The newly-formed Parkland Minor Football Association is getting underway in Dauphin.

Last year, there was a group of players playing in an unofficial capacity, leading parents to start a formal minor football program.

“We wanted to improve the football here in Dauphin and get the kids started before high school, teaching them the fundamentals and basics of football. So that when they’re in Grade 9 and entering high school, they know the jist of it and can become better and stronger players,” said program co-ordinator Shannon Genaille.

The program is for students in Grades 5 to 8. Although there is a registration deadline of Apr. 17, Genaille said they will accept students beyond that date.

“It’s going to be a short season, because we’re done at the end of May. We play against teams from Saskatchewan right now. So we’ll take kids as long as anybody enters. And then we would adjust the registration fees, this year only,” she said. “Just trying to get more kids interested and involved. Boys and girls.”

Practices will be held, Mondays and Wednesdays from 5 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. at Kin Field at the Vermillion Park Sportsplex.

“They’re going to be at the rugby field this year because of the Manitoba Summer Games,” Genaille said.

Read more in this week's Dauphin Herald!

The Swan Valley Animal Protection League held their annual spring banquet this past weekend (April. 13) inside the Veteran’s Community Hall where they had many games and draws that people got into, along with having a great supper, courtesy of Johnny and Jenna Catering.

Dauphin Regonal Health Centre (DRHC) is set to get a bit of a facelift thanks to Tim Hortons Westman and the Smilezone Foundation.

Through their Smile Cookie campaign, Tim Hortons Westman franchisees Rhonda Pardy and Greg Crisanti are looking forward to helping provide a more welcoming atmosphere at the region’s largest health facility. The initiative aims to enhance the healing environment and the comfort of patients and their families within the health centre.

“I was introduced to Smilezone and their team after seeing the completion of a Smilezone project at the Brandon Regional Hospital,” Crisanti said.

“Witnessing the transformation to the hospital as well as the impact on both patients and staff, we knew we wanted to bring this opportunity to Dauphin.”

Smilezone Foundation is a registered children’s charity founded by Scott Bachly and Adam Graves in 2012.

The foundation’s mission is to “make tough days a little brighter” for children receiving medical treatment in hospitals and health centres across Canada.

That is accomplished by renovating existing health care spaces (such as waiting rooms, playrooms and patient rooms), over a single weekend into fun and engaging “Smilezones” to harness the uplifting power of a smile and creating a safe space where children and their families can find comfort and distraction during challenging times.

“On behalf of our foundation’s board of directors, we extend our heartfelt thanks to Tim Hortons Westman for generously sponsoring the 2024 Smilezone project at Dauphin Regional Health Centre, a partnership made possible through their Smile Cookie campaign,” Bachly said, adding medical professionals have been consulted to uniquely design Smilezones for each facility.

Find the full in depth story in this week's Dauphin Herald!

An informal workshop was held last week as a preliminary step to reimagining the first block of Second Avenue as a “creative corridor.”

Dauphin Economic Development manager Martijn van Luijn has been tasked with creating a new vision for area.

“Council has desire to assist with reviving downtown and this would be considered sort of a pilot program, how can we reimagine this street by introducing some enhancements,” van Luijn said.

A consultant from Urban Systems has been contracted to help develop a plan and used the workshop as an opportunity to present examples from other communities as a means of stimulating conversation about what might be possible in Dauphin.

Check this week's Dauphin Herald for the full story!

