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High-speed internet necessity, not luxury

Many people head to the hinterlands to escape the city’s hustle and bustle and seek a slower-paced lifestyle.

They gladly leave the traffic jams behind, but many former urbanites couldn’t imagine life without high-speed internet, which opens the door to streaming television services, social-media websites or video-game platforms.

Tell that to the 17 per cent of Manitobans who, at the end of 2022, had yet to receive high-speed internet access, a rate that is second-worst in the country.

The statistic looks particularly woeful when compared with neighbouring Saskatchewan, which says 99 per cent of the province’s households can access high-speed internet through Sasktel, the provincially owned Crown corporation.

Will Alberta’s election campaign go federal?

Political tremors emanating from Alberta Monday night should serve as a warning shot for the rest of Canada.

The store next door

The basics are usually the same: a wall of chips and candy, milk, tins of coffee, bread, a newspaper stand, gum, some fresh fruit and vegetables, lottery, tobacco products and a roll top freezer full of treats to beat the heat on a sweltering summer day.

A celebration — but there’s still need for action

On June 28, 1968, The Stonewall Inn, a gay bar located in New York City’s Greenwich Village, was raided by police. When the cops became violent, the patrons — many of them drag queens and LGBTTQ+ people of colour — rose up and fought back.

Religious class shouldn’t get blessing

For generations, citizens of democratic nations have negotiated a sometimes-fraught tension in the boundaries between the authority of the state, and that of religious leaders.

Time to tune out transphobic rhetoric

The trumpet of ignorance sounded clearly this month when the Brandon School Division gave a full hearing to a proposal to ban books.

Taking its place among several other similar calls in the past year, the hearing offered grandmother and former division trustee Lorraine Hackenschmidt ample time on the microphone to cite her “concern” for the content of several books relating to gender identity and sexual health issues.

The meeting follows a pattern among would-be book banners. Hackenschmidt starts out by admitting she is not a doctor or a psychologist, but insists she has done her “research” into the “LGBT ideology” — clearly poor research, if it failed to instruct her that one’s sexuality and gender identity are not matters of ideology. Among her motivations for her call to establish a committee — which would review and remove any “inappropriate” material — is to “protect our children from sexual grooming.”

Not only is that fear utterly baseless, it’s also a tell that Hackenschmidt, and others fighting this “battle” alongside her, are merely regurgitating learned talking points.

PCs carving out legacy of blunders

Manitoba’s governing party faces many challenges, none of which is made easier by its talent for putting its foot in its mouth.

Alberta election a dry run for Manitoba?

Manitobans will be closely following the political battle in Alberta this month. That province’s May 29 election will set the course for the largest and most prosperous of the Prairie provinces. The Alberta contest may also suggest how ruling Conservatives and opposition New Democrats are faring ahead of Manitoba’s fall election.

In both provinces, the rural-based Conservatives and the urban-centred socialists are fairly evenly matched in public support. Public impatience with Conservative premiers Danielle Smith in Alberta and Heather Stefanson in Manitoba might bring the NDP to power in both Edmonton and Winnipeg during the next six months. Fear of economic damage from the anti-business instincts of the NDP might, however, keep the Conservatives in power in either province.

Both Conservative parties dumped their leaders, Alberta’s Jason Kenny and Manitoba’s Brian Pallister. Mr. Kenney lost his own party’s support because he was not stridently enough anti-Ottawa and anti-vaccine for the angriest segment of his party. Mr. Pallister fell into disfavour because his cuts to health care produced disastrous results when the COVID-19 pandemic hit the province.

Ms. Smith has used her six months in office to reassure the anti-vaccine activists that she hates the federal government as much as they do. Ms. Stefanson, during her 18 months in power, has been trying to persuade the public that she is a kinder, gentler Conservative, less extreme than Mr. Pallister.