UCN projects a deficit of $1.2 million in 2017-2018, according to college review

 

 

 

As both its 2017-2018 fiscal year and the current four-year collective agreement between the Governing Council of University College of the North (UCN) and the Manitoba Government and General Employees’ Union (MGEU) come to an end in five days on March 31, UCN is projecting a deficit of $1.2 million in 2017-2018, Higher Education Strategy Associates of Toronto said in its Government of Manitoba: Manitoba College Review System-Wide Report, released March 19. The provincial government asked for the review, co-authored by Alex Usher and Yves Y. Pelletier,  in 2016 and it was undertaken between November 2016 and November 2017.

UCN senior management and the Governing Council are currently working on the 2018-19 fiscal year budget.

The report also said the current role of the Council of Elders extends beyond the legislative advisory intention of the June 10, 2004 University College of the North Act and that UCN is “perceived as having a tri-cameral governing structure,” including the Governing Council and Learning Council also, which is “unique and problematic within a modern university context.” It recommends the Governing Council govern and that it ensure the role of the Council of Elders is advisory, as per the original legislative intent, it says, of almost 14 years ago.

Higher Education Strategies Associates’ mandate was to undertake a review of the five post-secondary institutions in Manitoba that offer college-level programs: Assiniboine Community College, the Manitoba Institute of Trades and Technology, Red River College, Université de Saint-Boniface and University College of the North, or UCN as its just as often abbreviated to and known as.

In launching the review, the Progressive Conservative government of Premier Brian Pallister, elected in April 2016,  set out five objectives: to develop forward looking system-wide strategic directions and a proactive, co-ordinated, systemic approach to college education; to enable the college system to improve outcomes for students, including indigenous students, with improved completion and employment rates; to strengthen labour market alignment and responsiveness to labour market need; to improve governance and sustainability of the college system with lean, efficient and effective administration and operations; and to further promote innovation, collaboration and partnership opportunities within the college system and with industry partners.

Usher, president of Higher Education Strategy Associates,  is a former director of Educational Policy Institute Canada (EPI Canada), where he managed the “Measuring the Effectiveness of Student Aid Project” for the Millennium Scholarship Foundation, a four-year $4 million research project to investigate the long-term effects of student aid, and is the author of the project’s final report, published in 2010.

Pelletier, a former assistant deputy minister for post-secondary education in New Brunswick, is a senior consultant with London-Ontario-based Academica.

“Based on its current projections and without the increase in revenues, UCN projects a deficit in the next three academic years, of: $1.2 million in 2017-2018; $1.8 million in 2018-2019; and $2.3 million in 2019-2020,” Usher and Pelletier write. “As UCN recognizes that it is not able to run a deficit, management decisions may be needed to reduce expenditures.”

The Manitoba Colleges Review, the shorthand name for the Higher Education Strategies Associates’ report, makes 11 specific recommendations “designed to help strengthen UCN,” the school said in a March 19 news release reacting to the report, “and more than a dozen recommendations regarding Manitoba’s overall college system. ”

The eleventh and final recommendation is that “UCN should clarify the role and responsibility of the Council of Elders, established in Section 16 of the University College of the North Act. The legislation currently notes in Section 16 (2) that: ‘The Council of Elders is to promote an environment at the university college that respects and embraces Aboriginal and northern cultures and values. The Council of Elders is also to promote an understanding of the role of elders within the university college.’

“While their mandate is clear, the Council of Elders has been operating as a third decision-making body of equal standing to the Governing Council and the Learning Council. The role and responsibilities of the Elders Council should be clarified by the Governing Council, who set the duties of the Council of Elders, as per by-law 16 (3). The Governing Council should ensure that the Council of Elders advise on community needs and student supports.”

In their concluding  chapter on the section of the 206-page report devoted to UCN, Usher and Pelletier write: “Through our various qualitative and quantitative measures, we have heard many stories regarding UCN, with many being less encouraging than at other institutions. Over the past decade, since it was given the power to develop and deliver university programming, the number of college programs offered has declined, while enrolments at the college level have been modest. This occurred during a period when the North was undergoing significant economic expansion due to high commodity prices which in turn led to labour shortages in areas where college-level training is required. This was a badly missed opportunity.”

Elsewhere in the report, Usher and Pelletier write: “Administrative decisions have led to a decrease in the number of college-level programs during this 10-year period, from 44 programs offered in 2006-2007 compared to 28 programs in 2015-2016, despite a doubling of its operating budget and a 17 per cent increase in college-level FLE enrolments.”

The transformation of the “former Keewatin Community College into the University College of the North did not have to entail a drop in college-level programming and seems set by management direction. There appears to be consensus, both from industry and community leaders, that UCN suffered from a lack of public engagement, that it was unresponsive in dealing with stakeholders and in some cases stumbled when trying to meet community needs … the current economic condition of the province’s North suggests that many of the trades and colleges skills which were in shortage for much of the past decade are no longer in shortage. UCN should not spend time re-litigating what should have happened in the last decade: it needs to be focused on future needs and it is by no means self-evident that the demand for college-level skills will be higher than that for university-level skills in the next decade.”

Tom Goodman, chair of UCN’s Governing Council, is quoted in the school’s March 19 news release responding to the report as saying, “UCN is committed to working with the Government of Manitoba and other colleges to address the review’s recommendations. UCN will make changes to strengthen our responsiveness to communities and to industry and will make the changes necessary to ensure that we continue to provide the highest quality education to Northerners. We will be taking immediate steps to begin to implement these recommendations.”

Goodman, who lives in the Flin Flon area, is a former senior vice-president and chief operating officer with Hudbay Minerals. He was appointed chair of the Governing Council by the province by order-in-council last April 12, with the appointment announced by Education and Training Minister Ian Wishart.

“This report makes clear that UCN has much work to do,” said Doug Lauvstad, president and vice-chancellor of University College of the North, in the same news release. “UCN is a young institution that has grown quickly since it was first established in 2004. We need to consider the findings of the review, and take the necessary steps to ensure that we can continue to support social and economic development in the North.”

UCN announced last June 23 that Lauvstad, of The Pas, would  take over last Aug. 1 as president and vice-chancellor, succeeding Konrad Jonasson, appointed president and vice-chancellor in June 2012, who retired.

Lauvstad had been serving as the executive director of the Northern Manitoba Sector Council, an association of the region’s largest industrial sectors of mining, forestry and energy. He had worked previously in a senior administration role with UCN and its predecessor, Keewatin Community College, from 1988 to 2007, and holds a Master’s of Business Administration (MBA) graduate degree.

