Debating nomenclature: Premier-designate or premier-elect – or neither? – Plus who’s who in Order of Precedence for Manitoba

On May 3, the Province of Manitoba will have its first change in political party in power as Her Majesty’s Government here since Oct. 5, 1999, when former NDP premier Gary Doer took office. So the arrival of premier-designate Brian Pallister, whose Progressive Conservatives won 40 of the 57 seats in the Manitoba Legislative Assembly in the April 19 provincial general election – tying a record for most seats set way back in 1915 when Premier Tobias Crawford Norris’ Liberals also won 40 seats in the Aug. 6 election in a legislature with 47 seats – is a pretty big deal as these things go.

Actually, for those wont to split hairs, Pallister is not really the premier-designate or premier-elect, some strict constitutional constructionists might argue. It’s just a convenient shorthand journalists in particular use to describe the leader-in-waiting-who-would-be premier (that’s my way-too-long-term). Philippe Lagassé, an associate professor of public and international affairs at the University of Ottawa, and a fellow with the Canadian Global Affairs Institute, whose work focuses on defence policy and the Westminster system, notably on the relationship between Parliament and the Crown, explained it this way last May in the Montreal-based Institute for Research on Public Policy’s digital edition of the magazine Policy Options Politiques: “What should we call the leader of a party who we expect will be appointed premier or prime minister but who doesn’t hold the office yet? … Unfortunately, premier-elect doesn’t make sense, constitutionally speaking, because first ministers aren’t elected.

“Voters elect representatives who sit in legislatures, not first ministers or governments. Nor do legislatures elect first ministers. Premiers and prime ministers are appointed by the Crown. Of course, those appointments are made based on the first minister’s ability to hold the confidence of legislature, but it’s an appointed office nonetheless.

“Premier-elect inaccurately describes how the first minister will come into office.

“The next term that’s used is “premier-designate.” I’m not a fan of this title, since there’s no actual office of premier-designate and I think is needlessly confuses things. That said, the term has been used internally within Canadian executives for administrative purposes for nearly a century, and vice-regal secretariats across the country have decided that it should now be used publicly.

“However, premier-designate is meant to describe a particular circumstance. A party leader is premier-designate only after the Crown has invited them to form a government.

“It’s equally important to note that, after this invitation has been issued, the incumbent premier is still premier. The premier-designate is merely preparing to be appointed premier and to advise the Crown on who should be appointed to ministerial offices.

“The premier-designate only becomes premier after the incumbent premier resigns and the Crown formally appoints the premier-designate as the premier.”

Lagassé concludes, “Unfortunately, there’s no good short hand term that accurately reflects our constitutional realities. As boring as it is, it’s best to simply refer to them as the leader of party X who is expected to be appointed premier or prime minister.” Aside from how the matter of how we should refer to the leader-in-waiting-who-would-be premier, there is also the issue of who’s who in the Order of Precedence for Manitoba even after we begin calling him Premier Brian Pallister sometime on Tuesday. The Order of Precedence for Manitoba is determined by the Federal-Provincial Relations branch within the Manitoba Department of Finance.

A sequential hierarchy, the Order of Precedence for Manitoba is not necessarily an indication of functional importance, if that isn’t too indelicate a way of putting it, but rather an indication of ceremonial or historical relevance, with some overlap, as might be expected, between the functional and the historical and ceremonial. Premier Pallister will be number two on the list, preceded only by Lt.-Gov. Janice Filmon, the wife of Gary Filmon, the last Tory premier of Manitoba until the election of Pallister earlier this month.

Manitoba joined Confederation as the fifth province – appropriately enough smack in the middle of 10, time-wise, as well as geographically – on July 15, 1870. The Manitoba Act, which created the Province of Manitoba, was passed by the Parliament of Canada, and received royal assent on May 12, 1870. Manitoba’s official flag, the Red Ensign, bearing the provincial coat of arms, was given royal approval by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II in October 1965, and officially dedicated and unfurled for the first time on May 12, 1966. In 1986, May 12 was designated as Manitoba Day.

