Columns – Brandon Sun

Tourists pose for a photo against a city view of Toronto on July 14 as the Air Quality Health Index rating soared to over 10, or “very high risk,” from wildfire smoke. (The Canadian Press files)

Canada is woefully ill-prepared for disasters

By Brodie Ramin 5 minute read Friday, Dec. 5, 2025

A fault line in Canada’s Yukon territory has stirred after more than 12,000 years of geological sleep. Researchers studying the Tintina Fault, which stretches 1,000 kilometres from northeast British Columbia into the Yukon and towards Alaska, have found evidence that the fault has built up at least six metres of unrelieved strain.

Like a loaded weapon, it may now be primed for a massive earthquake. To most Canadians, the news passed as a remote curiosity from the North, but the fault lies within a tectonic system that extends under Western Canada and hints at deeper vulnerabilities in eastern Ontario and beyond. Below the surface lies an uneasy truth: Canada is not immune to catastrophe.

A wildfire burned through the hills of Los Angeles in early 2025. Schools closed, emergency alerts buzzed across phones and emergency crews scrambled to get ahead of the flames as Southern California experienced one of its worst wildfire seasons on record, again.

Meanwhile, in Canada, smoke from record-breaking wildfires blanketed major cities, sending air quality plummeting in Ottawa, Toronto and Montréal.

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Wildlife, tourism at risk in Churchill

By Ron Thiessen 5 minute read Preview

Wildlife, tourism at risk in Churchill

By Ron Thiessen 5 minute read Sunday, Nov. 30, 2025

Churchill’s marine environment stands on the edge of profound change. Government investment is accelerating to transform the Port of Churchill into a year-round shipping hub.

Without careful planning, the very wildlife that makes this region globally renowned could be irreparably harmed.

Western Hudson Bay is one of Canada’s most ecologically important — and vulnerable — marine regions. These waters host tens of thousands of beluga whales each summer, are home to the world’s most famous polar bear population, and provide a critical stopover for migratory birds linking ecosystems across continents. The region’s wildlife is integral to Indigenous cultures and forms the backbone of Churchill’s world-class tourism economy.

In 2018, Parks Canada proposed establishing a national marine conservation area in western Hudson Bay. Since then, 12,000 Canadians and the Town of Churchill have sent written correspondences to the federal government urging it to launch the long-overdue feasibility study for the conservation area.

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Sunday, Nov. 30, 2025

A polar bear mother and her two cubs walk along the shore of Hudson Bay near Churchill, Man. in November 2007. Ron Thiessen writes that now is the time for a long-awaited feasibility study for a national marine conservation area in western Hudson Bay. (The Canadian Press files)

Time for Canadians to bank on Canada Post

By Simon Enoch and Ryan Romard 4 minute read Preview

Time for Canadians to bank on Canada Post

By Simon Enoch and Ryan Romard 4 minute read Friday, Dec. 5, 2025

Canada Post is “effectively insolvent.”

That’s how the CFO of the Crown corporation describes its current financial crisis. And this isn’t just due to falling mail volume. It’s insolvent because the corporation’s management refuses to do what successful postal services have already done: build a full postal bank that actually makes money.

In November, the corporation, which has posted operating losses every year since 2018, including a $748-million loss in 2023, submitted a “comprehensive transformation” plan to the government in its effort to move from cash-strapped to solvent. While few details are public, other national postal services facing the same pressures have already shown what works.

The most successful postal systems no longer depend on letter mail. In Canada, letter-mail volume has fallen by more than 60 per cent since 2006, and the old model simply doesn’t pay the bills. Other countries adapted. Canada Post didn’t.

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Friday, Dec. 5, 2025

A Canada Post employee returns to a delivery depot in Vancouver, B.C., late last year. (The Canadian Press files)

Missed opportunity will produce higher greenhouse-gas emissions

By Deveryn Ross 5 minute read Preview

Missed opportunity will produce higher greenhouse-gas emissions

By Deveryn Ross 5 minute read Friday, Dec. 5, 2025

In his Letter to the Editor published in the Sun yesterday, former Brandon West NDP candidate Quentin Robinson objects to the Kinew government’s plan to construct a $3-billion combustion turbine facility in Brandon.

