Whose story is being told? How perspectives shape our understanding

Please review each article prior to use: grade-level applicability and curricular alignment might not be obvious from the headline alone.

Seeding clock ticks loudly on Prairie fields

Seeding clock ticks loudly on Prairie fields

Laura Rance-Unger 4 minute read Preview

Seeding clock ticks loudly on Prairie fields

Laura Rance-Unger 4 minute read Saturday, May. 2, 2026

If the forecast holds, Manitoba fields will be crawling with equipment this week, as the race to seed this year’s crop begins.

An early-May start to seeding is right on track by historical standards, but still feels late this year, partly because it’s been so cold. Seeding dates have been edging earlier over time, especially for crops such as wheat, as farmers discover they can get away with super-early seeding under the right circumstances.

Due to the compressed growing season characteristic to this part of the world, it’s well-documented the later the crop is seeded, the lower it yields. However, seed too early and there’s a risk that a late-spring frost will force farmers to reseed some fields.

For most, it’s a gamble worth taking.

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Saturday, May. 2, 2026
Financial literacy’s blind spot

Winnipeg, U.K. economic experts team up to better understand poverty trap

Joel Schlesinger 5 minute read Preview

Winnipeg, U.K. economic experts team up to better understand poverty trap

Joel Schlesinger 5 minute read Saturday, May. 2, 2026

Money know-how is essential to survival no matter where you live in the world. Without adequate financial literacy, it’s difficult to achieve what many experts in the field call “financial well-being.”

A growing field of research suggests one reason financial literacy initiatives have failed to make in-roads, especially for low-income individuals, is because they do not address the many facets of financial well-being, says one of the leading experts in the field.

“Financial well-being for most people is about a balance, and what you see quite strongly is that it really has a social component,” says Adele Atkinson, a professor at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom.

Atkinson, who will be in Winnipeg this week, is a member of the university’s well-respected Centre on Household Assets and Savings Management (CHASM). She says financial well- being goes beyond long-term financial security.

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Saturday, May. 2, 2026
LINDA WENSEL/FREE PRESS file Philip Weiss was instrumental in building the culture of Holocaust education in Manitoba.

Despite discrimination, Winnipeg proved to be good fit for Jews fleeing Holocaust

Jan Burzlaff 5 minute read Preview

Despite discrimination, Winnipeg proved to be good fit for Jews fleeing Holocaust

Jan Burzlaff 5 minute read Saturday, May. 2, 2026

Freda Shiel was 10 years old when the train from Halifax pulled into Winnipeg in 1948. Other families on the platform were met by relatives. Freda and her parents stood there alone. “It was a heartbreaking moment,” she recalled 40 years later, when the Winnipeg Second Generation Group came to record what she remembered.

In the years after May 8, 1945, the end of the Second World War in Europe, hundreds of thousands of survivors and refugees had to find somewhere to go. Some of them, through routes that were rarely straightforward, ended up here. By the late 1950s, roughly 1,000 Holocaust survivors had settled in Winnipeg — more than five per cent of the city’s Jewish population. Forty-eight testimonies including Freda’s, recorded in 1988 and 1989 and now held at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, are still relatively unknown. What they say about this city is more precise, and more complicated, than either a story of welcome or of failure.

Winnipeg did not simply receive these newcomers. It admitted them on terms they would spend decades reshaping. Philip Weiss arrived the same year as Freda. He had survived the ghettos and labour camps of occupied Poland and finally the Nazi concentration camp Mauthausen, where American troops liberated him on May 5, 1945 — a date he carried for the rest of his life. He landed in Halifax on Feb. 11, 1948, his birthday, and took the train west. After years in cattle cars, he marvelled at the white tablecloths and silver cutlery in the dining car, at cherry pie and banana splits that seemed almost unreal on the Canadian Prairies.

Like Weiss, most survivors came through schemes like the Tailor Project, a joint initiative of the Canadian Jewish Congress, garment manufacturers and the federal government that offered entry on the condition that they work in the needle trades.

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Saturday, May. 2, 2026
Polonia’s mileage sign points to Poland, Slovakia and Hungary.

Memorable panoramas and paths await in Rosedale

Gord Mackintosh 5 minute read Preview

Memorable panoramas and paths await in Rosedale

Gord Mackintosh 5 minute read Saturday, May. 2, 2026

Margie and I ventured into Manitoba’s compelling but little-known municipality of Rosedale. We’re back on speaking terms.

Provincial Road 265 north of Neepawa gradually rises over eight kilometres up to Riding Mountain. Our destination: Rosedale Farm. Before a final incline, this road tricks you into believing you’re not climbing high above Manitoba’s prairies. As I’ve heard, don’t trust gentle slopes — they’re always up to something.

