ahead to the Greenlight Electricity Centre, a natural gas plant serving a data centre customer.

Pembina, Morgan Stanley Infrastructure Partners and Kineticor Asset Management expect the cost of the project to come in at $4.6 billion. The 932-megawatt plant would be built in Sturgeon County, part of Alberta's Industrial Heartland region north of Edmonton, with startup targeted for the second half of 2030. The companies have permits that would allow them to double capacity down the line.

Data centres house the computer hardware required to power various tech applications, and their scale has ballooned with the boom in artificial intelligence and cloud computing. The province and companies did not identify the data centre customer they're serving.

Alberta has been actively trying to court so-called hyperscale developers, like Meta and Google, to set up shop in the province, but its electricity grid currently does not have enough capacity to accommodate several such projects. So Alberta is prioritizing projects that build or contract their own power generation.

This old house is perfect

I’ve long maintained that the outside of my house is none of my business.

When it comes to the interior, my 102-year-old girl is very cute. When it comes to the exterior, her style is best described as “teardowncore.” The only look she’s serving is “haunted.”

My house did recently get a facelift in the form of new windows — she barely looks a day over 80 now — but I will admit I sometimes feel self-conscious about the peeling paint and crumbling stairs and … actually, I don’t have the word count to spare for the list. Especially as fancy-pants new builds pop up around it, replacing houses that looked a lot like mine. It’s hard not to internalize the subtext there.

I can usually counteract this with gratitude. It’s an immense privilege to own a home at all, especially one my husband and I have been able to pay for with words and creativity. It is, and has been, very good to us and I am proud of it.

Winnipeg Habitat home brings tears to the eye of single dad from Africa

Suleman Gado’s eyes filled with tears when the keys to his first house in Canada were placed in his hands Friday morning.

Beside him, his two sons, Gado and Mohammed, watched quietly as years of sacrifice and perseverance paid off.

“Very exciting day to me,” Suleman said. “And very emotional because I do not believe what I’m seeing today. A lot of amazing people who came out.”

Originally from Ghana, Suleman left his home country in 2015 to seek safety and a brighter future.

PM Carney says 24 Sussex to be restored with fundraising campaign, design competition

OTTAWA - Prime Minister Mark Carney unveiled plans Friday to restore the prime minister's residence at 24 Sussex Drive in Ottawa through a national design competition and fundraising campaign.

The prime minister said the winning design proposal will be announced by Canada Day of next year.

Carney said the heritage building is a "symbol of the nation" but has fallen into a "critical state" after decades of neglect, and he does not want to see it crumble.

“It has not been cared for with the respect it deserves," Carney said at a news conference outside the building on Friday.

Staff shortages threaten defence-related projects, construction industry warns

Construction industry leaders are flagging potential staff shortages as the sector prepares for a surge of defence-related projects.