It’s 2 a.m. and we’re snoozing into Sunday’s Central Standard Time (CST) in Manitoba

Provincial governments come and go in Manitoba, like elsewhere, but one of things that doesn’t change is my email reminder around this time every year: “Manitoba Municipal and Northern Relations reminds all Manitobans that daylight time will end in Manitoba early Sunday morning when clocks will be set back one hour,” the new NDP government’s Manitoba Municipal and Northern Relations department, presided over by Minister Ian Bushie, cheerily told me yesterday.

“Under the Official Time Act, daylight time ends on the first Sunday in November and resumes the second Sunday in March.

“The official time change back to central standard time will occur this year at 2 a.m., Sunday, Nov. 5 at which time clocks should be set back to 1 a.m.”

So at 2 a.m. in the morrow, we’re snoozing into Sunday’s Central Standard Time, (CST) in Manitoba, with our gratitude renewed for Scottish-born Canadian surveyor, engineer and inventor Sir Sandford Fleming, who we thank profusely for the extra hour of sleep.

While it has been gradually getting darker earlier in the evening since late June here in the Northern Hemisphere, the fact many of us, at least until tomorrow, can still travel home in waning daylight from work or school in the late afternoon in early November is in itself a credit to George Vernon Hudson, an English-born New Zealand amateur entomologist and astronomer who gave the world Daylight Saving Time (DST), a decade or so after Fleming’s development of Standard Time.

Hudson’s day (and sometimes night) job was as a clerk (eventually chief clerk) in the post office in the capital of Wellington on North Island. Hudson’s shift-work job gave him enough leisure time to collect insects, and led him to value after-work hours of daylight for that pursuit when he was working days. On Oct.15, 1895, spring in New Zealand, he presented a paper called “On Seasonal Time-adjustment in Countries South of Lat. 30°”  to the Wellington Philosophical Society, proposing a two-hour daylight-saving shift, and after considerable interest was expressed in Christchurch on South Island, where 1,000 copies of his paper were printed in 1896, he followed up on Oct. 8, 1898 with a second paper, “On Seasonal Time,” also presented to the  Wellington Philosophical Society in springtime, and which can be found in the Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand, housed at the National Library of New Zealand in Wellington.

It is Fleming, however, who deserves most of the credit for both the international dateline, and standard time zones, conveniently divided into hourly segments, dating back to October 1884 and the International Prime Meridian Conference attended by 25 nations in Washington, D.C. Before Fleming invented standard time, noon in Kingston, Ontario was 12 minutes later than noon in Montréal and 13 minutes before noon in Toronto. Noon local time was the time when the sun stood exactly overhead. As for the international date line, it is an imaginary line at the 180º line of longitude that runs from the South Pole to the North Pole separating two consecutive calendar days.

It was Hipparchus of Nicea, a Greek mathematician and astronomer, who around 150 BCE, proposed a global grid of longitude and latitude lines to measure position. It was a coordinate system for locating points on the surface of a sphere. The vertical axis measured “latitude,” and the horizontal axis “longitude.”

Immediately to the left of the international date line the date in the Eastern Hemisphere is always one day ahead of the date (or day) immediately to the right of the international date line in the Western Hemisphere. There is no regulatory body or agency that can say “yes” or “no” if a country wants to switch sides. The country simply lets the international community and mapmakers know. It is not a perfectly straight line, however, and has been moved slightly over the years to accommodate needs of varied countries in the Pacific Ocean. The Midway Islands are in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) -11, and the Marshall Islands are in UTC+12. The two group of islands, on different sides of the international date line, share the same day and date for the last hour of the day. Samoa, which happens to sit in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, just 32 kilometres, or 20 miles, east of the international date line, went directly from Thursday – on Dec. 29, 2011 – to Saturday, Dec. 31 – without a Friday, Dec. 30. Talk about being anxious to party on New Year’s Eve!

Kiribati, north of Samoa and near the equator, south of Hawaii, previously straddled the dateline. The eastern part of Kiribati was a whole day and two hours behind the western part of the country where its capital is located and a time difference of 23 hours between neighbouring islands. There were nine islands on the eastern side of the international date line, and 20 per cent of the population. On Jan. 1, 1995 it added an eastward extension to its section of the dateline so all 33 of its islands would have the same date and all of Kiribati would be in the Eastern Hemisphere.

Since 1892, when Samoa had two Monday, July 4ths, it had been east of the international date line until Dec. 29, 2011, after switching sides to coincide its days better with trading partners in the United States and Europe. Now, Samoa does a lot more business with New Zealand, Australia, China and Pacific Rim countries such as Singapore, so it switched back to the western side of the international date line.

After missing a train in 1876 in Ireland because its printed schedule listed p.m. instead of a.m., Fleming proposed a single 24-hour clock for the entire world with 24 time zones and within each zone the clocks would indicate the same time, with a one-hour difference between adjoining zones. Usually, when one travels in an easterly direction, a different time zone is crossed every 15 degrees of longitude, which is equal to one hour in time. Usually. China, however, has just one time zone, which makes the time zone uncommonly wide. In the extreme western part of China the sun is at its highest point at 3 p.m. and in the extreme eastern part at 11 a.m. In 1912, the year after the collapse of the Qing Dynasty, the Republic of China had created five time zones in the country, ranging from five and a half to eight and a half hours past Greenwich Mean Time. But in 1949, as the Communist Party consolidated control of the country, Chairman Mao Zedong ordered that all of China use Beijing time.

