Lawyer, philanthropist had a fierce sense of social justice

A luminary in human rights advocacy, Canadian lawyer Yude Henteleff was a natural explorer both in his travels and in his daily life. Henteleff lived 97 years with passion and dynamism.

He died Dec. 8, 2024.

Henteleff’s accomplishments and list of awards and accolades began at age 16 when he was elected president of the Jewish Youth Council and then to the youth division of the Canadian Jewish Congress. His activities in the Jewish community were extensive and lifelong.

The father, grandfather and partner lived life to the fullest, propelled by a fierce sense of social justice and belief in “tikkun olam,” a Hebrew phrase meaning “to repair the world.”

Life of pioneer for women’s rights in Manitoba chronicled in new account

Manitobans with an interest in history are proud that our province was the first in Canada to grant women the vote, but if asked who led the women’s suffrage campaign here, most would say Nellie McClung. A minority might say it was a team effort. Few would name Lillian Beynon Thomas.

Law professor Robert Hawkins became interested in Thomas because of her determined efforts to have a dower act passed in Manitoba. After devoting several years to the dower campaign, Thomas realized it would never happen without women’s suffrage. So in 1913, she organized the Political Equality League to lead the fight.

Born in 1874, Thomas came from a relatively poor family homesteading near Hartney. After finishing high school, she taught in rural schools off and on for 13 years, saving enough money to further her education; in 1905, when only 11 per cent of university grads were women, Thomas graduated from Brandon University. The following year, having had enough of teaching, she landed a job with the Manitoba Free Press.

For the next 11 years, Thomas edited the women’s page of a widely distributed weekly, The Prairie Farmer, and for five years wrote a daily column in the Free Press as well.

Rupert’s Land inhabitants blindsided by Canada’s purchase of their homeland in 1869

When the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) reached an agreement to sell Rupert’s Land to Canada in the spring of 1869, it came as a complete surprise to the people living in what is today Western Canada. They were neither consulted on the proposed annexation nor given any details about how it would affect their lives.

Rise of FLQ in 1960s documented in Montreal cartoonist’s graphic novel

Ever since he was a teenager, Montreal cartoonist Chris Oliveros has been fascinated by the story of the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ).

In high school, his history class was shown Robin Spry’s 1973 National Film Board documentary Action: The October Crisis of 1970, which detailed the acts of terrorism, including the kidnapping and murder of Quebec labour minister Pierre Laporte, carried out by the militant separatist group in Montreal — under the auspices of liberating Quebec from anglophone rule — and the military response that followed. (The film is available to watch free online at wfp.to/6pe.)

“I was really struck by the fact that events like these, these incredibly tumultuous events, kidnappings and the army in the streets of Montreal, all of this could happen here, in the city where I lived,” says Oliveros from his Montreal home. “I was really blown away.”

Earlier this month, Montreal publisher Drawn & Quarterly (which Oliveros founded in 1990) published his graphic novel Are You Willing To Die For The Cause?: Revolution in 1960s Quebec, the first of two books about the FLQ by the 57-year-old cartoonist.

Liberal insider reflects on struggle to entrench Indigenous rights during the constitutional process of the early 1980s

The following is an abridged excerpt from Unlikely Insider: A West Coast Advocate in Ottawa, by Jack Austin, a former federal Liberal policy adviser, chief of staff to prime minister Pierre Trudeau and senator, with Edie Austin (McGill University Press, 2023). In the book the Liberal insider reflects on the struggle to entrench Indigenous rights during the constitutional process of the early 1980s.

Indigenous issues no longer stuck on back burner

Manitoba follows a standard formula for federal elections: other than the affluent suburbs, Winnipeg votes mostly Liberal while everywhere else — besides the north — goes Conservative.

With support for provincial Conservatives waning, anger at Justin Trudeau for calling an election during a pandemic, and the rise of the provincial NDP, there are strong indications that predictable Manitoba seats are up for grabs.

The appearance of Trudeau and O’Toole in the city Friday is evidence.

Why would both visit on the same day NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh toured unmarked graves at a former residential school in Saskatchewan?

Winnipeg Railway Museum can punch your ticket to the past, but it also needs your help

The Winnipeg Railway Museum, run by the Midwestern Rail Association and the Winnipeg Model Railway Club, is "the coolest indoor museum in Canada in the winter and the hottest ticket in town in summer."

Documentary tells story of Ukrainian immigrants who put lives on the line for adopted homeland

A new war documentary follows a journey of acceptance for Ukrainian-Canadians that came at a heavy cost.

