Dauphin residents went to bed Thursday night knowing the remnants of three plowings in the past week and a half sat piled in the middle of Main Street and downtown corridors impeding traffic flow.

But when they woke up Friday morning, those menacing windrows had disappeared thanks to the overnight efforts of Dauphin’s Public Works crews. Even with the ridiculous amount of snowfall the community has received over the last few days, Dauphin operators - public and private - have shown themselves to be unrivalled in the level of service they provide.

Dauphin motorists are travelling about the community freely, while those in other communities continue to struggle in their trip towards spring.

The Life and Art Centre has been busy with projects this year. In addition to refinishing the wood floors on the main floor, the outdoor greenspace project is also well underway.

Memorial benches will be installed this spring with hopes of an outdoor amphitheatre installation in the near future.

Check out this week’s issue to find out what’s coming up at the LAC.

With all this snow fall, and all the closed roads lately, figured it was appropriate to talk about closed roads.

Did you know it is now illegal to drive on highways that are closed??

Read more in this week’s RCMP report.

Opaskwayak Cree Nation’s (OCN) Rhonda Head has accomplished a great many things in her musical career, but now she has achieved something that was a personal goal she had set for herself. Head was asked to sing the national anthem in Cree, as part of the Winnipeg Aboriginal Sport Achievement Centre (WASAC) Night during a Winnipeg Jets game.
“This is their sixth year for the WASAC Night and they contact various Indigenous singers and performers to be a part of that evening,” said Head. “When they contacted me and I immediately said yes.

The Minitonas Figure Skating Club showcased the work from their season with their year-end carnival, held on Friday (March 1) at the Minitonas and District Arena, coached by Chantelle Moshenko and Alison Burgess...

Shovels, snow blowers, trucks and tractors with blades along with graders and other heavy equipment were out in full force on Monday morning to clean up after the dump of snow the Valley - and much of the prairies - received in the prior 24 hours. Accurate snowfall amounts were not available from Environment Canada at press time.

Morley Bourns, with Dwight Bottrell throwing skip rocks, won the Dauphin Men’s Bonspiel, Sunday.

Bourns and his team, which also includes Steve Soloway and Nick Ogryzlo, beat Rob Rempel in the final of the first event, sponsored by Embroidery by Design.

Chad Sahulka was third and Barrett Procyshyn placed fourth.

Jeff Campbell and his team of Seth Gares, Blaine Johnson and Bart Michaleski won the second event, sponsored by McMunn and Yates Building Supplies, beating Jared Nimegeers in the final. Third place went to Cory Toews and in fourth place was Greg Thompson.

The third event, sponsored by Parkland Source for Sports, was won by the team of Kyle Forsyth, Jarvis Whyte, Trent Hill and Cody Hill. They beat Chris Belhumeur in the final. Mark Hadway was third and Brian Freiheit was fourth.

Rob Fisher and his team of Dave Campbell, Danny Scott and Brent Stykalo won the fourth event, sponsored by Baker Computers, beating Logan Devos in the final. Third place went to Luke Michaleski and in fourth place was Terron Stykalo.

Next up is the Dauphin Ladies Bonspiel, Mar. 8 to 10, which will feature a 1990s theme.

Julien Lopez battles for the puck behind the Killarney/Wawanesa net in game one of their best-of-three quarterfinal series, Feb. 27 in Dauphin.

Lopez scored twice and added an assist to lead the Clippers to a 4-2 victory, with Josh Yakielashek and Ronin Mouck adding singles.

Owen Chubka made 37 saves in picking up the win in goal. Tyron Sweetman scored four times to lead Dauphin to a 5-2 win in game two, Feb. 29, in Killarney.

Liam Chartrand had the other goal for the Clippers, which scored in the first minute of each period. Chubka made 31 saves in the win.

The Clippers will now face the regular-season champion Neepawa Tigers in the semifinals, with game one, Mar. 6, in Neepawa at 7:30 p.m.

Game two will be back in Dauphin, Mar. 13, at 7 p.m.

Eventually it will happen, but so far the Dauphin Kings just can’t seem to catch the Blizzard Jr. A Hockey Club.

After winning two of three games, last week, the Kings trail the Blizzard by four points, with two games in hand.

But the one loss the local junior A hockey club suffered last week was at the hands of the Blizzard, a 4-0 setback, last Tuesday in The Pas, a game in which the Blizzard outshot the Kings 45-15.

Kings head coach and general manager Doug Hedley felt it was one of the team’s worst games of the season.

“We weren’t very good. We talked about it being a good test for our group and we didn’t step up,” he said. “We weren’t good right from the back end to the front end. We could have played better. We’ve just got to clean up a few areas. It just came down to compete level and we didn’t compete as well as we wanted to that night.”

It was a quick turnaround for the Kings as they faced the Swan Valley Stampeders, the next afternoon at 12:30 p.m. on the Stamps’ school day.

Alex Senf scored twice and added an assist to lead the Kings to a 4-1 win.

“Seibs (goaltender Austin Seibel) played very well in net. Sheff (goaltender Cole Sheffield) just needed a break. He’s been playing quite a few games. Seibs stepped in, did a great job and we found a way to get two points,” Hedley said.

The Kings had their work cut out for them on Friday, as the Winnipeg Freeze took them to overtime, but Dauphin prevailed 4-3 on Logan Walker’s second goal of the game and third point.

Freeze netminder Braxton Burdeny was the story of the game, making 48 saves to keep his team in it.

“You have to give him credit, he was good. One of our strengths is how fast we play and how hard we work and when we do that, we’re a tough team to play against,” Hedley said. “In OCN, we weren’t a very tough team to play against. We weren’t hard on pucks. The last couple of games we were getting back to where we were.”

