Picking 2025’s Canadian newsmaker of the year

To say Prime Minister Mark Carney had a seismic impact on Canadian events in 2025 would be an understatement of Himalayan proportions.

The environmental cost of instant delivery

The box arrives before you’ve finished your coffee. That, in a nutshell, is the modern miracle — and modern problem — of online shopping.

The Epstein coverup leaves an even bigger mark

The victims of Jeffrey Epstein, and their bi-partisan political allies, had high hopes that the Epstein Files Transparency Act would prompt President Donald Trump to finally and fully release all of the file information being held by the U.S. department of justice on the disgraced sex trafficker.

Time to plan for the next forest fire season

The end of every year brings ample opportunity to reflect on the events of the previous 12 months and usually inspires one to look — and, hopefully, plan — ahead for the new year that awaits.

Preparation is essential to capitalize on opportunities and, more importantly, to minimize the negative impact of events that threaten our lives and livelihoods. Forewarned is forearmed, as the old saying goes.

All of which is to say, it is vitally important for Manitoba’s government to heed the dire warning issued earlier this month by the head of the union representing the personnel responsible for fighting the wildfires that have become a lamentably regular occurrence in this and other provinces.

On Dec. 16, the president of the Manitoba Government and General Employees’ Union (MGEU) released a report titled “Burnt Out: A Workers’ Perspective from Manitoba’s 2025 Wildfire Season,” the conclusions of which should be of great concern to anyone who remembers 2025’s intensely destructive summer of flames, wind and omnipresent thick, choking smoke.

Groceries, prices and efforts to gouge consumers

Premier Wab Kinew seems to want to prove himself to be among the most ambitious premiers Manitoba has ever had. There seems to be no limit to the size and scope of problem he will not at least attempt to solve.

A relationship that’s on the rocks

The hardest part of a breakup, it’s sometimes said, is letting go.

When it comes to Canada-U.S. relations, it seems many Manitobans might be ready to do just that.

Recent polling by Probe Research shows a clear majority — nearly two-thirds of 1,000 Manitobans surveyed between Nov. 25 and Dec. 10 — agree the United States is no longer Canada’s ally.

After a year filled with trade uncertainty, erratic tariff impositions and inflammatory but nonsensical musings by President Donald Trump about annexing this country as the 51st U.S. state, a great many folks hereabouts think significant damage has befallen what was once the world’s most reliable and enviable international relationship.

Taking back the internet with politeness

If you are at least closer to a good mood than a bad one this time of year, here’s a way that, maybe, we could all work together to make next year slightly better, especially online. Because a lot of the online world, particularly social media, is a dark pit of misinformation, hate and bile. Every day, insults grow and the borders that mark civility come closer to being overrun.

Riding the fiscal roller-coaster, and holding on tight

On Dec. 12, Manitoba learned it would be getting a $355-million increase to its federal equalization payment, bringing the total to just more than $5 billion. Equalization involves the redistribution of federal income tax revenue from provinces with bigger economies to those with smaller economies to ensure all Canadians have access to the same levels of government services.

Time to clean up a world of ‘slop’

Merriam-Webster chose its word of the year correctly, and for more reasons than it might realize.

“Slop” is the word of 2025, according to the dictionary publisher. The decision was motivated primarily by the public’s encounters with, and reaction to, content generated by “artificial intelligence” large-language models.

Despite the best efforts of the technology’s proponents, people are quickly getting tired of being inundated with gaudy, glossy, lazy AI-generated images and videos practically everywhere they turn, from social media platforms to T-shirt vendors.

According to a Pew Research Center survey of U.S. residents released in September, respondents were more concerned than excited by the technology, and were “generally pessimistic about AI’s effect on people’s ability to think creatively…”

Waiting out the ongoing American chaos

If you missed Wednesday’s speech to the American nation by President Donald Trump, you can rest assured you didn’t miss much that you haven’t already seen.

Except, perhaps, a performance that should give you serious pause about where our next-door neighbour and largest trading partner is heading. (A harried Free Press editorial writer watched it all, so you don’t have to.)

Flanked by two flags and standing behind a podium, Trump spoke for roughly 17 minutes, claiming that inflation had been defeated, wages were rising, drug prices were about to fall by “400, 500 and even 600 per cent” and America was respected “like never before.”