UCN operates two main campuses in The Pas and Thompson and 12 regional facilities operated through community partnerships in Flin Flon, Churchill, Swan River, Pimicikamak Cree Nation (Cross Lake), Tataskweyak Cree Nation (Split Lake), Chemawawin Cree Nation (Easterville), Nisichawayasihk Cree Nation (Nelson House), Mathias Colomb Cree Nation (Pukatawagan), Norway House Cree Nation, Misipawistik Cree Nation (Grand Rapids), Bunibonibee Cree Nation (Oxford House), and St. Theresa Point First Nation.

The number of full-time equivalent (FTE) university and college students at UCN grew from 894 FTEs in 2011-2012 to 1,168 students in2015-2016, the report said. The percentage of Indigenous students in base-funded university programs continued to increase, from 67 per cent in 2011-2012 to 74 per cent in 2015-16. The number of Indigenous students in base-funded college programs has fallen from 79 per cent to 68 per cent over the same period “The average age of the college student at UCN is 27, a consistent age throughout the last five years,” the report notes.

UCN has about 394 full-time employees, along with additional part-time and contract employees.

The full report can be found at: http://www.edu.gov.mb.ca/docs/manitoba_college_review.pdf

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What happens to boom-and-bust if there’s no upswing? Thompson heading into uncharted economic territory

Thompson has been through tough times before. Pick a year: 1971 or 1977 or 1981 or 1999 perhaps. Take 1981 for instance. A “Hard Times” dance for striking Inco Steelworkers on Oct. 24, 1981 was packed to capacity. The Thompson Chamber of Commerce was in full panic mode as local merchants, along with striking miners, faced the prospect of a very bleak Christmas 1981. Numerous homes and businesses were boarded up. A dissident USW group was demanding a vote on Inco’s most recent offer (they got it and it was turned down). Nickel prices continued to slide, selling for just over $3 per pound, while worldwide demand had sagged 12 per cent below 1974 levels. The company was reporting a record third quarter loss of $US 29.4 million – its worst performance in 50 years. Canada and the rest of the world were sliding into a brutal recession. And so on.

Legends have made been made out of how resilient Northerners are and how Thompsonites persevered through the bad times until sunnier days dawned again. But that’s because a downturn in mining was always followed by an upswing, sooner or later. Boom-and-bust. Mining is a cyclical boom-and-bust business involving a finite resource, in this case nickel, which is eventually depleted. Thompson’s first mining bust came in 1971, scarcely a decade after the town was born, when Inco announced the closing of the Soab mines; Pipe Number 1 Mine was closed; and work was slowed down at the open pit as all production was cut and more than 200 jobs shed. By the end of 1971, Inco had laid off 30 per cent of its workforce here. “The Greens” on Nickel Road, part of the eight-building apartment complex made up also of “The Pinks” and “The Yellows,” as old-timers still sometimes call them, built by Malcolm Construction in the 1960s, wound up back in the hands of mortgagor Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) and sat vacant for more than two years. Things improved in the mid-1970s but got tough again in both 1977 – with major job cuts at Inco – and again in 1981 with a bitter strike. But the good times always returned again to follow the bad. Just be patient and wait.

What if none of that is true this time? Does anyone seriously believe Vale’s Birchtree Mine, with about a couple of hundred jobs, is going to be open many years after the closure of the smelter and refinery next year and the 500 Vale jobs, give or take, about to disappear there one way or the other, as well as those of 250 to 375 contractors employed by the company.  The mine was previously on “care and maintenance” from 1977 to 1989.

What if there’s no bounce-back in mining?

While Vale’s $100-million-plus concentrate load-out facility and Dam B tailings expansion is welcome news looking toward the future of Vale’s Manitoba mining and milling operations here in Thompson, what if Vale’s proposed Thompson Foot Wall Deep Project, at the north end of Thompson Mine, previously known as Thompson (1D), with its 11 million tonnes of nickel mineralization, which forms a deep, north-plunging continuation of the Thompson deposit, doesn’t go ahead to help sustain the Thompson operation, given nickel is selling on the London Metal Exchange (LME) for US$4.96/lb. The refinery and smelter, which both opened March 25, 1961, are set to close next year and about 30 per cent of Vale’s production employees in Thompson work in the smelter and refinery.

Here’s a hint. Tourism, wolf or any other kind, is not going to save Thompson, if the goal is to maintain the city even at its current level of reduced economic vitality, much less return it to the glory nickel mining days of the 1960s. While hosting the 2018 Manitoba Winter Games next year will bring about 1,400 athletes and about 3,000 people overall – including coaches, officials and fans – into the city over an eight-day span, it is no long-term panacea for Thompson’s coming economic woes. Instead, it should hopefully be a nice one-time economic booster shot at a very welcome time.

Manitoba Chambers of Commerce president and CEO Chuck Davidson, who grew up in Northern Manitoba in both Flin Flon and Snow Lake, where he graduated high school, along with Opaskwayak Cree Nation Onekanew Chief Christian Sinclair, who co-chair the province’s Look North Task Force, which rolled out its new “Look North” website at http://www.looknorthmb.ca recently, both know that over the next two to three years about 1,000 jobs are going to disappear throughout Northern Manitoba, with a direct a loss of close to $100 million in annual income – and if you add-on a standard multiplier effect of three – an indirect loss of about $300 million is just around the corner.  Try triaging that with tourism.

I’m a local ratepayer and I work in both the private and public sectors in Thompson. I’ve lived here for a few months short of a decade. In the private sector, I work in the hotel industry, so I have a personal interest in seeing the tourism industry doing well in Thompson, and I do what I can for my part to facilitate that.  I also work in the post-secondary institutional public sector here as a public servant, so again, I very much want to see the people I serve every day do well. And while I think there are some good folks involved with both the Manitoba Chambers of Commerce provincially and the Thompson Chamber of Commerce locally, I’ve been around here long enough to remember ideas such as Barry Prentice’s airships to the arctic, which proposed using enormous cigar-shaped balloons, up to six storeys high, touted to offer cheap, reliable transportation for people and cargo, or Ernesto Sirolli, of Sacramento, California speaking to the local chamber, as the Italian-born founder of community economic development “enterprise facilitation.”

Sirolli developed the concept of enterprise facilitation more than three decades ago in Esperance, a small rural coastal community in Western Australia and now heads the Sirolli Institute in Sacramento. Esperance, an isolated coastal town of 8,500, had 500 people registered as unemployed in 1985, and a recent quota on fishing tuna that shrunk the local fishing industry.”Want to help someone? Shut up and listen!” Sirolli has famously said many times. “In 1975 I read Small is Beautiful by Ernest Schumacher. He was an economist who was critical of the Western approach to development in the Third World and he proposed a different approach known as ‘intermediate technology.’

“I was intrigued by his approach but what truly inspired me was something he wrote: ‘If people do not wish to be helped, leave them alone. This should be the first principle of aid,'” Sirolli said.

