Thanks to a partnership with the Manitoba Arts Council, The Pas Arts Council and the Rotary Club of The Pas, residents in the tri-community will get the opportunity see ballet performed by the Royal Winnipeg Ballet (RWB) next week. On the Edge Tour featuring the RWB Anna McCowan-Johnson Aspirant Program’s Aspirants will be sole performers on this tour.
“The RWB Anna McCowan-Johnson Aspirant Program is a two year post-graduate program for students who have graduated from a professional dance program,” said RWB Anna McCowan-Johnson Aspirant Program Director Vanessa Léonard. “They enter this program as a transition from being a ballet student into a professional dance life. We have a strong focus on preparing the dancers for the stage and repertoire. We also focus on creating audition materials that they can send out to companies around the world. There are 16 aspirants in the program this year and range from 18 to 21 years old.

The provincial government recently appointed a new judge, who is familiar to the area and to the provincial court of Manitoba in The Pas. Lori Ann Hunter grew up in The Pas and also has strong family roots in the community.
“When I was five years old, my family moved to The Pas, but my maternal side of my family has lived here for three generations,” said Hunter. “My father worked for the provincial government and my mother had an independent business in the community. I grew up in the community having ties to those sectors.”
Hunter didn’t embark upon becoming a lawyer right away. She spent some time working in the justice sector in the frontlines, before attending law school.
“My career in law started later in life for me, because I went to school not in the traditional trajectory,” said Hunter. “I spent twenty years working in the legal system. I started working as administrative support in the Crown’s office. My first career was a court reporter.

A royal event is in the works for little princesses in the tri-community. The Pas and Area Animal Shelter is hosting another Princess Ball fundraiser this spring.
“This is our second year hosting the Princess Ball,” said Lynda Geswin. “For the first year of this fundraiser, we were sold out. It was very well received and we heard positive feedback from those who attended. This was modeled after a Princess Ball in Winnipeg and relies heavily on volunteers.
“Based on the feedback and messages we’re receiving, I’m expecting we will be sold out again this year. We haven’t put out our tickets yet and we’re getting a lot of requests. I would encourage people to buy their tickets early, because there’s a limited amount for sale. There will be 140 tickets for sale and there is a child price and a parent price for tickets. A child’s ticket is $40 and a parent’s ticket is $20.”

When children get sick it hits the hearts of everyone who knows and loves that child. Having to undergo treatments and surgery for life threatening diseases is scary and when one beats the odds, it’s a miracle that is worth celebrating.
15-year-old Emily Heape, has experienced such an ordeal that has forever changed her life.
“Emily is almost 16 years old and loves elephants, animals in general, swimming, camping and her family,” said Emily’s mother Anisa Eluik. “She’s a quiet kid now, much more reserved, although she is a teenager now. Emily is quite efficient with technology, which is good, as we get older, we have no clue how new stuff works. She loves to bake and try new recipes as well, so this upcoming fundraiser with the Dream Factory is right up her alley.

A royal event is in the works for little princesses in the tri-community. The Pas and Area Animal Shelter is hosting another Princess Ball fundraiser this spring.
“This is our second year hosting the Princess Ball,” said Lynda Geswin. “For the first year of this fundraiser, we were sold out. It was very well received and we heard positive feedback from those who attended. This was modeled after a Princess Ball in Winnipeg and relies heavily on volunteers.
“Based on the feedback and messages we’re receiving, I’m expecting we will be sold out again this year. We haven’t put out our tickets yet and we’re getting a lot of requests. I would encourage people to buy their tickets early, because there’s a limited amount for sale. There will be 140 tickets for sale and there is a child price and a parent price for tickets. A child’s ticket is $40 and a parent’s ticket is $20.”

The Gateway Keewatin Corridor is hosting public presentations with a meeting, and then their Annual General Meeting next week. The presentations and meeting will focus on the upgrades of the Tote Road and the impact to industry and agriculture to the community and the north.
“We started a group on the Manitoba side in 2002, called the Highway 283 taskforce and the purpose of that was to get the road that goes west of The Pas towards Nipawin, SK, and the Alberta border, up to RTAC standards,” said Gateway Keewatin Corridor President Len Gluska. “We were looking for it to be brought up to a commercial road where it could have primary traffic and full semi loads of product moving on it. Where it’s at now, it’s only three months of the year.

Embracing one’s culture and tapping into the artistic side of it is something that Keeper of the Little People Regalia Outfitters’ Charleen Spence has been able to achieve. Like many other Indigenous people, Spence didn’t have the opportunity to learn her culture and traditions from family, due to the severe conditions imposed by residential schools. It was only later on in Spence’s life that she was able to embrace those traditions and talents.
“I always wanted to dance when I was a child,” said Charleen Spence. “I did not have anyone in my life or that I knew that shared the traditions openly. Due to the residential school and treaties making our cultural practices illegal, our culture knowledge was not passed down to our families and myself. I learnt about who I was through the different traditional teaching from Joe A Ross School and the University College of the North.

It’s a tough time for most school divisions in Manitoba as they finalize their upcoming school year budgets. Each school division is struggling to do more with less funding and Kelsey School Division is no different. Some tough decisions had to be made to minimize the amount of cutbacks that could have occurred.
Kelsey School Division put a great emphasis in this year’s budget on ensuring that staffing levels were maintained.
“Our main focus was to prevent losing any staff through budget cuts,” said Kelsey School Division Chair Cheryl Sinclair. “We wanted to hold staffing levels to where they are and that was one of our main questions asked by the public.

The annual Storyteller’s Film Festival is coming up in April and this year there are some excellent documentaries being showcased that represent life in northern Manitoba.
“First we have a film called Sam Waller's Museum, which is a short documentary about Sam Waller, his life in the area, and his museum,” said Cheryl Antonio. “The next one is Gift to Give and it’s a short documentary about a family whose father is ill and in need of a transplant. We The Artists of the North is a documentary about artists in Thompson, Manitoba. Then our feature length film is called Beans and is a film set in the Oka Crisis of 1990, coming from the perspective of a young girl.”