A Canadian War Story, directed by John Paskievich, a Winnipeg filmmaker and photographer, follows the plight of Ukrainian immigrants, who first came to Canada in the 1880s and for decades settled on homesteads across Western Canada, including Manitoba.

Those settlers, and their children, would join the Canadian effort during the Second World War, and the film offers their stories of sacrifice, tragedy and eventually victory.

“The film isn’t just a series of veterans’ testimonials, like how it was to be in Hong Kong or D-Day. It was a coming-of-age story,” says Paskievich, who spent three years making the hour-long movie.

Claims of Indigenous ancestry by non-Indigenous Canadians on the rise

Writing about identity politics is fraught with political landmines. People tend to be highly sensitive to any challenge to how they identify themselves. It’s personal.

It is therefore intriguing that author Darryl Leroux has walked purposely right into the minefield. It’s political.

In Distorted Descent: White Claims to Indigenous Identity, Leroux describes the obsessive search by some heretofore non-Indigenous Canadians for long-ago Indigenous ancestors who can justify them identifying as Métis. According to Leroux, an associate professor of social justice and community studies at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, the popularity of genealogical websites and online forums has created communities where race-shifters can organize. The motive, he warns, is not benign.

Leroux makes it clear that he is not talking about people who are seeking to reunite with their kin after being forcibly disconnected from their Indigenous identity through Indian residential schools, the Sixties Scoop or Indian Act policies.

Canadian veterans' stories detail selfless sacrifice, struggle

The lives of the men and women who served and are serving in the Canadian Armed Forces are a mystery to many Canadians.

Remembrance Day may be a time when family memories of what a grandparent or great-grandparent did in the First World War or Second World War are vaguely recalled. Winnipeggers over 30 likely remember the flood of 1997, when the army was deployed to protect the city from the raging Red River, but what else have our Armed Forces done? Jody Mitic offers readers an answer.

In his 2015 autobiography Unflinching: The Making of a Canadian Sniper, Mitic told the story of his life in the Canadian Armed Forces: the physical and mental challenges he had to overcome, the years of training he endured, his deployment to Bosnia, becoming a sniper-team leader in Afghanistan, losing his legs to a landmine and overcoming this life-changing injury and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Everyday Heroes is Mitic’s collection of 21 first-person accounts of life in the Canadian Armed Forces. He turns from his story to one “encouraging Canadians to get to know the men and women who wear the Canadian flag on their shoulders… to see beyond the uniform to the person.”

A country born amid controversy

Given his penchant to portray Canadian history as a glorious fusion of brazen courage, underdog determination, generosity of spirit and the march of progress, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau definitely would have been in his element had he been in Toronto 150 years ago.

The new province of Ontario had the most to gain from Confederation. By virtue of its large population, Ontario’s politicians were to dominate the new federal or central government and the province’s economic potential was seemingly unlimited. (It is not by accident that the western boundary of Ontario set in the early 1880s extends as far as Kenora, 1,900 kilometres from Toronto.)

Thus, on July 1, 1867, there was great optimism among Toronto’s 50,000 citizens. The ringing of the bells at St. James Cathedral at midnight on June 30 had signified that the Dominion of Canada was now a reality.

The publisher of the Toronto Globe, George Brown, a key player who, along with John A. Macdonald and George-Étienne Cartier, had made Confederation a reality, had stayed up most of the night composing a 9,000-word article about the meaning of Confederation that took up the entire front page of the Globe on July 1. “We hail the birthday of a new nationality,” he wrote. “A United British America, with its four millions of people, takes its place this day among the nations of the world.”

While our 150th birthday party is a big, 'Dominion Day' began with respectful restraint

It’s safe to say what is now called Canada Day had modest beginnings in these parts.As far back as 1869 — two years after Confederation and one year before Manitoba was born — the July 3 issue of the Nor’Wester, the paper of record for the “Colony of Assiniboia,” dutifully reported that celebrations on July 1 were muted.

“Dominion Day was kept in our little town by the raising of the ‘Canadian’ flag upon the now celebrated staff — said to be 70 feet, be the same 20 feet more or less — which flag was liberal sainted during the day by an ‘Anvil Chorus’ adapted to ‘God Save the Queen’ and ‘Hurrah! for the New Dominion,” the paper noted. “The affair was wound up by a large bonfire in the evening.

