Architect's pop-up porta-potty is a triumphant step in his long human-rights campaign

From May 2018: While the issue of cleaning up biohazards — blood, urine, feces, needles, vomit — is not new, the problem has reached a tipping point in major cities across Canada, Europe and the U.S.And the answer, in a growing number of communities, involves a trip back to the future: Public toilets and washrooms.

Life is a struggle on God's Lake Narrows First Nation, but a will to overcome gives purpose

Free Press reporter Randy Turner and photographer Mike Deal travelled to God’s Lake Narrows First Nation in October with a straightforward mission: document everyday life on a remote, northern fly-in Indigenous community that only a fraction of non-Aboriginal Canadians would ever visit.

Canada has long been presented as a nation of Two Solitudes — the cultural and political divide between French- and English-speaking Canadians. Hugh MacLennan’s novel of the same name, published in 1945, was standard high school literature. 

But to define Canada as a nation of two solitudes is a conceit that ignores the solitude that was here in the first place — the one experienced by Indigenous peoples.

Yet for generations, First Nations, mostly in the North, have existed in relative isolation. Their day-to-day lives, their shared history, unfolds in a world unrecognizable to the vast majority of Canadians.

Defeat is not an option for Sel Burrows, the patron saint of Point Douglas

In 2007, Sel Burrows, a cat-loving hippie, heard a loud ruckus outside his home on Grove Street in North Point Douglas.He quickly realized that a member of the Crazy Eights street gang was threatening the son of one of his neighbours.

Turns out, the neighbour’s kid wanted to extricate himself from the gang, so the member, around 16, had dropped by to issue an ultimatum: we’ll burn your house and kill your little dog, too.

Well, this would not stand for Burrows, all 5-foot-7 and about 140 pounds of him.

So Burrows, then 64, sprints outside to confront the young gangster. He’s carrying some cheap camera. Recalls Burrows: “I stupidly came out with a little digital camera and said I was going to take pictures of him.”

Using memories as fuel, heartbroken family committed to creating treatment centre

As a boy, Bruce Oake was a precocious kid. He was outgoing, friendly and impulsive. 

“He spoke baby gibberish for a long while, and one day he just started talking,” says his father, Scott Oake. “And he never shut up, ever after.”

As a teenager, Bruce was a prankster. He and his brother, Darcy Oake, would play a game where they’d walk down the street holding hands to see who would let go first.

“If it wasn’t fun, he wasn’t interested in it,” says Bruce’s friend Bret Olson. “He never wanted the day to end and couldn’t wait for it to get started again. That’s what stands out for me: just that tireless, ‘What are we doing next?’”

Follow 3 migrants on their perilous, frozen trek into Canada

EMERSON — All is quiet on the northern front.It’s the middle of the night, just a stone’s throw from the Canada-U.S. border, and the temperature has fallen to -23 C.There’s only a breath of wind, but it’s the kind of night where the cold is not weather anymore, it’s the enemy.

So maybe this isn’t a good idea, after all, to sit in a parked car from 11:30 p.m. until dawn hoping to document the first moments for asylum seekers as they set foot on snow-coated Canadian soil.

Surely, no one will arrive on this night, when even sitting in a parked car with the engine off — any border jumpers will likely be heard before they’re seen — is a bone-chilling exercise in patience.

A Free Press reporter is in one car and a photographer is in another. We’re parked on the northeast edge of town, along the railway tracks which, in recent days, have been a common path for refugee claimants — most originally from east Africa — who sneak over the border in the dead of night.

The Back Story with Randy Turner

Randy Turner takes you behind the story of his National Newspaper Award nominated project on the Winnipeg Art Gallery’s new Inuit Art Centre.

Desperation Trumps danger for members of thriving Minneapolis Somali community

MINNEAPOLIS — It’s early evening at a place nicknamed the Somali Starbucks, a coffee shop in a district of Minneapolis known as Little Mogadishu.

The customers, all men, are gathered in clutches around tables. There is a cacophony of voices involved in animated discussions. A reporter from Winnipeg on a mission to find out why Somalis from this city are risking their lives to walk across the Canadian border at Emerson — in the dead of night, in sub-zero temperatures — sits down in front of a man at random, off by himself.

At the mention of the word “Winnipeg,” men at the next table suddenly turn their heads.

And within seconds of introductions, the man, 36-year-old Abdirahim Adar, opens up.

The WAG's Inuit Art Centre will be about people, not just things they create

The Winnipeg Art Gallery wants its decades-in-the-making Inuit Art Centre to be an Inukshuk: a place to communicate and take shelter from the bitter winds of a miserable history.

An often brutal history, beautifully told in Inuit art

Winnipeg Art Gallery’s Inuit Art Centre will connect the Far North with Canada’s south and the rest of the world. To better understand the ambitious project, reporter Randy Turner and photographer John Woods travelled to Nunavut to explore how the art form took root and flourished.

The game of life: Small-town survival depends on vitality of local hockey rink

FOXWARREN — It’s Saturday afternoon and the old barn is alive. For now, anyway.

The parking lot is jammed. Inside, the 65-year-old arena is lousy with kids, most of them half-dressed in hockey gear. A boy in goalie equipment is standing at the cafeteria window ordering a piece of apple pie.

The air is filled with squeals of children and the aroma of sweat that seems to have permeated the Foxwarren building over decades — not unlike any other aging small-town hockey rink on the Prairies.

For those raised in these endangered buildings, it’s the smell of home.

The outsiders

From Jan. 29, 2016:

They were invisible then; they are invisible now.

Yet the little-known legacy of Rooster Town — a long-since displaced community of shanties bulldozed to make way for Grant Park Shopping Mall in the late 1950s — remains ingrained in the city’s character, according to historians.

For cancer survivor Don Dietrich, heaven is a hockey rink in the Rockies

When the helicopter rose over the Rocky Mountains, Don Dietrich looked down on a glistening sheet of ice below and cried.

Not a sad, empty cry, like the time he was first diagnosed with Parkinson's disease at age 34. Or the first time he was diagnosed with cancer, four years later, and given six months to live. Or the second time he was diagnosed with cancer. Or the third.

No, these were the tears of a 54-year-old man who saw his own nirvana. A hockey rink.

"I'll put it to you this way," Dietrich said on Friday, from his home in Deloraine. "If there's a heaven on Earth, I've been there."

City Beautiful: How architecture shaped Winnipeg’s DNA

An exploration of Winnipeg’s largely hidden architectural history, development and recent renaissance.

The naked truth: those who work in the exotic dance industry are misunderstood

Exotic dancers are leered at, fantasized about, marginalized and shunned. They can be used up, exploited and spit out. But they can also be grossly misunderstood.

Hockey’s disgusting little habit

The young man, just 20, uses a tin of tobacco a day. At night, he plays in the Manitoba Major Junior Hockey League.

He’s being asked about the effects of a habit he first picked up at age 15 and has progressed ever since. He answer comes in the form of a visual.

“My tongue goes down to here now,” he says, showing how much further he can burrow down inside his front lip — about halfway to his chin — due to gum erosion from tobacco use.

Right now, the hockey player is sitting on the bench while his teammates fly about the ice during a recent practice. He doesn’t want his name used, which is fair enough. After all, none of the several Winnipeg Jets who use smokeless tobacco wanted to speak on the record for this story, either.