From the Missiguash River to the Mackenzie Delta, breathtaking, raw beauty

This is a land bigger than the imagination – for all of us. In the Northwest Territories, the Akaitcho say, “‘Denech’anie,’ meaning ‘the path the people walk’ and that ‘we will live on the land as long as the sun shines, the river flows, and the grass grows.”

I’ve driven across the Western Arctic’s Mackenzie Delta; summer at 68 degrees latitude and the vast, open land at the top of the world, listening to Robin Mark’s “Revival In Belfast (Hope In The City)” and Susan Aglukark’s powerfully haunting song, “E186,” about what it meant to be an “Eskimo” with a number and no name, cranked up to full volume. With its raw power, it served as a defining moment in helping me to understand, if imperfectly and incompletely, the difference in what it meant to be Inuit rather than qallunaat (which, loosely translated from Inuktitut, is not terribly flattering, as it translates a bit closer to honky than white) North of 60 in the 1940s and 1950s.

Inuvik lives for me as a kaleidoscope of snapshots. One of the most vivid standing on the shore of the mighty Mackenzie River watching a flotilla of small boats head out in miserable weather for Aklavik.

The Gwich’in and Inuvialuit were gathering to bury three of their own: Doug Irish, Larry Semmler and Charlie Meyook. Northerners, aboriginal and non-aboriginal, look after their own.

Hundreds of Gwich’in, Inuvialuit and white men travelled by river and by air from Inuvik, from McPherson, from Tsiigehtchic, from the Yukon, from Alaska and from the South for the funerals at All Saints Anglican Church in Aklavik, on the site of the original Anglican Cathedral of the Arctic. The women volunteered to cook the community feast; the men hunted caribou and dug graves, all giving aid and comfort to their brothers and sister in Aklavik.

The Northwest Territories is a vast and open land, where two of the highest virtues practiced are tolerance and respect. I’d come home from work that first October in 2001 to my apartment on the shores of Great Slave Lake, and read more and more of Bern Will Brown’s Arctic Journal and  Arctic Journal II (a colleague had wisely recommended Brown’s writing as a good introduction to the Northwest Territories).

One dark December day, l got a sense of how imaginatively the lives of the peoples of the Circumpolar North are weaved together, between glances out my balcony window before 3 p.m. darkness fell and watching Smilla’s Sense of Snow, the delightful 1997 Danish thriller starring Julia Ormond, Gabriel Byrne, and Richard Harris, based on the 1992 novel Frøken Smillas fornemmelse by Danish author Peter Høeg, with both the book and the film telling the story of a transplanted Greenlander, Smilla Jasperson, who investigates the mysterious death of a small Inuit boy who lived in her housing complex in Copenhagen. Clues send her not just around Copenhagen, including the Hotel d’Angleterre, but also to Kiruna, the northernmost town in Sweden in Lapland, and Ilulissat in western Greenland.

I remember the first time I heard Stan Rogers’ “Northwest Passage” performed in the Northwest Territories in Yellowknife, with seemingly everyone in the audience in a school auditorium raising their voices in unison to join in. One of those moments that still send chills up your spine years later. I’ve long forgotten who performed it that night some 20 years ago almost now, but I haven’t forgotten it was a Stan Rogers song, and thinking the Bard of Guysborough County was truly one of Canada’s poets, a coast-to-coast-to-coast national treasure.

We are a country blessed with national treasures. Rhonda Payne, author of the play “Stars in the Sky Morning,” a tale of the hardships of women on the Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland – was a playwright the National Post described as a “national treasure” in 1999. Rhonda was a fiery actor, writer, director, producer and activist from Curling, who would go onto co-found Ground Zero Productions with Don Bouzek in Toronto, and after that Riverbank Productions in Peterborough, Ontario on Parkhill Road East (the studio office was quite literally on the banks of the Otonabee River).

From Churchill, Manitoba, I’ve had the chance to sail a beluga-populated Hudson Bay, across the invisible maritime boundary that divides Manitoba from Nunavut, and share the Seal River with polar bears. Churchill Airport was built by the United States military in 1942 and owned and operated by Transport Canada as a remote airport since 1964. Churchill Rocket Research Range, also built by the United States Army, under the aegis of Canada’s Defence Research Board in 1956, operated 23 kilometres east of town, where the Churchill Northern Studies Centre now is, until 1985.

I remember the haunting but not at all unwelcome sound of the train whistle when I would visit my mother, who lived near Amherst, Nova Scotia, on Fort Lawrence Road, east of Exit 1, as the Via Rail Ocean passenger train, en route from Montréal to Halifax, or Halifax to Montréal, crossed the saltwater Tantramar marshes between Amherst, Nova Scotia and Sackville, New Brunswick, a stone’s throw from the Missiguash River, bordering New Brunswick and Nova Scotia and connecting the Nova Scotia peninsula with those who come from away elsewhere in North America.

The saltwater Tantramar marshes, sometimes referred to singularly as the Tantramar Marsh, is a very special place indeed, and was even long before the first train crossed it in the 19th century. Memory surrounds you everywhere in Nova Scotia. This is the soil my Acadian ancestors lived and laboured on. All I have to do is close my eyes for but a moment listening to Lorena McKennitt’s The Mystic’s Dream and I clearly hear the words, “All along the English shore,” and in my mind’s eye I see the Acadian tricolor of blue, white and red, the gold star Stella Maris at top left, seeking the guidance and protection of the Virgin Mary, patron of the Acadians.

This is Aulac Ridge, a prominent rise running west to east across the Tantramar marshes on the Isthmus of Chignecto, just west of the Missiguash River. This is the demarcation line between Fort Lawrence and Fort Beauséjour, New France and British North America, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, overlooking the Cumberland Basin of the Bay of Fundy.

Nowhere, of course, in the song are the words, “All along the English shore” actually heard, not even as a mondegreen where you mishear the lyrics to a song, which is a sort of aural malapropism, where instead of saying the wrong word, you hear the wrong word as a result of near-homophony, in a way that gives it a new meaning. No, this, as it was for Marcel Proust, is remembrance of things past.