Solar eclipses are one of those things that aren’t really as rare as they seem, as there tends to be an annular or total solar eclipse about once a year or once every couple of years or so somewhere on the globe. The feeling of them occurring once in a generation or even once in a lifetime tends to be because the Earth is such a phenomenally massive place and about 71 percent of it is covered by water.
Thus, depending on where you live and depending on your financial means or ability to travel, there very well may be quite limited opportunities when it comes to experiencing a solar eclipse, and when I had the ability and means to travel to experience a total solar eclipse – possibly the greatest celestial wonder visible by the naked eye on planet Earth – I didn’t hesitate that I needed to make this happen.
Loaded with a bag of camcorders and my travelling essentials, I set forth on a trip to Niagara Falls, Ont., that only took me out of Manitoba for barely over 48 hours for an experience that I have anticipated since 2017 – the last time a total solar eclipse crossed the North American continent – but have longed to see ever since hearing stories as a child of a solar eclipse crossing Manitoba in 1979.
As it turns out, this trip was a bundle of anticipation realized as well as plenty of disappointment. It seemed every time I struck good fortune, there was bad to follow. Really though, I’m just glad I got on all my flights and there were no unreasonable delays. I’m grateful for that.
But, I did have to sleep in my rental car the first night I was in Niagara Falls, due to the limitation of reasonably priced accommodations. My choice of viewing the solar eclipse from one of the busiest tourist areas in Canada also meant that I had to pinch my nose and tap my card when it came to paying for parking. And, it took me 45 minutes to get a burrito for lunch, standing in line just down the block from Clifton Hill. Not to mention, I missed the Blue Jays game I bought a ticket for on Monday evening because Queen Elizabeth Way on the way back to Toronto was so obscenely busy and slow. (If I had made it to downtown Toronto, instead of stopping in Mississauga where my Airbnb was, I might have been lucky enough to see part of the ninth inning, followed by more traffic on an evening that also had a Maple Leafs game scheduled.)
My bad fortune also consisted of me losing my phone in the park along Niagara Falls, with the slimmest of chances of ever getting it back, provided the perfect combination of kind souls has it in their possession and can contact me about my locked device that I happened to put into Airplane Mode minutes before I lost it.
Not to mention, the viewing location I chose also happened to have complete and consistent cloud cover for most of the day, conveniently clearing about an hour after the moon totally covered the sun.
I was in the same boat as the tens of thousands of other people who decided to visit Niagara Falls on April 8. I suppose I should be grateful that the city was not as busy as anticipated. What was projected to be an influx of nearly 1 million extra people that day only tallied to about 200,000 according to numbers reported by Niagara Parks, which still ended up being the biggest tourism draw in the area ever at one time, beating out the time tightrope walker Nik Wallenda walked across the Falls, which at the time had 130,000 watching live on location, not to mention an additional 10,000 in New York just on the other side of the water.
The Niagara Falls mayor was quoted as saying that “this was a gift that we could never afford to pay for”, showing his appreciation for the boon to the local economy that relies heavily on tourism, following the economic downfall that occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic.
As it turned out, had I driven from the airport the day before and gone north to Montreal or Sherbrooke, Que., I would have been treated to perfectly clear conditions. I wouldn’t have had a place to stay, but, let’s be honest, I slept in my car anyway.
That being said, it is difficult to describe or even depict with pictures or videos what it is like when – even when it is cloudy – the sky goes from the 9 o’clock twilight of a partial eclipse to the midnight blackness of totality within just a couple of minutes. The air gets cold, the horizon in every direction gets a sunset at once because of where the shadow stops, the sounds of night pick up for a few minutes and the energy of thousands of people all as amazed as you is overwhelming, especially when the clouds parted for a few seconds during totality and everyone was able to briefly look at our sun and moon in a way they’ve likely never seen in person before.
You can see pictures, you can see the video, but it’s different when you’re staring at it there in the sky, no safety glasses, no safety squints, the only time you are able to view the corona – or outer atmosphere – of the sun with the naked eye.
It was a moment that was so dazzling – yet incomplete as I was unable to witness the full and complete phenomenon without atmospheric obstruction – that I feel the itch to jump on another plane to catch one in the future.
But alas, if my financial situation will not allow for me to fly to Iceland or Australia or Morocco for a few days on a whim, with the chance that I might look up and see similar clouds, then I can always wait for 2044 when a total solar eclipse crosses the Rocky Mountains in August, right over one of Canada’s other major tourist meccas - Banff, Alta..
In listening to the many podcasts, YouTube videos and first-hand accounts from other community members who have seen a total solar eclipse – such as high school teacher and fellow videographer Kevin Penner, who shot a wonderful documentary about his experience in 2017 – it was expressed how much of a memorable experience to view a total solar eclipse in person and you owe it to yourself to see it if ever presented with the opportunity.
Indeed, I would have to agree, because, ultimately, the only part of my total solar eclipse experience that I was disappointed by was by how much of it I didn’t get to see.

While efforts are currently underway to bring immigrants to the Parkland to ease worker shortages, the council of the Municipality of Roblin wants to know just how big of an issue that shortage is locally.

To that end, the municipality is hosting a round-table meeting next week to determine a course of action. The meeting is set for Wednesday, April 24, at the Community Centre starting at 7:30 p.m.

Find out more in this week’s Review.

The Storyteller’s Film Festival is getting ready to showcase some Manitoba talent in the film industry, whether it be writing, directing, or acting. The interest in making films has increased and event organizers are seeing more entries comes from all over the province.
“There will be eight films at this year's Storyteller’s Film Festival,” said Storyteller’s Film Festival Organizer Cheryl Antonio. “Seven of those will be short films and one will be a feature length.
“Submissions for the festival has gone up and they have been coming from all over the province. They went up this year. Also, this year, we had two submissions from one local film maker, however, one of the films, A Conversation About Racism, is about and stars, an Opaskwayak Cree Nation (OCN) member.”

