A full Saturday — a trail race at Chippewa, the convention at the Superior Inn and a hundred motorcycles headed for the Journey to Life Centre — then Terry Fox and a punk show on Sunday, a history talk Tuesday, and Wednesday brings both the Access Expo and the City's water plan open house.

Saturday, September 19

Sunday, September 20

Tuesday, September 22

Wednesday, September 23

🌥️ Saturday, September 19 — Thunder Bay

Overnight low 7°C

Mainly cloudy. 30% chance of showers late in the afternoon. UV index 5 — moderate.

Manitoba announced on Thursday that its residents will not be setting their clocks back this November — the province is moving to permanent daylight time. By Friday morning, Kenora–Rainy River MPP Greg Rickford had mayors, reeves and First Nations leadership from almost every community west of Thunder Bay on a video call to ask the obvious question: do we go too?

Kenora Mayor Andrew Poirier says there was a lot of favour in the room for what he calls the Manitoba model, and that everything he has heard since points the same way — though he is careful to say that is not the whole community yet. Leaders now take it back to their councils, with public engagement to follow; Poirier wants a special or public meeting in Kenora, and some municipalities have already put surveys on their websites. The pressure is the calendar. Rickford told the group there are roughly six weeks to decide, and that he is updating the Premier and the Attorney General as it goes. Kiiwetinoong MPP Sol Mamakwa framed the risk plainly: stay put and Northwestern Ontario becomes an island of central daylight time all winter. Atikokan and Pickle Lake already run their own version — on the map they sit in the central zone but never switch, so they line up with Eastern Standard in winter and Central Daylight in summer. Poirier's own argument is Winnipeg: Kenora residents drive there for medical appointments, and Winnipeg comes back the other way every summer.

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🗳️ Your call: Manitoba has moved, and the communities west of here have about six weeks. Where do you land?

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It is 22 feet long and 9 feet 4 inches tall, it is called Morrisseau Masterwork, and as of Friday it is the first thing you see walking through the front door of the Thunder Bay Art Gallery. It was painted in 1985, shown briefly, and has sat in storage ever since. The handful of people who saw it back then only ever saw it lying flat on a floor.

Gallery collection manager Meaghan Eley says it may be the largest single-piece painting Norval Morrisseau ever finished — he worked often in multi-panel sets, and she has not come across a bigger one done in one piece. She reads it as a painting about gathering: people, animals, life coming together, and a reminder of what a community can do when things look bleak elsewhere. She describes the moment staff unrolled it in the large gallery as one everybody stopped for. Morrisseau was from Bingwi Neyaashi Anishinaabek, is widely counted among the most significant artists Canada has produced, and is the painter most associated with the Woodland style. The piece is on loan from EA Studios Jasper Limited of Calgary and hangs until January 3, 2027.

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The Current River Churches Food Cupboard used to serve about 100 clients every two weeks. It has now been closed for several months, and coordinator June Gaw is still hunting for somewhere to put it. “I feel like we're wandering in the desert,” she said. “We have been looking and looking and looking.”

The trouble started with a rent increase in August 2025. The replacement space they found could not take their freezers. The next one, on Munro Street, worked until May, when the group renting to them moved to the south side and the arrangement stopped being affordable. They were offered a spot down there, but Gaw will not ask Current River clients to cross the city: “They have a hard enough time with food sustainability, never mind transportation.” Everything is sitting in paid storage in the meantime, and clients keep phoning to ask whether there is a place yet. Gaw has volunteered with food banks since 1998 and is the current president of the Regional Food Distribution Association. What she needs is roughly 800 to 1,000 square feet with room for shelves, tables, fridges and freezers, at a rate the group can actually pay. If you know of something, she can be reached at 807-627-8768.

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The Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre's simulation lab has a new patient. Charlie is a SIM Man 3G Plus, bought with donations through the hospital's foundation, and he replaces mannequins that were all more than ten years old.

The upgrade that matters, says simulation program manager Leanne Baird, is that Charlie works with the hospital's own gear — he can be wheeled into the ICU or an operating room, hooked up to the real monitors, and display vital signs on the same equipment staff use every day. “The bottom line is, if you made a mistake with Charlie, that's fine. But that's not going to happen with a real patient,” she said. Participants often turn up shy, she added, and leave asking to do more. Dr. Rosie North, chief of the emergency department, trained in a simulation lab herself and describes a colleague surgically opening a patient's airway in under two minutes with no time to prepare — a procedure practised on a mannequin long before it was ever needed on a person. Dr. Aaron Ruberto, an ICU physician and Ornge transport doctor, says newer equipment simply lets more people through the room: medical students, residents, nurses, respiratory therapists and other staff besides.

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Two polls this week, and both landed on a clear majority.

The art gallery's half-built waterfront home (22 responses)

Takeaway. The interesting number is the zero. Not one reader picked the option that spends more municipal money — and yet a majority want the building finished. That is less a contradiction than a very specific instruction for whoever wins in October: go get somebody else's cheque. The third who want it left paused are not voting against the gallery either; they are asking for a plan they can believe before another dollar moves.

Wake the Giant's headliner apology (20 responses)

Takeaway. Two thirds of you went to the same practical place: apologize, then screen the booking harder next time. Almost nobody wanted a festival that drew 8,000 people judged on one set.

💬 What Readers Are Saying. Only one person left a written note this week, and it was a suggestion rather than a complaint — put the gallery and Science North under one waterfront roof, on the argument that sharing a building would cost less and would make far more of the site than either would alone.

Final Thoughts. Twenty-two votes and twenty votes: enough to see the shape of a room, nowhere near enough to call it a mandate. Treat it as a temperature check rather than a verdict. This week's question is up at the top — we'll do this again next Saturday.

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