Tourism is often touted by politicians of various stripes as a fix-it for winding-down resource-based economies. But it just isn’t so. Tourism has some complementary economic role to play, more in Churchill than Thompson, but it will never replace high-value private sector mining jobs, such as exist at Vale’s above ground surface smelter and refinery operations, and underground at Birchtree Mine. Why is it so hard to say so out loud?

Same goes for the Thompson Economic Diversification Working Group (TEDWG), which was created in May 2011, six months after Vale announced the shutdown of the refinery and smelter in November 2010, and which has been lauded by what passes for thought leaders in Thompson as an example of how resource-based companies and the communities they operate in can work together to address the ramifications of changes in operations. “Unfortunately,” the Thompson Citizen rightly noted in a Feb. 8 editorial, “processes don’t mean much unless they achieve some tangible results and it’s difficult to see exactly what the time (and money, in Vale’s case) dedicated to the process has yielded so far.”

Vale paid out more than $2.5 million in cash to fund TEDWG, mainly using Toronto-based consultants rePlan, a Canadian firm with decades of experience helping resource-based companies and communities adapt to change. Within its first year, TEDWG had identified by the end of 2012 – more than four years ago now – five keys area of focus: a restorative justice facility, education and training, local and regional identity, housing, and economic development. Sirolli’s visit here in September 2013 came as local businesses stood at a crossroads as the implementation work coming out of TEDWG was supposed to begin.  Ask yourself where we are today with that agenda?

Prentice and Sirolli may well be visionaries, but well-meaning chambers of commerce folks? Not so much, I’m afraid.

Ask yourself about TEDWG right after you ponder for a few minutes whatever happened to the Thompson Community Development Corporation, better known as Thompson Unlimited, the city’s economic development corporation established in 2003 and disbanded last June by city council to be replaced by what? A City Hall operation to showcase Thompson’s rising taxes and water bills, along with falling housing prices and businesses closing?

Northern Manitoba needs much more than tourism. Lonely Planet, the world famous and largest travel guide on the planet, started by Tony and Maureen Wheeler more than 40 years ago, published an entry back in mid-2015 simply called “Introducing Thompson,” which can be found at: https://www.lonelyplanet.com/canada/thompson, and the result isn’t pretty. “Carved out of the boreal forest by mining interests in the 1950s, Thompson is a rather charmless town that travelers pass through en route to Churchill.”

True, two exceptions are named: “Thompson’s relatively new fame as ‘Wolf Capital of the World’ and a Boreal Discovery Centre that allows visitors to learn all about this predator, common in the wilderness around town, as well as other denizens of the boreal.” Well, the Thompson Zoo, which had opened in 1971, closed its doors going on five years ago now in the fall of 2012 and the resident animals decamped elsewhere. The future Boreal Discovery Centre on the site is, well, future. Lonely Planet is famous in its own words for telling travelers what a place is like “without fear or favor … we never compromise our opinions for commercial gain.”

Think of it this way. How many of us who now live in Thompson came to the city initially because we were drawn here by tourism of any kind? That’s what I thought. We came for a job and stayed for the job or jobs. Paint Lake, Pisew Falls and Sasagiu Rapids are nature’s bonuses, not the original draw here.

Along with Fodor’s and Frommer’s, Lonely Planet is one of the more respected and widely quoted travel guides in the world in what is a fairly crowded field.

Even Churchill, with its well established polar bear tourism, along with growing beluga whale and other eco-tourism, will be dead in the water if the Port of Churchill doesn’t get back to shipping something soon, and freight rail service is increased again. OmniTRAX, the Denver-based short line railroad, which owns the Port of Churchill, announced last July 25 it would be laying off or not re-hiring about 90 port workers, as it was cancelling the 2016 grain shipping season. At the time the cancellation was announced near the end of July, OmniTRAX did not have a single committed grain shipping contract. Normally, the Port of Churchill has a 14-week shipping season from July 15 to Oct. 31.

OmniTRAX bought most of Northern Manitoba’s rail track from The Pas to Churchill in 1997 from CN for $11 million. The track reached Churchill on March 29, 1929. The last spike, wrapped in tinfoil ripped from a packet of tobacco, was hammered in to mark completion of the project: an iron spike in silver ceremonial trappings. OmniTRAX took over the related Port of Churchill, which opened in 1929, when it acquired it from Canada Ports Corporation, for a token $10 soon after buying the rail line. The Port of Churchill has the largest fuel terminal in the Arctic and is North America’s only deep water Arctic seaport that offers a gateway between North America and Mexico, South America, Europe and the Middle East. OmniTRAX created Hudson Bay Railway in 1997, the same year it took over operation of the Port of Churchill. It operates 820 kilometres of track in Manitoba between The Pas and Churchill.

OmniTRAX had a terrible grain shipping season through Canada’s most northerly grain and oilseeds export terminal in 2015, moving only 184,600 tonnes as compared to 540,000 tonnes in 2014 and 640,000 tonnes in 2013.  In 1977 an all-time record 816,000 tonnes were shipped from the Port of Churchill. OmniTRAX is on a Canadian National (CN) interchange at The Pas and relies on CN for the grain-filled cars. OmniTRAX  considered 500,000 tonnes a normal shipping season. Wheat accounts for most of the grain loaded in Churchill, with some durum and canola also being shipped. In addition to grain and oil seeds, the shipping season has also included vessels loaded with re-supply shipments, such as petroleum products, northbound for Nunavut.

OmniTRAX moved between 2011 and 2014 to diversify the commodity mix the railway and port handle here in Manitoba in the wake of the federal government legislating the end of the Canadian Wheat Board’s grain monopoly, creating a new grain market. OmniTRAX said at the time transporting just grain would not be enough to sustain their Manitoba business over the longer term. The Canadian Wheat Board, renamed G3 Canada Ltd. by its new owners, has built a network of grain elevators, terminals and vessels that bypasses Churchill and uses the Great Lakes, St. Lawrence River and West Coast to move grain to foreign markets.

In 2013, worried about the viability of relying primarily on grain shipments through Churchill, OmniTRAX unveiled plans to ship Bakken and Western Intermediate sweet crude oil bound for markets in eastern North America and Western Europe on 80-tanker car Hudson Bay Railway trains from The Pas to Churchill and then from the Port of Churchill on Panamax-class tanker ships out Hudson Bay, the world’s largest seasonally ice-covered inland sea, stretching 1,500 kilometres at its widest extent, to markets in eastern North America and Western Europe.

However, the oil-by-rail to Churchill plan, unveiled in Thompson on Aug, 15, 2013, met a firestorm of public opposition, ranging from local citizens, members of First Nations aboriginal communities along the Bayline between Gillam and Churchill, with whistle stops in places like Bird, Sundance Amery, Charlebois, Weir River, Lawledge, Thibaudeau, Silcox, Herchmer, Kellett, O’Day, Back, McClintock, Cromarty, Belcher, Chesnaye, Lamprey, Bylot, Digges, Tidal and Fort Churchill, environmental activists, including the Wilderness Committee’s Manitoba Field Office, and even government officials – opposition fueled in part no doubt by the tragedy only 5½ weeks earlier at Lac-Mégantic, Québec where  a runaway Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway (MMA) freight train carrying crude oil from the Bakken shale gas formation in North Dakota – in 72 CTC-111A tanker cars – derailed in downtown Lac-Mégantic in Quebec’s Eastern Townships on July 6, 2013. Forty-seven people died as a result of the fiery explosion that followed the derailment.