“Not a gun was heard, or a funeral note or anything else,” the account added, “but then you see the H.B.C. (Hudson Bay Company) is keeping her patriotism like champagne, well bottled and wired down, for a future occasion, when we may expect to see it burst forth in a manner calculated to astonish the natives.”

Of course, these were the days of the Riel Rebellion in the Red River Colony. Not exactly the time to be popping that “champagne” in public. Besides, the majority of the less than 1,000 colony settlers considered themselves British. And a vast majority of residents, the Métis under Riel, were literally at war with the new Canada.

Canada’s autonomy took more than Vimy Ridge

Last month, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, as is his style, waxed eloquently about the terrible sacrifice of the soldiers who fought there and the battle’s larger meaning for Canadian history. But he went a bit overboard attributing to Vimy something that is not so: that Canada “was born” on that battlefield.

It is true that at Vimy, for the first time in the war, “the four divisions of the Canadian Corps fought together and drove the Germans off a ridge that dominated the terrain in the area of Arras in northern France,” as historian Jack Granatstein explains. Yet as he also adds, despite the 3,598 Canadians killed in the fighting, Vimy did not end the war, nor did Canada achieve autonomy within the British Empire.

This nation-building narrative was somewhat promoted in 1917 and then in 1936 when the Vimy memorial was opened, but it did not truly take hold for another generation. In 1967, on the 50th anniversary of the Vimy Ridge battle that coincided with Canada’s centennial, then-prime minister Lester Pearson reimagined Vimy as “the birth of a nation.”

The fact was that several months after the fighting at Vimy, Canada’s soldiers found themselves knee-deep in the mud in the area around the village of Passchendaele, near Ypres in Belgium. That battle had started at the end of July 1917, because the British commander, Sir Douglas Haig, had insisted stubbornly that the key to victory on the Western Front was capturing the Passchendaele ridge.

When war came to Winnipeg

If Day, the simulated Nazi invasion of Winnipeg, was a daring publicity stunt that involved weeks of planning, thousands of volunteers and garnered media attention across North America. Most importantly, it raised millions of dollars for Canada’s war effort.

The purpose of If Day was to drum up sales for Victory Bonds. Sold to businesses and individuals, often through payroll deduction plans, they were an essential tool for financing Canada’s war effort.

Dr. Jody Perrun has researched If Day and Winnipeg’s participation in Victory Bond campaigns for his book The Patriotic Consensus: Unity, Morale, and the Second World War in Winnipeg. He estimates that of the $22 billion the federal government spent fighting the war between 1939 and 1945, more than $12 billion was offset through the sale of Victory Bonds.

The promotion of the bonds was the responsibility of the National War Finance Committee in Ottawa. The short-term sales campaigns were initially quite centralized, with a national theme and propaganda products that were forwarded to provincial committees who used rallies, concerts and other tried-and-true public events to make up their portion of the national sales goal.

Vous auriez pu être résistant?

'Qu’est-ce que j’aurais fait dans la France occupée par les Allemands? Est-ce que je serais devenu un héros de la Résistance? Ou bien serais-je devenu nazi?"

Voilà les questions qui ont conduit le médecin Philippe Erhard à écrire son tout premier roman, The Ladders of Death.

Erhard est médecin à Winnipeg depuis 1982. Depuis qu’il a quitté sa pratique générale à la Clinique Saint-Boniface en 2008 pour se lancer en médecine sportive à la Clinique Pan-Am, le natif de Belfort en France, travaille à un rythme plus décontracté.

"J’ai enfin le temps de réfléchir. En 2010, j’ai publié un livre sur le mieux-être, Being — A Hiking Guide through Life. J’étais inspiré par mon travail de médecin et par des souvenirs d’une randonnée à pied dans les Vosges. Depuis, et de plus en plus, je suis mes propres conseils sur l’importance de ralentir son train de vie et de se laisser vivre!"

L’ impact d’une loi injuste et intransigeante

LE 10 mars 1916, le gouvernement de T. C.

Norris adopte une nouvelle loi scolaire.

L’enseignement du français devient illégal.

Normand Boisvert est un des acteurs clés dans la renaissance du français scolaire. Il nous partage son point de vue.

Century of progress: 'Prairie grit' helped Manitoba women secure the right to vote

OTTAWA — Almost a century after Nellie McClung pushed Manitoba to become the first province to allow women to vote or run for office, she would have been pretty proud of what women have achieved, says her granddaughter Marcia McClung.

But she also probably would have been a little disappointed to see women have not achieved true equality, be it in the workplace, the political world or even in many families.

