The City has unveiled a new Recreation Levy for Swift Current ratepayers. 

The levy will be for $140 per property per year, and will be going towards not only the maintenance and general upkeep of existing recreation spaces, but also towards saving for a new Aquatic Centre or Field House.

Swift Current Mayor Al Bridal hopes that the public understands why the council finds this measure necessary. 

"We want our citizens to understand that recreation does cost money," said Bridal. "The only way we can continue to have these facilities is to maintain what we have or build new ones."

In the first year, the City expects to raise $1 million to put directly into savings for a new Aquatic Centre or Field House. Both projects are being pursued by the City through grant applications, witht he Aquatic Centre taking precedence. 

Bridal noted that this is a move they need to tmake to show those in charge of the grant programs that the City of Swift Current is seriously committed to getting the updated indoor pool. The total cost of the new Aquatic Centre is estimated to be around $36 million dollars total.

"Then next year if they don't give us a grant by the end of next year, we will say we have $2,000,000 saved," said Bridal.

He confirmed that the Recreation Levy will be kept in place during the application for grants, and even after the Aquatic Centre is built. 

"I don't think it will ever come off," said Bridal. "Because we're always going to have recreational facilities and we're always going to have to maintain and build new facilities."

For the taxpayers, Bridal says this levy has the benefit of showing where the money is going directly. With a general tax increase, the money is dispersed to all aspects of governing. The Recreation Levy goes directly into the maintenance of public facilities, and into the savings account for new ones. 

"In 20 years' time, hopefully, that Aquatic Center is paid off and the levy of $140 will be targeted towards something else," said Bridal.  

Saskatoon city council approved the functional designs for a project meant to upgrade a busy westside intersection.

In the midst of an overdose crisis, organizations are calling for the Saskatchewan government to fund naloxone nasal spray, which is easier to use.

Dawson Creek is looking at team care to serve the needs of the community.

A man in his 20s has died after a shooting in Brampton on Wednesday night, Peel police said. The shooting happened around 11 p.m. near Heritage Road and Embleton Road, police said in a post on X. 

Good morning. As Canada sprints into an election, the threat of disinformation looms large – more on that below, along with anti-Hamas protests in Gaza and Justin Trudeau’s new digs. But first:

Today’s headlines

• Carney calls Trump’s 25-per-cent tariffs on vehicles ‘a direct attack’ on Canada and its auto workers
• On the ground in the epicentre of Ontario’s measles outbreak
• Winnipeg police identify Buffalo Woman, the victim of a serial killer, as Ashlee Shingoose

A new poll suggests that Canadians are feeling less anxious about losing their jobs as U.S. President Donald Trump continues to pursue his trade war with Canada and much of the world.

The Leger poll for The Canadian Press, which sampled 1,599 Canadian adults from March 21 to March 24, suggests that 38 per cent of employed Canadians are worried about losing their jobs over the next year.

The City of St. John’s is reminding residents that garbage put out at the curb for collection must be completely covered from April 1 through November 30. 

Acceptable methods of covering garbage include using nets or containers with a closed lid. City garbage cart lids must also be completely closed.

Waste is not permitted at the curb before 6:00 a.m. on the scheduled collection day. This helps to reduce the amount of litter in your neighbourhood and on city streets, parks and open spaces.

A new study from Leger Marketing indicates that many Atlantic Canadians are not in a good mindset when it comes to their finances.

The study indicates that 60 per cent of people in the region say they don’t have enough money left to save, invest, or pay down debt, and more than half of respondents say money is their biggest stressor.

Wendy Brookhouse, CEO with Black Star Wealth, says there are several factors coming together that create the increased stress and strain on people’s finances.

She calls it a “tsunami” or “perfect storm” of things like inflation and high interest that are coming together to put stress on people’s discretionary income.

Internal divisions and leadership challenges threaten the party’s future. Can this election be different?

With Snowfall Warnings now in place for much of Southern and Central Manitoba, it appears sleds and toboggans will be getting more use than bikes at the beginning of Spring Break. Environment Canada has issued Snowfall Warnings for essentially all areas along and north of the Trans Canada Highway between the Saskatchewan and Ontario border.

Here in the southwest, the Melita, Virden, Souris, Brandon, Boissevain and Killarney regions are currently not within the Warning area, but we are still expecting accumulating snowfall starting tonight and lasting through Friday.