Within a year, OmniTRAX shelved its oil-by-rail shipping plan from The Pas to Churchill in August 2014.

After more than a year of due diligence, OmniTRAX and the Mathias Colomb First Nation, Tataskweyak Cree Nation and the War Lake First Nation, known as the Missinippi Rail Consortium, signed a memorandum of understanding last December for the latter to buy OmniTRAX’s rail assets in Manitoba, along with the Port of Churchill, but the deal has not been completed to date, as the consortium looks for additional investors, and neither the provincial or federal governments are rushing for a seat at that table. Whatever other investors may be out there and how deep their pockets are remain to be seen. Just four days before the provincial election last April 19, OmniTRAX Canada filed a lawsuit on April 15, 2016 against the province, along with former NDP Premier Greg Selinger and former Thompson MLA and minister of infrastructure and transportation Steve Ashton, naming them as individual defendants, alleging they interfered in December 2015 in the sale of Hudson Bay Railway, a wholly-owned subsidiary of OmniTRAX Canada, to a consortium of 10 Northern Manitoba First Nations, led by Mathias Colomb Cree Nation, by disclosing confidential financial information about OmniTRAX Canada to consulting firm MNP LLP and Opaskwayak Cree Nation (OCN) at The Pas. That lawsuit remains outstanding.

As for the University College of the North (UCN), Northern Regional Health Authority (NRHA) and other provincial government departments and agencies in Northern Manitoba, they are are not going to offer economic salvation either.

While the public sector has some very good and well paid jobs and will continue to, the overall trend over the next several years is going to be away from growth and moving in the opposite direction toward job and budget cuts. The Pallister Tories have already told Helga Bryant’s NRHA to find about $6 million in savings in its $230-plus million annual budget. The province last month also announced it was scrapping for now at least a $9 million planned renovation of the Northern Consultation Clinic here in the basement of Thompson General Hospital. The clinic itself, which houses among other things, a number of resident and visiting medical specialties, who come through town on a rotating basis, sort of like a locum, remains open to see patients, often referred by a general or family practitioner.

“Barring a miracle, things in Thompson and in the north as a whole are not going to get better economically in the short term and it looks quite likely that they will actually get worse,” the Thompson Citizen observed editorially March 1. “What’s more, no white knight is going to ride in in the form of a company looking to employ lots of people in high-paying jobs that begin right away and last until the end of time.”

Every spring for the last 12 years, Toronto-based MoneySense magazine has published a closely watched annual survey, which ranks cities across the country from best to worst places to live in Canada – both overall and in specific categories. In the most recent survey, published last June in the summer issue of the magazine, Thompson got a nice bounce back up to 132nd spot in 2016 after its worst worst-ever finish in 177th place in 2015.

This year? Time will tell soon enough.

Same for Statistics Canada’s annual Juristat Crime Severity Index values, which will be released in July, for police services policing communities over 10,000 in population, with their Violent Crime Severity Index, Overall Crime Severity Index and Non-Violent Crime Severity Index values.

The crime severity indexes are calculated by assigning crimes different weights based on seriousness as measured by each crime’s incarceration rate and the average prison sentence courts mete out for each crime. The weighted offences are then added up and divided by population. The CSI is standardized to a base of 100 which is derived from the index values for the year 2006. While some of Thompson’s perennially high index numbers have improved marginally in recent years, the Violent Crime Severity Index did not, as we went from being fourth-highest in that category to third highest last year, behind North Battleford and Prince Albert in Northern Saskatchewan.

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This is how Parliamentary democracy works: We change the governing party from time to time

Brian Pallister has been premier of Manitoba going on 12 hours now and as far as I can tell the world hasn’t ended, although Humpty Dumpty no doubt did take a big fall off the wall here in Northern Manitoba in last month’s 41st general election.

There has been a change in government in Manitoba today for the first time since Oct. 5, 1999. That’s how Parliamentary government works. We change governments every now and then. Truth be told, most elections are far more a referendum on the governing party than they are a vote for the imaginative new ideas the opposition parties put forward in any given campaign.

The April 19 election was a referendum on former Premier Greg Selinger, more than anything, and to a somewhat lesser extent, the rest of the long-governing NDP. Given how our Parliamentary system of government works, voters (at least outside his Winnipeg constituency of St. Boniface) couldn’t vote “yea” or “nay” to Selinger directly, so they did what Canadian voters have done since before Confederation: They threw the bums out, the lot of them, as the old saying, which probably started in the United States in the 1920s, as a chant by spectators at boxing and wrestling matches, before moving in due course to baseball, and finally politics, goes.

This year the bums happened to be the NDP. Other years it has been the Progressive Conservatives or Liberals. And as grand a day as this is for the Pallister Progressive Conservatives, who won 40 of the 57 seats in the Manitoba Legislative Assembly April 19 – 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 – they will in due course find a time when the people throw them out, and they are the bums again. That’s how government and elections work in Canada.

One good thing about a landslide win, which this was for the Manitoba PCs, is we’re spared the interminable debates that inevitably follow many closer election results in Canada, where the usual suspects argue in favour of either the current first-past-the-post (FPTP) electoral system we use in Canada, or more likely in recent years, argue for some form of proportional representation (PR), which is the most common system among well-established democracies.

It’s not that I haven’t taken enough political science courses in university to understand how much fairer PR would be, in theory anyway, compared to FPTP. No, it’s more a case of me being something of a self-admitted contrarian and pot-stirrer. Something like the federal election campaign of 1872 might appeal to me.

During the federal election campaign of 1872 – the country’s second after Confederation in 1867 – voting began on July 20, just five days after the writ was issued, and finished on Oct. 12, which was 89 days after the writ had been dropped – making it the longest in Canadian history, still surpassing last year’s 78-day federal election campaign. In fairness, it is something of an apples and oranges comparison because 1872 was still part of the fading era of multiple day voting, whereas 2015 was a single day contest last Oct. 19. The longest single day contest before last year was the  74-day campaign leading up to the Sept. 14, 1926 federal election.

Back in 1872, in all provinces except Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, elections were held on different dates in different ridings. The system allowed the party in power to hold elections in a safe riding first, hoping in this way to influence the vote in constituencies less favourable to them. The system even enabled a candidate who lost in one riding to run again in another. Steve Ashton might still be our NDP MLA in such a scenario applied provincially, although I’m not sure which constituency we might have him run in, if not Thompson.

