Downtown needs definitive action

With news this week that Teranet Manitoba is relocating the Brandon Land Titles office to 18th Street near Brandon University, it’s clear that the exodus of viable businesses out of downtown Brandon continues apace.

In 2014, the Manitoba government sold its property registry — which includes the Land Titles and Personal Property registries — to Teranet Manitoba for a cool $75 million in a deal that was finalized toward the end of the Selinger government mandate in 2014.

As part of the deal, Teranet Manitoba received an exclusive 30-year licence to operate the registries on behalf of the province.

But as a private business, Teranet has no government mandate to stay downtown, and will leave its 705 Princess Ave. address, where Brandon’s land titles offices have been operating from since 1890. The Manitoba Historical Society notes that the building had a modern upgrade from its original ornate Victorian Gothic style, and opened with a more “modern” look in 1958.

The ‘Buy Canadian’ trade war challenge

“Buy Canadian,” they tell us, as trade tensions escalate between Canada and the United States. “Elbows up,” the pithy slogan advises again and again, in response to the latest daily affront from increasingly unbalanced U.S. President Donald Trump.

And there’s no question Canadians from coast to coast to coast have bought into the patriotic mindset that politicians, from Prime Minister Mark Carney right on down to elected officials at the municipal level, have implored us to adopt.

“We were attacked,” is how Carney described the Aug. 21 unravelling of trade talks, after U.S. negotiators reportedly inserted last-minute demands the Canadian side viewed as both unreasonable and unacceptable. “You’re at war when you get attacked. We got attacked.”

The breakdown led to the immediate imposition by Trump of steep new tariffs on $29 billion worth of Canadian goods headed to south-of-the-border markets. A targeted, dollar-for-dollar Canadian tariff response will take effect after the Labour Day weekend. In the meantime, Canadians are more motivated than ever to stand firm against Trump’s tyrannical tactics.

BU aids hike in Indigenous enrolment

If education paves the road to success, it’s a path that increasingly leads to Brandon University for Indigenous students.

The school announced this week that it has a 12.5 per cent increase from last year as of Sept. 1, which is an outstanding achievement for everyone involved, with about 17 per cent of the total student population self-declared as Indigenous, the BU website says.

Indigenous is defined as Métis, Inuit, First Nation status and First Nation non-status.

The latest numbers bring the total count to 570 with Brandon, Winnipeg, The Pas, Dauphin and Thompson driving the rise as the university sees increased applications from high schools in communities with larger Indigenous populations. BU does not conduct its final enrolment census until Nov. 1, so that number is likely to change.

Bad news continues to pile up for Poilievre

If there’s one thing to take away from the Liberal Party’s sweep of three federal byelections on Monday evening, it’s that the federal Conservative Party may be in the market for a new leader.

Well, among other things, of course.

Prime Minister Mark Carney secured his government’s majority on Monday, with all three Liberal candidates securing resounding wins. Not only did the Liberals hold onto the ridings of Beaches-East York in Ontario and North Vancouver-Capilano in B.C., but they also scored another win against the embattled Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre by taking Chicoutimi-Le Fjord in Quebec.

Ordinarily, byelections are not considered a reliable sign of overall government popularity. They tend to suffer from chronically low voter turnout, heavy protest voting and a complete lack of high-stakes general election dynamics.

Hydronyms just one way countries vent frustration

“I read in a book once that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but I’ve never been able to believe it. I don’t believe a rose WOULD be as nice if it was called a thistle or a skunk cabbage.”

― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

U.S. President Donald Trump finally cracked the code on international diplomacy, trade wars and cartography by signing an executive order on Thursday to rename Lake Ontario to “Lake America.”

And the rationale behind this sudden act of geographical manifest destiny?

Health care needs long-term planning

If there’s been a throughline in the past 30 years of Manitoba politics — apart from the fact the electorate has bounced between NDP and Progressive Conservative governments — it’s that the state of provincial health care is almost always in the headlines.

Remember the “hallway medicine” catchphrase used by Gary Doer’s New Democrats in the 1999 provincial election campaign? It’s not that far removed from the “ER bottlenecks” that Manitobans, especially Winnipeggers, must deal with today.

In a recent Winnipeg Free Press examination of emergency room medicine (Condition critical, Aug. 22), Dr. Alecs Chochinov, a former director of emergency medicine at St. Boniface Hospital, attributed the bottleneck problem to “access block,” meaning that more personal-care home beds and home-care services are needed to free up acute-care hospital beds and enable patients to move more quickly through emergency rooms.

So, how should access block be addressed, and who should direct the implementation of long-term investment and solutions?

City has to live up to host status again

Brandon will once again be able to prove its bona fides as a national-event host in 2027, with a pair of high-level events being held in the city.

With the recent announcement that the Telus Cup is coming in April and the older news that Softball Canada’s under-17 national girls championship will be here from Aug. 11 to 15, the Wheat City will once again be called upon to deliver.

Happily, it’s a city that believes it has a uniquely good group of volunteers and facilities that make events here a success.

It may be worth considering the idea is a universal conceit. If you were to ask the good folks of cities like Red Deer or Kamloops or Fredericton or Charlottetown, they would also likely tell some version of the idea that their volunteers are universally recognized as among the best in Canada and that’s why so many events keep coming to their city.