I spent a balmy Maritime spring evening reporting from Middle Musquodoboit Harbour on the Eastern Shore’s Musquodoboit Harbour River, while I’ve travelled deep in the woods near Earltown in Colchester County, on the north slope of the Cobequid Mountains, searching for Willard Kitchener MacDonald, the so-called “Hermit of Gully Lake,” who had gone AWOL in 1945 after being conscripted and abandoning a troop train during the Second World War. Canada declared an amnesty for army deserters in 1950, but MacDonald, retained a lifelong suspicion of government and police. In the same area, I later returned to Sugar Moon Farm, also near Earltown, in search of maple syrup stories, while travelling the back roads of Folly Lake-Folly Gap-Folly Mountain, and through the Cobequid Mountains and Wentworth Valley to Londonderry, formerly known as Acadia Mines, in Colchester County, where time appeared to have stood still.

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University College of the North: $1.3 million in funding slashed over two fiscal years

University College of the North (UCN) has lost $1.3 million in external funding over the last two fiscal years, says Dan Smith, vice-president academic and research.

“What many people may not realize,” Smith said May 12, “is that in the last fiscal year, that’s the 18/19 fiscal year, the University College of the North lost $400,000 in its grant, plus $500,000 in funding that was dedicated to access programing. To add that to the 19/20 budgetary decisions that saw UCN lose another $400,000 for a total loss over two years of $1.3 million dollars. That’s a lot of money.”

Smith said UCN President and Vice-Chancellor Doug Lauvstad has made the “specific commitment” not to recoup that $1.3 million either through staff layoffs or increased tuition fees for students. Instead, Smith said, UCN has managed to “contain” that “$1.3 million loss” in lost external  revenue through some “internal restructuring,” including doing what might seem like minor things, he said, but which can really add up in cost. The example he cited was promoting the use of UCN fleet vehicles rather than employees using their personal private vehicles and being reimbursed for mileage by the school to travel when necessary between campuses and post secondary access centres, known until recently as regional centres. The two campuses in The Pas and Thompson are almost 400 kilometres by road and four hours apart.

UCN also has 12 regional post-secondary access centres 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.

Smith also noted that Lynette Plett, whose appointment was announced March 12, will be UCN’s first associate vice-president of access for the newly-created access department within the academic and research division. Plett, who is based on The Pas campus, began working at UCN May 6. She comes from a Mennonite Anabaptist tradition, and grew up on a rural farm in Manitoba.

While the shape of the access department under Plett’s leadership is a work-in-progress, Smith said he has asked her to focus on building he department and begin developing a strategy around access and accessibility to post-secondary programs at UCN, including essential skills and upgrading.

Plett joined the University College of the North after more than a decade working for the provincial government. During her time in Manitoba Education and Training, Plett led adult learning and literacy, the branch responsible for adult learning centres, and most recently served as senior executive director of skills and employment partnerships.

The University College of the North marks its 15th anniversary being known as such this coming Monday.

UCN is the successor of Keewatin Community College as the main post-secondary education institution in Northern Manitoba. Keewatin Community College was established in 1966. Its Thompson campus was created in the early 1980s.

The University College of the North came into existence on June 10, 2004 when the University College of the North Act received royal assent. Keewatin Community College, as established by Section 2 of the Colleges Establishment Regulation, Manitoba Regulation 39/93, was continued as the university college.

From the outset, UCN was set up to provide “post-secondary education in a culturally sensitive and collaborative manner” that “is fundamental to the social and economic development of Northern Manitoba.”

UCN has the power to grant degrees, honourary degrees, certificates and diplomas.

The act also stipulates “post-secondary education in Northern Manitoba should be learner and community centered and characterized by a culture of openness, inclusiveness and tolerance and respectful of aboriginal and Northern values and beliefs.”

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Workplace skills development and certificate programs outpace degree and diploma options in record UCN enrolment

University College of the North (UCN) said March 26 that it reached a record enrolment of 2,699 registered students at the end of February, mainly do to the “incredible” growth of workplace skills development training and certificate programs. Growth was particularly strong at UCN’s 12 regional post-secondary access centres, and other off-site locations, but less so at the two main campuses in The Pas and Thompson, and less so also in the areas of degree and diploma post-secondary education, which often take longer to complete than workplace skills development and certificate training. The school said it plans to focus on “increases in degree and diploma program enrolment” next academic year.

Workplace skills development, which supports industry needs, saw enrolment increase by 344 per cent, growing from 168 students as of Feb. 28, 2018 to 746 students at the end of February.

Overall enrolment between Feb. 28, 2018 and Feb. 28, 2019 increased by 20.4 per cent on The Pas campus and by 39.7 per cent at the Thompson campus, UCN says, although it did not provide the most recent actual raw numbers for the two campuses. However, last September the school said there were 190 full-time students registered on its Thompson campus and 298 full-time students registered on The Pas campus. Six months ago, another 127 UCN students were registered part-time on the Thompson campus, bringing the total number of students here to 317 then. In The Pas, there were 151 additional part-time students, bringing their total to 449.

The two campuses are almost 400 kilometres by road and four hours apart.

An additional 258 students as of last September were registered at UCN’s 12 regional post-secondary access centres 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. There were 205 full-time students registered at the dozen regional centres and 53 part-time students registered as of last September.

Workplace skills development accounted for 578 additional students at the end of February, with the balance of enrolment increases occurring in certificate programs. Enrolment in all of UCN’s certificate programs grew by 39.2 per cent, led by a 95.6 per cent increase in students enrolled in the health care aid certificate program, and a 115.2 per cent increase in enrolment in the educational assistant certificate program.

“Our enrolment growth reflects UCN’s commitment to increase engagement with industry and with northern communities,” said Dan Smith, vice-president academic and research at UCN.

“Our efforts have paid off with exceptional growth in industry-related and community-delivered programming, and next year we add a focus on increases in degree and diploma program enrolment,” Smith added.

Final enrolment numbers for the 2018/19 academic year will be available after June, UCN said.

The 2018 Manitoba Colleges Review found that UCN needed to do more to meet the needs of employers in contributing to labour force development in the North and do more to meet the needs of Indigenous and Northern communities.

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.

The Toronto-based consultant said in its Government of Manitoba: Manitoba College Review System-Wide Report that UCN was projecting a $1.8 million deficit in 2018-2019. “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 wrote. “As UCN recognizes that it is not able to run a deficit, management decisions may be needed to reduce expenditures.”

Last fall, UCN reorganized its senior administration by reducing its four vice-presidents, who reported to president Doug Lauvstad, to one vice-president of academic and research and a chief administrative officer. None of the incumbents in the positions eliminated were laid off or otherwise lost their jobs, and most are still working for UCN in some capacity.

