Gallery: Sports on the University of Manitoba campus Posted: 11:22 AM CST Monday, Feb. 5, 2024 Last Modified: 11:27 AM CST Monday, Feb. 5, 2024

Frustration mounts as drug raids sweep problems out of downtown, into West End

West End business owners say their neighbourhood has been under siege for months, and some believe downtown police drug sweeps have made things worse by pushing more street disorder in their direction — and pushing customers away.

The trolls inside the Conservative tent

The Conservative Party of Canada has a troll problem. And it’s coming from inside the tent.

Once, trolls existed only in imagination. They were figures of mythical proportion, big and small. They lived solitary lives under bridges, in caves, or forests. They were considered dim-witted and mean. Best avoided.

Today, they are real, unavoidable, and ubiquitous on social media. They are anything but solitary. There are tribes of them out there and tribal is how they think and post. As for dim-witted and mean, others can opine but they are uniformly mean and dismissive.

Mean to anyone who disagrees with their views. Dismissive of any view but their own. They distribute questionable, at best, facts and opinions grounded in hostility towards anything or anyone deemed disagreeable or heretical to their world view.

Canada vows dollar-for-dollar tariff retaliation, suspends trade talks with U.S.

OTTAWA - A last-ditch effort to reach a new trade deal before a midnight tariff deadline failed Friday, as Prime Minister Mark Carney suspended talks with the United States and summoned his negotiators back to Ottawa.

The decision meant new 50 per cent tariffs on billions of dollars in Canadian exports to the U.S. took effect at 12:01 a.m., and Carney vowed Canada would retaliate with equal measures of its own.

"In recent weeks, we made important progress toward improving Canada's position as having the best deal in the world with the U.S.," Carney said in a statement just before Trump's tariff deadline.

"However, that progress has not been enough to meet our objectives for Canadians."

Wooed by wood, Cedarella founder takes pride in handcrafted designs

Marina Bulan is the founder of Cedarella, a two-year-old venture that turns out eye-catching wood products such as jewelry, kitchen decor, children’s toys and, most recently, metre-high outdoor planters that double as home street-number indicators.

Ahead of immigrating to Winnipeg a decade ago from their native Russia, Bulan and her partner thought it would be prudent to conduct some research on their soon-to-be new home, a city they knew next to nothing about.

Imagine their surprise as they were viewing the 2007 surrealist film My Winnipeg, which comically blends historical facts about our burg with what Winnipeg-born writer/director Guy Maddin has termed “mystical hypothesizing.”

(For instance, there is no proof that, as reported in the award-winning flick, Winnipeg is the sleepwalking capital of the world, and that residents keep keys to their former abodes on their person in the event they turn up there during a bout of somnambulism.)

Plenty of alternatives to U.S. wines on the shelves

In February 2025, Manitoba (and most other provinces) pulled American liquor from store shelves as part of the ongoing trade dispute with the United States.

Then in December, the province followed a similar course to others and put American booze that was already on hand back on shelves, selling off inventory that had been wasting away in warehouses for months, and directing proceeds from those sales to charities.

Lineups sprung up at numerous stores as consumers snapped up bestselling American products — think Maker’s Mark, Jack Daniel’s, Apothic Red and the like. After that initial rush, what was left has been languishing on shelves ever since, with many products eventually being drastically discounted for a quick sale, lest they become too long in the tooth.

I decided early on not to write about/review U.S. products in this space until things were well and truly sorted. But a few months back, I found myself in the mood for a big, oaky red wine and — in a moment of weakness, or nostalgia, or maybe just curiosity — I picked up a $30-ish California Cabernet Sauvignon.