Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press (Newspaper) - January 3, 2025, Winnipeg, Manitoba Are you ready to tackle your to-do list? For all your home and renovation projects, find the help you need to get it done at the Winnipeg Renovation Show. Connect with hundreds of trusted experts, including Bryan Baeumler from Bryan’s All In on Home Network. From kitchen and bath to windows and doors, discover the latest trends, find innovative solutions and get practical advice. Get Advice. Get Inspired. Get it Done. Sponsors: Produced by WINNIPEGRENOVATIONSHOW.COM JAN. 10-12 RBC Convention Centre TO ENTER VISIT WINNIPEGRENOVATIONSHOW.COM/FREEPRESS WIN ENTER TO A 4 PACK OF TICKETS! AND MORE! Courtesy of: See Home Network’s Bryan Baeumler Jan. 10 & 11. SCAN QR CODE & BUY TICKETS ONLINE Promo Code: FREEPRESS 2-FOR-1 *On Regular Adult Admission Only FRIDAY, JANUARY 3, 2025 A4 ● WINNIPEGFREEPRESS.COM NEWS I PROVINCE / NATION NDP’s mostly smooth flight about to hit turbulence T HE Kinew government’s honey- moon is over. There are no hard and fast rules on when newly elected governments can stop blaming their predecessors for the problems they face. But after more than 14 months in of- fice, a new calendar year and a general feeling that the NDP is running out of excuses for failing to make good on many of its 2023 election pledges, it’s unlikely the Kinew government will be given much slack in 2025. The hard knocks of politics are about to set in. Premier Wab Kinew and the NDP have been riding high in public opinion polls. According to the most recent Free Press-Probe Research poll released last month, 53 per cent of Manitobans would vote for the NDP if an election were held at that time. That’s down slightly from a peak of 56 per cent in September, but up from the 45 per cent popular vote the party received in the Oct. 3, 2023, provincial election. The numbers are even more impres- sive in Winnipeg, where the NDP con- tinues to gain ground. The poll shows the NDP with 61 per cent support, a gargantuan lead over the Opposition Tories, who are down to 27 per cent in the capital city. The NDP received 52 per cent popular support in Winnipeg in the last election. The party even won the constituency of Tuxedo in a June bye- lection, a riding the Tories had never previously lost. But that could change this year, as the public-policy headaches continue to pile up. Health care is the No. 1 thorn in the NDP’s side. Despite pledging to “fix” health care by hiring more doctors, nurses and other front-line workers, there is little evidence health care has improved. Emergency-room wait times at Win- nipeg hospitals were longer in Novem- ber than they were the same month in 2023. After improving slightly in the early part of last year, hospital conges- tion began to worsen again in the fall. Wait times for hip- and knee-replace- ment surgery were longer in 2024 than in 2023, according to the most recent provincial data. And wait times for MRIs, CT scans and ultrasounds all grew last year. The only glimmer of hope is wait times for cataract surgery were lower in 2024 than the previous year. Is it still too early to expect better results from a government that’s been in power only 14 months? Perhaps, but that narrative will fade in 2025 as the excuses for poor outcomes run out. Health care was the biggest focus for the NDP during the 2023 election campaign and it will be its toughest challenge in 2025. Alleviating poverty and homeless- ness was another major pledge by the NDP. Sadly, there appears to be little, if any, sign that government has made progress on that file. The number of encampments around the city and the daily evidence of homelessness on Winnipeg streets appears little different than it was in 2023. The Kinew government has pledged to get more people off the street and into affordable housing in 2025. How- ever, with few details on how it plans to do so, it remains unclear if it has the infrastructure and action plan in place to achieve that goal. Affordability for Manitobans was another major plank in the NDP’s campaign platform. But with property taxes, gas prices and Winnipeg Transit fares all going up this month (not to mention little relief at the grocery store checkout), the NDP will struggle to convince voters it has made good on that pledge. The Kinew government will face other challenges in 2025, including on crime, which governments have little control over in the short term. Efforts to tackle the root causes of crime, in- cluding poverty, addiction and mental health, take years to produce results. Even then, it’s virtually impossible to show how improvements in those areas have a direct impact, since crime rates are driven by such a wide range of complicated factors. Either way, governments will always get blamed for high crime rates. If there are no improvements in that area soon, the Kinew government will feel the pinch in 2025. To add to its misery, the NDP will find it difficult to find the resources it needs to invest in all of the above areas. Part of that is the government’s own doing, after giving away hundreds of millions of dollars in tax cuts. But government will also be chal- lenged by what appears to be another year of weak to modest economic growth in 2025 for Manitoba (at least according to the forecasters), which means little extra tax revenues for the provincial treasury. That’s bad news for a government saddled with a projected deficit of $1.3 billion in 2024-2025. Kinew’s “econom- ic horse” needed to pull the “social cart” is looking more like a donkey with a bum leg than a Clydesdale. The easy road for the NDP govern- ment appears to have come to an end. The heavy lifting now begins. tom.brodbeck@freepress.mb.ca TOM BRODBECK OPINION Premier says work underway on measures to fight election interference MANITOBA Premier Wab Kinew says work is underway on a bill aimed at protecting provincial elections from foreign interference, forged images and videos and other issues that could unfairly affect the vote. “I think there’s a lot of examples that … concern us about having free and fair elections, which, to me, is one of our most important democratic rights,” Kinew said in a year-end interview with The Canadian Press. “I’ve seen a draft bill already. We are bringing in legislation, probably in the first (legislature) sitting of 2025, to ad- dress a lot of these issues.” The provincial Elections Act already bans people from disseminating false information