The 1872 federal election was in fact the first time Manitobans, who joined Confederation as the fifth province – appropriately enough smack in the middle of 10, time-wise, as well as geographically – on July 15, 1870, got to participate in a federal election – and the last before the secret ballot was widely introduced (except for New Brunswick, which had adopted the secret ballot in 1855) , replacing oral voting – which really put a damper on politicians “treating” voters approaching their voting place with offers of cash, alcohol, pork, flour and other foodstuffs. In the 21^st century, politics is a bit more opaque and nuanced then it was in the 19^th century when it comes to those sort of enticements. The transparency was to be found back in 1872.

Let’s face it. When it comes to politics, elections (first-past-the-post or proportional representation or some other form of voting) and democracy, all rolled together, is a bit like sausage-making; the finished product tastes pretty good at the ballpark with a cold beer, or on the grill in the back yard, but you don’t necessarily want to see how the sausage is made. Same with governments. Unless you want to go back to 1872.

My old reporter friend Johnny Driscoll at the Peterborough Examiner used to say that sausage adage applied equally well to newspapering, and he was right.

As former Conservative Prime Minister Winston Churchill said in the British House of Commons on Nov. 11, 1947: “Many forms of government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time….”

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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.

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Northern Manitoba: Orange Crush for the NDP

Steve Ashton, minister of infrastructure and transportation, and Thompson’s NDP MLA since 1981, making him the marathon man of Manitoba politics, did what every political analyst and commentator in the province believed was impossible. He lost the supposedly safest NDP seat in Manitoba to Progressive Conservative rookie Kelly Bindle by 210 votes. “Bindle received nearly 45 per cent of the vote compared to a little over 39 per cent for Steve Ashton and 16 per cent for Liberal candidate Inez Vystrcil-Spence,” wrote Thompson Citizen editor Ian Graham in his online election night story. “Ashton took 68 per cent of the votes in the 2011 election, more than double the total of the PC candidate Anita Campbell.”

The turnout in Northern Manitoba was the lowest in the province. Here in Thompson, where the weather was sunny and 21.2°C, way above the normal daytime high of 6°C, voter turnout was 38.12 per cent, with only 3,865 of 10,138 eligible voters casting a ballot. Thompson had 21 rejected ballots and 20 voters declined ballots. The turnout here was about 20 per cent less than the provincewide turnout of 58.86 per cent.

There have only been 13 provincial general elections since the Thompson constituency was created in June 1969. Progressive Conservative Labour Minister Ken MacMaster, who won the seat in the Oct. 11, 1977 election, and held it for four years until 1981, was the only Tory to ever hold the seat before Bindle. Before MacMaster, Ken Dillen, who ran against Ashton as a Liberal in the 2011 election, held the seat for the NDP from 1973 to 1977, while Joe Borowski held the seat in 1972-33 as an Independent NDP, and from 1969 to 1972 as an NDP member. Borowski defeated former Thompson mayor Tim Johnston’s father, Dr. Blain Johnston, by seven votes in the Feb. 20, 1969 byelection in the old provincial constituency of Churchill, which included the town of Thompson. He went on four months later to win the newly-created constituency of Thompson in the June 25, 1969 general election.

Ashton had won nine consecutive elections between 1981 and 2011 before going down to defeat in 2016 in his bid for 10 in a row. For that, he can thank mostly Premier Greg Selinger, first for increasing the PST in July 2013 by one per cent from seven per cent to eight per cent without a referendum, less than two years after promising voters in the 2011 election campaign that he wouldn’t raise the tax without a referendum, and secondly for the premier desperately clinging to power as his popularity plummeted, still hanging on futilely after beating former health minister Theresa Oswald by 33 votes on the second ballot of a leadership campaign vote in March 2015. Ashton, who also ran against Selinger for the leadership in 2009, was dropped from the 2015 race after finishing last on the first ballot. While his own party couldn’t quite get rid of Selinger, Manitoba voters as a whole proved themselves as being more than up for the job, dispatching the NDP from power for the first time since the last millennium, although the premier has the consolation – if it is any – of holding onto his own St. Boniface seat.

Long-victorious politicians like Steve Ashton almost always only lose their seats when the tide turns against their party in a huge way, and they’re swept out, along with most of their colleagues. Nothing personal, more or less, although there has been an undercurrent in Thompson since the 2011 election that perhaps now was the time for “Steve to go.” Go in the sense that maybe after more than three decades, it was time for Steve to stand aside. Most Thompsonites would likely have preferred to see Ashton make that call on his own to retire on top, rather than be turfed at the polls, but rare is the politician from any party who knows when it is time to go and exit gracefully.

Brian Pallister’s Progressive Conservatives, which take office May 3, won 40 of the 57 seats in the Manitoba Legislative Assembly in Tuesday’s landslide victory, 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. The Manitoba Legislative Assembly has had 57 seats since 1949. The NDP won 37 of the 57 seats in the 2011 election but only 14 this time.

Ashton was first elected to the Manitoba legislature at the age of 25 in the Nov. 17, 1981 provincial election, defeating MacMaster by 72 votes in a race that has entered the realm of local political folklore, as the April 19, 2016 provincial election no doubt will as well.  Ashton garnered 2,890 votes to MacMaster’s 2,818 in the 1981 election. Liberal Cy Hennessey finished dead last with 138 votes. At the time of his first election, Ashton was involved in an Inco strike as a member of Local 6166 of the Steelworkers. Ashton still gets a kick out of pointing out his shift boss voted him for him, saying he would make a better politician than a miner.

Chris Adams, vice-president of Probe Research, and an adjunct professor at the University of Winnipeg in the Department of Political Science, who has served as an election desk analyst for various media outlets in Manitoba, suggested to Winnipeg Free Press multimedia producer Kristin Annable the results of Tuesday’s provincial election in Northern Manitoba, including in the neighbouring Kewatinook constituency, formerly called Rupertsland, where another veteran NDP cabinet minister, Eric Robinson, also went down to defeat, to Liberal challenger Judy Klassen from St. Theresa Point First Nation, show the core of the NDP  is more damaged than previously thought. Even in The Pas and Flin Flon constituencies, the NDP barely clung to their seats. Adams, who has written extensively on Manitobans’ voting patterns, said he was surprised at Ashton’s and Robinson’s defeats. The NDP’s core electorate is based in inner-city Winnipeg and Northern Manitoba, he said.

Damaged core for the NDP is right. Think engine room and a warp core breach on the USS Enterprise (NCC-1701),  a Federation Constitution-class starship, and you’ve got the provincial NDP picture for Northern Manitoba right now.

My own election prognostication, while accurate for the province as a whole, also missed the shifting ground in Northern Manitoba. Two days before the election, I wrote: “If the pollsters are correct, the provincial NDP, which have won four consecutive majority governments dating back to 1999, are about 48 hours away from being turfed from power, having been at the helm since 1999, with Pallister and his PCs easily forming the next majority government.

