Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter received medical attention for dehydration while in Winnipeg on Thursday, where he is helping build a Habitat for Humanity home. 
 
 The statement from the organization said that Carter was being rehydrated in hospital, and his wife was with him. 
 
 A Habitat volunteer told CBC News he saw Carter, 92, collapse after he'd been working in the sun for about an hour, using a handsaw to cut wood for a staircase. 
 
 Carter's bodyguards rushed over and carried him to a nearby vehicle. Shortly afterwards, firefighters and paramedics were seen scrambling, and an ambulance arrived. 
 
 The media was pushed back from the view of Carter before the ambulance left the site, followed immediately by his motorcade. 
 
 Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter received medical attention for dehydration while in Winnipeg on Thursday, where he is helping build a Habitat for Humanity home. 2:15 
 
 A motorcade of black vehicles remained parked outside the emergency doors at St. Boniface Hospital. 
 
 A spokesperson for Habitat for Humanity told media that Carter was taken there as a precaution, for observation. The former president has told the organizers he is feeling fine. 
 
 "He's asked us to continue with our day," said Jonathan Reckford, CEO for Habitat for Humanity International. 
 
 "He encourages everyone to stay hydrated and keep building." 
 
 Rosalynn Carter is escorted to a waiting van outside Winnipeg's St. Boniface Hospital on Thursday. Her husband, former U.S. president Jimmy Carter, is in the city to work with Habitat for Humanity. (CBC) 
 
 Carter — the U.S. president from 1977 to 1981 — and his wife, Rosalynn, are longtime supporters of Habitat for Humanity and are helping the not-for-profit organization with a build in the city. 
 
 They were scheduled to be part of the build for Thursday and Friday. There has been no word if those plans have changed. 
 
 Reckford said any further information on Carter's condition will have to come from the Carter Center, a not-for-profit organization founded by the ex-president. 
 
 President Jimmy Carter's motorcade parked outside the emergency entrance to St. Boniface Hospital in Winnipeg. (Cameron MacIntosh/CBC) 
 
 The last time Carter was in Manitoba was 1993, when he lent a hand at the construction sites for 18 other Winnipeg homes through the Habitat organization. 
 
 The couple already made a stop this month in Alberta to help with builds in Edmonton. 
 
 The projects are part of a Habitat for Humanity "blitz" aiming to build 150 new homes — including 25 in Manitoba — between July 9-14 to commemorate Canada 150. 
 
 Carter started Thursday by leading a morning prayer service from 8-8:30 a.m. Construction is set to wrap up at 4:30 p.m. for the day. ||||| Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter was taken to a Winnipeg hospital Thursday morning, after the 92-year-old appeared to feel faint while working on a Habitat for Humanity house. 
 
 WAYNE GLOWACKI / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Jimmy Carter with volunteers at the Habitat for Humanity work site in Winnipeg on Thursday. 
 
 "President Carter has been working hard all week. He was dehydrated working in the hot sun," Habitat officials said in a statement. 
 
 "As a precaution, he was transported to St. Boniface General Hospital for rehydration. Mrs. Carter is with him," the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority and The Carter Centre said in a statement. 
 
 Carter had been working in the sun for about 90 minutes when he went to sit down on a chair. As he sat, he appeared to wobble; Secret Service agents supported him, and whisked him back to where his motorcade was parked. 
 
 After a few minutes, a waiting ambulance pulled to the back of the house, near where the president was sitting. The ambulance remained on site as paramedics walked over to attend to the president. 
 
 The ambulance later left the site without lights or sirens. His motorcade followed the ambulance down the back lane. A number of Secret Service officers remain on site. 
 
 Carter informed build leaders that he is feeling "OK," according to Habitat International CEO Jonathan Reckford, and encouraged volunteers to continue on with their regular workday. 
 