Although some land remains cultivated to fund the Whitemud Watershed District that maintains this landscape, a government-funded project bought hillside farms here in the 1960s to stop massive erosion. Folks planted about 200,000 trees — for purely sedimental reasons.

Almost five kilometres of two mowed, circular paths now usher visitors through a wonderland of caragana, roses and ferns under tamarack, red, jack and even ponderosa pines. Ahh, forest fragrance. Margie exclaimed, “Smell that!” I romanticized, “Is that a candle? Shampoo? Your deodorant?”

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Saturday, May. 2, 2026
MIKAELA MACKENZIE / FREE PRESS Nicolas Audette and Pascal Fournier-Audette, 3, pick out local and Ontario-grown tomatoes Thursday at Jardins St-Léon Gardens, which opened this week for the gardening season.

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

Malak Abas 5 minute read Preview

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

Malak Abas 5 minute read Friday, May. 1, 2026

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.”

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Friday, May. 1, 2026
SUPPLIED Eishia Hudson.

Expert accused of ‘speculating without evidence’ at inquest into teen’s death

Tyler Searle 4 minute read Preview

Expert accused of ‘speculating without evidence’ at inquest into teen’s death

Tyler Searle 4 minute read Friday, May. 1, 2026

The lawyer for Winnipeg police told an inquest Friday that a use-of-force expert who weighed in on the fatal shooting of teenager Eishia Hudson, by calling the officer’s actions unjust, had made errors of his own.

Kimberly Carswell suggested during her cross-examination of Peter Rampat that he relied too heavily on video evidence of the incident and discounted witness statements in his report into the death of the 16-year-old from Berens River First Nation.

Hudson was shot dead after leading police on a high-speed pursuit that ended with her crashing a stolen Jeep on Lagimodiere Boulevard during the evening rush hour on April 8, 2020.

Rampat’s report determined Const. Kyle Pradinuk was not justified when he fired two bullets at Hudson, who began to reverse the Jeep as officers swarmed the vehicle.

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Friday, May. 1, 2026
Carson Carels says his hockey work ethic that has NHL general managers taking notice is owed to working on his family’s farm. (Ruth Bonneville / Free Press)

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

Mike McIntyre 11 minute read Preview

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

Mike McIntyre 11 minute read Friday, May. 1, 2026

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.

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Friday, May. 1, 2026
JOHN WOODS / FREE PRESS A squirrel is seen on a baseball field at Fairgrove Park as the city has announced that it will start a ground squirrel management program involving the use of Rozol RTU Field Rodent Bait and RoCon Concentrate Rodenticide at several city parks Tuesday, April 7, 2026. reporter: ? JOHN WOODS / FREE PRESS

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

Conrad Sweatman 6 minute read Preview

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

Conrad Sweatman 6 minute read Friday, May. 1, 2026

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.

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Friday, May. 1, 2026
Asylum seekers line up to enter Olympic Stadium Friday, August 4, 2017 near Montreal, Quebec. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Paul Chiasson

‘Denial of care’: Doctors worry about refugees as payment requirements take effect

Nicole Ireland, The Canadian Press 6 minute read Preview

‘Denial of care’: Doctors worry about refugees as payment requirements take effect

Nicole Ireland, The Canadian Press 6 minute read Saturday, May. 2, 2026

TORONTO - Refugees now have to pay out of pocket for part of their drug prescriptions, mental health counselling, dental services, vision care and health equipment — including wheelchairs — as changes to a federal program take effect.

For decades, Canada's Interim Federal Health Program has provided complete health coverage to refugees and refugee claimants until they are eligible for provincial health plans and benefits.

But starting Friday, they must pay $4 for every prescription and 30 per cent of the cost of supplemental health products and services.

More than a dozen medical, nursing, social work and refugee organizations, including the Canadian Medical Association, the Canadian Paediatric Society, the Canadian Psychiatric Association and the Canadian Nurses Association, have warned that refugees can't afford those co-payments and their physical and mental health will suffer.

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Saturday, May. 2, 2026

Breaking the digital blockade

Greg Arndt 4 minute read Friday, May. 1, 2026

In the world of logistics, there is a saying: “You don’t notice the infrastructure until it fails.”

For the thousands of Manitoba truck drivers who cross the 49th parallel every week — including our team at Jade Transport — the “invisible” infrastructure has been failing far too often.

Currently, Manitoba sits at an extraordinary geographical and economic crossroads. We must applaud Prime Minister Mark Carney and Premier Wab Kinew for their leadership regarding the Churchill Plus project.

By committing to a year-round Arctic gateway and streamlining regulatory hurdles, they are building a trimodal powerhouse that links rail, road and sea to the global North.