For those unfamiliar with the issue, the plant will initially be fuelled by natural gas, but the government says the goal is to eventually shift to an energy source such as renewable methane or hydrogen. The power mix being created will reportedly include 600 megawatts of wind-generated electricity, meaning that the gas-fired plant would only be used when needed, not year-round.

In explaining the decision to build the plant, Premier Wab Kinew said, “We’re Trump-proofing our economy by having power sovereignty … (It’s so) we’re no longer as reliant on bringing in electricity during the coldest days of our winter.”

What he really meant is that Manitoba has become increasingly reliant on electricity imports from the U.S. and, given the unstable and occasionally vindictive nature of the Trump administration, that exposes our province to an unacceptable level of risk.

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Friday, Dec. 5, 2025

The Manitoba Hydro Brandon Generating Station off Victoria Avenue East. The provincial government is proposing a $3-billion combustion turbine facility at the site to meet the increasing demand for power. It is expected to be in place by 2030 at the latest. (Tim Smith/The Brandon Sun files)

RCMP’s release of body camera footage sets dangerous precedent

By Christopher J. Schneider and Stacey Hannem 5 minute read Preview

RCMP’s release of body camera footage sets dangerous precedent

By Christopher J. Schneider and Stacey Hannem 5 minute read Wednesday, Dec. 3, 2025

The first authorized body-worn camera footage to be officially shared in Canada was made public by Manitoba Mounties at the end of November.

The video, at just under one minute, is an edited compilation of footage taken from RCMP officers’ body cameras over the last year as the Mounties rolled out the devices across the country.

The week prior to the release of the video compilation, body camera video captured a fatal shooting by an RCMP officer at Sagkeeng First Nation in Manitoba.

“We want to see it,” said a close friend of the deceased.

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Wednesday, Dec. 3, 2025

RCMP Sgt. Paul Manaigre, media relations officer with D Division, wears one of the body cameras the RCMP deployed to 44 detachments in Manitoba during a press conference in Steinbach last year. (Svjetlana Mlinarevic/The Carillon files)

Disillusioned Gen Z, millennial consumers can drive real change

By Eugene Y. Chan 6 minute read Preview

Disillusioned Gen Z, millennial consumers can drive real change

By Eugene Y. Chan 6 minute read Monday, Dec. 1, 2025

Walk into any classroom, scroll through TikTok or sit in on a Gen Z focus group, and you’ll hear a familiar refrain: “We care, but nothing changes.”

Across climate action, racial justice and corporate ethics, many young people believe their values are out of sync with the systems around them and are skeptical that their voices, votes and dollars alone can address deep systemic problems.

If you feel this way, you’re not alone. But are young consumers truly powerless? Or are they simply navigating a new kind of influence that’s more diffuse, digital and demanding in ways previous generations did not experience?

The rise of political consumerism

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Monday, Dec. 1, 2025

FILE - Locks cover the fence on the Love Bridge in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh as a person walks by Nov. 3, 2021. A poll from MTV Entertainment Group and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds that Americans ages 13 through 56 think the pandemic made parts of their lives harder, but Gen Z reported higher levels of disruption to their education and dating lives. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar, File)

What would Marx say about the AI bubble?

By Elliot Goodell Ugalde 7 minute read Preview

What would Marx say about the AI bubble?

By Elliot Goodell Ugalde 7 minute read Sunday, Nov. 30, 2025

When OpenAI’s Sam Altman told reporters in San Francisco earlier this year that the AI sector is in a bubble, the American tech market reacted almost instantly.

Combined with the fact that 95 per cent of AI pilot projects fail, traders treated his remark as a broader warning. Although Altman was referring specifically to private startups rather than publicly traded giants, some appear to have interpreted it as an industry-wide assessment.

Tech billionaire Peter Thiel sold his Nvidia holdings, for instance, while American investor Michael Burry (of The Big Short fame) has made million-dollar bets that companies like Palantir and Nvidia will drop in value.

What Altman’s comment really exposes is not only the fragility of specific firms but the deeper tendency Prussian philosopher Karl Marx predicted: the problem of surplus capital that can no longer find profitable outlets in production.