 Vehicles in former U.S. President Jimmy Carter's motorcade and Winnipeg police vehicles are seen outside the emergency department at St. Boniface Hospital Thursday. (Wayne Glowacki / Winnipeg Free Press) 
 
 'Pleased to be here' 
 
 Earlier, Jimmy Carter and wife Rosalynn made their first public appearance in Winnipeg this morning, welcomed by the sound of thunderous applause. 
 
 The Carters, who will stay in Winnipeg through Friday to work on a Habitat for Humanity build, arrived at the St. James work site shortly before 8 a.m. to lead a morning devotional. 
 
 "I just wanted to say how pleased we are to be here," Rosalynn Carter said to the over 500 volunteers gathered under the site's kitchen tent to greet them. 
 
 "Somebody just asked us if we could see the change in Winnipeg from the time when we were here before (in 1993), but we don't remember," Rosalynn, 89, said with a laugh. "It was a long time ago." 
 
 The former president opened by offering greetings from his home church of Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Ga., and extended a special invitation to the volunteers. 
 
 "You're all welcome to come (to the church)," said Carter, the 92-year-old former president who served his term in 1977-1981, and added a wink: "Not all on the same Sunday, but you're all welcome." 
 
 WAYNE GLOWACKI / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter is assisted by Secret Service after he appeared to feel faint while working on a Habitat for Humanity house in Winnipeg 
 
 Only minutes after finishing the devotion, the Carters joined the crew at the house that will become home to Todd Gauthier and his daughters Chloie and Carmin, aged nine and seven. 
 
 Under the watchful eye of a team of Secret Service agents, Gauthier and the volunteers gathered for a brief chat with Carter before picking up their saws and hammers. 
 
 "He just introduced himself, and said he wants to get going on the work and get it done," Gauthier said, while the Carters worked on sawing boards for the front steps. 
 
 "It was just straightforward, wanting to get the project going and complete it. It's pretty cool." 
 
 That home, designated as the "Carter House," is located at the construction site on Lyle Street where 21 Winnipeg houses are being built as part of Habitat for Humanity and the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter Work Project. 
 
 25 houses to be constructed in Manitoba 
 
 A total of 25 houses are taking shape in Manitoba as part of a total 150 homes across the country to celebrate Canada’s 150th anniversary. Eight of the homes will house Indigenous families. 
 
 WAYNE GLOWACKI / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter and Rosalynn Carter work with volunteers taking part in construction on Lyle Street Thursday morning as part of the Habitat for Humanity’s 34th Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter Work Project. 
 
 Carter and his wife have volunteered since 1984 with Habitat for Humanity to build houses in places such as Winnipeg. 
 
 Five hundred volunteers will be working each day in Winnipeg out of a pool of about 1,600 who have signed up. 
 
 Successful applicants for Habitat homes must pay market value for their homes through a pay schedule that’s based on income. At least one adult must be working full time and have been doing so for at least the past two years. 
 
 Other requirements are a housing need, 500 hours of sweat equity, a willingness to be completely transparent in the transaction, and children in the household. 
 
 The process is intense and intrusive in the hope it’ll avoid setting a family up for failure, said Sandy Hopkins, the chief executive officer of Habitat for Humanity Manitoba. 
 
 After the houses are constructed, volunteers will make way for professionals to complete the final touches such as plumbing, electrical and heating. 
 
 In the 36 years since Carter left the White House, Carter and the nongovernmental, not-for-profit organization called the Carter Centre that he founded in 1982 have helped people in more than 80 countries by resolving conflicts, advancing democracy and human rights, preventing disease and improving mental health care. 
 
 The former U.S. president and first lady were in the Winnipeg in 1993 and helped build 18 Habitat homes in the North End. After Carter was defeated by Ronald Reagan, Carter and his wife started volunteering with Habitat and created the Carter Work Project to officially volunteer every year for a week. 
 
