There is a simple truth too often lost in political debate: growing the economy is job No. 1 for every level of government. Not because it is the only priority, but because it enables all others.

Economic growth is what makes funding healthcare, housing, infrastructure, and social supports possible.

This is not an ideological argument, it is a practical one.

Without sustained growth, governments cannot maintain the services that define quality of life.

The image of Manitoba’s first commissioner of teacher professional conduct, Bobbi Taillefer, overseeing the ethics of our province’s classrooms from a remote office in Florida is, at best, a bizarre modern irony.

At worst, its messy conclusion, characterized by Premier Wab Kinew as a firing for being out of the province and by Taillefer as a resignation over “political liability,” has cracked the foundation of a very old, very quiet agreement.

While the “Florida-gate” headlines focused on the optics of a snowbird civil servant, the deeper story is far more consequential for the future of Manitoba’s schools. It isn’t just about where the commissioner sits; it’s about who that commissioner is, what they represent, and whether the delicate truce that has governed our education system for 70 years is about to be torn up.

To understand the stakes, one must look back to the mid-1950s. This was the era of the “grand bargain.”

Can middle powers actually coalesce?

Let’s set to one side the lack of definitional clarity and precision about the concept of so-called “middle powers.” In a previous column, I raised some concerns about how the term “power” is calculated and measured, which countries should belong to this club and whether their membership is more a function of the roles that they perform on the international stage.

I’ll assume that this classification of states does exist for purposes of this discussion. But are these middle powers capable of joining forces and serving as a counterpoise to the “great powers” of China, the U.S. and, arguably, Russia? Can they also come together to constrain the actions of the major powers, to articulate new avenues to confront serious global difficulties and to bring sanity to the community of states?

In January, Prime Minister Mark Carney spoke a lot about the emergent middle powers as central to the institutional machinery and international norms that make global politics manageable. His speech in Davos highlighted the seminal challenge of the moment: “The multilateral institutions on which the middle powers have relied — the World Trade Organization, the United Nations, the Conference of the Parties — the architecture, the very architecture of collective problem solving — are under threat.”

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.

Eat your hearts out, Pablo Escobar, Joaquín (El Chapo) Guzmán and Nemesio (El Mencho) Oseguera Cervantes. The richest cartel by far is still the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, and its leaders also get to die in bed. But one of its oldest members, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), has just quit. No notice, no explanations — just quit.

The UAE is the cartel’s third-biggest producer, so this is going to have several major consequences. The first, which will happen as soon as the Strait of Hormuz is reopened, is that the price of oil will drop, possibly even below the pre-war price. (Brent oil was selling for about US$65 a barrel one year ago; this week it reached US$119.)

The whole purpose of a cartel is to keep the price of the product high by restricting the supply. That requires discipline by the producers, because some producers will benefit more than others if they succeed in keeping the prices high. (The oil is sold to everyone at the same price, but the cost of producing a barrel of oil varies widely among the OPEC members.)

So there has always been a process of negotiating production quotas inside OPEC, and the UAE usually wanted a higher quota than the cartel’s biggest producer and de facto leader, Saudi Arabia. It wasn’t just greed, though. The two countries have a profound disagreement about when the remaining oil will become unsaleable: a “stranded asset.”

The chief promise of artificial intelligence is turbocharged productivity. The trade-off? Epic disruption.

This week includes the National Day of Mourning, a day that is observed every year to remember and honour workers who have been injured, suffered illness or lost their lives due to workplace hazards.

It is a day to think of loved ones, friends and co-workers who we have lost and those who have had their lives permanently altered because of their jobs. It is also a day to recommit ourselves to continuing to make workplaces safer and free of hazards so that all workers come home safe and whole at the end of every shift and workday.

In Manitoba, our workers compensation system is built upon the foundational principle that when a worker is injured on the job, they are entitled to supports to help them recover from their injury, replace lost employment income and safely return to work.

The Workers Compensation Board of Manitoba was set up over a century ago at a time when work, and our understanding of the effects of work, were a lot different than they are today. Understandably, much of the laws and rules that the WCB is based upon were set up to help workers with physical workplace injuries, because for a long time that was our society’s common understanding of the types of injuries that people could suffer at work.

I was in attendance in the gallery of the Manitoba legislature on March 19 when Bill 232, The Autism Strategy Act, introduced by Liberal MLA Cindy Lamoureux, passed second reading and moved to the committee stage.

There is a lot to like in Budget 2026’s health-care chapter. Building and expanding emergency departments, investing in home care and increasing health workforce training positions are just a few examples. The Kinew government deserves credit for listening to the concerns of Manitobans and putting real money into a struggling health-care system.

But buried in the highlights are two lines worth examining: $223 million for more doctors and an additional $6.3 million to recruit more doctors to rural Manitoba.

There is no question, Manitoba needs more doctors. However, a question the budget doesn’t answer, and frankly, one nobody in the legislature seems to be asking is: why are we spending $229.3 million exclusively on physicians when that same investment could fund more than 1,700 physician assistants — and get patients seen faster, in more communities, starting now?

This is not a rhetorical question. The “math isn’t mathing.”

It is a matter of chronic surprise that politicians, otherwise well-trained in saying just the right thing for the audience they are addressing, forget that whatever they say can be heard everywhere. Right away. By anybody who cares to listen, including journalists always hungry for the next story.

So it is with Kenya’s President William Ruto, who was in Italy last week talking up his country’s virtues. One of his claims was that Kenyans speak “some of the best English in the world” — and then, noticing that the audience was dozing off and in need of a joke, he went on to say that Nigerian-accented English, by contrast, was incomprehensible.

He got such a big laugh (most of the audience were Kenyans living in Italy) that he kept going. “If you listen to a Nigerian speaking, you don’t know what they are saying — you need a translator.” Another big laugh — and then social media all over Africa lit up with protests.

How dare Ruto mock fellow Africans? Why should Africans be speaking a colonial language like English anyway? And who the hell did he think he was to judge the quality of Nigerian English? He was thoroughly spanked and sent to bed without supper by the media — but it does open some interesting questions.

Spring has sprung and young mens’ thoughts turn to … agriculture. Well, at least let’s hope that the young men and women who comprise the government of Manitoba brain trust are turning their thoughts in that direction.