Manitoba has been the home of some of the most important, often colourful and eclectic, and at times controversial who’s who of Canadian history. Almost any such list would include Métis leader Louis Riel, considered by many to be the “Founding Father” of Manitoba; Nellie McClung, the controversial feminist author, social activist and politician; writers Gabrielle Roy and Margaret Laurence; J.S. Woodsworth, Methodist minister, community activist and Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) politician; Los Angeles-born Stanley Knowles, United Church minister, social gospel movement activist, CCF politician and parliamentarian; Progressive Conservative premier and senator Duff Roblin; former governor general and NDP premier Ed Schreyer; Doer, also Canada’s former ambassador to the United States, as well as a former premier; newspaper editor John Wesley Dafoe; journalist E. Cora Hind; and Canwest’s Izzy Asper.

Add filmmaker Guy Maddin; spymaster Sir William Stephenson; cable TV pioneer and philanthropist Randall Moffat; and Olympic speed skater Cindy Klassen, to that list too.

In addition, to the important and famous, there are also the quirky and unique things that make Manitoba, well, Manitoba. Things like the nine “disorganized” municipalities of Armstrong; Birch River; Chatfield; Fisher Branch; Kreuzberg; Piney; Sprague; Stuartburn; and Woodlea, now absorbed into Rural Municipalities (RM’s). When the Depression arrived in the 1930s, municipalities were faced with a sudden drop in tax receipts and many were forced to accept administration from the provincial government. Nine municipalities, located in the Interlake and southeast corner, allowed their government to lapse completely and have never reappeared in their old form. Even rarer than “ghost towns,” these former municipalities are, in effect, “ghost” municipalities, notes the Manitoba Historical Society.

So what makes the Order of Precedence of Manitoba so important? Well, for one thing it, it is useful for determining where dignitaries are seated at formal official dinners hosted by the Keystone Province in the capital of Winnipeg – or by analogy up here in Thompson – figuring out which table should go first and whose at the front of the line at a St. Lawrence Parish Hall social, Kokanee, or rye and Coke, or both in hand, for a midnight lunch of kielbasa, rye bread, Old Dutch barbecue potato chips, dill pickles and cheese.

So yeah, kind of important.

And so, ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, the Order Precedence of Manitoba, after Her Honour, and the premier, whose official title by the way is “president of the executive council of Manitoba,” better known as the premier and his cabinet:

• Chief Justice Richard J.F. Chartier of the Manitoba Court of Appeal;
• Former lieutenant-governors of Manitoba or surviving spouses in order of seniority in taking office;
• Former  presidents of the executive council of Manitoba in order of seniority in taking office;
• Members of the Privy Council of Canada resident in Manitoba by order of seniority of taking the oath of office;
• Members of the executive council of the Province of Manitoba in relative order of seniority of appointment;
• Chief Justice of the Court of Queen’s Bench Glenn Joyal;
• The Speaker of the Legislative Assembly of Manitoba;
• The puisne judges of the Manitoba Court of Appeal and of the Court of Queen’s Bench in relative order of seniority of appointment;
• The Leader of the Official Opposition in the Legislative Assembly of Manitoba;
• The Archbishop of St. Boniface, Albert LeGatt;
• The Bishop of Rupert’s Land; Donald Phillips;
• The Archbishop of Winnipeg, Richard Gagnon;
• The Metropolitan of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church;
• The Metropolitan of the Ukrainian Catholic Church:
• The President of the Manitoba Conference of the United Church of Canada;
• The chair of the Manitoba Conference of the Presbyterian Church in Canada;
• The Chair of other representatives persons of the following denominations as indicated below and whose person will be signified to the clerk of the executive council from time to time: Lutheran Church; Jewish Rabbi; The Mennonite Faith; The Baptist Church; The Salvation Army; The Pastors Evangelical Fellowship;
• Members of the House of Commons resident in Manitoba by order of seniority in taking office;
• Members of the legislative assembly of Manitoba in relative order of seniority in taking office;
• Provincial court judges in relative order of seniority of appointment;
• Magistrates in relative order of seniority of appointment;
• Members of the local consular corps in relative order of seniority of appointment;
• Mayors, reeves and elected local government administrators in relative order of date of taking office.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

It may be fiction, but it’s still nice to see evangelical authors Randy Alcorn and Frank Peretti haven’t given up completely on journalists and the secular media

I say bravo to Randy Alcorn and Frank Peretti for offering us characters such as Jake Woods and Marshall Hogan in books like Deadline and This Present Darkness.