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. At the end of last May, Pelletier, at the invitation of UCN,  returned to lead an initiative to ensure the alignment of administrative structures in order for the senior executive to be able to achieve their goals and objectives.

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.

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.

UCN has more than 330 employees, including full-time, part-time and contract employees.

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University College of the North has 190 full-time students registered on Thompson campus

University College of the North has 190 full-time students registered on its Thompson campus, Dan Smith, vice-president of academic and research, reported Sept. 19. There are 298 full-time students registered on The Pas campus.

Another 127 UCN students are registered part-time on the Thompson campus, bringing the total number of students here to 317. In The Pas, there are 151 additional part-time students, bringing their total to 449. The two campuses are almost 400 kilometres by road and four hours apart.  An additional 258 students are registered at 12 UCN 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. There are 205 full-time students registered at the dozen regional centres and 53 part-time students registered.

Total University College of the North enrolment at the two main campuses and regional centres stood at 1,024 students, 693 full time and 331 part time as of Monday.

By way of a fairly recent comparison, in the 2015-16 academic year, UCN had a full-time equivalent enrolment of 604 university and 564 college students for a total of 1,168. University program enrolment has grown 47 per cent since the 2011-12 academic year, while college student enrolment grew 17 per cent over the same period and overall enrolment by 31 per cent.

Last March 19, Higher Education Strategy Associates of Toronto said in its Government of Manitoba: Manitoba College Review System-Wide Report that UCN was projecting a $1.8 million deficit in 2018-2019. 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. At the end of last May, Pelletier, at the invitation of UCN,  returned to lead an initiative to ensure the alignment of administrative structures in order for the senior executive to be able to achieve their goals and objectives.

Pelletier also benchmarked UCN’s allocation of human resources by functional areas with those at two or three similar institutions offering a broad suite of post-secondary programs and serving vast geographical areas through networks of campuses and regional delivery sites.

Enrolment on the two main campuses in The Pas and Thompson, as of Sept. 17, had increased by almost 5.7 per cent – from 725 students at this time last year to 766, as of Monday. Comparable information from the 12 regional centres  from this time last year is not available, Smith said.

“Institutional Research and the Office of the Registrar will both tell us that these numbers are preliminary and are subject to change – and they are correct,” Smith said. “The official numbers will become available in about six weeks after the voluntary withdrawal date. At that time, we’ll have a more solid sense of how enrolment is evolving this year. ”

UCN has more than 300 full-time employees, along with additional part-time and contract employees.

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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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Steve Ashton: End of a Northern Manitoba NDP political dynasty?

 

 

 

 

 

 

A clever headline might say something like “Ashton fades to black” or “NDP  Orange: The New Black.” Clever perhaps. But not accurate. Because there is nothing about Steve Ashton that suggests fading away or going gently into the good night. That’s not who he is. Not quite House of Cards material perhaps, he is still one of the toughest bare-knuckle street-fighting politicians of any party in Canada, not just the NDP. Internal party opponents who underestimate his resolve do so at their own political peril.

In a two-way leadership race against 35-year-old rookie Fort Rouge constituency NDP MLA Wab Kinew, Ashton, 61, has decided on the high-risk gambit of revisiting two long ago stayed criminal domestic assault charges against Kinew from April and May 2003 when the leadership aspirant was 21 years old. The alleged victim has not been identified and both assault charges were stayed at the request of the Crown in 2004.  A charge that is stayed can be reactivated within one year of a judge granting a stay of proceedings, but seldom are, and such was the case with Kinew’s.

Wab Kinew, a former CBC Radio and TV reporter and host, author, rapper, and later acting associate vice-president of Indigenous Affairs at the University of Winnipeg, was born on the Ojibways of Onigaming First Nation near Nestor Falls, Ont. in Northwestern Ontario’s frontier Sunset Country in the Central Time zone, but grew up mainly in suburban Winnipeg. Aside from the two stayed assault charges from the Spring of 2003, Kinew was no saint, a fact he readily admits.  Even before the later stayed assault charges, Kinew was convicted in February 2003 of failing to provide a breathalyzer or blood alcohol sample in a driving case, and was fined $922. After the stayed domestic assault charges, he was convicted in June 2004 of assaulting a cab driver and fined $300. As recently as October 2014, an unpaid speeding ticket eventually resulted in $606.50 of his wages being garnisheed by the Crown from his wages at the University of Winnipeg. Kinew has also apologized for several misogynist and homophobic tweets he made from his Twitter account, particularly back in June and July 2009, when he was actively rapping and by then 27 years old. And on Oct. 17, 2012, Kinew tweeted, “Riding in my limo back to my king size sweet [sic] feeling really bad for those kids in Attawapiskat #haha #terrible #inative.” Kinew was by now 30.

All told, CTV News Winnipeg reported Aug. 22, Kinew has been charged with more than a dozen offences, most dating back to 2003 and 2004.

So why is it such a high-risk gambit, one which clearly smacks of political desperation, some, if not many, would say, for Steve Ashton to go on the political offensive over those two long ago stayed criminal domestic assault charges against Kinew from April and May 2003 when he was 21?

First, Kinew, if not in detail always, has nevertheless many times in many places in recent years, including on social media and in his 2015 book, The Reason You Walk,  apologized for his past behaviour.

Secondly, in April 2016, the voters of  Fort Rouge elected Kinew as their MLA, as he defeated then Manitoba Liberal leader Rana Bokhari, Progressive Conservative candidate Audrey Gordon and Green Party candidate Grant Sharp, to hold onto the NDP seat held by retiring incumbent Jennifer Howard, a former NDP cabinet minister.

Thirdly, the Manitoba NDP vetted Kinew, as they did Ashton, and sanctioned both their leadership bids.

The narrative that Kinew has apologized for his past and is a changed, albeit gradually, man is a powerful one for anyone who believes youthful indiscretions can and often are followed by remorse, forgiveness and redemption. Wab Kinew has clearly made something of his life and is a net contributor to society. There is no reason to think he wouldn’t make a good leader for the Manitoba NDP.

At the same time, it also true that much less is known publicly about those two long ago stayed criminal domestic assault charges against Kinew from April and May 2003 than the other matters, both criminal and non-criminal, that he has apologized for. Zita Somakoko, a Manitoba NDP member and domestic violence survivor advocate, has suggested to several media outlets this week that Kinew needs to be more forthright in explaining the stayed assault charges from 14 years ago. CBC News Manitoba reported today that Somakoko had “shared her dismay at Kinew’s responses with Steve Ashton….”