Meta settlement should be only the first of many

Who knew? A massive company knew its products were harmful to children and teens, and not only kept its products on the market, but worked to make it more addictive to build their own profits.

Welcome to social media, and a huge settlement in a case against online giant Meta.

First, the cash in the settlement: Meta will pay US$12.1 billion to settle suits by 47 U.S. states, which had argued Meta knowingly exploited teenage weaknesses. (A lot of money, until you consider that Meta’s revenues last year were US$200 billion.)

Meta is promising to limit teens’ access to social media platforms to two hours a day (unless parents allow more), block sites between midnight and 6 a.m., block notifications during school hours and stop allowing image modifications for teens, among other things.

Running for office comes with a cost

When it comes to our elected officials, we often forget that the extra work that they take on in order to serve their community always comes at a personal cost. And sometimes a professional one, too.

That is true whether you’re a longtime councillor at city hall or taking a run for a seat around the school board table. Sure, some candidates may have personal agendas when they throw their names into the hat for election day.

Some look at small-town politics as a stepping stone to bigger seats at bigger tables. Others may be driven to run because of a single issue that they are passionate about.

But most anyone who runs for councillor or trustee believes that they have the time and the experience to help grow their community, and do some good. And while members of the community can often lose sight of this reality when their streets aren’t cleared of snow, or there’s a broken water main on their street causing them irritation, it’s important to remember that every locally elected official is a human being with families, friends and failings like the rest of us.

Can the mouse survive an attacking elephant?

“We are entering a phase where fiscal strength, discipline, focus is going to be very important. It’s going to be scrutinized. Markets sometimes ignore these fundamentals and then all of a sudden they focus on them. And when they focus on them, if you don’t have your house in order, it’s too late. We have our house in order and we’re getting stronger.”

— Prime Minister Mark Carney

Question: So how does a mouse survive an attack from a rampaging elephant?

Answer: By refusing to fight on the elephant’s terms.

Let cooler heads prevail on retaliatory measures

“Despite the addition of both the Wuskwatim and Keeyask generating stations to our system over the past 14 years, which added almost 900 megawatts of generating capacity, we are simply not the energy superpower many think we are.”

— Manitoba Hydro CEO Allan Danroth

Ever since Prime Minister Mark Carney announced that he ordered his team to walk away from the negotiating table after the Trump administration offered up a poison pill of untenable demands, Canadians of all partisan stripes have come together from across the country in support of that decision.

While this is certainly encouraging in the face of an attack on our sovereignty and economic autonomy from the United States, there has been an understandable — but somewhat misguided — view among Canadians that we need to hit the Americans back, and hit them hard. No matter the cost.

Trade war with U.S. won’t be easy fight

“We’ve recognized from the start that America has changed. We recognize that sometimes its signature is written in pencil.”

— Prime Minister Mark Carney

It has been seven months since Mark Carney rose to the podium in Davos, Switzerland, and bluntly declared that the traditional U.S.-led rules-based international order is over, and that it had been replaced by an era of great power rivalries and economic coercion.

Health-care problems very daunting for NDP

“Fixing health care is probably one of the most daunting tasks that you could lay before a province at this time. And yet, we have taken the time to listen to experts and lay out a credible path forward, and I believe that we will be able to execute on it.”

— Premier Wab Kinew, October 2023

“It’s the worst it’s ever been. Patients are deteriorating while they’re waiting and there’s no place for them to go.”

— An ER nurse at the Health Sciences Centre in Winnipeg, August 2026

Time to move forward on all-Canadian power grid

The New York Times published a quite terrifying story on the U.S. electrical grid this week, pointing out that, with a few simple directed attacks on nine major U.S. substations, the entire U.S. power grid could be disabled.

And the power might remain off for as long as 18 months.

Why so long? Well, the power grid was built as a number of individual systems, all Frankensteined together into a sort of unplanned giant. The main problem? Parts of that grid depend on very old — and very hard to replace — transformers.

The average lead time to replace large transformers is 128 weeks, and can be as long as five years — and there’s a not-so-subtle irony that the U.S. would need to get transformers from countries such as China, Mexico and South Korea, all countries that have been on U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff hit list.

What’s next for our downtown?

There can be no sugarcoating the fact that another two large banking institutions have decided to flee downtown Brandon for more friendly commercial retail corridors in other parts of the city.

Later this year, BMO and RBC will leave their long-standing downtown Brandon locations, with BMO moving to Park Avenue and the Royal Bank branch on Rosser Avenue consolidating with an existing branch on 18th Street.

They join TD Canada Trust, which closed its downtown location on Rosser in 2020 and moved to 18th Street, as well as Westoba Credit Union in 2017, which shuttered its 10th and Princess location in 2017.

Hope and optimism aren’t the typically emotions we feel when significant businesses abandon our neighbourhoods. We have to be real about this situation — this is a distressing reality for downtown Brandon. The ongoing trend of financial institution exodus from the downtown signals a decline in local foot traffic, reduced commercial investment in the region and obvious economic stress, which can lead to even more neighbourhood decline.