A sample: “We’re doing what nobody thought was even possible, not even remotely possible. There has never, frankly, been anything like it. One year ago our country was dead. We were absolutely dead. Our country was ready to fail, totally failed. Now we’re the hottest country anywhere in the world, and that’s said by every single leader that I’ve spoken to over the last five months.”

Pierre Poilievre may be his own problem

It’s often said the first step toward finding a solution is admitting there’s a problem.

Pierre Poilievre has a problem. What seems to be making it difficult for the Conservative party leader to fix is his inability to recognize — or, at least, publicly acknowledge — that Pierre Poilievre, in large part, is the problem.

In the wake of recently having three Conservative MPs exit his caucus — two crossing the floor to join the ruling Liberal party and a third declaring he intends to leave office early next year — Poilievre continues to reject any suggestion his leadership style is a factor in those departures or the other concerning trends that find the party he leads losing strength and influence less than 12 months after seemingly being headed toward a massive majority victory.

When Acadie-Annapolis MP Chris d’Entremont defected in November, he cited Poilievre’s combative/divisive style as a factor in his decision. “It’s just looking at leadership styles and whether we are doing the right thing for Canada or we’re doing the right thing for ourselves, and I would rather be on the side of Canadians,” he said, adding other Conservatives should consider whether they’re “trying to build for the world… rather than knocking people down.”

The growing horror of antisemitic violence

This can’t keep happening.

Members of the Jewish community in Australia faced a horrific attack at a religious holiday event, with two gunmen opening fire on families and children at Australia’s famed Bondi Beach. The suspects are a father and son; the elder died at the scene and the son is in hospital.

The dead include a Holocaust survivor who died shielding his wife from bullets, two rabbis, a 10-year-old girl, a 62-year-old businessman and philanthropist who tried to draw the attackers’ fire to save others, and an older couple who were both killed as they tried, but failed, to disarm one of the shooters early in the attack.

All that appeared to matter to the shooters was that their targets were Jews celebrating the start of Hanukkah.

Penny-wise, pound-foolish fire department budgeting

There are many ways to balance a budget. Choosing the cheapest option in the short term is not always the most responsible one.

Winnipeg city council’s continued refusal to bring firefighter staffing up to acceptable levels — while leaning ever harder on overtime to plug the gaps — is a textbook case of being penny-wise and pound-foolish.

It may look fiscally prudent on a spreadsheet. But in practice, it is burning out a workforce, eroding public safety and almost certainly costing taxpayers more in the long run.

Winnipeg firefighters and their union representatives have been sounding the alarm bell for months about chronic understaffing. And they are not crying wolf. They are describing a service at a breaking point.

More unsettling sabre-rattling to the south of us

America’s ambassador to Canada will have to forgive Canadians for being skeptical.

Pete Hoekstra, U.S. President Donald Trump’s representative in this country, is trying to assuage Canadian concerns that the U.S.’s new national security strategy means the administration may come to meddle in Canadian politics.

The strategy adds a “Trump corollary” to the Monroe doctrine of 1823, which was aimed at keeping European powers out of the affairs of the Western Hemisphere. Trump’s update re-asserts America as the No. 1 power in the hemisphere, vowing to “deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our hemisphere.”

It goes on to state the U.S.’s intention to “enlist” allies in the hemisphere to “control migration, stop drug flows, and strengthen ability and security on land and sea,” and “expand” its influence by “cultivating and strengthening new partners while bolstering our own nation’s appeal as the hemisphere’s economic and security partner of choice.”

A temporary move that we shouldn’t plan to continue

Apparently, there are two vastly different definitions of “elbows up,” the ubiquitous rallying cry of patriotic Canadians outraged over injuries and insults inflicted by U.S. President Donald Trump.

The first definition, of course, is a reference to the hockey-style elbow shiver we are prepared to inflict on anyone who threatens our sovereignty.

More recently, however, “elbows up” has developed a parallel connotation: as a description of the posture some Canadians assume as they raise an elbow to quaff an American wine or whiskey.

The latter group of elbows-up activists were in abundance this week when the NDP government announced it would start selling off the $8-million stockpile of American alcohol it pulled off the shelves earlier this year to protest Trump’s tariffs and annexation fantasies.