As Manitoba approaches one year since its first COVID-19 case, Premier Brian Pallister is looking back on the hard lessons learned, the lives lost and how Manitobans have changed.
Sioux Valley Dakota Nation borders the heavily travelled Trans-Canada Highway in western Manitoba, yet the community held back waves of COVID-19 cases that swept the area last year.
In the opposite corner of the province, Shamattawa First Nation, a remote fly-in community in northeastern Manitoba, had an outbreak so severe that the Canadian military was flown in to help after one-third of the 1,500 residents were infected.
MIKE DEAL / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS
COVID-19 checkstops on the roads into Peguis FN only allowing residents and essential workers in.
How the two communities, situated 900 kilometres apart, have been impacted by the pandemic speaks to the complexity of COVID-19, and the dramatic variabilities among the 63 reserves in Manitoba.
Winnipeg Free Press By: Dylan Robertson
Manitoba NDP MP Niki Ashton says the federal government should distribute the COVID-19 vaccines directly to Indigenous communities. (Mikaela MacKenzie / Winnipeg Free Press files)
OTTAWA The Trudeau government is rejecting an NDP demand to overstep the provinces and dispatch COVID-19 vaccines directly to Indigenous communities.
OTTAWA The Trudeau government is rejecting an NDP demand to overstep the provinces and dispatch COVID-19 vaccines directly to Indigenous communities. We need to see a plan now, NDP MP Niki Ashton told reporters Monday. We need to ensure that there is no patchwork approach to delivering the vaccine to Indigenous communities.
Winnipeg Free Press
Unclear which communities will get first Moderna shots By: Dylan Robertson
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick
Manitoba Metis Federation president David Chartrand: “Ottawa has a fiduciary responsibility for Indigenous people, on and off reserve.
OTTAWA Manitoba’s Indigenous leaders are getting antsy about who will get the yet-to-be approved Moderna vaccine against COVID-19, which could arrive in the province next week.
OTTAWA Manitoba’s Indigenous leaders are getting antsy about who will get the yet-to-be approved Moderna vaccine against COVID-19, which could arrive in the province next week.
The federal government has convened a committee in an attempt to get Indigenous leaders and provinces on the same page ahead of a vaccine roll-out no one expected to come so soon. However, Ottawa says it won’t strong-arm provinces who fail to uphold their constitutional duty to protect Indigenous peop