You don’t have to be an animal rights activist to oppose black bear hunting in Manitoba. You also don’t have to trade in your ethics in order to understand biology. Most animal and nature-loving Canadians can do it all: understand science and care about animal suffering. Well, unless your paycheque requires otherwise.

Such is the case for the author of a recent article for the Free Press (Why claims of sentience can’t guide black bear policy, Think Tank, April 16), Mark Hall, who conservation-washes the killing of black bears in our province. The B.C.-based hunting advocate also conveniently failed to mention his vested interest in the issue, including that the organization he works for is funded by companies in the trophy hunting business. He also failed to follow the actual science.

The fact is, framing Manitoba’s spring black bear hunt as a conservation measure grounded in biology just doesn’t hold up. Especially since it is also marketed by local companies as trophy hunting. “During your bear hunt you will be placed over an active bear bait site (and) with a little patience and some determination you will be able to harvest a trophy of a lifetime,” states one company’s website.

Lesley Fox, executive director of Canadian wildlife protection charity The Fur Bearers, says “heralding the spring bear hunt as conservation is a public relations tactic that supports special interests, not wildlife.”

The Winnipeg School Division is facing backlash over plans to relocate its holistic education program for pregnant teenagers and young moms.

Starting in September, the Adolescent Parent Centre — an off-campus program that’s been housed at 136 Cecil St. since 1989 — will operate inside a North End high school.

“One of the big reasons I wanted to go is because I knew I’d be in a school surrounded by a bunch of people who were in the exact same situation as me,” said Billie Pryor, a 2023 graduate who enrolled when she, then 14, was pregnant with the first of her three children.

Pryor, 20, said the student population, free on-site daycare rooms and distance from traditional high schools, where gossip is commonplace and physical fights break out, were part of its appeal.

As a part of its body-worn camera program, the RCMP recently completed a pilot project using artificial intelligence to draft reports. The AI-generated reports are created from audio captured from officers’ body cameras. A report can be drafted in mere seconds. The pilot, which ran for about six months and concluded in January, occurred across eight detachments in British Columbia generating nearly 800 reports.

Harnessing AI to write police reports is replete with some serious and unresolved concerns and must be immediately discontinued.

It isn’t even entirely clear why police need to use AI in the first place.

The primary justification for the expanding use of AI to generate police reports across law enforcement is to free police from the administrative burden of having to write reports in the first place. The idea is that officers could do more relevant police work, presumably patrol work.