Manitoba

Destiny Funk said people pretending to work for Manitoba Hydro attempted to lure her into making a deposit on a Bitcoin machine by using a lot of personal information and elaborate theatrics to make everything seem "very realistic."

On Monday afternoon, the 26-year-old received a call by someone claiming to be a Hydro technician, telling her they had a work order to cut her power within the hour due to unpaid bills.

Funk said the person had her name and address, and that it all seemed very legitimate.

Marion Willis, founder and director of the organization, told CBC News that over the last two weeks, nine encampments have been dismantled, helping at least a dozen people to pack their belongings and relocate into shelter spaces and other forms of housing.

"There's no safety, there's no hope at the encampments, and that just elevates the chance that a person will succumb to a fentanyl overdose or violence," she said.

"We have noticed that the shelter system is completely full, that's why it's so important that we have an emergency response, but even more important we have a housing response," Blaikie Whitecloud from Siloam Mission said.

"We're not going to emergency shelter our way out of homelessness."

The provincial government will introduce legislation that eliminates the use of restrictive covenants for grocery stores, which limit the kinds of stores that can open near a particular company's location, Kinew said.

The throne speech — which outlines the government's priorities for the coming legislative session — also says the government will open more than 100 beds at health-care facilities, unveil a new strategy for cutting ER wait times and commission a new statue to replace the Queen Victoria monument that was toppled in front of the Manitoba Legislature.

The one-year freeze on electricity rates, one of the affordability promises in the throne speech, will start in 2025.

Kinew promised a freeze in the 2023 election campaign, and while in office has insisted the utility has the means to service large new industrial customers in spite of warnings from Manitoba Hydro about a looming capacity crunch and the need to generate more power. Hydro has said its infrastructure requires billions of dollars in fixes.

A personal care home in Winkler, Man., has been forced to close 26 desperately needed beds after its elevator became unstable, and petitioned the provincial government for months before Shared Health finally committed to fund the repair.

Karin Oliveira, CEO of Salem Home, had to make the difficult decision last month to move 26 people off the facility's second floor after she lost confidence in the elevator that kept breaking down.

The province conducted 26,321 CT scans at facilities across Manitoba in August of this year, a 3.3 per cent increase from the 25,470 cases performed the prior August, according to provincial data.

[Progressive Conservative health critic Kathleen] Cook called that a "marginal increase" that "does not justify the huge jumps in CT scan wait times," she said in an interview Tuesday.