For the latest Road Report and Cancellation information, click here.

15 to 25cms is possible in the warning area, with lesser amounts south of the Number 1 highway. At this point, 5 to 10cms seems likely for the southwestern corner of the province.

Travel conditions will deteriorate starting Thursday night, and will remain poor throughout the day Friday. 

For the latest forecast details, click here.

Visibility will be significantly reduced due to heavy snowfall and localized blowing snow, as northeasterly winds gust to 70 km/h beginning tonight and continuing through Friday.

The snow will taper off Friday night, with cooler than average temperatures expected for the weekend.

School Division Boards across the province are struggling to make ends meet when it comes to the 2025-2026 budget. This has prompted increases to the special levy for education on property taxes in many communities.

The previous budget for Turtle Mountain School Division was $16, 053,337. But that number has risen by over $2 million for the 2025-2026 budget set at $18,180,452.  The Special Levy, which is the portion of property taxes that funds education, is projected to increase by 16.55% in this year's budget for Turtle Mountain.

"Each year balancing the budget is a challenge, but this year was difficult," says Wiesner.

In some ways you could say it was the perfect storm with rising maintenance costs and an increase in student population which prompted additional teaching and support staff. In addition to teacher salaries and benefits, there are additional financial obligations the school division board has, including contractual obligations for support staff and bus drivers.

"Each year balancing the budget is a challenge, but this year was difficult," says Grant Wiesner, TMSD Superintendent.

"The increase in provincial funding falls significantly short of covering the increased costs resulting from the provincial teacher collective agreement and increased staffing needs," shares Wiesner. "The Board received a 1.6% increase in funding in February, amounting to $108,621. This represents approximately one-eighth of the funding required to fully cover the increased costs associated with the teacher contract and the necessary staffing increases due to student population growth."

The Board did not anticipate the current situation, says Wiesner.  "The 1.6% increase compared to the previous year’s funding is much lower than expected, and with the rising costs that we're seeing, contractual obligations and our growing student body, it just was not making up the difference."

"We've had a number of years when school divisions couldn't tax and last year was when school divisions could start taxing again," explains Wiesner, "and the Board has always done its best to ensure that they consider the taxpayer and what our actual costs are, and how that's going to impact families with increases to the special levy.

In TMSD 82% of their budget is contractual obligations.  In addition to this the rising costs of bus fuel and maintenance, school maintenance, hydro, right down to cleaning supplies, says Wiesner, all costs have increased across the board.

"We need to maintain our school bus fleet and ensure that we're providing the best transportation service as possible,"

However, this year the TMSD Board decided to put school buses back into the budget.

For the last number of years, buses were not part of the school budget.  Wiesner says they would either purchase a bus through budget surplus dollars, or they were just maintaining their fleet as it was, without the purchase of new school buses.

"We need to maintain our school bus fleet and ensure that we're providing the best transportation service as possible, so that's been added back into the budget," he explains. "But our buses are aging, and we need to get into a system where we can upgrade a couple of buses every year, just to ensure we have the safest buses on the road."

Wiesner says TMSD's primary focus for the 2025-2026 budget is to maintain the status quo when it comes to teacher-to-pupil ratios, like other divisions are doing.

TMSD has grown significantly over the last 5 years

Five years ago, TMSD had less than 1000 students enrolled in their Killarney, Boissevain, Minto, Mayfair Colony, Can Am Colony, Holmfield Colony and Wellwood Colony Schools.  Now in 2025 their total student enrollment is close to 1200.  "So, we have grown significantly in the last 5 years," notes Wiesner.

"We want to ensure that we have our teacher to student ratios where the Board has them set," shares Wiesner. "We feel that's the best for providing a good learning experience for our students.  We also need to make sure that we're supporting students with diverse learning needs the best way we can." 

The TMSD is committed to preserving current ratios of:

• 1 teacher to 18.75 students in K-4,
• 1 teacher to 19.75 students in grades 5-8, and
• 1 teacher to 21.25 students in grades 9-12

"Our hope is that as the Province is moving to developing another funding formula for school divisions, that it will be equitable and it will meet our needs, and that again it will consider places like Turtle Mountain where our schools are growing, which is an awesome thing that we are growing," shares Wiesner. "But we also have to ensure that we have the money to pay for the costs of growing."

Please listen to more with Grant Wiesner below!

