City missing opportunity to help the homeless, save significant amount of money

By all accounts, Winnipeg could face a tsunami of homelessness this summer. And, by many of those same accounts, Winnipeg is woefully unprepared.

Last month, End Homelessness Winnipeg released a new audit of the number of people living on Winnipeg streets and found that it had risen exponentially over the last year. The best, current estimate is that more than 8,200 Winnipeggers were living without adequate housing, and over half that number meeting the definition of chronic homelessness.

Agencies that support the homeless population have warned the city and province that warmer weather usually expands the number of people living rough on the streets. They have pleaded for more immediate help to deal with this impending crisis.

Government is responding, albeit rather unevenly.

Winnipeg: the crumbling city

At least Christine Keilback had a sense of humour about it. The 58-year-old fell into a buried, uncapped catchbasin on Lipton Street and ended up having to be pulled from the shoulder-deep hole by firefighters.

Conservation shouldn’t come at the cost of access

The Seal River Watershed in northern Manitoba is one of the last great intact ecosystems in North America.

An important step for provincial child care

In the recent provincial budget, Manitoba took an important step toward reducing child poverty and strengthening our early learning and child-care system.

Hopes rise for reuse of heritage buildings

The chairperson of a committee that advises city council on climate change issues is excited about a new report that outlines potential options for Winnipeg to reuse heritage buildings.

The city’s standing policy committee on property and development is scheduled to discuss the Promoting Adaptive Reuse and Preservation of Heritage report on Wednesday.

The 25-page document explores bylaws and rules Winnipeg could implement to promote the “adaptive reuse” of buildings — a recycling strategy that focuses on maintaining the structure or basic fabric of a building and repurposing its function.

Adaptive reuse would help the city reduce waste, protect historic places and add more housing options, according to the report.

RRC Polytech program cuts take bite out of hospitality, tourism sector

Manitoba’s tourism industry is bracing for the disappearance of hospitality training programs — once-popular courses among international students.

Citing budgetary challenges related to a shift in federal immigration policy, Red River College Polytechnic is scrapping 11 programs and scaling back three others in 2026-27. Its hospitality business management diploma is one of seven permanent casualties.

The announcement, while unsurprising, is but the latest blow to a sector trying to “build back the workforce” in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, said Michael Juce, president of the Manitoba Hotel Association.

“Are people going to go outside of Manitoba for training? And if they leave, are they going to come back?” Juce said, adding that rural hotels in particular are already grappling with staffing shortages.

Empower youth by giving them tools to stay safe online

Do you support banning kids from social media? Do you also post photos of your kids on your Facebook or Instagram?

Whenever the topic of banning social media for kids comes up, as it did again this week when Premier Wab Kinew announced that Manitoba will ban youth from using social media and AI chatbots, we run into a wee bit of cognitive dissonance among the adults.

Many of today’s young people had social media presences long before they were old enough to consent to them — not as users, but as content posted by their parents. Instagram is nearly 16 years old; the iPhone nearly 20. A lot of kids have had digital footprints since the sonogram. Their whole lives are online.

So, as young people who are already on social media transition into social media users themselves, we should, as a society, empower them to make informed decisions about how, where and if they want to show up online, not ban them from platforms they use to connect with their peers, express their creativity and learn about the world. Platforms they’ve grown up around and, in many cases, on.

More time at work is not always more productive work

Canada’s productivity conversation has increasingly focused on a simple but important measure: output per hour worked. In other words, what are we actually producing for the time we are putting in?