Alcorn, who lives in Gresham, Oregon, is the founder and director of Eternal Perspective Ministries (EPM), a nonprofit ministry. Alcorn, who holds bachelor of theology and master of arts in biblical studies degrees from Multnomah University, served as a pastor at Good Shepherd Church in rural Boring, Oregon for 14 years before he started Eternal Perspective Ministries in 1990, after a writ of garnishment for Alcorn’s wages was served  on Good Shepherd Church on May 4, 1990, where he was pastor of missions, ordering the church to surrender a portion of his wages.

In 1989, Portland police, as Tim Stafford later noted in an April 1, 2003 piece for Christianity Today, had arrested Alcorn “several times for blocking the doors of several abortion clinics. One of the clinics had sued him and other ‘rescuers,’ winning a small judgment plus attorney’s fees. Alcorn had refused to pay, believing it would violate his conscience to write a check to an abortion clinic.”

As Stafford tells the story, “Some time before the suit, Alcorn and his wife, Nanci, had placed all their assets in her name – house, car, and bank account. Alcorn had given away or sold the copyrights to his five published books. At a debtor’s hearing he was able to state truthfully that he owned nothing of value. An opposing lawyer went so far as to ask about the gold band he was wearing on his left hand.

“Alcorn held up the ring, milking the drama of the moment. ‘I’m not sure what it’s worth today, but I paid $12.50 for it at Kmart four years ago.'”

“Alcorn had not anticipated having his wages garnished, however. This implicated not just Alcorn’s conscience, but also that of his church. If the church refused to pay, serious legal complications could follow. Many church members had grave doubts about the wisdom of Alcorn’s protests.”

So Alcorn resigned two days later from Good Shepherd Church, which he had co-founded, and was the only church he had ever pastored.

Deadline,  written in 1994, was Alcorn’s first novel after writing five non-fiction books. It tells the story of three old friends, whose friendships date back to childhood and their service in Vietnam: Jake Woods, a liberal and largely secular journalist who is an award-winning syndicated columnist for the Oregon Tribune; Dr. Greg “Doc” Lowell, chief of surgery at the local hospital, and a diehard atheist and humanist; and Finnegan “Finney” Keels, a  devout Christian and the owner of a computer software business – represent two conflicting worldviews that Jake has to choose between after a halftime Kansas City Chiefs and Seattle Seahawks football-watching Sunday afternoon pizza-and-Coors beer run to Gino’s in Lowell’s cherry-red Suburban ends in tragedy, leaving Woods as the sole survior of what may not be an accident, as it first appears, but rather a double homicide.

In endorsing Deadline,  Frank Peretti  wrote: “Randy Alcorn is a walking resource library guided by godly wisdom. Like his  nonfiction,  this  novel  is  for  clear  thinkers  who  enjoy  a  good  argument.  There  can  be  no  mistaking – and  there  should  be  no  ignoring – the  vital message of this book.”

Trumpeted in both TIME and Newsweek as the creator of the crossover Christian thriller, Lethbridge, Alberta-born Peretti now lives in northern Idaho (he spent from 1978 to 1984 as a factory ski maker working at the K2 ski company on Vashon Island in Washington State’s Puget Sound) wrote two of the best-selling spiritual warfare novels in recent times – This Present Darkness, published in 1986 and Piercing the Darkness, published in 1989.

He also played the banjo in a bluegrass band called Northern Cross.

This Present Darkness was not an immediate publishing phenomenon, but gradually word began to spread, and the book remained on the Christian Booksellers Association’s Top 10 bestsellers list for over 150 consecutive weeks. It has sold over two million copies worldwide. This Present Darkness and Piercing the Darkness, popularized the idea of territorial spirits ruling over specific geographical areas, vividly portraying demons, commanded by Rafar, and angels – led by Tal, captain of the heavenly host – engaging in fierce aerial battles over schools, churches, towns and territories, have combined sales of more than 3.5 million copies.