 Winnipeg was the couple's first Habitat build outside of the United States. Since then, the Carters have participated in builds in other countries, including Mexico, South Korea, India, the Philippines and Haiti. 
 
 melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca 
 
 — with files from Ashley Prest ||||| By 1992, three years after he left the White House, Ronald Reagan was anything but a beloved former president. As a painful recession gripped the country, the public came to see the Reagan years -- which featured a massive defense buildup, soaring deficits and even a stock market crash in 1987 -- as the source of their economic woes. Running for president that year, Bill Clinton promised to enact a clean break from the "failed policies of Reagan and Bush." As Reagan prepared to speak at the Republican National Convention in August, a Gallup poll found that just 46 percent of Americans had a favorable view of him. By contrast, Jimmy Carter, the man Reagan had defeated in a 44-state rout in 1980, was viewed favorably by 63 percent of the American public. The Reagan presidency stood in something approaching disrepute. 
 
 Today, though, you'd never know any of this happened. In the two decades since it bottomed out, Reagan's image has been resurrected, thanks largely to a relentless campaign from conservative activists. Will Bunch, who writes for the Philadelphia Daily News and is a senior fellow at Media Matters, chronicled Reagan's image makeover -- and the reality of his record as president -- in his 2008 book "Tear Down This Myth." We spoke with him recently about how the myth of Reagan has taken hold, and whether there's any truth to it. 
 
 I'm really struck by the poll that showed Carter much more popular than Reagan. It's not something that people would think is possible if you asked them now. Can you talk about how we reached that point, back in the early '90s? 
 
 By 1992, Reagan and Carter were kind of being compared as ex-presidents, and on a lot of levels, Jimmy Carter has had this very successful ex-presidency with the work he's done for Habitat for Humanity and from the other peace-oriented types of missions he's been on around the world. Reagan received an enormous amount of criticism a couple of years after he left office, particularly for an episode that's probably not going to get mentioned a lot this week, which is accepting, I believe it was $2 million, to give a speech in Japan. At the time, it was unusual and kind of jarring for Reagan to accept that much money to give a speech, plus the fact that a bunch of millionaires in California had all chipped in to buy Reagan a house, which a lot of people thought was kind of suspicious and didn't look too different from bribery. 
 
 Also, Nancy Reagan actually published her memoirs (1989's "My Turn"), and they were very poorly received as being kind of nasty and vindictive. And so there were a lot of negative feelings about Reagan. But the real reason Reagan had fairly high unpopularity in the early 1990s was that people were not happy with the aftermath of his policies as president. The American economy was doing very poorly in the early 1990s, there was a recession during the presidency of George H.W. Bush. Bush 41's presidency basically collapsed because he was forced to increase taxes to deal with the continuing deficits that were a legacy of Reagan. There was high anxiety among the American people starting in Reagan's second term about the loss of jobs in manufacturing, the growing clout of Asia -- so all of these things really caused Reagan to be viewed pretty negatively at the time. Bill Clinton campaigned very aggressively against Reaganomics. When Clinton was able to get some of his economic policies through Congress in the first two years of his presidency, Time ran a cover with a picture of Reagan upside down, and it was about the death of Reaganomics. That was the tone in the early '90s, before this conservative campaign to build what I call the Reagan myth got started. 
 
 Going back a step to his time in office, the popular version of Reagan's presidency is that he was elected kind of overwhelmingly, and then in 1984 reelected in a 49-state landslide, and then he just rides off into the sunset at the end of his term. But that second term was -- there were some serious problems in there, weren't there? 
 
 Oh, absolutely. A lot of people -- and I mean people in Congress who were in a position to do something about it -- felt that Reagan possibly committed impeachable offenses in the Iran-Contra scandal. There were several reasons he wasn't impeached. One, I think, was his age and some concern about his mental state, and the fact that he was in his second term. You have to remember that in the late 1980s, it really didn't feel like it was that long after Watergate -- and I think there's a tendency in politics to not want to relive something that's so traumatic. I mean, obviously, Congress had shed its qualms about impeachment by the late 1990s, but I think with Reagan there was a reluctance to do that. 
 