Several Manitoba media outlets received two anonymous emails last week containing previously-unreported details about Kinew’s legal history, including the two stayed assault charges against a woman from 2003.

Mohinder Saran, the MLA for The Maples, who was booted from the NDP caucus earlier this year as the result of sexual harassment allegations, which he denies, recently ordered copies of Kinew’s complete court documents.

Saran told CBC News Manitoba that he is unofficially working on behalf of Ashton’s campaign to attract delegates, but declined to comment about the court documents. Kinew currently has 588 committed delegates for the Sept. 16 leadership vote to Ashton’s 339 delegates. Saran denied sending documents to Ashton’s campaign or the media.

CBC News Manitoba compared the metadata — essentially, the file’s digital “fingerprint” — from the PDF document containing Kinew’s court records sent to media anonymously to that of the PDF containing Steve Ashton’s personal disclosure statement from last week, showing no involvement with the criminal justice system, which was sent via his campaign’s email account.

The two files were created using the same make and model of scanning device, CBC News Manitoba reports.

This does not prove that the two files were necessarily created on the same printer, however, CBC News Manitoba says it analyzed dozens of PDFs sent to media from various other NDP groups and sources, none of which were made using the same device.

Political analyst Christopher 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, told CBC News Manitoba that while this is not proof of direct involvement by Ashton or his campaign, it does put his campaign under the microscope.

“If I were Perry Mason, this is strong circumstantial evidence,” he said, referring to the famous fictional lawyer.

“I am not a lawyer. I am a political scientist, but it does start showing you that maybe something is coming out of the [Ashton] campaign,” said Adams, who added “that sometimes supporters go ‘rogue’ and use tactics not authorized by a political campaign.

Ashton said Saran was not involved in his campaign and denied any knowledge of how the leaked court documents were sent to the media.

“I don’t know. I was a sent a copy [of the anonymous email received by media] last week, so I don’t know what the story is there,” Ashton told CBC News Manitoba.

“When the campaign received the [anonymous email] our decision was not to go public with it. Not to leak it, not to go public,” he said.

CBC News Manitoba says they requested a copy of the email that Ashton says his campaign received. “He has not responded to this request.”

“I think Ashton is right to ask about what were those things?” Adams told CBC News Manitoba. “Who was the person involved? What was the actual incident that caused this, that eventually led to the stay of charges? I think Ashton is kind of doing what we would expect him to do,” he said.

Ashton, who had been the marathon man of Manitoba politics, last year 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.

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. 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.

He has a much less impressive track record to date, however, in his two previous bids for the Manitoba NDP leadership in 2009 and 2015. In a two-way race in 2009, NDP finance minister 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, while in 2015 Ashton finished third on the first ballot with a similar share of the vote totals.

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

 

Real News: Manitoba Tories to stop subsidizing air travel for medical escorts, but some on Facebook wonder if that’s ‘fake news’

Way back aeons ago, say around August 2014, when I last wrote in print, the phrase “fake news” hadn’t yet entered the popular lexicon. It’s not that fake news, especially in the form of state-sponsored propaganda, didn’t exist. It did and it had a long history. Octavian famously used a campaign of disinformation to aid his victory over Marc Antony in the final war of the Roman Republic,” noted James Carson, head of search engine optimization and social media at the Telegraph Media Group in London, in a March 16 piece headlined “What is fake news? Its origins and how it grew in 2016,” which appears in the Telegraph online at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/0/fake-news-origins-grew-2016/

Carson also notes that in the aftermath of Octavian’s final war of the Roman Republic, from 31 BC to 29 BC, also known as Antony’s civil war, Octavian “changed his name to Augustus, and dispatched a flattering and youthful image of himself throughout the Empire, maintaining its use in his old age.”

The British, in particular among the Allies, made good use of propaganda against the Germans during the First World War from 1914 to 1918, demonizing the “Hun” with unsubstantiated false reports of atrocities. Twenty years later in the lead-up to the Second World War, the Nazi party in Germany “used the growing mass media to build a power base and then consolidate power in Germany during the 1930s, using racial stereotyping to encourage discrimination against Jews.” That’s why the name Joseph Goebbels, who served as Reich minister of propaganda, still sends chills down our spine.

It wasn’t until Donald Trump’s first press conference as president-elect on Jan. 11, when he pointed at CNN reporter Jim Acosta, while refusing to listen to his question, saying, “You are fake news!” that the phrase entered the popular lexicon.  Two days after Trump became president, Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, added to the lexicon, telling Chuck Todd, host of NBC’s Meet the Press, that White House press secretary Sean Spicer had used ‘alternative facts’ in his first statement to the press corps Jan. 21,  when making false claims about the inaugural crowd size. Spicer had baldly told the pants-on-fire lie that Trump drew the “largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period.”

Lo-and-behold, on Friday, I posted on Facebook links to two media stories, one from May 2, written by Jonathon Naylor, a hometown Flin Flon boy, whom I have known for 10 years, and who has edited the local newspaper, The Reminder even longer, headlined “Patient escort subsidy for airfare to be eliminated” (http://www.thereminder.ca/news/local-news/patient-escort-subsidy-for-airfare-to-be-eliminated-1.17447605), and a similar May 4 story from CBC News Manitoba, headlined “‘Who’s going to help them now?’: Manitoba cutting airfare subsidy for escorts of northern patients” http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/northern-patient-escort-subsidy-1.4100111

Naylor wrote: “The provincial government plans to cancel a subsidy that offers affordable airfare to the escorts of northern Manitoba patients who fly to Winnipeg for medical appointments.

“The Northern Patient Transportation Program (NPTP) currently allows patients and their escorts to purchase commercial flight tickets for $75 each, far below the standard price.

“While eligible patients will continue to have this option, the province plans to remove the subsidy for escorts at a date yet to be announced.

“Manitoba Health spokeswoman Amy McGuinness said the move is important for financial reasons.

“‘This ensures that costs are being managed for medically necessary trips,’ she said, adding the change is estimated to save about $1 million a year.

“Escorts, she said, ‘will need to travel by land, or to purchase a regular ticket with the air carrier.’ A one-way plane ticket from Flin Flon to Winnipeg costs up to $859 without the subsidy.

