Landmark needs to add a way for water to get in and waste to get out before any new development can grow the town.

That was made clear at the Jan. 14 Taché council meeting where councillors heard about efforts to get a new forcemain in Landmark before being presented a housing action plan draft by planners from M Richard & Associates.

RM economic development officer (EDO) Martha Petrusevich explained how she is applying for the Canada Housing Infrastructure Fund before its Mar. 31 deadline in the hopes of funding a water forcemain in Landmark. The goal of the fund is to create more housing.

Petrusevich said she needs to beat the recently posted deadline because future funds may end with a federal election on the horizon. She said the deadline was added after she started as EDO in December.

Let’s talk about anger and its impact on mental health. Anger is a powerful emotion that can originate in frustration, hurt, annoyance, or disappointment.

Everyone feels angry occasionally. Usually it passes quickly because we resolve the situation and the angry feeling passes. Anger becomes a problem if we “bottle it up” or if we ‘blow up”. These responses cause problems for the angry people and those around them. Feeling angry is a normal reaction to some situations beyond our control. Angry feelings might also be a sign that we’re under too much stress and it can be difficult to know if we should wait for the anger topass or work at getting rid of it.

We need to admit our anger is a problem and look for ways of dealing with it if it’s constantly on our minds and harms our enjoyment of life. If it hurts relationships with family and friends, makes us act violently towards others or ourselves, or causes us to do vengeful acts, then our anger is definitely a problem and needs to be dealt with. We also need to be concerned if the anger is caused by something that happened a long time ago or if it interferes with our ability to do our jobs well.

Anger is a normal and healthy emotion when expressed appropriately. When it isn’t, it can have devastating effects. Anger is the cause of many personal and social problems such as domestic violence, physical and verbal abuse, and community violence and crime. And the effects of anger can tax our immune systems and contribute to headaches and migraines, severe gastrointestinal symptoms, skin disorders, hypertension, and coronary artery disease.

The RM of Ritchot servers and systems were hacked over the holidays leading to a shut down of its servers and system.

On Dec. 20, the RM’s servers were down after a cyberattack impacted its utility billing system. On Dec. 24, the RM sent out a notice that there was a cybersecurity event.

“As a result of the RM of Ritchot’s servers/system being down due to the recent cybersecurity incident, utility bills have not yet been processed,” read the notice on social media on Jan. 3.

The RM wouldn’t say if bills are being processed now nor how many residents were impacted by the breach.

If there were a subcategory of political economy in the National Book Awards, my vote for the 2024 Book of the Year would go to George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison’s Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism. By “invisible” and “secret,” some might suspect another conspiracy theory, before being confronted by the extensive, detailed, documented evidence provided throughout. It certainly fits the category of nonfiction.

Like its unmentioned precursor The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power published in 2003 by American-Canadian law professor Joel Bakan, Invisible Doctrine has also been converted into a documentary film by the same name. And just as The New Corporation: The Unfortunately Necessary Sequel was released in 2020, so too Monbiot and Hutchison may need to release an unfortunately necessary sequel of Invisible Doctrine sooner rather than later. The re-election of Donald Trump and his cadre of billionaires has made the creed now blatantly obvious.

Neoliberalism is “an ideology whose central belief is that competition is the defining feature of humankind, and that greed and selfishness light the path to social improvement.” As eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher and founder of capitalism Adam Smith sermonized, any political state which handcuffs the “invisible hand” of the free market—self-interest engaged in competition—interferes with the “natural order.” As such, humans are primarily consumers, not citizens.

The term neoliberalism—capitalism on steroids—was coined in 1938 and first championed by Austrian-British philosopher Friedrich Hayek in reaction to the welfare state policies of economist John Maynard Keynes in Britian and the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt in America, both designed to survive the 1930s Great Depression.

Even a casual observer of politics will have seen and heard it. After the election of a new government, a great deal of the new administration’s time is spent blaming the previous government. This is fairly standard political stuff. This is not always without some explanation. For example, if a new government is elected halfway through a budget year, there is clearly some shared decision making between the two administrations.

But as time goes on, it becomes more difficult for a government to blame those that came before them. That’s because, naturally, the longer you are government the more time you have had to either set a new course or to reject entirely decisions by a previous government. And while the public at some point starts to demand results and not excuses from a government, it is often hard for elected officials to stop blaming those that came before them.

Take for example the current Manitoba NDP government. It has now been almost a year-and-a-half since the NDP were elected. Manitobans likely remember that they came into office promising to improve things like healthcare, justice and the economy with some quick and easy fixes. What those quick and easy fixes would be were not well explained, but the NDP simply said “Trust us.”

Now, after months and months in government, “Trust us” has been replaced with, “Don’t blame us.” Far from there being improvements to these specific areas as the NDP promised, things have gotten worse and there doesn’t seem to be any plan to make them better. It’s unclear at this point whether the NDP ever had a plan to address these issues or whether they are just struggling to implement it. Either way, it is Manitobans who are paying the price.