 Reagan's poll numbers really suffered a lot in the last two years of his presidency, partly because of Iran-Contra, but the other thing was the huge crash of the stock market in October 1987, which in the short run caused people to really start to reexamine Reagan's economic policies and whether the economic boom of the mid-1980s had maybe been a house of cards. I believe there was a poll that showed maybe a third of the American people wanted to see Reagan resign before his term was over, and certainly his approval ratings fell back under 50 percent. 
 
 The thing about Reagan and his approval ratings is they really went way up and way down. I mean, he was elected by a pretty big margin in 1980, probably because of Jimmy Carter's unpopularity. Then, when he came into office, he cut taxes and always gets so much credit for improving the economy -- except the economy got much worse over the next year, to where unemployment hit a high point, I think 10.8 percent. And Reagan's approval ratings dropped much lower than Obama's ever has, down to 35 percent. And then in '84 -- talk about good timing -- he really got the most benefits of the inevitable capitalist cycle of the reversal of the economy. It was really roaring back in '84, and the Democrats didn't really nominate the strongest opponent in [Walter] Mondale, and Reagan did win a big landslide. But then his popularity really plunged again because of Iran-Contra and nagging worries about aspects of the economy. 
 
 When he left office, his approval ratings were pretty high, and I think that after all the failed presidencies that came before him -- Nixon, Carter and Ford -- there was a sense of relief that he'd gotten through two terms and nothing disastrous had happened. There was goodwill toward Reagan because of his personality and his age. So he left office with a pretty high approval rating. And when he left office and people started to ponder the effects of his policies, his poll numbers dropped again only to be resurrected in the late 1990s. 
 
 But here we are just 15 or 20 years later and that whole story you just outlined is forgotten by so many people. What was the turning point from, say, that summer of '92, when Carter was actually more popular than Reagan, to where we are today? 
 
 There was always an effort on the right, starting from 1989 on, to try to give Reagan credit for winning the Cold War. The funny thing was, at first the public didn't really buy into that because the public was following the day in and day out of the news very carefully and felt what I think most scholars feel, which is that the credit for the Soviet Union collapsing largely belongs to Mikhail Gorbachev -- that it was Gorbachev pressing for these reforms and Reagan was an external force that wasn't quite as important. I quote in "Tear Down This Myth" a USA Today poll that was taken after the Berlin Wall collapsed (in October 1989) and a majority of Americans credited Gorbachev and only 14 percent credited Reagan. 
 
 How the myth gets started is that memories get softer and you have one group that gets very aggressive in pushing this notion that it was all Reagan's doing, that it was because of his defense buildup. The other thing is, during the 1990s, it was a great time economically -- probably better than it should have been because of the dot-com boom. At least among one class there was a lot of affluence in America -- and there were improvements that reached down to lower income. Black unemployment, for example, dropped during Clinton's presidency. It created this feeling that America had been on a roll and people forgot the recession of the early 1990s and how bad things had been and their anger with Reagan. They were more willing to say, "Well, this all started with Reagan," forgetting all those bad things that happened in the '80s and '90s. 
 
 It's no accident that the push to glorify Ronald Reagan started in 1997, because it was the year that Bill Clinton started his second term. He had just defeated Bob Dole overwhelmingly and things looked bleak for the broader conservative movement. They didn't seem to have anybody on the horizon to be a leader of the party, so there was this very conscious and calculated effort to look back. Something else that you can't overlook is that in 1997 Reagan was still alive and he announced with a lot of class and dignity in 1994 that he had Alzheimer's, so the public hadn't actually seen Reagan for three years. And the public impression of Nancy Reagan softened quite a bit, for good reasons -- she was out there pushing for stem cell research and other things. It would have been very difficult to criticize Reagan because of his health, a situation that engendered personal goodwill. 
 