“McGuinness could not confirm when the change will be implemented, saying the health department will work with the Northern Health Region to confirm timelines.”

Amy McGuinness is press secretary to cabinet for the Pallister Progressive Conservative government.

While I may not much like some of the news delivered by her and her Tory bosses, including this news of the cancellation of a subsidy under the Northern Patient Transportation Program (NPTP) that offers affordable airfare to the medical escorts of Northern Manitoba patients flying to Winnipeg and back  to Winnipeg for medical appointments, I would never have dreamed McGuinness was offering up “fake news” or “alternative facts” here.

Just because I find something in the news I definitely don’t like and find most unpalatable, such as the cancellation of the medical escort subsidy, doesn’t make it “fake news,” whether I post it on Facebook or elsewhere on social media, or not.

Back in the day, when I edited the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News here for seven or so years, I was never accused, even by another name, of faking the news or linking to fake news stories online.

What I was accused of sometimes was running too many real but inconvenient “bad news” stories, especially actual crime and crime-related statistical stories on how Thompson finds itself for crime, along with some OmniTRAX rail stories on freight train delays, derailments and plans (now scrapped) to ship oil-by-rail across Northern Manitoba from The Pas in the southwest to Churchill and Hudson Bay in the northeast.

The timing was bad, to say the least. 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, opposition fueled in part no doubt by the tragedy only 5½ weeks earlier at Lac-Mégantic in Quebec’s Eastern Townships 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 on July 6, 2013. Forty-seven people died as a result of the fiery explosion that followed the derailment.

While many of the comments were spot-on in reacting to the news of the province cancelling the subsidy under the Northern Patient Transportation Program (NPTP), several others wondered on my timeline if this had been confirmed by the government or was it just media speculation?

Either some of my well-meaning Facebook friends perhaps needs to read links a little more thoroughly before commenting, or Amy McGuinness, press secretary to cabinet for the Pallister government, needs to raise her profile a little more when quoted in news stories. Perhaps something like AMY MCGUINNESS, PRESS SECRETARY TO CABINET FOR THE PALLISTER GOVERNMENT, said today. I suspect, although I could be wrong, part of it is that some of my Facebook friends, especially ones with Tory leanings (yes, I do have friends like that) were a bit blindsided by the news of the province cancelling the subsidy under the Northern Patient Transportation Program (NPTP) that offers affordable airfare to the medical escorts of Northern Manitoba patients flying to Winnipeg and back for medical appointments, and couldn’t quite believe what they were reading at first. They didn’t want to believe it was true.

The topper, however, was the one Facebook friend from here in Thompson, who managed to post the comment “Fake news” with zero elaboration twice on a single thread (well done, Ron). But he also “liked” the story (I think), although it’s always hard to know exactly what that means on Facebook. Now Ron, speaking earlier of Huns, I consider to be somewhere just to the right of Attila the Hun. But here’s the thing about small Northern towns. You know people personally. And I like Ron in person. While we don’t run into each other in real life so much, we do on occasion and we have great chats about the State of Thompson, as it were.

But I must confess after readings Ron’s somewhat cryptic “fake news” allegation, I went for a little troll on his Facebook page, to see what he was reading, listening to and watching these days. A few days ago, on April 28, Ron shared on his Facebook timeline the Metaspoon story, “Ship Went Missing In The Bermuda Triangle. But Then It Shows Back Up 90 Years Later” http://www.metaspoon.com/ship-bermuda-triangle?so=pgshM&cat=shock&fb=17036M1mwr3565a0&utm_source=17036M1mwr3565a0

It’s a great story. And one that appeals to me having written soundingsjohnbarker posts such as “Invisible ships: Romulan Star Empire Birds-of-Prey and the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard’s USS Eldridge” on Nov. 25, 2015 (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2015/11/25/invisible-ships-romulan-star-empire-birds-of-prey-and-the-philadelphia-naval-shipyards-uss-eldridge/) and last Oct. 23, “Can meteorology use science to unmask the long-cloaked air and sea secrets of the Bermuda Triangle?” https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2016/10/23/can-meteorology-use-science-to-unmask-the-long-cloaked-air-and-sea-secrets-of-the-bermuda-triangle/

Ron’s Metaspoon story goes like this. The SS Cotopaxi, a tramp steamer that disappeared in December 1925, was discovered by the Cuban Coast Guard 90 years after it vanished in the Bermuda Triangle. The story originated in the World News Daily Report, which on May 18, 2015 published an article reporting that the Cuban Coast Guard had intercepted the SS Cotopaxi that disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle while en route to Havana in 1925. The story originated with the Weekly News Daily Report and has been widely picked up by “news” aggregators such as Metaspoon.

“The Cuban authorities spotted the ship for the first time on May 16, near a restricted military zone, west of Havana. They made many unsuccessful attempts to communicate with the crew, and finally mobilized three patrol boats to intercept it,” the Weekly News Daily Report says.

Problem is, Ron, while there was indeed a real SS Cotopaxi, which disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle in December 1925, it unfortunately did not reappear to the Cubans on May 16, 2015. Or at any other time. World News Daily Report is a news and political satire web publication, which may or may not use real names, often in semi-real or mostly fictitious ways. It routinely publishes clickbait hoax articles. All “news” articles contained within worldnewsdailyreport.com are fictitious. Any resemblance to the truth is purely coincidental, except for all references to politicians and/or celebrities, in which case they are based on real people, but still based almost entirely in fiction.

Fake news, Ron. Didn’t happen.

Another Facebook friend posted on my timeline: “Media is a tricky business to navigate . I’ve learned that the hard way when it comes to being misquoted or have had things taken out of context (not by you personally ). I’m grateful for journalists that look into all sides and facts before stating an opinion.”

Perhaps so. In the old days we used to talk about things like a story having a “ring of truth” or whether it passed the “smell test.”

