In pictures: Flin Flon wildfire tour June 12, 2025 By: Photography by Mike Deal / Free Press Posted: 6:48 PM CDT Thursday, Jun. 12, 2025

Mayoralty race off to glacial start

Just a few months before voters select their next city council, Winnipeg’s mayoral race has barely begun.

Mayor Scott Gillingham, who registered his re-election bid May 1, has yet to share a single promise about what he would do if re-elected.

That decision could reflect several circumstances of this particular race, including the current slate of mayoral candidates, according to a local political expert.

“It could be (Gillingham’s) just keeping his powder dry … I think he’s likely waiting to see what shakes out for his opponents, if there will be somebody of a higher profile, like a Kevin Klein, or somebody from the right or left of him (entering the race),” said Christopher Adams, an adjunct professor of political science at the University of Manitoba.

As Canada’s newest top doc, Dr. Joss Reimer immediately had to confront two deadly global outbreaks

OTTAWA — The whirlwind that has been Dr. Joss Reimer’s career has officially touched down in Building 62.

A modern, non-descript complex in a suburban industrial park, Building 62 is the only name given to the headquarters of the Public Health Agency of Canada, and Reimer’s new home as the country’s chief public health officer.

For the record, whirlwind is hardly an exaggeration.

Seven years ago, Reimer was a well-respected, somewhat low-key obstetrician and medical educator in Winnipeg. Along the way, she spent time as a YouTube public-health influencer, the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority’s medical director for public health, the provincial government’s medical officer of health and — in the role most familiar to Manitobans — the medical lead and official spokesperson for the provincial COVID-19 vaccine implementation task force.

An evening in the emergency room

This situation needs immediate intervention. Anything less means nothing.

Rage politics meets its serious counterpart

Serious times call for serious politics. That means serious leaders offering serious solutions.

If all this sounds like a campaign slogan for the establishment, you’re probably right. But its rising resonance may well prove the unravelling of the conservative populist rage that has been driving politics in Canada, the United States and Europe.

Already we are seeing signs that the “burn it all down” rhetoric of more than a decade of MAGA Trump in the United States, Brexit and Faragism in the United Kingdom, and the angry and anti- establishment brand of Poilievre conservatism in Canada, has crested. Today, voters are yearning for stability and real solutions, the exact opposite of what divisive populist politics promise.

Events, current and past, rightly fuelled the anger. The 2008 financial crisis marked the beginning of our current “end times.” It was followed in short order by the first triumph of Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again movement in 2016, Brexit in Britain in 2016, the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas atrocities in Israel and that country’s two-year invasion and war in Gaza, and the triumphant return of Trump and MAGA in 2024. Now comes the ongoing war with Iran launched by the U.S. and Israel.

Bombers backup Brown takes the reins in clash against Argos

Mike O’Shea isn’t a big fan of letting reporters under the hood when it comes to how certain decisions get made.

Yet, as the head coach of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers was pressed for information on how he came to his final conclusion before naming Dru Brown his starting quarterback for Friday’s showdown with the Toronto Argonauts, O’Shea worked through a number of questions before revealing this decision eventually made itself.

“We brought Dru in for a reason. We brought Dru in for this reason,” said O’Shea, noting the final call wasn’t made until Thursday morning. “So, you execute the plan as it was laid out.”

Asked a follow-up question for clarification, O’Shea made it clear that he prefers not to deal with hypotheticals, even if precautions are made to cover all of the bases.