“Frankly, that wouldn’t surprise me at all. That’s how democracy works. Every political party and every politician has a best-before date. The NDP may be rapidly approaching shelf life expiry. Certainly, even if they somehow manage to hang onto power Tuesday, it will be as a very marked-down electoral product in most of Manitoba. Not so here in Northern Manitoba methinks. Perhaps it is the cold climate, but I expect the NDP to have an extended shelf life here, illustrating for the first time in this millennium perhaps the political divide that can exist between north and south in Manitoba at times, although the 31 Winnipeg constituencies will likely be the wildcard that decides which party will govern in the 57-seat legislature, not, alas, the four loyal orange Northern Manitoba constituencies of The Pas, Flin Flon, Kewatinook and Thompson.”

Just how thoroughly NDP orange Thompson was surprised me when I first moved here in 2007. Thompson is a place where I discovered not only did many members of the local Thompson Chamber of Commerce support the NDP, some were even on the local NDP provincial constituency executive! Nowhere else had I lived in Canada where the NDP had that kind of support from Chamber of Commerce folks. Past mayor Tim Johnston ran against Ashton as a Liberal in 1995 but was himself a card-carrying NDP member and loyal Ashton supporter by the time I arrived in Thompson nine years ago. That Ashton had a lock on the local political establishment was indisputable. In 2008, Louise Hodder, district supervisor of the Thompson Assessment office for Manitoba’s Department of Intergovernmental Affairs at the time, served as president of the Thompson Chamber of Commerce, while a card-carrying NDP member. Hodder, who is also a certified municipal administrator, was later appointed by an order-in-council of the provincial NDP government as the $88,000 per year resident administrator of the Local Government District (LGD) of Mystery Lake on Jan. 28, 2013.  Margaret Allan, a former CBC Radio producer and manager of the Thompson Chamber of Commerce back in 2008, was also an ardent NDP supporter. The Thompson Chamber of Commerce NDP membership affiliations – even a single one – would be considered remarkable in much of the country. Here, it was just considered good business. Thompson really was a different world.

Mind you, Kelly Bindle, who was recruited by Pallister’s Tories to run surprisingly successfully against Ashton in what turned out to be a classic David-and-Goliath contest, is far from an unknown in Thompson, albeit he is a political novice. Bindle is a popular small businessman, who after the 2011 provincial election wound up taking over Carroll Meats, which had been closed for more than a year, on March 15, 2013, when Dave Carroll retired for health reason, renaming his business Ripple Rock Meat Shop. “Before I started I didn’t know anything about butchery,” Bindle told the Thompson Citizen in 2013.  “Part of the deal in buying the place was getting trained by Dave [Carroll]. I purchased all the assets and part of the deal was he would train us and help set it up.” Bindle, who is also a civil engineer and in 2006 opened his engineering consulting firm Bindle Engineering Limited, which he still works at, spent more than three years before that working for INCO in Indonesia before returning to Thompson, after growing tired of the isolation of sitting in an office behind a computer all day.  Bindle’s late father, Otto, first came to Thompson as one of the pioneers here in 1959 to run the Thompson Inn, or TI, as locals usually call it, as well as the Burntwood Hotel, across the street almost, and later owned Thompson Bargain Furniture. His mother, Grace, a retired teacher, is a well-known member of St. James the Apostle Anglican Church in Thompson, and a former Thompson Volunteer of the Year, an award established by the City of Thompson, as well as a Thompson YWCA Women of Distinction recipient.

Ashton, a native of Surrey in England, came to Canada at the age of 11 with his family. His dad was unemployed, he noted in April 2008, when they arrived in Toronto in 1967, and they moved the same year to Thompson. A graduate of R.D. Parker Collegiate in Thompson and the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, he received his master’s degree in economics from Lakehead University in Thunder Bay and is an economist. He was president of the University of Manitoba Students Union in 1978-79 and lectured in economics for the former Inter Universities North in Thompson and Cross Lake.  Ashton’s wife, Hari Dimitrakopoulou-Ashton, has taught mathematics in the business administration program in the Roblin Centre at Red River College in Winnipeg, and is from Alexandroupoli in northeastern Greece originally. She moved to Thompson with him in December 1979. Also an economist, Dimitrakopoulou-Ashton has lectured at the post-secondary level in economics, management and women’s studies. She authored Women Entrepreneurs in the North, and as well is a former trustee with the School District of Mystery Lake (SDML), as his son, Alexander, who chaired the SDML for two years during a turbulent period several years ago. He did not seek re-election when his four-year term expired in October 2014. From 2009 to 2014, he was employed at University College of the North (UCN) in Thompson as a civil technology instructor. He spent last year in Denmark working on a master’s degree in urban planning and management at Aalborg University.  Steve Ashton’s daughter, Niki, is serving her third term in the House of Commons as NDP MP for the federal riding of Churchill–Keewatinook Aski after besting Liberal challenger Rebecca Chartrand by 912 votes in last October’s federal election. She was first elected to Parliament in October 2008 and re-elected in the May 2011 election. A former instructor at University College of the North (UCN), she is married to Ryan Barker, who moved here with her, and is now a local school teacher and Juniper Elementary School-R.D. Parker Collegiate school connector from Mayerthorpe, Alberta.

Ashton also has two family members who are doctors in Northern Manitoba. His brother, Dr. Martin Ashton, is based in South Indian Lake, and his cousin, Dr. Sarah Ashton, is stationed in Oxford House.

While Steve Ashton has lived and breathed Manitoba politics for seemingly his entire adult life, he also some other interests that while still political, are not Manitoba specific. He is the chair of the Canadian Committee for the Restitution of the Parthenon Marbles, seeking the return of the sculptures from Britain to Greece. He’s a delegate to the International Association for the Reunification of the Parthenon Sculptures, speaks Greek and has written on the political culture of Greece.

The Temple of Athena Parthenos on the Acropolis of Athens is the symbol of the Golden Age of Greece and of the ideal of democracy. It is considered an integral part of the identity of the modern Greek nation and a monument of worldwide significance. Lord Elgin in 1801 removed several of its sculptures, which are housed in the British Museum in London. In 1982, Greece petitioned the British government for the return of these sculptures. The Canadian committee was formed in 2000.

The Tiger Dam controversy “that has dogged Ashton was also a likely factor in his loss,” Adams told Kristin Annable April 19.