Today, I might point to something like, Deception Detection for News: Three Types of Fakes by Victoria L. Rubin, Yimin Chen and Niall J. Conroy, which appeared last year in the Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology. The abstract can be found here: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pra2.2015.145052010083/pdf

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Soundingsjohnbarker: ‘You can write that?’ You bet

https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/) debuted as a WordPress blog two years ago today with a small post headlined “Labour history: Mine-Mill v. Steel” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/03/labour-history-mine-mill-v-steel/) on September 3, 2014 about Mick Lowe’s The Raids, a 295-page fictionalized work centred on the epic battle in Sudbury in the late 1950s and early 1960s in relation to the Cold War, international politics, McCarthyism, Communism, and the inter-union rivalry between the United Steel Workers of America (USWA) and the International Union of Mine, Mill & Smelter Workers Local 598, which had just been published that May by Robin Philpot of Baraka Books in Montreal. Here in Thompson there is a still partially untold story of that same inter-union rivalry between the Union of Mine, Mill & Smelter Workers and United Steelworkers of America between 1960 and 1962. Mine-Mill was the first bargaining agent here in Thompson when Inco workers unionized and had negotiated a contract with Inco that ran through 1964. But the USW was certified by the Manitoba Labour Board as the bargaining agent for Inco employees in Thompson on May 31, 1962. Because the USW itself went on to merge five years later with the United States section of the International Union of Mine, Mill & Smelter Workers in Tucson, Arizona in January 1967, a lot of that nastiness has been papered over, at least publicly.

There was also a post that day headlined “Black Death: Not so bad?” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/03/black-death-not-so-bad/) which went onto explain a new study in PLOS ONE, an international peer-reviewed journal, authored by University of South Carolina anthropologist Sharon DeWitte, which suggested that people who survived the medieval plague, commonly known then as the Black Death, lived significantly longer and were healthier than people who lived before the epidemic struck in 1347. The Black Death killed tens of millions of people, an estimated 30 to 50 per cent of the European population, over just four years between 1347 and 1351, which, it turns out, may not have been such a bad thing after all.

Finally, on Sept. 3, 2014, soundingsjohnbarker had a third posting headlined “A bigger picture,” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/03/a-bigger-picture/) which focused on Samaritan’s Purse’s “Operation Christmas Child,” which was started in 1990. By 1993, it had grown to the point it was adopted by Samaritan’s Purse, a Christian organization founded by Dr. Bob Pierce in 1970 and now run by Franklin Graham, son of 97-year-old Asheville, North Carolina evangelist Billy Graham.  While “Operation Christmas Child” has its share of supporters and critics with meritorious arguments on both sides for and against its “shoebox” gifts collected and distributed in more than 130 countries worldwide each Christmas [each shoebox is filled with hygiene items, school supplies, toys, and candy. Operation Christmas Child then works with local churches to put on age-appropriate presentations of the gospel at the events where the shoeboxes are distributed], Samaritan’s Purse is about much more than Operation Christmas Child, whatever your views might be on that, I pointed out. In the midst of the deadliest Ebola viral hemorrhagic fever outbreak recorded in West Africa since the disease was discovered in 1976, Samaritan Purse’s Ebola care centre on the outskirts of the Liberian capital of Monrovia was right on the front lines. Dr. Kent Brantly, the medical director of the centre, contracted Ebola and was medically evacuated to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, the first patient ever medically evacuated to the United States for Ebola treatment, where he was given ZMapp, an experimental drug treatment produced by U.S.-based Mapp Biopharmaceutical, while Nancy Writebol, who was with Serving in Mission, (SIM), which runs the hospital where Samaritan’s Purse has the Ebola care centre, was also medically evacuated to Emory University Hospital and treated with ZMapp.  Both Brantly and Writebol survived their brush with death Ebola experiences and returned to Liberia.

So that was Day 1 for soundingsjohnbarker on Sept. 3, 2014. And in some ways it set the tone for the 226 posts that have followed since over the last two years. Some of them tell Thompson stories but many don’t. Some (OK, many) are offbeat and the range of topics that has struck my fancy to write about has been eclectic, if not downright eccentric at times. I explained some of my thinking behind how I choose what to write about in a blog post March 7 headlined “Tipping points and blogging by the numbers” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2016/03/07/tipping-points-and-blogging-by-the-numbers/) where I noted, “Write local if you want some big numbers on a given day. While I do from time to time, if some local issue or story interests me in an unusual way, I stay away from that kind of writing for the most part. For one thing, those kind of stories, I find, have little staying power, with three or four rare local exceptions (an unsolved murder story; a story about Dr. Alan Rich’s retirement and local lawyer Alain Huberdeau’s appointment to the provincial court bench; and several Vale stories come to mind). But most of them are one or two day wonders. It’s the more eccentric pieces on other places and even times that have a deeper and wider audience in the long run. Fortunately, I prefer to write on more eclectic things these days without any particular regard for geography or subject matter if the topic strikes my interest. Thompson city council may well make decisions that affect me in myriad ways, not the least of which is in the pocketbook as a local taxpayer, but even that can’t remove the glaze from my eyes long enough to write much about local municipal politics, although our water bills are tempting me to make an exception. But reading newspaper accounts of such goings on is usually painful enough. Mind you, I realize what strikes my fancy to write about when I don’t write local, is not for everyone, and I have no doubt that I’ve created some eye glazing of my own especially when I write on eschatology or some other arcane to some of my local readers religious topic.”

That’s not to say I’ve lost my interest in local affairs. I live here after all. But I don’t have the inclination, or time even if I had, to write about all of them. So, pretty much like everyone else in Thompson, I rely on the local media, including the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News, CBC Radio’s North Country, Arctic Radio’s thompsononline.ca and Shaw TV to keep me informed with occasional stories about Vale’s proposed Thompson Foot Wall Deep Project, at the north end of Thompson Mine, previously known as Thompson (1D), and what the chances of the 11 million tonnes of nickel mineralization, which form a deep, north plunging continuation of the Thompson deposit, have of being developed into a new mine that will sustain the Thompson operation for up to 15 years when nickel is selling on the London Metal Exchange (LME) for US$4.5269/lb, with the refinery and smelter, which opened March 25, 1961, set to close sometime in 2018, resulting in lost jobs – don’t kid yourself and think otherwise – as more than 30 per cent of Vale’s production employees in Thompson work in the smelter and refinery.

Take away nickel mining, which isn’t destined fortunately to happen for at least several decades yet in even the most pessimistic scenario, and there’s not much reason for Thompson, at least as we have all come to know it, to exist, all mindless happy talk from politicians, newspaper publishers and other spin doctors aside. Mind you, I have admittedly been a tad critical of newspaper publishers in this space before, writing on Sept. 14, 2014: “In the old days, publishers and newspaper owners would from time to time ‘kill’ a writer’s column before publication. Despite their ballyhoo and blather about freedom of the press, publishers and newspaper proprietors are almost universally in my long experience with them a timid lot, if not outright moral cowards at times, always afraid of offending someone.”(https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/11/retroactively-spiked-the-post-publication-killing-of-msgr-charles-popes-blog-post-on-new-york-citys-st-patricks-day-parade/).