And one of the unlikely heroes of This Present Darkness? The fictional editor of the local small town weekly newspaper, the Ashton Clarion, former big city reporter and skeptic Marshall Hogan.

Deadline, which remained on various bestsellers lists for 36 months, was the first in Alcorn’s Ollie Chandler collection of novels to date, featuring Chandler as a brilliant and quick-witted homicide detective who lives by Ollies’ First Law: “Things are not what they appear.”  Dominion followed Deadline in 1996, and a third book, Deception, was published in 2007.

Alcorn spent time with Portland homicide detectives, Tom Nelson, a now retired detective sergeant and certified forensics computer examiner from the Portland Police Bureau, and columnists at the Oregonian, as well as observing editorial meetings at the Indianapolis Star, so he could accurately create the Deadline’s storyline, setting and characters.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

Catholicism is a big tent with an eclectic communion of saints: Will there be room for G.K. Chesterton some day?

Catholicism is a big tent with an eclectic communion of saints, which probably explains why we’d have Padre Pio of Pietrelcina, a Capuchin stigmatist and bilocator, St. Joseph of Cupertino, the levitator, who is the patron saint of air crews, students, aviators and test takers, St. Denis of Paris, the head-carrying cephalophore, and St. Nicholas Owen, all in the same room happily together. G. K. Chesterton, who may some day join them, would probably heartily approve.

March 22 was the Feast Day of St.Nicholas Owen, who was martyred in 1606. He was canonized by Blessed Pope Paul VI in 1970 as one of the 40 Martyrs of England and Wales. I learned this, as I have much in a similar vein over the years, from Franciscan Media, formerly St. Anthony Messenger Press, in Cincinnati, and their “Saint of the Day,”  which offers a brief biography of a well-known, or a little-known saint. “Catholic saints are holy and human people who lived extraordinary lives,” says Franciscan Media. “Each saint the Church honors responded to God’s invitation to use his or her unique gifts.” Franciscan Media Productions, which produces Saint of the Day (yes, there is a smartphone app) is a ministry of Franciscan Media, sponsored by the Franciscan Friars of the Province of St. John the Baptist in  Cincinnati.

Established by the Franciscan Friars in the 1890s, “with the foundational belief that everyone deserves to experience a deep, heart-felt relationship with God, Franciscan Media supports spiritual development by providing inspiring, practical, and helpful multimedia resources in the spirit of St. Francis of Assisi,” they got their start with St. Anthony Messenger magazine in 1893. Franciscan Media conducts its publishing ministry with the official ecclesiastical approval of Archbishop Dennis M. Schnurr, ninth archbishop of the Archdiocese of Cincinnati, who succeeded to the office in December 2009.

St. Nicholas Owen, familiarly known as “Little John,” was “small in stature but big in the esteem of his fellow Jesuits,” reports Saint of the Day.

“Born at Oxford, this humble artisan saved the lives of many priests and laypersons in England during the penal times, when a series of statutes punished Catholics for the practice of their faith. Over a period of about 20 years he used his skills to build secret hiding places for priests throughout the country. His work, which he did completely by himself as both architect and builder, was so good that time and time again priests in hiding were undetected by raiding parties. He was a genius at finding, and creating, places of safety: subterranean passages, small spaces between walls, impenetrable recesses. At one point he was even able to mastermind the escape of two Jesuits from the Tower of London.”

After many years “at his unusual task, he entered the Society of Jesus and served as a lay brother, although – for very good reasons – his connection with the Jesuits was kept secret.”

He was arrested and tortured in 1594 and again in 1606, when he was martyred.

As I said, Chesterton would no doubt approve of this diverse panoply of saints gathered together in one communion and no doubt join them at table. This is the convert to Catholicism after all who wrote: “[W]e should thank God for beer and Burgundy by not drinking too much of them.” Privately, he joked, “One pint is enough, two pints is one too many, three pints isn’t half enough.”