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Sunday, Nov. 30, 2025

Sam Altman participates in a discussion during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) CEO Summit in November 2023, in San Francisco. Altman recently told reporters he believes the AI sector is in a bubble. (The Associated Press)

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Experimental course proves prescient

By David McConkey 5 minute read Preview

Experimental course proves prescient

By David McConkey 5 minute read Sunday, Nov. 30, 2025

“Next Stop: Latvia.” That was the headline of a recent Brandon Sun story about soldiers from Shilo on their way to a NATO operation in the Baltics. Unremarkable, yet unthinkable until recently. Reading that headline reminds me of the prescience of a high school course I took decades ago.

The year was 1968 and I was in Grade 12 at Vincent Massey Collegiate in Winnipeg. By chance, I found myself taking an experimental social studies course. It was taught by Gerry Labies, a history teacher at the school. Labies explained to our class that he was a member of a curriculum development committee. As part of that project, he would be testing a new course with us. We teenagers didn’t appreciate it at the time but we would be treated to a gifted teacher free to explore his vision, untrammeled by precedents or textbooks.

The course was centred on the rise of authoritarianism in the 20th century. We studied communism in Russia and China, Nazism in Germany and fascism in Italy and South America.

Even more than 50 years later, I can recall the scenes Labies painted with his passion and his words. We could imagine that we were there: with V.I. Lenin in 1917 on a sealed train speeding across Germany towards Russia; with Adolf Hitler in 1923 in Munich during the failed beer hall putsch; with Mao in the 1930s in China on the Long March.

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Sunday, Nov. 30, 2025

Cpl. Aaron MacLennan sits at the front of the bus that left CFB Shilo in December 2024. About 175 soldiers were deployed from the base to Latvia. David McConkey describes how Latvia’s independence — and a special teacher — taught him the value of hope. (Connor McDowell/The Brandon Sun files)

Acknowledging World AIDS Day

By Abby Wronowski 4 minute read Preview

Acknowledging World AIDS Day

By Abby Wronowski 4 minute read Sunday, Nov. 30, 2025

World AIDS Day has been celebrated worldwide on Dec. 1 since 1988. World AIDS Day falls right between AIDS Awareness Week, which runs in the last week of November, and Aboriginal AIDS Awareness Week, which is held in the first week of December. This year’s theme is “Overcoming disruption, transforming the AIDS response”; the goal for World AIDS Day is to accelerate the response to HIV/AIDS, and work towards an end to the epidemic as a public health threat by 2030. World AIDS Day is also used as a day to spread information on HIV/AIDS, end the stigma surrounding AIDS, and remember the loss of loved ones who have passed away from AIDS.

What is AIDS? According to the Government of Canada Website, AIDS, which is short for acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, is a worsened stage of HIV, which is short for human immunodeficiency virus. HIV attacks the body’s immune system. People who are diagnosed with HIV are not all bound to get AIDS. With the right treatment, HIV can be managed, and people can live long, healthy lives even if they have HIV. When HIV is left untreated, the problems start to arise. HIV targets the body’s immune system, which is the body system used to fight infections. Without a strong, healthy immune system, the human body is susceptible and unable to fight severe infections. This is why HIV leads to AIDS.

In the 1980s, when AIDS was first discovered, there was a huge epidemic, as it was first presented as a mysterious and terrifying disease with no cure. Through the years of research and studies, scientists and doctors were able to identify that AIDS was the final stage of HIV. With that knowledge, treatments have emerged for people with HIV to receive and prevent AIDS. The epidemic is still not over; it is just managed with the help of treatments. According to the public health services section of the Canadian government website, an estimated 65,270 Canadians were living with HIV in 2022.

Originally, the symbol for AIDS awareness was a red ribbon. However, in 1991, the Regional HIV/AIDS Connection (RHAC) created the symbol of a red-coloured scarf, to illustrate your support, awareness and solidarity for those living with AIDS.

