An emergency responder will tell you that the voices of a bad accident never leave the place where it happened. That pausing at a stop sign or a roadside memorial near an old accident scene can bring a lot of things flooding back.

Even time passing doesn’t change that: a year later, things can still be as fresh as when they happened, as if the intervening time has failed to change anything.

A year after a serious accident at Carberry lead to 17 deaths, first responders are still facing the fallout from that day.

Others are facing their own personal pain.

We have to express one major point of contention with the process followed by the administration and council this year, particularly when it comes to the city’s 10-year capital budget documents.

On Jan. 17, we sent a request via email to city manager Ron Bowles and several other city staff asking to get a copy of the full capital budget document that Mark Allard, the city’s general manager of development services, had been showing excerpts from during a previous council meeting.

As we stated in the email, we were hoping to take a look through the document to see how the administration had categorized projects into the essential, primary amenity and secondary amenity designations.

We were told by Allard that this document is not typically made public. Yet considering the nature of the information, and the city’s stated ambition of being open and transparent, we would ask for it.

It’s a significant gap that makes it impossible for voters to be confident that they know the background of those seeking election to school boards and municipal councils throughout Manitoba.

As the Sun reported this past Saturday, the recent Brandon School Board by-election has exposed flaws in the newly-amended Municipal Councils and School Boards Elections Act with respect to who is responsible for verifying information provided by aspiring candidates, and what the consequences are if that information is not accurate.

The report discussed the case of Scott MacMillan, who ran for election in Ward 1 in the October by-election. Though he finished last among the eight candidates, it now appears that information he provided within his nomination document was not accurate.

Under recently-passed amendments to the Municipal Councils and School Boards Elections Act, each candidate’s nomination papers must include a statement disclosing any offence they have pled guilty to or been found guilty of under the Criminal Code, the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, The Income Tax Act (Manitoba), the Income Tax Act (Canada) “or any other law related to financial dishonesty that the Lieutenant Governor in Council has, by regulation, designated for the purpose of this section.”

‘I think everyone in Manitoba recognizes that we can do better than what we’re seeing right now.”

Those were the words of Premier-designate Wab Kinew following his first more-or-less-official meeting last Tuesday with Winnipeg Mayor Scott Gillingham. And while it’s not surprising for both Kinew and Gillingham to adopt conciliatory postures at this delicate stage in the transition of a new provincial government, it’s still an important moment.

How important? Kinew’s pledge to “do better” should be welcomed news for anyone living in the city of Winnipeg who cares about the state of this community and all who reside here. In many ways, it would be hard for Kinew to do worse. The previous seven years of provincial-municipal relations have been marked by cynical austerity and bald betrayal. Former Tory Premier Brian Pallister crippled grants to municipalities shortly after taking office in 2016. Critical funding to support core municipal services such as police, fire and transit, along with capital investments, were essentially frozen for most of that time, putting enormous pressure on local governments to find ways to make do.

Those ways included larger than necessary property tax increases, and drastic reductions in the scope of municipal services. The provincial PC government channeled some of the savings that it achieved by freezing municipal grants into tax cuts, but even for homeowners it was a high price to pay for the diminution of civic services.

It was just an early morning drive to Brandon on the second of May.

The weather was clear, and road conditions on the Trans-Canada Highway were good.

At Carruthers Road, on the eastern edge of Austin, there was a pickup truck getting ready to cross the highway.

The Brandon-bound driver’s thought seconds before the accident?

“Media freedom is not a toy. A free press is the cornerstone of democratic societies and a key tool in the fight against harmful disinformation.”

It was fully expected that once the federal government began distributing billions of dollars in emergency aid to Canadians at record speed during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, some of that money would end up in the hands of ineligible recipients.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith is plunging ahead with her Alberta sovereignty act, rapidly rewriting it from one day to the next as critics point out absurd elements. She explained that she never gets everything right the first time.

Provincial ministers under the administration of Heather Stefanson continue to pick and choose how they respond to media interview requests during so-called election and byelection “blackout” periods, even when the rules of engagement are clearly spelled out.

While it is not, as has often been in correctly assumed, associated with the Hippocratic Oath that provides an ethical framework for physicians, the phrase “First, do no harm” still has value as a guiding principle for those who pursue careers in medicine.