Steinbach’s first-ever cannabis store won’t be arriving any time soon after proponents of the store were denied the right to hold a plebsicite.

A plebiscite vote can only happen around provincial elections, which are held once every four years, and require signatures of 20 percent of registered voters. Retailers TobaGrown and Flamingo Plus were denied permission to hold a plebiscite to ask if the community wanted a cannabis store or not, due to not meeting the criteria.

“Look at the last election, in Steinbach, our petition was three times as many as the people that showed up four years ago. That is a concern for the city councillors who are using their personal bias, the fact that cannabis has been illegal for most of their life,” TobaGrown Founder Jesse Lavoie said.

Lavoie said his petition had 4,000 plus signatures but only 900 signatures were accepted. He said the city rejected the majority of signatures over a rule that people must put their street numbers when they sign a petition.

Election day is less than two weeks away. Advance voting starts this Saturday on Oct. 17.

There are lots of candidates running to be a Hanover School Division trustee. Unsurprisingly, every candidate claims to prioritize academic excellence.

But what does this look like in practice? While it’s easy to pay lip service to academics, voters have every right to insist that candidates do more than simply include academic excellence as a bullet point on a campaign brochure.

Prioritizing academic excellence means keeping a laser-like focus on improving student achievement. This means promoting teaching methods that are consistent with the science of learning.

Leadership scholar Warren Bennis once said, “Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality.”

Many of you wrote me about the disappointing results from C-218: The Right to Recover Act. The PMB (Private Member’s Bill) introduced by Conservative MP Tamara Jansen, which I seconded, would have amended the Criminal Code to ensure that a mental disorder by itself could not qualify as a grievous and irremediable medical condition for the purposes of MAID (Medical Assistance in Dying) eligibility.

To remind you why bill C-218 was needed, back in 2021, the Senate amended Government Bill C-7 to include mental illness as a sole underlying medical condition by which people could qualify for MAID. The bill was passed but implementation of the Senate amendment for mental illness to be included for MAID, was then delayed through subsequent legislation, currently delaying the eligibility date to be effective March 17, 2027.

Earlier this year, Parliament formed a special joint committee on MAID, which recommended that people whose sole underlying medical condition is a mental illness, be indefinitely excluded from eligibility for MAID.