about candidates, im- personating election officials and more. Penalties include up to a $10,000 fine and a year in jail. Manitoba’s chief electoral officer, Shipra Verma, said in a recent annual report that the law should be expanded to also ban objectively false informa- tion about election officials, the elec- toral process, the equipment used in elections and more during the period leading up to an election. False information about voter eligi- bility and voter registration processes should also be banned, as well as any forged material that falsely claims to be from a candidate, an election official or a political party, Verma wrote. Kinew said he is committed to look- ing at the recommendations, and is concerned about so-called “deepfake” images — pictures or videos that are manipulated to make it look like some- one has said or done something they did not. “We’ve thought about foreign inter- ference. We’ve also thought about arti- ficial intelligence and deepfakes and all the content that’s floating out on the web now and how do we need to grapple with that.” The NDP government’s plan appears somewhat similar to a bill currently before Parliament, which updates the Canada Elections Act to account for new technology. If passed into law, the federal bill would clarify that deepfakes are cov- ered under existing measures that ban impersonation and the publication of false statements aimed at affecting elections. The federal bill would also prohibit contributions in the form of crypto assets, as well as money orders or pre- paid gift cards. The aim is to ban con- tributions that are difficult to trace. The Ottawa-based advocacy group Democracy Watch has called on the federal government to add more meas- ures to the bill. Among its recommen- dations is a requirement for third parties such as interest groups to dis- close their donors for election-related activities and only spend money raised from Canadian citizens and permanent residents. — The Canadian Press STEVE LAMBERT DAVID LIPNOWSKI / THE CANADIAN PRESS FILES Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew says he is concerned about so-called ‘deepfake’ images. Canada primed for more severe wildfire days, driven by dry forest fuel: study CANADIAN forests are increasingly primed for severe, uncontrollable wildfires, a study pub- lished Thursday said, underlining what the auth- ors described as a pressing need to proactively mitigate the “increased threat posed by climate change.” The study by Canadian researchers, published in the peer-reviewed journal Science, looked at Canadian fire severity from 1981 to 2020. “The widespread increases, along with limited decreases, in high-burn severity days during 1981 to 2020 indicate the increasingly severe fire situation and more challenging fire season under the changing climate in Canada,” the study read. Co-author Xianli Wang, a research scientist with the Canadian Forest Service, says there were on average an additional two days con- ducive to high-severity fires in 2000 to 2020, compared to the previous two decades. In some areas, it was closer to five days. While that may not sound like much, last sum- mer’s devastating wildfire in Jasper, Alta., grew to about 60 square kilometres in a matter of hours. “This is just a more dramatic fire situation that we are currently having than before,” he said. When it comes to the geographic distribution of severe wildfire, Wang said the findings sug- gest Canada’s record-breaking 2023 season was not an aberration, but a “glimpse into the future.” “You will see this kind of high-severity burn- ing across the board,” said Wang. The study suggests the major environmental driver of fire severity was dry fuel, such as twigs and leaves, while the effect of weather — such as hot, dry and windy conditions — was more pro- nounced in northern regions. The results, the study said, demonstrated “the critical role that drought plays” in a fire’s severity. As climate change lengthens the fire season, the study says spring and autumn have added more high-severity burn days in recent decades. Those increases coincided with areas that also had the most severe summer months. “A lot of the time, you think only summer fires are more severe — they burn higher flames, they destroy everything — but in the spring it’s not that bad. That is not the case anymore,” Wang said. The greatest increase in burn severity days was recorded in an area covering northern Que- bec and an area covering Northwest Territories, northwest Alberta and northeast British Colum- bia. Both of those regions are home to extensive coniferous trees. Areas with more low-burn se- verity days were mainly in southern broadleaf and mixed-wood forests, the study said. Severity is a measure of how much damage a fire wreaks on the forest’s vegetation and soil. While fire is a natural part of the ecosystem, Wang said severe fires can in some cases burn so hot and deep into the ground that they wipe out seeds stored in the soil, affecting the forest’s recovery. — The Canadian Press JORDAN OMSTEAD RCMP vehicle catches fire after collision TWO Portage la Prairie women are facing char- ges after a stolen SUV struck two RCMP vehi- cles, including one that caught fire. A Portage la Prairie RCMP officer tried to make a traffic stop on 8th Street Northwest and 6th Avenue Northwest at 2:15 p.m. on Dec. 24, but the driver would not stop, police said in a news release Thursday. The officer did not follow the SUV because of safety concerns. Officers later found the vehicle travelling on Road 70 North towards Provincial Road 240, where officers placed a spike belt on the road. The SUV stopped before hitting the belt and then reversed into an RCMP vehicle travelling behind it, police said. The SUV then drove over the spike belt and turned south onto Provincial Road 240, where it drove head-on into another police vehicle, RCMP said. Both vehicles caught fire. Officers removed the two women from the SUV. Both suspects and one officer were taken to hospital, where they were treated and released. The alleged driver of the SUV — Michelle Whitford, 32 — is charged with assaulting a po- lice officer with a weapon, dangerous driving, theft of a motor vehicle, flight from police and resisting arrest. The other woman, age 30, faces charges of flight from police and resisting/obstructing a po- lice officer. She was released from custody. SUPPLIED The SUV and an RCMP vehicle caught fire after colliding on Provincial Road 240. ;