Chesterton lived from 1874 to 1936. Under the influence of his wife Frances, he became an  Anglican and converted to Roman Catholicism in 1922.

Pope Francis, it turns out, had been a member of the Chesterton Society in Argentina and had approved a prayer for his beatification. Pope Francis was also a member of an honorary committee of a conference for the Argentine Chesterton Society and celebrated a mass for the conference. He owns several books written by Chesterton.

In September 2013, Bishop Peter Doyle, bishop of the Diocese of Northampton, appointed Canon John Udris, a priest of the diocese and currently spiritual director at St Mary’s College, Oscott, to undertake a fact-finding exercise on his behalf into whether a cause for Chesterton’s canonization should be opened. Udris in due course will submit a dossier to the bishop on whether to open the cause for Chesterton’s canonization.

As Udris told the Catholic Herald in an interview a year ago in March 2014, Chesterton, one of the most important Catholic writers and apologists for the faith of the 20th century, is “potentially a huge model” for the Church who “breaks the mould of conventional holiness.”

Udris noted Chesterton, a married layman, was not conventionally devout and could show Catholics “you don’t have to say your rosary every five minutes to be holy.” The first stages of a canonization cause include collecting evidence of heroic virtue.

Instead, Udris suggested, “Chesterton’s holiness could be found in his humour, his charity and his humility.” His defence of the faith in particular, Udris said, “was a model for Catholics.”

Dale Ahlquist, president of the American Chesterton Society, and a former Baptist who converted to Catholicism, said in 2013 the idea that someone like Chesterton could be a saint attracted him to the Catholic Church: “The fact that a 300-pound, cigar-smoking journalist might be a saint of the Catholic Church made me understand what the communion of saints is all about. They’re not just one particular type of person.”

Exactly so. Did Chesterton lead a perfect life? Hardly.  His excessive enjoyment of food and drink exhibited a distinct lack of temperance, the cardinal moral virtue “that moderates the attraction of pleasures and provides balance in the use of created goods,” as the Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it. As well, some of his utterances, contemporaneous with his times, clearly sound anti-Semitic to the modern ear. There should be no whitewashing of Chesterton’s life.

Saints, we are reminded time and again, lead holy, but not always conventionally holy, and never perfect lives. They were human beings before they were saints.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

‘Edward Baker:’ Thompson, Manitoba’s microwaved telephone company night watchman 1998 urban legend owes its fame to real-life American scientist and a Denver newsman

Wendy Northcutt is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley with a degree in molecular biology. But what she is best known for since 1993 is being the prime collector and propagator of the stories that make up the annual Darwin Awards, one of the most popular humour pages on the Internet,  as they recognize and catalog individuals who have supposedly contributed to human evolution by self-selecting themselves out of the gene pool via death or sterilization by their own very stupic actions. The tongue-in-cheek honour originated as early as 1985 in Usenet newsgroup discussions.

While the Darwin Awards make every attempt to keep the competition for stupidity pristine by acting as gatekeeper and blocking the entry of pranksters with urban legends, some “apocryphal” stories are included on the “Darwin Awards website because they are inspirational narratives of the astounding efforts of legendary Darwin Awards contenders,” Northcutt says.

Case in point: Meet  Mark Boslough, an Albuquerque, New Mexico physicist, member of the technical staff at Sandia National Laboratories and an adjunct professor at the University of New Mexico, who is also a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and member of the group New Mexicans for Science and Reason, who has Asteroid 73520 Boslough (2003 MB1) named after him. Boslough is also the author of this now famous account, dated Dec. 25, 1998:

“Telephone relay company night watchman Edward Baker, 31, was killed early Christmas morning by excessive microwave radiation exposure. He was apparently attempting to keep warm next to a telecommunications feedhorn.

“Baker had been suspended on a safety violation once last year, according to Northern Manitoba Signal Relay spokesperson Tanya Cooke. She noted that Baker’s earlier infraction was for defeating a safety shutoff switch and entering a restricted maintenance catwalk in order to stand in front of the microwave dish. He had told coworkers that it was the only way he could stay warm during his twelve-hour shift at the station, where winter temperatures often dip to forty below zero.