But if you think being a regional hub for Northern Manitoba, or tourism, or even both, is going to give Thompson a new raison d’etre for continued existence at its current size and state in a somehow magically more diversified local economy sans nickel mining some day in the near-to-mid future, I’m afraid you’ve been drinking too much of the Thompson Economic Diversification Working Group (TEDWG) Kool-Aid.

I’m a bit of a contrarian when it comes to the local good news peddlers of all stripes. So it’s perhaps best for everyone’s peace of mind, mine included, if I stick these days to writing mainly about the faraway and eclectic. Bad news prophets have a short best-before date at home.

And besides there is something just plain fun about writing about the weird and whacky. It’s a good antidote to taking either yourself, or life for that matter, too seriously. Hence I’m just as incorrigible when it comes to posting stories or links from others about the offbeat and odd on Facebook, as I am about my own blog post writing, I must confess. “The internet has been aflame this summer with predictions the Antichrist was coming Aug. 30,” I mentioned in a Facebook posting Aug, 31, noting I had forgotten all about it until the next day. “Me bad,” I wrote. When my old friend from Iqaluit Michèle LeTourneau found herself among those who couldn’t resist joining the thread to comment, she observed “OK. I think I just officially outed myself as a weird nut that posts really weird things on Facebook. Maybe I am. Maybe I’m not.” I reassured her by replying, “I think I could give you a bit of competition for the ‘weird nut Facebook poster’ title, Michèle!”

Locally, the Thompson Citizen was moved to editorialize Aug. 31 that “Northern Manitoba’s summer of woe turned [a] deeper shade of blue with the announcement Aug. 22 that Tolko was shutting down its operations in The Pas.”

Tolko Industries said they were going to pull the plug Dec. 2 on their heavy-duty kraft paper and lumber mill in The Pas after 19 years, leaving all 332 employees unemployed. The mill in The Pas has been a money-loser for years. It was conceived by the Progressive Conservative provincial government of premier Duff Roblin in 1966.

Less than a month before Tolko pulled the plug on its mill in The Pas, OmniTRAX, the Denver-based short line railroad, which owns the Port of Churchill, announced on July 25 it would be laying off or not re-hiring about 90 port workers, as it was cancelling the 2016 grain shipping season. OmniTRAX bought most of Northern Manitoba’s rail track from The Pas to Churchill in 1997 from CN for $11 million. 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.

At the time the cancellation was announced, 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. When the Canadian Wheat Board lost its grain monopoly, creating a new grain market several years ago, and was renamed G3 Canada Ltd. by its new owners, the newly-minted G3 Canada Ltd. began building 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. Surprise.

While OmniTRAX accepted a letter of intent last December from Mathias Colomb First Nation, Tataskweyak Cree Nation and the War Lake First Nation to buy its rail assets in Manitoba, along with the Port of Churchill, the deal has not been completed to date, and its future looks murky to non-existent. Rail freight shipments measured by frequency along the Bayline have been cut in half by OmniTRAX this summer.

“Government announces more grant money to develop tourism during visit to Churchill” headlined the Nickel Belt News in an unbylined front page story Sept. 2.  Don’t get me wrong. I love Beluga whales and polar bears. I’ve seen both visiting Churchill (known as Kuugjuaq in Inuit.) And guess what? While Beluga whales and polar bears will support some local tourism and related businesses, it’s still not enough to make for a local sustainable economy of any scale in the community of less than 800 permanent residents now along our Hudson Bay coast.

That’s about as likely to happen as calling itself the “Wolf Capital of the World” is going make a game-changing difference to Thompson’s economic future. A difference, sure. Great. But don’t bet Northern Manitoba’s future on tourism. We’re still either a resource-based economy or no economy to speak of.  If it’s any comfort that remains largely true for most of our provinces and territories and Canada as a whole. Sure there’s the capital cities and a few other kinda largish provincial cities – Victoria, Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Regina, Winnipeg, Toronto, Ottawa, Montréal, Québec City, Moncton, Saint John, Halifax and St. John’s (this is a very generous reading BTW) – and even a few more genuine high-tech areas such as Gatineau, Québec and Kanata, Ontario on either side of Ottawa, along with Kitchener, Ontario and elsewhere in the Regional Municipality of Waterloo, all of which are exceptions to the hewers of wood and drawers of water reality, but the exceptions are few and far between.

Oops … did I say that out loud? Me bad.

Kool-Aid anyone?

I may need to quench my thirst unless I intend to pen my next post on UFOs, eschatology or perhaps some virulent disease, preferably a safe distance from Thompson.

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

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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The train whistle carries on the east wind

I wrote the time down: 12:47 p.m. Yesterday. I wanted to make a note of it because I so seldom hear train whistles up here in Thompson, Manitoba. The wind has to be blowing in just the right direction at the right time.

Thompson is pretty much at the dead centre of Manitoba, Canada and North America, give or take a few kilometres here and there. Halfway north, halfway south, halfway east and halfway west, I have to remind myself at times. In the winter, we feel (quite literally with our legendary -40°C/-40°F temperatures) more connected to our northern geography. But conversely in summer, when July temperatures average 23°C and temperatures of 30°C and even higher are registered, we’re more aware of our southern connections to the Prairies of Southern Manitoba.

The bonus of a 30°C day in Thompson in July is that the humidity, with the exception of a few days usually each summer, remains relatively low and bearable compared to what I lived with for years in Southern Ontario. The only relief from that stifling summer heat for me for many years was annual trips to the Maritimes, when you knew that once you got just past Quebec City on the St. Lawrence River, somewhere between Montmagny, Kamouraska and Notre Dame du Portage, the air was going to clear of humidity and the temperature drop, making for pleasant driving for the rest of the evening to Edmundston, New Brunswick, gateway to the Atlantic time zone and jumping of point for all places in the Maritimes. Here in Thompson, the air cools off routinely at night to at least as low as 12°C or 13°C, even after a 30°C day, and the number of nights the temperature has been above say 20°C still at midnight, I could probably count on the fingers of one hand in my more than eight years living here now. Certainly, I’ve never needed a fan or air conditioning, although life-long Northerners tend to make a run on both here at Wal-Mart or Canadian Tire if they notice the thermometer is predicted to head up to 27°C or 28°C for more than a day or two.

