Local garden centres rev up even as cold temperatures delay outdoor planting season

Colin Rémillard is obsessed with the weather.

When he and his family opened Winnipeg gardener’s staple Jardins St-Léon Gardens for the 2026 season on Wednesday, it came after weeks of chilly weather. But with staff itching to go — and customers waiting — they decided to open the doors after a “mad dash” to bring in produce and tag every product in the store one day earlier.

“Everything seemed to roll fairly well. We’re in good shape. It’s going to be a colder spring, that’s just reality,” Rémillard said from the garden centre Friday.

“We’ve had really nice springs for the past one or two years. We always remember only one year in the past, so we think this is unusual, but it is pretty normal to have this amount of cold.”

Thorn in their side: Assiniboine Park asks for help to remove invasive plant

Assiniboine Park Conservancy is rallying the troops to stop the invasion.

Saturday will be a bad day for European buckthorn at the park, as forestry staff are hoping 100 volunteers will show up to help clear the problematic plant.

“It’s a big issue and there’s a lot of it,” said Barret Miller, the park’s manager of education and programming.

This is the first time the conservancy is asking for help from the public to remove the invasive weed from the Winnipeg green space. The section being targeted is in the heart of the park, just south of the cricket fields.

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.

Working the family farm set up top NHL draft prospect Carels for hockey success

It takes a village to raise a hockey player.

Carson Carels would be the first to tell you his just happens to include hundreds of cows, goats, peacocks, chickens and whatever else might be wandering the 2,000 acres of rolling hills in south-central Manitoba that he and his family call home.

The farm isn’t just where the 17-year-old lives. It’s where he was built.

“It has shaped who I am,” said Carson.

Innocuous critter or varmint to vanquish? Debating best approach to Richardson’s ground squirrel long a Prairie predicament

A peculiar debate brewed in the pages of Saskatchewan’s newspapers in 2001.

It did not concern post-9/11 security or squabbles over federal gun and environmental policies, though it did evoke other perennial Canadian political tensions.

It had to do with gophers.

Saskatchewan’s NDP government was choosing an animal to symbolize the province, and the suggestion of a gopher was driving some squirrelly.

Canada Soccer receiving $9.8M from Ottawa for national training centre project

OTTAWA - Canada Soccer's plan to build a national training centre has received a major funding boost.

The federal government announced Friday it will contribute $9.8 million from the new Build Communities Strong Fund for the planning, design and pre-construction of the proposed facility.

“The national training centre will be a multi-use, nationally significant sport and community infrastructure project, and will establish a permanent home for soccer in Canada," housing and infrastructure minister Gregor Robertson said at the announcement in Vancouver.

"The national training centre is envisioned as an integrated sport and community campus. Plans feature outdoor fields, a full-sized indoor pitch for year-round use, and high-performance training and sports science facilities.”

Captain Kennedy House reopens after $1.4-M upgrade

Manitobans will once again be able to enjoy tea and scones while taking in history — the tea room at the Captain Kennedy House has reopened after a 10-year absence.

The Heritage Tea Room is reopening after a $1.4-million restoration of the historic building on the Red River south of Lockport, Environment and Climate Change Minister Mike Moyes said Thursday.

Moyes said in a statement the building was restored and revitalized and will now offer visitors and area residents “a unique opportunity to experience the rich history of St. Andrews in a welcoming accessible environment.”

The stone house, a provincial heritage building, was built for Capt. William Kennedy, an Arctic explorer, Métis community leader, and Hudson’s Bay Company employee, in 1866.

Business council’s new housing alliance, partners complete first ‘deeply affordable’ project

A unique Manitoba business-led enterprise created to invest in​ affordable housing has completed its first project, helping to launch a 23-unit building in Winnipeg’s inner city.

City offers real cost-of-living help while Ottawa, province pander for popularity

There’s no shortage of political enthusiasm these days for “cost-of-living relief.” Governments at every level are tripping over themselves to prove they feel your pain at the checkout counter and the gas pump. The problem isn’t the intent, it’s the execution.

Solar ranch in Tennessee aims to prove grazing cattle under the panels is a farmland win-win

CHRISTIANA, Tenn. (AP) — From a distance, the small solar farm in central Tennessee looks like others that now dot rural America, with row upon row of black panels absorbing the sun's rays to generate electricity.

But beneath these panels is lush pasture instead of gravel, enjoyed by a small herd of cattle that spends its days munching grass and resting in the shade.

Silicon Ranch, which owns the 40-acre farm in Christiana, outside of Nashville, believes cattle-grazing is the next frontier in so-called agrivoltaics, which mostly has involved growing crops or grazing sheep beneath the panels.

The solar company debuted the project this week and will spend the next year working to demonstrate to farmers that much larger cattle also can thrive at solar sites. If successful, advocates say, that could jump-start new projects to meet the soaring electricity demand driven by rapidly expanding data centers — without contributing climate-warming carbon emissions — and help cattle producers hold onto their land and livelihoods.

Toy company Spin Master bracing for rising production, shipping costs from war

TORONTO - The war in the Middle East will soon make your kid's favourite toys more expensive to produce and deliver to store shelves.

Spin Master Corp., the Toronto-based firm behind Paw Patrol, Gabby's Dollhouse and Ms. Rachel toys, said Thursday that a blockage of one of the region's key shipping routes is pushing up its freight, resin and packaging costs.

The impact has so far been minimal because the company had several contracts with suppliers that locked in commodity prices before the conflict began on Feb. 28.

But chief financial officer Jonathan Roiter said that will soon change.

Young Canadians want AI companies to make their chatbots less addictive: report

OTTAWA - A new report focusing on the perspectives of young people says the government should order AI companies to take steps to curb the addictive aspects of their AI chatbots.