Healthcare shortages are everywhere in Manitoba and all across Canada, but St. Anthony’s Emergency Department has been hit hard with over a 50 percent vacancy rate in their nursing staff. This led to a social media post put forward by the Manitoba Nurses Union (MNU) on behalf of the nurses working at St. Anthony’s, who are asking for help.
The post reads, “The public needs to know what is happening in St. Anthony’s Emergency Department in The Pas. We are not ok! We have a 56 percent vacancy rate with two additional nurses off injured.
“We are working with nurses who are redeployed from the medical ward and are partially ER trained, with some not trained at all to work in ER, meaning they have none of the mandatory courses to work here. Agency nurses are coming to help, but some of them have no ER qualifications, or limited ER qualifications. We need help, but shouldn’t be expected to train and mentor while working short under additional stress.

It was not the news many people in the tri-community wanted to wake up to on a Monday morning, but it definitely was a shocking way to start the week. At around 4:38 a.m. on April 8, The Pas Fire Department received a call that smoke was coming from the Lido Theatre building.
The Pas Fire Department, along with their Mutual Aid partner, Opaskwayak Cree Nation Fire Department spent 17 hours battling the flames, in hopes to save the building, along with the investigation and clean-up.

Staying consistent with its election focus of fixing health care and making life more affordable for Manitobans, Wab Kinew’s NDP government released its first full budget last week.
“Six months ago, Manitobans put their trust in our government to rebuild health care and lower costs for families,” Kinew said.
“Our first budget delivers on those commitments by hiring 1,000 new health-care workers and delivering cost savings for Manitoba families with a $1,500 Homeowners Affordability Tax Credit. We’re strengthening our province’s economy, with help for you and help for those who need it most.”
As it was through the election campaign, health care dominated the province’s budget with $1 billion in new spending going directly to the front lines.
According to Kinew, the record investments in health care support a plan to hire 100 doctors, 210 nurses, 90 paramedics and 600 health care aides over the next year, along with investments to retain and train even more.
It also adds hospital and ICU beds, and opens new minor injury and illness clinics and primary care clinics, so more Manitobans can see a doctor when they need one.
“The challenge that we face in health care isn’t going to be fixed overnight,” Kinew said, adding capital funding in health care is more than doubled this year.
“But based on this document, you are going to start seeing improvements in health care this year.”
The premier noted the budget helps to take better care of seniors, invests in better health care for rural and northern communities takes action to improve cancer care in Manitoba, and will help modernize health records and bring in plastic health cards.
When it comes to affordability, an extension of the gas tax holiday through the summer leads the way in addition to providing renters and seniors with increased tax credits, expanding $10-a-day child care, providing free birth control, increasing funding for fertility treatment and providing rebates for electric vehicles.
“What we heard resoundingly is the reality and the impacts of rising costs, the difficult conversations Manitobans have been having at their kitchen tables in every part of Manitoba,” Finance Minister Adrien Sala said, commenting on the process which resulted in the budget.
“We heard about the difference the gas tax is having for people in this province, of the freedom that lower costs create for your family and we know it has meant a bit more left to put into savings at the end of the month.”
The budget also makes significant investments in community safety, agriculture, the economy and education.
“I want Manitoba to be a have province in the next decade and in order to do that you have to grow GDP per capita by about 10,000 to 12,000 dollars,” Kinew said.
“And the way we do that, the best economic plan, is an education plan.”
The work is hard, Sala added, considering the situation left by the previous government when it was removed from power by voters.
“The previous government left us with a huge mess to clean up - a historic deficit, a health-care system that’s been badly hurt by seven years of cuts, and a failure to strengthen our economy or support families who were struggling with years of rising costs,” said Sala, adding the budget charts a path to balance by the end of the NDP’s first term.
“We’re different. We’re making smart, targeted investments. We can take steps to fix health care and lower costs, and we can do it while being responsible with public money and charting a path back to balance. That’s what Manitobans can expect from our first budget.”
Budget 2024: One Future, One People, One Manitoba, is a document borne of extensive consultations and conversations, Kinew said, and is a plan which should excite every Manitoban and bring them pride.
“A huge amount of work has gone into identiying the needs, to listening to the challenges, but also hearing the opportunities that Manitobans are excited about for our future. We don’t have to agree on everything to do the big things together like fixing health care and lowering costs in this present economy,” he said, adding that in addition to unity, the theme of this budget, is about delivering more help for those who need it most.
“It’s a path forward that is built on compassion. It is built on listening to the evidence and most importantly it is built on listening to you. We are very proud to bring forward this document, so that we can continue to work together making this province such a great place. A great place to grow up and a great place to grow old.”
More budget details are available by visiting www.manitoba.ca/budget2024