“Microwaves can heat water molecules within human tissue in the same way that they heat food in microwave ovens. For his Christmas shift, Baker reportedly brought a twelve pack of beer and a plastic lawn chair, which he positioned directly in line with the strongest microwave beam. Baker had not been told about a tenfold boost in microwave power planned that night to handle the anticipated increase in holiday long-distance calling traffic.

“Baker’s body was discovered by the daytime watchman, John Burns, who was greeted by an odor he mistook for a Christmas roast he thought Baker must have prepared as a surprise. Burns also reported to NMSR company officials that Baker’s unfinished beers had exploded.”

The clues, of course, to the fabricated nature of the story are contained in the names of the participants: the victim, “Baker”; his discoverer, “Burns”; and the spokeswoman, “Cooke.”

Boslough attached his microwaved worker offering to a then-current list of Darwin Award stories for 1998, declared his entry to be that year’s winner, sent it out to a few friends and sat back and watched the inevitable unfold, as veteran Denver Post editor and columnist Dick Kreck was taken in by the hoax, publishing it as the authentic 1998 Darwin Award winner. It seems, at some level, we all want to believe.

Certainly, Kreck, who retired from the paper in June 2007, was no rookie. Born in San Francisco in 1941, Kreck grew up in Glendale, California. After earning a bachelor’s degree in journalism from San Francisco State College, he worked as a reporter and copy editor at the San Francisco Examiner and the Los Angeles Times. He joined The Denver Post in 1968 and held various jobs, writing a city column for 18 years and covering television and radio. His books include Colorado’s Scenic Railroads; Denver in Flames; Murder at the Brown Palace; Anton Woode: The Boy Murderer ; and Smaldone: The Untold Story of an American Crime Family.

Boslough wrote to Kreck in 1999:

“Dear Mr. Kreck:

“Thank you so much for reprinting my Darwin Award hoax in the Denver Post.

“Like you, I am a skeptic and have always very suspicious of these stories. However, I am also a scientist so I decided to do a little experiment. I made up the most outrageous and twisted death-by-stupidity tale I could imagine. I made sure that all the characters in the story had names (Mr. Baker, Mr. Burns, Ms. Cooke) that would give my joke away to any wary reader. I set the story in a location that allowed the company “Northern Manitoba Signal Relay” to have the same acronym as New Mexicans for Science and Reason, our local version of Boulder-based Rocky Mountain Skeptics.

“I took a list of Darwin Awards that somebody sent me and attached my own creation, which I also declared to be this year’s winner. I turned it loose by e-mailing it to a few out-of-state friends on New Year’s Day. Seeing it this week in the Post is a bit like getting a response to a note in a bottle eight months after throwing it into the ocean. It is also a good lesson in why we should all be skeptical of what we see on the Internet … not to mention what we read in the newspaper!

“By the way, NMSR president Dave Thomas – a recent guest speaker at Rocky Mountain Skeptics – is the only person who discovered the hoax and correctly attributed it to me. He had searched for “NMSR” under Deja News and recognized my brand of humor when his search turned up my story.

“Best regards,

“Mark Boslough”

This invariably led to a ritual debunking on the Urban Legends Reference Pages, better known as Snopes.com , which looks at stories of unknown or questionable origin and is a well-known resource for covering urban legends and Internet rumors, receiving 300,000 visits a day. Snopes.com is run by Barbara and David Mikkelson,  a California couple who met in the alt.folklore.urban newsgroup. Snopes takes it name from the Snopes trilogy – The Hamlet, The Town and The Mansion – written by American novelist William Faulkner between 1940 and 1959 regarding the Snopes family in fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi.

You can read the “Christmas Roast  1998 Urban Legend” on the Darwin Awards website at: http://www.darwinawards.com/legends/legends1998-11.html and the Snopes “Nuke of Earl” account at: http://www.snopes.com/horrors/techno/microwave.asp

And you can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22