“Ashton has faced months of allegations surrounding his attempt to secure a $5-million, sole-source contract for Tiger Dam flood-mitigation equipment.”  Annable wrote. The company involved was represented in Manitoba by Winnipeg restaurateur Peter Ginakes with whom Ashton “had a strong personal and professional relationship,” she said. Ginakes owns the Pony Corral Restaurant & Bar on St. Mary Avenue in downtown Winnipeg. He and his family have been in the restaurant  business in Winnipeg since the 1950s, owning popular eateries such as the Thunderbird Restaurant, Rib Shack Restaurant and Lounge and the  Town & Country. Ginakes had donated two years before the 2011 floods to Ashton’s unsuccessful leadership campaign in September and October 2009 to become Manitoba NDP party leader and premier, after Gary Doer stepped down to become Canada’s  ambassador to the United States in Washington. Outgoing Premier Greg Selinger took almost two-thirds of the ballots cast and sailed to victory in the two-way race with 1,317 votes to Ashton’s 685.  None of Ashton’s cabinet colleagues – some who had sat around the cabinet table with him for a decade – supported his bid to become premier in 2009.

Ashton did not serve in the cabinet of Howard Pawley for the seven years he led the NDP in Manitoba as premier from 1981 to 1988, but Ashton easily won re-election in Thompson as an MLA 1986, 1990, 1995, 1999, 2003 and 2007. The NDP were defeated in the provincial election of 1988 and Ashton served for a time as house leader for the NDP in opposition. He also served at various times as the NDP’s labour critic, health critic, and led the unsuccessful fight against the PC’s privatization of MTS in 1997. He finally made it into cabinet in October 1999 when Doer appointed him as minister of highways and government services. Following a cabinet shuffle in September 2002, Ashton became minister of conservation. In June 2003, he was also made minister of labour and immigration with responsibility for multiculturalism and administration of the Workers Compensation Act. In November 2003, he was named as the province’s first minister of water stewardship and in 2007 was shuffled to the post of minister of intergovernmental affairs and minister responsible for emergency measures.

Ashton asked  Ron Perozzo, recently retired Manitoba conflict-of-interest commissioner, for a formal opinion on Ginakes’ contribution to his 2009 leadership campaign in June 2015, as the Tiger Dam controversy continued to swirl. Ashton asked Perozzo for an opinion on whether the restaurateur’s contribution to his 2009 leadership campaign created a conflict of interest.

Perozzo said it had not.

“In my opinion, a contribution to a leadership contestant made in accordance with the terms of the Election Financing Act would not be a fee or commission paid to a person for representing the interests of another person,” Perozzo said in his report last July 15.

Carson City, Nevada-based US Flood Control Corporation markets the Tiger Dam system, which bills itself as an alternative to sandbagging prior to a flood, and consists of elongated flexible tubes which maybe quickly stacked, joined end to end and filled with water. International Flood Control Corporation of Calgary is the Canadian subsidiary, which Ginakes acted as Manitoba Tiger Dam distributor for. Tiger Dam’s pyramid-shaped structure forms a barrier to protect buildings, resort properties and any other structures prior. The tubes can be filled with a two-inch pump, a fire hydrant or even a garden hose. The tubes are capable of being stacked up to a maximum of 32 feet high and linked together seamlessly for miles. They can be virtually any length and take any shape. Each tube weighs 65 pounds dry and 6,300 pounds when filled with water.

These temporary engineered, interlocking, flexible tubes are then drained of water which flows back into the river when the flooding subsides. The result is a reusable system that protects property without the need of sandbags. When the floodwaters recede, the tubes can be drained within minutes, rolled up and reused again and again.

Manitoba Ombudsman Charlene Paquin said in a Jan. 7 report Manitoba Infrastructure and Transportation (MIT) did not have sufficient reason to try to purchase the Tiger Dam flood-fighting equipment  in 2014 without going to tender. Her report into the attempted purchase – which didn’t go through and was then sent to tender in December 2014 in the form of a Request for Proposal (RFP), which was subsequently not awarded – also found that Manitoba Infrastructure and Transportation did not do enough research and analysis into whether the particular type of flood-fighting equipment that the Interlake Reserves Tribal Council (IRTC) wanted for the Interlake Emergency Operations Centre was the best way to fight flooding.

“No MIT staff we interviewed knew of research the department had conducted or considered regarding the flood protection needs for First Nation communities in the Interlake region of the province or for the purchase of $5 million of Tiger Dams, despite the guidance in the PAM [Procurement Administration Manual] to do ‘research and analysis’ in the first stage of the procurement cycle,” Paquin said in her report.

“Our understanding is that the department did not conduct this research and analysis because IRTC had already stated to the department that it wanted a specific brand of water-filled barriers and because it was directed to prepare a submission accordingly. We are not satisfied that IRTC requesting specific equipment is sufficient justification for the department not to follow the guidance in the PAM that encourages departments to provide research and analysis regarding what goods or services should be purchased.”

Manitoba Infrastructure and Transportation submission to the Treasury Board Secretariat in Manitoba Finance proposed waiving a competitive bidding process because it felt the sole source exception – one of four acceptable circumstances under which untendered purchases for more than $50,000 can be made – applied. “Individuals we spoke with at MIT indicated that departmental staff did not agree with waiving a competitive procurement process,” wrote Paquin. “However, as noted previously, the department was directed by the minister of MIT [Steve Ashton] to draft a submission that proposed an untendered contract for Tiger Dams. The department indicates that the direction supported IRTC’s request for this equipment because IRTC had this equipment in its inventory and had experience using it.”

While Paquin determined that Manitoba Infrastructure and Transportation did not conduct sufficient research and analysis to support the type of flood-fighting equipment to be purchased, she also said “overall the investigation found that legislation and policy related to tendering were followed.” You can read the 35-page Report on Flood-Fighting Equipment for the Interlake Emergency Operations Centre: The Tiger Dams Proposal is on the ombudsman’s website at: https://www.ombudsman.mb.ca/uploads/document/files/ombudsman-report-on-flood-fighting-equipment-en.pdf

The Interlake Reserves Tribal Council  (IRTC), which currently is comprised of the Dauphing River First Nation; Kinonjeoshtegon First Nation; Lake Manitoba First Nation; Little Saskatchewan First Nation; Peguis First Nation; and Pinaymootang First Nation wound up purchasing the Tiger Dam equipment using federal funding instead.

Just four days before the provincial election, OmniTRAX Canada filed a lawsuit April 15 against the province, along with Selinger and Ashton, named as individual defendants, alleging they interfered last December in the sale of Hudson Bay Railway to a consortium of 10 Northern Manitoba First Nations, led by Mathias Colomb Cree Nation, by disclosing confidential financial information about OmniTRAX Canada to consulting firm MNP LLP and Opaskwayak Cree Nation (OCN) at The Pas.