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Sunday, Nov. 30, 2025

UNAIDS executive director Winnie Byanyima speaks to the media about World AIDS Day 2025 during a press conference at the European headquarters of the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, on Tuesday. (Salvatore Di Nolfi/Keystone via The Associated Press)

A tough decision for women

By Deveryn Ross 5 minute read Preview

A tough decision for women

By Deveryn Ross 5 minute read Friday, Nov. 28, 2025

Earlier this week, the Sun reported that a committee named “Her Seat at the Table” is encouraging women to seek positions on city council in the next municipal election. As part of that effort, the group will host a gathering on Dec. 3, at which there will be a range of information available for those considering running. That meeting will be followed by a second session in February, which organizer Tracy Baker says will be “more strategic.”

I have no doubt that the “Her Seat at the Table” initiative is well-intentioned, in that it seeks to resolve the gender imbalance that currently exists at the city council table. That said, it is important that anybody thinking of running for any elected position — women in particular — have a very clear idea of exactly what they are getting themselves into.

Over the past 20 to 30 years, I have often been contacted by people who were pondering being candidates in an upcoming election, whether it be at the school board, city council, provincial or federal level. Their concerns have ranged from the cost of election campaigns to the time commitment required to do the job if elected, and everything in between.

More recently, their top issue by far is the amount of abuse they will experience during the campaign and, if they are elected, during their tenure as an elected official.

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Friday, Nov. 28, 2025

Families Minister Nahanni Fontaine’s constituency office is shown after it was vandalized in September. Vandalism or even worse forms of harassment is something women in elected and non-elected leadership positions face every day, Deveryn Ross writes. (Mike Deal/Winnipeg Free Press files)

Election feelers hint at Kinew’s aspirations

By Tom Brodbeck 5 minute read Preview

Election feelers hint at Kinew’s aspirations

By Tom Brodbeck 5 minute read Friday, Nov. 28, 2025

Premier Wab Kinew’s musing about an early election call probably has more to do with his own personal agenda than it does about political strategy for the NDP.

Kinew said earlier this month he came close to calling an election after the Opposition “held up” Bill 48 (legislation to detain highly intoxicated people longer) and were “playing games” with the bill. That’s nonsense, of course.

Opposition parties routinely scrutinize government bills and sometimes delay their passage. But ultimately, majority governments have the authority and power to pass whatever bills they want, through the use of closure, if necessary.

Strategically, there is no compelling reason for Manitoba’s NDP government to go to the polls early.

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Friday, Nov. 28, 2025

Premier Wab Kinew talks to the media prior to the throne speech at the legislature on Nov. 18. (Mike Deal/Winnipeg Free Press files)

Online harassment silencing Canada’s health experts

By Heidi J.S. Tworek, Chris Tenove and Netheena Neena Mathews 6 minute read Preview

Online harassment silencing Canada’s health experts

By Heidi J.S. Tworek, Chris Tenove and Netheena Neena Mathews 6 minute read Friday, Nov. 28, 2025

Canada has lost the measles elimination status it has held since 1998. To regain that status, one crucial factor is hearing from researchers who speak about vaccine safety in public.

Canada can’t afford to lose expert voices at a moment when the threat of vaccine-preventable diseases is rising. Yet our work suggests that online harassment is a growing deterrent that is driving researchers and scientists out of the conversations needed at this time.

Harassment is a long-standing problem in academia. While it occurs within different institutions and disciplines, it has increasingly taken the form of online attacks from people outside of academia. It’s a phenomenon that accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic, and one where health experts are left to cope alone.

Canadian institutions and research organizations need to create broad support for these individuals.

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Friday, Nov. 28, 2025

Health-care workers watch from a window as demonstrators gather outside Toronto General Hospital in September 2021 to protest against COVID-19 vaccines, COVID-19 vaccine passports and COVID-19 related restrictions. (The Canadian Press files)

Looking past the spin on education property taxes

By Alan Campbell 5 minute read Preview

Looking past the spin on education property taxes

By Alan Campbell 5 minute read Thursday, Nov. 27, 2025

In response to and building upon Deveryn Ross’ column “Higher school taxes a preventable problem” from earlier this week.

As the president of the Manitoba School Boards Association, I, along with our team often need to steer our organization through the tricky balancing act of building partnerships and repairing relationships while at the same time speaking truth to political spin. On the subject of education property taxes and the funding of public education in Manitoba, there has been no shortage of political spin in recent months and years.