It’s one of a series of recommendations made by youth between the ages of 17 and 23 who took part in roundtables across the country.

Participants presented the report — published by McGill University’s Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy and Simon Fraser University's Dialogue on Technology Project — and its recommendations on Parliament Hill on Thursday.

Maddie Case, a youth fellow with the McGill centre, introduced the 25 young people who developed the chatbot recommendations.

The best hockey I knew was the first

“Nothing is as good as it used to be and it never was. The ‘golden age of sports,’ the golden age of anything, is the is the age of everyone’s childhood.” — Ken Dryden

I grew up in Winnipeg, in a small suburban enclave called Morse Place. Not exactly the centre of the hockey universe, but it was home. A little working-class pocket in the north part of the city. Terry Sawchuk, the great Detroit goaltender was probably our best known hockey export.

Dad worked in an iron foundry, and mom ran the house like a general. My older sister excelled at school and her choir singing. We weren’t poor, but let’s just say there was very little money left over after dad brought home the paycheque.

We didn’t have much, but we, or rather I, had the rink. The community club had one glorious sheet of outdoor ice with real boards, an old streetcar converted into a clubhouse, and a pot-bellied stove that tried to keep your toes from freezing. And yet … it was magic.

Brandon works on tourism strategy

Brandon Tourism says it selected UpHouse, a creative marketing agency in Winnipeg, to help build the city’s first comprehensive tourism strategy, which will be unveiled in the fall.

RMTC's Rubaboo: A Métis Cabaret is a musical mélange of jazz, folk, roots

You’ve probably had sirop d’érable and pemmican, but have you tried rubaboo?

A scoop of peas or corn, a dash of flour and onions, bison meat if you have it, a maple syrup garnish — and suddenly you’re cooking with bear grease (which you shouldn’t forget to add, either).

In a pinch, you might substitute grouse for bison meat, and throw in some extra turnip and parsnip plus wild vegetables to thicken your rubaboo stew.

Cooking and fusion metaphors are never far from how we talk about cultural blending, but in Canada, we’ve tended to resist America’s more assimilationist image of the melting pot. Instead, we talk of mosaics, or sometimes salad bowls, to emphasize eclecticism.

Months after reporting two-foot deep boulevard hole, West End homeowner still waiting for city to respond

Grace Livingston feared an unsuspecting pedestrian would fall and break their leg after she discovered a thigh-deep hole in the boulevard in front of her West End home last year.

Livingston said she is still waiting for the City of Winnipeg to fill the hole and eliminate the safety hazard, six months after she called 311 and emailed her councillor to raise concerns.

“I was hoping they would send somebody by or at least put up a barricade or something,” she said Wednesday. “How many times do people have to complain about something before they acknowledge it?”

Livingston contacted the Free Press about the situation after reading about the plight of Wolseley resident Christine Keilback, who fell shoulders-deep into a hole on a boulevard across from her Lipton Street home Saturday night.

Proposed social-media ban for Manitoba children gets likes, thumbs-down

Mia Danyluk had a YouTube channel before she reached double digits. She was 11 years old when she signed up for Snapchat. In Grade 9, she joined Instagram.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was on social media that she learned about Manitoba’s plan to ban children and youth from accessing these platforms.

The irony was not lost on her — a 16-year-old who was raised in Winnipeg and on the borderless online world.

“We’re seeing younger and younger kids grow up with an iPad instead of toys in their hands. If we’re exposing kids to screens, we need to teach them online safety,” the high schooler said.

Winnipeg photographer captures striking stills that market major motion pictures

Eric Zachanowich is the most famous photographer you’ve probably never heard of.

He’s worked with Tinseltown heavyweights such as the late Robert Redford, Ralph Fiennes, Laura Linney, Woody Harrelson and Anya Taylor-Joy, and even appeared in Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson’s wrestling biopic The Smashing Machine, disguised as, you guessed it, a photographer.

“It was for one of the opening scenes so I could shoot Dwayne Johnson walking to the ring. I made the final cut of the movie — although it’s hard to place me — and also got a spectacular photo that was used heavily during marketing,” says Zachanowich, 32.

More often than not, he operates as a silent observer on the sets of cinema blockbusters and prestige television dramas alike, his lens capturing the world’s biggest A-listers at their most vulnerable and intense moments.

City gets to the bottom of how deep hole formed in boulevard

A Winnipeg woman’s fall into a deep hole in a boulevard Saturday night marked a first in the city’s recent history, sparking an investigation to determine its cause and prevent it from being repeated.

Christine Keilback told the Free Press she was on her way home from a movie when she suddenly fell shoulders-deep into the hole across the street from her Wolseley home.

Winnipeg Fire Paramedic Service came to the rescue and helped her return to solid ground. The city placed barricades around the large hole.

On Tuesday, Mayor Scott Gillingham said this is the only such incident he’s aware of since being elected to city council in 2014 as St. James councillor. He was elected mayor in 2022.

Kinew threatens billion-dollar fines for tech giants ignoring social-media ban for youths

Manitoba may impose billion-dollar fines on tech companies that violate a proposed ban on social media and AI chatbots for youths under the age 16.

‘What a stupid situation’ as woman plunges into boulevard hole

Talk about a hole in one.

Christine Keilback was getting home from the movie theatre Saturday night when she suddenly fell shoulders-deep into a hole in the boulevard across the street from her home in Winnipeg’s Wolseley neighbourhood.

Keilback tried to boost herself out but she couldn’t get a foothold because the dirt crumbled away.

The 58 year old, who serves as the executive director at a local non-profit, says she was not injured and immediately found the situation humorous.

Youth social media ban likely to begin in schools, provincial education minister says

The first phase of a provincial social media ban for youth will likely start with Manitoba schools, which already restrict cellphone use, Education Minister Tracy Schmidt said Monday.