The claim states at the time OmniTRAX Canada was exclusively negotiating the sale with a consortium of 10 northern Manitoba First Nations led by Mathias Colomb Cree Nation. “The unlawful and wrongful conduct of the defendants as aforesaid amounts to a deliberate, high-handed, wanton and outrageous interference with the plaintiffs’ rights,” OmniTRAX Canada claims in their court filing in the Manitoba Court of Queen’s Bench. The alleged breach of the March 2015 non-disclosure agreement “compromised and threatened the plaintiffs’ negotiations for the sale of the plaintiff’s business and assets thereby interfering with the plaintiffs’ economic relations and causing the plaintiffs to suffer loss and damage,” OmniTRAX Canada claims in the court filing.

OmniTRAX Canada entered into a deal last December to sell the Port of Churchill and Hudson Bay rail line to a group of First Nations led by Mathias Colomb Cree Nation.

OmniTRAX Canada has not said how the alleged disclosure of the financial information to Opaskwayak Cree Nation affected the deal.

“Based on internal reviews already undertaken, the government intends to deny the allegations,” Shane Gibson, a government spokesman, said in a statement.

The allegations by OmniTRAX Canada have yet to be tested in court before a trier of fact.

OmniTRAX Canada is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Denver-based short line railroad, which owns Hudson Bay Railway. OmniTRAX in turn is an affiliate of The Broe Group, owned by Pat Broe, who founded the company in Denver in 1972 as a real estate asset management firm.

OmniTRAX created Hudson Bay Railway in 1997, the same year it took over operation of the Port of Churchill. It operates more than 1,000 kilometres of track for freight service in Manitoba between The Pas and Churchill. OmniTRAX Canada, Inc. bought the Northern Manitoba track from CN in 1997 for $11 million. It took over the related Port of Churchill, which opened in 1929, when it acquired it from Canada Ports Corporation, for a token $10 soon after buying the rail line.

Via Rail Canada also rents the use of the track for passenger service along the Bayline to Churchill from OmniTRAX Canada. Along the Hudson Bay Railway Bayline between Gillam and Churchill is Bird, Sundance Amery, Charlebois, Weir River, Lawledge, Thibaudeau, Silcox, Herchmer, Kellett, O’Day, Back, McClintock, Cromarty, Belcher, Chesnaye, Lamprey, Bylot, Digges, Tidal and Fort Churchill.

The Bayline reached Churchill on March 29, 1929.

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Tall Tales omit Costa Rica: Why was Brian Pallister trying to sell us a bill of goods?

Down to the wire. Strange days: Manitoba – Decision 2016.

Winnipeg Free Press columnist Dan Lett nails what is likely to be the last and strangest issue (and that’s saying something) of Manitoba’s soon-ending provincial election campaign in his April 15 column (http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/special/provincial-election/pallisters-decision-to-mislead-people-about-time-spent-in-costa-rica-is-inexplicable-375787341.html) about Progressive Conservative leader Brian Pallister misleading Manitobans as to how often and when he is visiting his vacation home in Costa Rica.

As Lett writes of the Tory leader’s Costa Rican visits, “They are odd not because of the frequency or duration of his visits. Pallister is a self-made man of means who should not be judged or criticized for having the resources to own property in a tropical paradise. They’re odd because, for reasons that are not readily apparent, he won’t respond truthfully when he’s asked about the frequency and duration of his trips.”

The Costa Rica Star reported April 16 (http://news.co.cr/records-reveal-brian-pallisters-assets-in-costa-rica/46690/) that a public records search of Costa Rica’s Registro Nacional reveals that Pallister owns three properties in Costa Rica through a Costa Rican holding company, Finca Deneter Doce S.A., of which he is president. Pallister’s Finca Deneter Doce S.A., in turn “owns three pieces of real estate in the highly sought-after coastal district of Tamarindo, in the northwestern province of Guanacaste,” writes Timothy Williams of the Costa Rica Star.

“One property is registered as measuring 2.26 acres, with a taxable value of ¢62.8 million Costa Rican colones, or about $118,000 USD; a second property of 5.6 acres with a taxable value of ¢3.3 million, or about $6,000 USD; and a third property of about 5.4 acres with a taxable value of ¢5.3 million, or about $10,000 USD,” writes Williams.

“It should be noted that in Costa Rica,” says Williams, “the ‘taxable value,’ or valor fiscal, is oftentimes only a fraction – sometimes 10 cents on the dollar – of the market value of a property, in the case of real estate.

“Pallister also controls a second Costa Rican holding company in which is registered a 2007 Toyota LandCruiser Prado with a taxable value of ¢16.4 million (about $31,000 USD) and a 2007 Honda TRX680 All-Terrain Vehicle, with a current taxable value of ¢2.2 million (about $4,000 USD).”

While there is no pubic scandal here, or suggestion of other impropriety, such gratuitous lying about his private whereabouts to me raises a troubling red flag about the character of the man, if nothing else, and his fitness to hold public office as premier. While the 2013 decision by Premier Greg Selinger to increase the PST by one per cent from seven per cent to eight per cent without a referendum, less than two years after promising voters in the 2011 election campaign that he wouldn’t raise the tax, has come back to haunt him ever since and will likely cost the NDP significantly on Tuesday, at least there was the stated rationale by Selinger and the NDP that as the post-flood provincial picture after the floods of 2011 came into focus not long after the Oct. 4, 2011 election, revenues from the increase would fund infrastructure across the province, including roads, hospitals and flood-prevention structures, which it has. In other words, a political calculus was made, with voters getting the final says on how it all adds up April 19. It’s hard to see where the political calculus is in Pallister lying about Costa Rica. What end does that serve?

Perhaps this end.

Some academics in the area of neuroeconomics and business marketing to consumers have described deceptions such as Pallister’s on Costa Rica as falling into a category of lies involving self-benefiting deception where people are known to lie as a form of impression management to protect their public self or to protect their private self-worth.

If the pollsters are correct, the provincial NDP, which have won four consecutive majority governments dating back to 1999, are about 48 hours away from being turfed from power, having been at the helm since 1999, with Pallister and his PCs easily forming the next majority government.

Frankly, that wouldn’t surprise me at all. That’s how democracy works. Every political party and every politician has a best-before date. The NDP may be rapidly approaching shelf life expiry. Certainly, even if they somehow manage to hang onto power Tuesday, it will be as a very marked-down electoral product in most of Manitoba. Not so here in Northern Manitoba methinks. Perhaps it is the cold climate, but I expect the NDP to have an extended shelf life here, illustrating for the first time in this millennium perhaps the political divide that can exist between north and south in Manitoba at times, although the 31 Winnipeg constituencies will likely be the wildcard that decides which party will govern in the 57-seat legislature, not, alas, the four loyal orange Northern Manitoba constituencies of The Pas, Flin Flon, Kewatinook and Thompson.

But the question remains: Why was Brian Pallister trying to sell us a bill of goods? And if he’s lying about something so seemingly inconsequential as when and for how long he was in Costa Rica, is there a larger bill of goods at stake, if he were to win the election, and how does that auger for him holding sacred the public trust as the next premier, the president of the executive council of Manitoba?

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