Summer staff are starting to trickle back to the International Peace Garden as they prepare for one of the most exciting seasons in the year; spring planting!

CEO Tim Chapman says some of the 8 and 9-month employees will be coming back over the next few weeks to prepare the grounds and the flower beds.

"We're fortunate to still be growing our annuals through Saddler's Greenhouse up in Souris and that really allows us in the first early weeks to get a lot of stuff done without having to worry too much about irrigating the plants because Saddlers does an incredible job and brings the plants down to the Peace Garden towards the end of May early June, ready to go into the ground," shares Chapman.

Staff are eager to bring back their volunteer days to help with the clean-up of fall season leaves, winter wear and tear on trees and bushes and getting their buildings ready for staff and visitors.

Friday, May 2nd will be their facilities volunteer day where they have folks with a variety of skills coming in to help them get the main facilities ready.

May 30th will be their Volunteer Grounds Maintenance Day, "which is a chance where hopefully it's been a little warmer and we don't have snow on the ground, and we can start to do a little bit of the fall and winter clean up. There's usually a little bit of ice in March and April that takes down some tree limbs. So having volunteers help us kind of clean things up outside a little is very helpful," he says.

On the two Saturdays, June 14th and June 21st, the Peace Garden will be hosting their big volunteer planting days "where we welcome folks from all over to come be a part of putting those beautiful annual flowers displays actually into the dirt so that they can come back through the season  and see how those beds mature and really fill out when they hit peak bloom in late July and August."

Mother's Day is the official start to the summer season at the Peace Garden, which takes place on Sunday, May 11th this year, featuring a special lunch buffet and some wonderful surprises for visitors.

"It's always a really fun time of year to kind of kick off the season," shares Chapman. "Depending on what the weather's doing we should have a variety of our bulbs starting to bloom. And thanks to the Central Dakota Daylily Society out of Bismarck, we have about 200 new varieties of day lilies that will be making their first spring bloom in our dirt.  We planted those last year, so we're real excited to see all the color come out."

By mid-May many of the flowers and flowering crab trees will be starting to bloom and many of the cacti will be blooming as well in the Conservatory.

"With the days already being longer and the cacti enjoying their new home we already have blooms coming out, which is incredible to see, and they'll just keep taking off through the summer," he adds.

This year's theme for the outdoor gardens will be 'Peace' which has turned out to be quite timely, given everything that's going on internationally says Chapman.

"Part of that selection was just wanting to kind of ground ourselves again and what the Garden was founded on, but also after a couple years of some really intricate designs, we wanted the horticulture team to be able to do more flowy designs and maybe a little less detail, compared to especially last year when we were designing the images around the different book characters."

"So, it's going to be a really beautiful, colorful set of displays and includes some piece imagery like doves that will be worked into the design and peace signs," he adds.  "So, we really think folks will enjoy that and hopefully it also serves as another reason for folks to visit."

MONTREAL — As Montreal grapples with growing homelessness, the Catholic archdiocese in the city is forming a new real estate arm that it says will help ensure any redevelopment of church properties addresses “pressing community needs.”

The creation of the Roman Catholic Real Estate Corp. of Montreal, announced Thursday, is the first non-profit subsidiary created by a Catholic archdiocese “to leverage real estate development as a tool for community benefit” and heritage preservation, the church says in a news release.

With congregations dwindling and buildings aging, pastoral work is becoming more challenging, Archbishop Christian Lépine said in an interview Wednesday inside Montreal’s Mary Queen of the World Cathedral.

Earlier this month, the left-leaning opposition party Québec solidaire called on the Coalition Avenir Québec government to look to underused or empty church spaces to help fight Montreal’s homelessness crisis.

Lépine said churches have always been willing “to offer space, to offer room,” in times of crisis, and there are already churches that are welcoming homeless people. Some parishes have converted buildings that formerly housed clergy into social housing, he noted, but churches are only part of the solution.

“We cannot do that alone,” he said. “It’s also with the city involved, with organizations.”

The Catholic Church in Montreal includes about 180 parishes, said Stefano Marrone, who currently oversees church real estate and will run the new non-profit arm.

Marrone is helping parishes with redevelopment or real estate projects. The goal, he said, is to work with different levels of government and other potential partners “so that any development is going to have social impact for the community.”