Because of the blizzard which hit most of southern Manitoba, Sunday, the Kings were unable to travel to The Pas, for another game against the Blizzard.

The Kings have three big matches on the card this week, with a game in Virden against the MGEU West Division-leading Oil Capitals tonight.

On Friday, they visit the Neepawa Titans, before hosting the Blizzard, Saturday at Credit Union Place.

All three games begin at 7:30 p.m.

With the season winding down, these are three big games the Kings will need to win.

“If we could run the table that’d be great. We’re correcting a few things. We’ve got to clean up a few areas. We’ve got to be better in our D zone. Just the consistency part of our game needs to be there right through our lineup,” Hedley said. “We’ve got seven games to work at it and get it going.”

Kings court:

After this week, the Kings will have four games remaining on their schedule - Mar. 12 at home against the Portage Terriers in a makeup game, Mar. 15 against the Winnipeg Blues in Winnipeg, and Mar. 16 in Selkirk against the Steelers. Sunday’s game in The Pas has yet to be rescheduled.

There is something to be said for consistency. And consistent is how Dauphin fire chief Cam Abrey described the past year for his department in a rundown of 2023 operations for city councillors at their regular meeting, Feb. 26.

In fact things were so consistent that, at 236, the department responded to the same number of calls in 2023 as it did in 2022.

“Which, we believe, is the first time that’s ever happened in the history of the department, that it’s been consecutive numbers from year to year,” Abrey said, adding the two years boast the highest number of calls when looking back over the last decade.

False alarm calls continue to be the largest category by volume at 38 per cent of all calls. In 2023, the number rose to 89 over the 75 false alarms in 2022.

Abrey said 47 properties were issued a first offence notice under provisions of a City bylaw, with 14 receiving a second notice and eight receiving penalties for a third offence.

“That’s where the penalties start to kick in. Then the fines are issued by the City of Dauphin to the property owner,” he said, adding seven property owners received a penalty notice for a fourth offence, four got a fifth notice and one received a sixth penalty notice.

Motor vehicle collisions are the second highest category by volume with 41 responses accounting for 17 per cent of all calls.

Of those 41, 26 of the calls were eligible for claims under Manitoba Public Insurance guidelines, Abrey said and totalled $32,107.21.

“Now we just wait and see how much they actually pay back because sometimes they pay the full claim, sometimes they dispute the full claim, sometimes they reject the claim altogether,” Abrey said, adding determining factors include whether a driver is properly insured or whether they decide not to open a claim with MPI. “In that case, when there’s no claim filed, we don’t get paid either.”

In other categories, kitchen fires accounted for 11 per cent of department activity. Outdoor fires and structure fires each came in at eight per cent, carbon monoxide alarms at four per cent and vehicle fires at three per cent.

Abrey added the department changed its record keeping by pulling EMS lift assists - which involves helping to move larger patients - out of the catchall category of “other.”

“Our city manager Sharla (Griffiths) had emailed prior to the AMM conference and asked is this an issue in Dauphin? At that time I said, ‘no it’s not’ and then all of a sudden our calls exploded for lift assist following that email,” Abrey said, adding there were 16 such calls in 2023 and just 13 total from 2020 to 2022. “Those 16 totaled 251 personnel hours, or an average of 15.5 people responding to the station every time we’re paged out. Now the issue is that when EMS request assistance they ask for four members to show up, but they’re paging out every single member of the department.”

Abrey said there is getting to be more and more such calls across the province as emergency services agencies of all kinds, including EMS, are short staffed.

“That assistance is a service to our ratepayers,” he said, adding the Manitoba Association of Fire Chiefs and the Office of the Fire Commissioner talking to Shared Health about the issue. “Setting up something similar to what MPI does where they pay for our response.”

In total, firefighters dedicated 4,398 hours to the 236 calls with 18 per cent, or 792 hours spent responding in the RM of Dauphin and 3,606 hours worked in the city. One per cent, 30 hours was spent assisting neighbouring departments through the mutual aid system.

Firefighters also dedicated 2,286 hours to regular Wednesday evening training in addition to taking part in numerous weekend training opportunities offered through the Manitoba Emergency Services College.

Some of those opportunities include Firefighting Level I and II classes for members of the mutual aid district along with Incident Command System 200, Vehicle Extrication, Pump Basics, Emergency Vehicle Driving, Pumps Advanced, Grain Rescue, Advanced Fire Dynamics, Occupational Hygiene and Electric Vehicle Training.

With 30 members currently, Abrey said the department is continuing its recruitment efforts, attracting members through a number of different means.

“I’m happy to report that we’ve also resurrected our cadet program with the high school. So we currently have two cadets that are between the ages of 16 and 17 that have been coming out to our training,” he said. “This is something that kind of fizzled during COVID, but we’re glad to see that it’s being fired up again and we have some new interest in that.”

Finally, Abrey told councillors the Firefighters’ Association will be fund-raising in March for Muscular Dystrophy Canada, it’s charity of choice.

“MD has been the firefighters’ charity of choice since 1954, but I guess Dauphin got involved in 1976,” Abrey said. “Since that time it’s over $100,000 that our department has raised for muscular dystrophy.”

On behalf of Dauphin residents, mayor David Bosiak, extended appreciation for the department and its commitment to the safety of everyone in the community.

“I think we have probably one of the best rural fire departments anywhere and a lot of that relates to leadership, so keep leading,” Bosiak said. “We truly appreciate everything that your members do . . . the city truly supports what you’re doing and keep doing it.”