 And that was something else conservatives could use as they launched this campaign to build up the Reagan legacy. They call it the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project, started in 1997 by Grover Norquist. It was this aggressive push to rename as many things as possible across the country for Reagan. It started with the airport in Washington, which they successfully renamed Reagan Airport. And it's funny to see news from that time, because a lot of Democrats were biting their tongues because they had no good memories of Reagan's presidency, but because of his health nobody was going to vote against renaming the airport for Reagan. Not all of the ideas have been enacted. We still don't have Reagan's picture on a $50 bill, or alternating on the dime with FDR, as some people proposed. But there are an increasing number of Ronald Reagan statues across the country, and you can almost drive across the Sun Belt continuously on some sort of Ronald Reagan boulevard or freeway or highway. Not surprisingly, the push to rename things for Reagan has been more successful where conservatism is the most popular. 
 
 It seems that a lot of people aren't even aware of what Reagan actually did as president, and you can point out areas where he clearly didn't do things that you would call conservative -- immigration comes to mind, with the amnesty in 1986. Do the Reagan deifiers even know what they're worshiping? 
 
 Especially now that Reagan's passed away, I think they're able to purport this idyllic, mythological version of Reagan who happens coincidentally to support all the pillars of the modern conservative movement. Political movements need a hero and Ronald Reagan -- the word "roles" is often associated with him because of his acting career, and his final role has been hero. But to do that, this movement had to do a rewrite, and things like the amnesty for undocumented immigrants had to go to the cutting room floor. He increased taxes on a number of occasions, either to undo the damage of his first tax cut, or because -- unlike modern conservatives -- he would actually engage in negotiations and try to compromise with Democrats on certain issues. All these things get lost because they don't fit the storyline that they're trying to push out there. 
 
 What goes through your head when you hear conservatives talk about Ronald Reagan now? 
 
 Well, I think they're misusing Reagan to push policies that in 2011 are destructive and could continue to be destructive to America. The whole tax thing is kind of insane -- that you can never raise taxes, which is not anything like what Reagan actually did. Even when he was governor of California, he actually signed the biggest tax increase that the governor of any state had ever signed at that time. So Reagan never subscribed to the idea that you can never raise taxes. The other thing that really rang true in the Bush years is using the great sound bites Reagan produced -- like "tear down this wall" or "evil empire" -- to justify things like the war in Iraq. 
 
 I don't know if you saw "The Social Network," but there's a line in it about how every good creation myth needs a devil. Does this help explain why, just as Reagan's popularity has gone up in the last two decades, Jimmy Carter's has taken a hit? Is he a casualty of the creation of the Reagan myth? 
 
 Yeah. The issue that was really the centerpiece of Carter's presidency was energy -- trying to promote useful alternative energy. And I don't see how you can look at what's happened over the last 25 years and not say that Carter was right: that we should have been researching alternative energy the whole time, and as a result we've fallen behind other countries; that we're addicted to oil and unable to shake that. But if you listen to talk radio, Jimmy Carter is reduced to wearing the sweater and turning the thermostat down at the White House. They've done such a good job creating Carter as kind of an anti-Reagan -- that part of Reagan's greatness was that he saved America from the malaise, which, by the way, is a word that Carter never actually uttered. This has become the modern equivalent of waving the bloody shirt was for the post-Civil War Republicans: waving the Jimmy Carter cardigan sweater.
– Jimmy Carter was hospitalized in Canada after he collapsed while building a Habitat for Humanity home Thursday in Winnipeg, CBC reports. The 92-year-old former president was using a handsaw to cut wood for a staircase at the time. The reason given for Carter's collapse was dehydration. According to the Winnipeg Free Press, which has video of the incident, Carter had been working in the sun for about 90 minutes. Habitat for Humanity states Carter was taken to the hospital as a precaution and the former president is doing fine. "He encourages everyone to stay hydrated and keep building," Habitat for Humanity CEO Jonathan Reckford says.