Even in summer, we’re just close enough to Hudson Bay that a deep low pressure system with a strong counter-clockwise rotation, can send our temperature abruptly back down to 8°C for a day or so, reminding us the polar bears are never really that far away

As for train whistles, I’ve always found them to have a haunting, slightly distant sound that engages the soul instantly. All through my childhood, growing up in Oshawa, just east of Toronto, an east wind invariably meant two things: You could hear the train whistle from the CN tracks well south at Bloor Street, and rain, long steady rain, was an hour or two, not much more, away. You could not hear the train whistle at any other time from the house I lived in from the age of six to 19, and while it rained at other times, especially with summer thunderstorms, with winds from other directions, that was more unpredictable. An east wind started the clock running for the countdown to rain. For me, east winds and train whistles are so internalized they’re still part of my chronobiology at some deep level.

Years removed from Oshawa, I would still notice the haunting but not at all unwelcome sound of the train whistle when I would visit my mother, who by then lived on Fort Lawrence Road, east of Exit 1, as the Via Rail Ocean passenger train, en route from Montréal to Halifax, or Halifax to Montréal, crossed the saltwater Tantramar marshes between Amherst, Nova Scotia and Sackville, New Brunswick, a stone’s throw from the Missiguash River, bordering New Brunswick and Nova Scotia and connecting the Nova Scotia peninsula with those who come from away elsewhere in North America. The saltwater Tantramar marshes, sometimes referred to singularly as the Tantramar Marsh, is a very special place indeed, and was even long before the first train crossed it in the 19th century. Memory surrounds you everywhere in Nova Scotia. This is the soil my Acadian ancestors lived and laboured on. All I have to do is close my eyes for but a moment listening to Lorena McKennitt’s The Mystic’s Dream and I clearly hear the words, “All along the English shore,” and in my mind’s eye I see the Acadian tricolor of blue, white and red, the gold star Stella Maris at top left, seeking the guidance and protection of the Virgin Mary, patron of the Acadians. This is Aulac Ridge, a prominent rise running west to east across the Tantramar marshes on the Isthmus of Chignecto, just west of the Missaguash River. This is the demarcation line between Fort Lawrence and Fort Beauséjour, New France and British North America, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, overlooking the Cumberland Basin of the Bay of Fundy.

Nowhere, of course, in the song are the words, “All along the English shore” actually heard, not even as a mondegreen where you mishear the lyrics to a song, which is a sort of aural malapropism, where instead of saying the wrong word, you hear the wrong word as a result of near-homophony, in a way that gives it a new meaning. No, this, as it was for Marcel Proust, is remembrance of things past.

Train whistles, which were also called steam trumpets, originated in England in 1832 with the stationmaster at the Leicester and Swannington Railway opening, who suggested that trains should have an audible signaling device. A local musical instrument maker was commissioned to create a steam trumpet for the steam locomotive. The proportional tracker action of the steam calliope in those days allowed for the engineer to individualize to some extent the expression of the sound and many locomotive operators would have their own style of blowing the whistle so it would be often be known who was operating the locomotive by the sound.

The purpose of the train whistle was to serve as an audible warning device, which it still does, and as a way to signal to other rail workers up and down the railway track, which, of course, in the latter case today has been supplemented, although not replaced, by two-way radios and even smartphones and text messaging. And train whistles to this day are still seen as an inexpensive warning device compared to other options, such as elevated rail crossings where tracks intersect with roads used by motor vehicles. Under Transport Canada’s Canadian Rail Operating Rule (CROR 14), a combination of two long whistles, followed by a short whistle, then followed by another long whistle, indicates that a train is approaching a public grade crossing.

Both the old steam whistle and today’s compressed air whistle waver in pitch, suggesting a cry or wail, giving them that distinct haunting, lonesome or melancholic sound often ascribed to them. In the United States in the 19th century, different whistle sounds were created for different railroads (the preferred term rather than railway in the U.S.) in order to distinguish them, ranging from high pitched to deeper tones.

When I lived in Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories, I found that to be an exception to the east wind-means-rain rule. There, deep in the continent, like here, but without the proximity of meteorological effects emanating from Hudson Bay, an east wind off Great Slave Lake and Yellowknife Bay, which I could see down the road from my place, often meant high pressure and plenty of sunshine and fine weather, especially in the summer. As for trains, they only ran as far north as Hay River in the Northwest Territories, as I recall. There were no train whistles to be heard in Yellowknife.

Here in Northern Manitoba, Via Rail Canada Train  693 runs north between Winnipeg and Churchill, stopping in Thompson, while Train 692 runs south from Churchill to Winnipeg, also making a stop in Thompson, As well, Hudson Bay Railway (HBR), which owns the track and is a wholly-owned subsidiary of  OmniTRAX Canada, runs its own freight Train 295 from its interchange with CN Rail and its railhead at The Pas along the route. OmniTRAX Canada is in turn a wholly-owned subsidiary of Denver-based shortline railroad OmniTRAX, Inc., an affiliate of The Broe Group, which was founded in 1986 and is privately owned by Pat Broe, who founded the company in Denver in 1972 as a real estate asset management firm.

Via Rail Canada stations and stops along the Winnipeg to Churchill route in Manitoba and Saskatchewan include Portage-La-Prairie, Gladstone, Plumas, Glenella, McCreary, Laurier, Ochre River, Dauphin, Gilbert Plains, Grandview, Roblin, Togo, Sask., Kamsack, Sask., Veregin, Sask., Mikado, Sask., Canora, Sask., Sturgis, Sask., Endeavour, Sask., Reserve, Sask., Hudson Bay, Sask., The Pas, Prospector, Root Lake, Wanless, Atik, Simonhouse, Cranberry Portage, Optic Lake, Heming Lake, Sherridon, Ruddock, Charles, Pawistik, Mile 151.8, Pukatawagan, Orok, Halcrow, Cormorant, Dering, Dyce, Wekusko, Turnbull, Ponton and Pipun.

Along the Bayline, the stations and stops include Wabowden, Lyddal, Odhil, Hockin, Thicket Portage, Leven, Thompson, Sipiwesk, Pikwitonei, Bridgar, Pit Siding, Ilford, Wivenhoe, Gillam, 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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