Robert Beaudry, the Montreal executive committee member responsible for fighting homelessness, noted there’s already a long history of the church serving as a haven for vulnerable people.

“There are a number of community groups that started in church basements, soup kitchens too,” he said in a phone interview. “Remembering where community action in Quebec was born, it was in church basements.”

Beaudry said church buildings are usually located in the heart of their communities and are often sold at prices that make them attractive for repurposing. But he noted that some have been poorly maintained, and many would need extensive renovations, including additional washrooms, universal access and emergency exits, if they were to become shelters.

Beaudry said the need for housing and shelter is so great that governments need to evaluate all options on the table, including churches and any unused government buildings, to see if they can help address the crisis.

“It’s not an option without its challenges, but it’s an option that deserves to be explored,” he said.

Those challenges can go beyond building codes. Recently, the city and province paid around $2.5 million to purchase a former church in the Rosemont neighbourhood to help serve the needs of vulnerable people. Even before a formal announcement was made, the news drew strong community opposition to the idea of the building serving as a homeless shelter.

Beaudry said social acceptability is at the heart of every project, but he acknowledged it can be hard to reach when opposition and media attention start even before a project is defined.

Mario Beauchamp, social pastoral agent in the city’s Côte-des-Neiges neighbourhood, believes churches are a last-ditch solution.

“For some churches that are about to close, sure, but for those that are fully in use with lots of parishioners, it’s another thing. There’s the issue of social cohabitation at play,” Beauchamp said.

One of the churches in his parish, St. Pascal Baylon, was used for a few winters as an overnight warming centre, ending in 2023. It was run by a local community organization, providing food and shelter to a few dozen people a night.

“There was no question of renting that space year-round because the church had some concerns,” Beauchamp said. He said there were a few incidents of damage or vandalism stemming from the shelter.

“That said, there were good moments and the church was happy to do its part and help people who needed it, but there are less good moments too,” he said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 27, 2025.

Sidhartha Banerjee and Morgan Lowrie, The Canadian Press

Watching the sun rise out of the Atlantic ocean is a pastime accessible to anyone with a good view from Canada’s east coast. But this Saturday, the appearance of the rising sun will differ dramatically from what observers in the region are used to experiencing.

Instead of the usual reddish-orange disc, the sun will pierce the horizon with the sharp horn of a crescent as it rises in the midst of a deep partial eclipse.

Every Saturday at Toronto’s Dufferin Mall, I join a group of people in my neighbourhood to hand out leaflets with a call to action “Boycott...

The post Diversity of Tactics: Leafleting for a free Palestine first appeared on Spring.

Southeast Manitobans are getting a little taste of summer, as the Hanover Agricultural Society (HAS) announces the headliner for its annual Ag Fair.

This year, Canadian Country hit, Ryan Langdon will be swinging by for a performance on Aug. 16, that will not easily be forgotten, says Brenda Levesque with the society.

"He hasn't really been out to this area yet, so we want to bring some new Canadian talent that we haven't maybe seen," she says. "He's a great, solid country artist. He's had numerous Top 40 Canadian Country hits, and he has 14 million career streams, so we really lucked out that he was available."

Langdon's supporting act is the Sean Taylor Band, which originates in Manitoba.

As the concert wraps up, fireworks will go off, Levesque says.

Tickets to the show are $30 each, with children under 5-years-old being free.

She notes there should be something available at the fair for everyone, as it celebrates its 79th year.

"We love a vibe where everyone feels welcome. We have space if you want to dance, if you want to bring your lawn chair and sit, you can sit on the grass, we have our grandstands — whatever your vibe is, we've got you covered," she says, adding VIP tables will also be available.

Thursday and Friday of the fair will also feature bull riding, a pancake breakfast Friday morning, and an outdoor movie that evening.

Saturday will offer a full day at the fair, with the Manitoba Mud Mafia coming to do ATV mud races, cultural performances in the afternoon, an arm wrestling competition, and family fun zone.

"All of the good stuff that we usually have," Levesque says. "Our goal (is) family fun for everyone."

It takes quite a bit of effort to pull the fair together, she says, with eight board members, two staff, and a handful of core volunteers planning year 'round.

"Then we have, of course, the wonderful community that comes and volunteers, but it is non-stop," she says. "We meet constantly, we're talking almost everyday of the year almost."

Find more details about the fair as they come at hanoverag.com.

Written with files from Carly Koop