First, some facts. Manitoba is not the only province in Canada to fund public education with education property taxes. In fact, most provinces charge education property taxes in order to fund their public schools. In Manitoba, our system remains by far the most responsive to local community needs because our locally elected school boards are the last remaining in the country that have the democratic autonomy to set local mill rates on those education property taxes.

In other words, when the provincial government underfunds our public schools, the local school board has the capacity to supplement that funding with locally derived education property taxes as part of consultative budget development.

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Thursday, Nov. 27, 2025

Manitoba School Boards Association president Alan Campbell, shown in a 2021 photo, says when it comes to education property taxes and the funding of public education in the province, “there has been no shortage of political spin in recent months and years.” (Ruth Bonneville/Winnipeg Free Press files)

Motherhood changes how women spend, save, think about money

By Oriane Couchoux and Gabrielle Patry-Beaudoin 6 minute read Preview

Motherhood changes how women spend, save, think about money

By Oriane Couchoux and Gabrielle Patry-Beaudoin 6 minute read Wednesday, Nov. 26, 2025

Mothers aren’t just losing income, promotions and career advancements. They’re also quietly spending their own money, absorbing more day-to-day costs and making financial sacrifices that place them at a long-term disadvantage.

We already knew about the impact of motherhood on women’s income. A 2015 study by Statistics Canada shows that mothers earn 85 cents for every dollar earned by fathers. Ten years after the birth of their first child, mothers’ earnings are still around 34.3 per cent lower than they would have been without children.

But our research also reveals that women’s relationship with money is rewired with motherhood and that having children changes their financial decisions and spending habits.

Study participants describe two competing narratives when discussing their personal finances. On the one hand, they view motherhood as a financial project they must manage independently, within the limits of budgets and cost-benefit considerations. On the other hand, they also see motherhood as a role that requires financial sacrifice, where children’s needs and well-being take priority over all financial considerations.

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Wednesday, Nov. 26, 2025

There needs to be broader recognition of the financial labour that mothers bear, write columnists Oriane Couchoux and Gabrielle Patry-Beaudoin. (Tribune News Service files)

Higher school taxes a preventable problem

By Deveryn Ross 4 minute read Preview

Higher school taxes a preventable problem

By Deveryn Ross 4 minute read Tuesday, Nov. 25, 2025

Tens of thousands of Manitoba home and business owners face the prospect of permanent double-digit increases to the school tax portion of their property tax bills. Few of them are aware of that likelihood, let alone the reasons why.

Earlier this month, senior officials employed by the Brandon School Division advised the division’s board of trustees (my son is a board member) that the BSD is facing an increase in labour costs of almost $7 million for the coming fiscal year. It could necessitate a property tax hike of greater than 10 per cent if the level of provincial funding for the division does not increase.

That percentage doesn’t include other budgetary pressures, including inflationary costs for items such as utilities, let alone restoring cuts that were made to last year’s budget, which increased the school tax by 6.78 per cent.

Add in those factors and Brandon property owners could be slammed with a school tax increase closer to 20 per cent for 2026.

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Tuesday, Nov. 25, 2025

Brandon School Division board of trustees chair Linda Ross says that provincewide teacher bargaining and wage harmonization has disproportionately hurt smaller and rural school divisions. (The Brandon Sun files)

Canada should not stand for China’s threats toward Japan

By Scott Simon 5 minute read Monday, Nov. 24, 2025

Canada cannot afford to stay on the sidelines of escalating tensions between Japan and China.

China has co-ordinated an all-of-society attack against Japan ever since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi answered a question in the National Diet on Nov. 7 to clarify that Chinese military action in a Taiwan conflict would be a “survival-threatening situation.” This classification could justify mobilization of Japan’s Self-defence Forces in certain contingencies.

The immediately shocking response was that China’s Consul General in Osaka, Xue Jian, seemed to threaten decapitation of Takaichi in a since-deleted X post. Rather than apologize for the consul’s inappropriate remarks, China doubled down in a domestic and international campaign against Japan.

In a PLA Daily editorial, translated and published by Global Times, China’s military characterized Takaichi’s remarks as the most aggressive act against China in 80 years, raised the spectre of Japanese militarism and warned that Japan will suffer consequences if Takaichi does not retract her “wrong remarks.”

December 7, 2025

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