Although Nellie McClung dreamed that if women could secure the right to vote, all the other rights to become equals with men would surely follow, she knew when she died, in 1951, that had not happened.

“She did acknowledge there wouldn’t have been any progress without the vote,” Marcia said in an interview with the Winnipeg Free Press. “It was a really significant step.”

Témoignage de survivantes de l’Holocauste à l’USB

Le père Patrick Desbois, un prêtre catholique français réputé pour son travail de recherche sur l’Holocauste, en est convaincu: “Les génocides ne commencent pas avec les chambres de gaz. Ils commencent plutôt par des petits manquements de respect.” Des petites indignités comme celle qui restera gravée à jamais dans la mémoire de Régine Rubinfeld Frankel.

On est en 1942. La jeune Régine, âgée d’une dizaine d’années, est partie de la maison où sa famille se cachait, avec un carnet de rations, chercher des vivres dans la ville la plus proche. Au lieu de retourner à pied avec ses sacs — un trajet de huit kilomètres — elle a décidé de prendre le bus. Mais le chauffeur, une connaissance, exige qu’elle descende plusieurs kilomètres avant son arrêt, alors que la nuit tombe.

“Même maintenant quand j’en parle, j’ai envie de pleurer, parce que je me demande toujours pourquoi il n’y avait pas une seule personne dans ce bus qui a dit: ‘Laisse-la!’ ”

Régine Rubinfeld Frankel et sa sœur, Rachel Rubinfeld Fink, ont raconté leurs souvenirs lors d’une conférence intitulée “Plus Jamais”, présentée à l’Université de Saint-Boniface le 9 novembre.

Boom and gloom

Stefan Epp-Koop's We're Going to Run This City explores the dynamic political movement that came out of the 1919 General Strike, the largest labour protest in Canadian history, and the ramifications for Winnipeg throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Winnipeg was a deeply divided city. On one side, the conservative political descendants of the General Strike's Citizen's Committee of 1000 advocated for minimal government and low taxes. On the other side were the Independent Labour Party and the Communist Party of Canada, two groups rooted in the city's working class, though often in conflict with each other.

The political strength of the left would ebb and flow throughout the 1920s and 1930s but peaked in the mid-1930s when the ILP's John Queen became mayor and the two parties on the left combined to hold a majority of council seats. Astonishingly, Winnipeg was governed by a mayor who had served jail time for his role in the General Strike.

Winnipeg had grown rapidly in the early decades of the 20th century. The city had all the appearances of a boom town, tripling in size in the first decade. Businesses flocked to the city to service the growing population of Winnipeg and the Canadian West. Manufacturers, wholesalers, and retailers opened in the city, establishing it as the pre-eminent commercial hub of Western Canada. The city also profited from the growing agricultural production of the Prairies as the home of the grain exchange and many companies producing agricultural implements and supplies.

Optimism abounded, anything was possible. Civic boosters imagined Winnipeg as the "Chicago of the North," a world-class city. That became the commonly accepted narrative of the city's growth. Indeed, many Winnipeggers did become quite wealthy during those boom years, and there was significant economic opportunity for those who were able to access it.

Les souvenirs d’un vétéran de Bosnie et d’Afghanistan

On n'a jamais tiré sur Marc Lavoie. Ni en Bosnie, ni en Afghanistan. Mais l'adjudant-maître du 38e Groupe-brigade du Canada connaît intimement les zones sinistrées par la guerre.

Lorsque Lavoie est arrivé en Bosnie, en 1997, la période de violence armée dans l'ancienne Yougoslavie était révolue. Le natif de Kapuskasing, aujourd'hui adjudant-maître chargé du maintien de l'équipement du 38e Groupe-brigade du Canada, se souvient "bien clairement" des ravages de la guerre.

"Les forces canadiennes faisaient alors partie de la mission de l'OTAN, chargée de stabiliser les zones sinistrées en Bosnie-Herzégovine, Croatie, Macédoine et au Kosovo. J'étais stationné la base canadienne de Drvar, en Bosnie, pour mes deux tours de mission. "J'assumais le maintien des véhicules, des génératrices d'électricité et d'autres équipements militaires. Parfois, il fallait quitter la base pour remorquer des véhicules qui avait été touchés par des mines.

"Le grand défi c'était de stabiliser la région. On était l pour aider les habitants du pays se remettre sur pied. Des villages entiers avaient été dévastés par la guerre. Dans bien des endroits, les gens vivaient comme au 19e siècle. On chargeait nos camions de bois pour le chauffage, sans parler d'eau potable.