On Oct. 28, Manitobans will once again elect the people who serve on our local school boards. School trustee races rarely attract the attention given to other elections. Yet school boards are among our most immediate forms of representative democracy.

Before asking who should be a school trustee, perhaps we should ask a more basic question:

What, exactly, are we electing a school trustee to do?

Trustees are elected to govern a school division. They are not elected to run it.

There’s an old saying that even a stopped clock is right twice a day. It’s a good way to describe Premier Wab Kinew’s recent announcement that his government is ending seasonal time changes in Manitoba. From this point on, Manitoba will remain on Central Daylight Time all year long.

Let’s give credit where it is due. The premier got it right when he announced that Manitobans will no longer turn their clocks back an hour this November. In fact, it should have been an easy decision.

Opinion polls show that the vast majority of Manitobans were ready to end the practice of switching their clocks twice a year. This issue was brought to the fore when British Columbia and Alberta recently announced that their residents would no longer have to switch their clocks. Saskatchewan, of course, had never participated in the time change.

With all our western neighbours ditching the twice-annual time change, it made little sense for Manitoba to continue with this antiquated practice. Plus, there’s plenty of evidence that switching our clocks was stressful and led to a loss of sleep. Now we will just keep the same time all year round.

Building permits are hitting new levels in Steinbach.

Coun. Susan Penner made the motion to approve the August building permits during the Tuesday council meeting.

While the month had a total permit value of $27.9 million, it was the number of residential units that stood out.

Residential permits exceeded $25 million, including 145 multi-family units and 3 single- or two-family units for a total of 148.

Re: Choose carefully in local elections, Think Again, Michael Zwaagstra, Sept. 10, The Carillon.

Mr. Zwaagstra shares methods for gathering information on candidates in the upcoming Hanover School Division board of trustees election in an effort to ascertain whether they are ‘right-leaning’ or ‘left-leaning.’ Presumably, he does this because he knows that any candidate tagged ‘conservative’ is essentially guaranteed to win any election in Steinbach and the RM of Hanover.

It’s no secret that the current HSD board of trustees has had more than its fair share of controversy. They have made quite a name for themselves; not only locally, but also provincially, and even nationally.

It’s also no secret that our district has consistently been voting conservative ever since the days American Christian radio programs first began airing on Southern Manitoba’s local radio stations. (Prior to that we generally voted liberal.)

Re: Choose carefully in local elections, Think Again, Michael Zwaagstra, Sept. 10, The Carillon.

How little does Mr. Zwaagstra think of the electorate, I wonder, to suggest that candidates running in the municipal election must fall on one side of the political spectrum or the other, and that this should be the deciding factor in how we vote?

In the view expressed in his column, traditional values and low taxes are right-leaning, so anyone supporting them must be on the right, while inclusion and big spending are left-leaning talking points used by those who are left-leaning. There is no room for nuance; all candidates must be sorted into either team left or team right so you can safely vote for whoever falls on your side of the line.

The word for this is tribalism.