Fleming was born on Jan. 7, 1827 in the town of Kirkcaldy in the lieutenancy area of Fife on the east coast of Scotland. He emigrated to Canada in 1845, settling in Peterborough in southeastern Ontario.

This year, as we shift back to Standard Time from Daylight Saving Time at 2 a.m. tomorrow, which means an extra hour of slumber for many, but also causes me to ponder the potential complications of moving the clock back an hour and repeating the hour from 1 a.m. to 2 a.m. What happens when the clock jumps backward at 2 a.m. again to 1 a.m. for the second time that night and then repeats the hour? Would you have official log chronologies showing 1:13 a.m., 1:37 a.m., 1:56 a.m., 1:03 a.m. and 1:12 a.m. with the later two actually coming after the first three because they came after the clock fell back an hour? How would you distinguish which came first if need be, if someone needed to inspect the log months later (add the annotation 1:13 a.m. CDT or 1:03 a.m. CST?)

Most of Canada’s time experts work in a place called Building M-36 (which involuntarily conjures up for me visions of the X-Files and Area 51.) They work in the Frequency and Time program in the Measurement Science and Standards portfolio with the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) on Montreal Road in Ottawa. Physicist Rob Douglas, the principal research officer, however, can be found on Saskatchewan Drive in Edmonton.

Douglas explained to me years ago that “in a handwritten log the hour of ambiguity to which you refer can be simply resolved by appending the time zone (e.g. CST or CDT) to potentially ambiguous entries … e.g. “01:32 CDT” for the first pass through the hour of ambiguity and “1:32 CST” during the second pass.

“By explicitly writing the time zone as part of the time entry,” Douglas added, “you also bypass the time acts’ defaults for official time – as you might wish to do if you are making agreements across a time zone boundary where there is the possibility of geographic ambiguity of time zone.

“The above procedure is very clear in Canada, but unfortunately less so in the USA,” said Douglas. “We in Canada can refer to ‘official’ or ‘legal’ time, which can alternate between being a ‘Standard Time’ or being a ‘Daylight Time.’ In the USA, to allow regulation by the federal government, both ‘Standard Time’ and ‘Daylight Time’ must be considered a ‘standard’ to avoid having time changes be a state responsibility under the residual powers clause of their constitution. If you think you may have to deal with the American ambiguity, it may be worthwhile to include an explanatory note in the log, such as ‘CST is defined as UTC-6h, and CDT is defined as UTC-5h.’

“If the times are being logged in a permanent logbook, with entries in chronological order for a fixed reckoning of time (i.e. in the absence of clock adjustments), then a simple way of removing the ambiguity is to include in the appropriate place in the log an entry such as “02:00 CDT – log’s clock changed from CDT to CST – 01:00 CST.

“If the log is a computer log, by using the operating system’s timestamps (for example as the time recorded for a file’s modification) the problem disappears since these timestamps are recorded as Coordinated Universal Time (UTC – the modern version of Greenwich Mean Time) which is never subjected to Standard/Daylight changes. The operating system re-interprets these timestamps into its version of the correct local time in effect for the particular UTC timestamp, and this re-interpretation may unfortunately still be expressed ambiguously, but the underlying UTC timestamp can be used to resolve any ambiguity about time zones and Daylight/Standard time.”

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Google Search is a writer’s friend: Primo spell checker

For years now I’ve used Google Search as my go-to-spell checker on the internet for words that stump Microsoft Word’s spell checker (which is unfortunately a pretty low bar … “no spelling suggestions” and red underlined words are a pretty common occurrence. I may get one yet writing this sentence).

A spell checker is an application program that flags words in a document that may not be spelled correctly. Spell checkers may be stand-alone, capable of operating on a block of text, or as part of a larger application, such as a word processor, e-mail client, electronic dictionary, or search engine.

“The spell checker scans the text and extracts the words contained in it, comparing each word with a known list of correctly spelled words (i.e. a dictionary). This might contain just a list of words, or it might also contain additional information, such as hyphenation points or lexical and grammatical attributes,” Wikipedia tells me.

“An additional step is a language-dependent algorithm for handling morphology. Even for a lightly inflected language like English, the spell-checker will need to consider different forms of the same word, such as plurals, verbal forms, contractions, and possessives. For many other languages, such as those featuring agglutination and more complex declension and conjugation, this part of the process is more complicated.”

Most of the time I do know how to spell the word triggering the red alert, but even my largely two-index fingers typing has a tendency to overrun my typing on the page when I am composing something quickly in my head, as I write (err … type), and sometimes it is just as fast, when it is more than one word, to copy-and-paste the sentence into Google Search rather than to individually correct several suspect words. Sometimes, of course, I correct the word in Word just to make sure I really do remember how to spell it. Sort of like doing math in your head, or at least on paper with a pen or pencil, rather than using a calculator. We pretty much all figure we should be able to do those things manually; we just don’t want to overdo it.

This got me thinking the other day, wondering why Google Search is so much better at correcting my spelling in sentences, almost as an afterthought, while it completes a search that may or may not be additionally helpful in and of itself. Google Search will often finish a sentence correctly for me, even if I only paste or type a part of the sentence into the search box or bar.

My first hunch was that it had something to do with the vast amount of data Google Search processes with over three billion searches a day, and developing algorithms and other proprietary tools based on that.

My second hunch was that if I was pondering this other people have thought about it, researched it, and likely written about it before me.

My intuition for both hunches turned out to be correct.

Intuition, in fact, is what Google Search is all about. What makes it intuitive? Context. Context rules.

John Breeden II, the Washington, D.C. chief executive officer of Tech Writers Bureau, who formerly was the laboratory director and senior technology analyst for Government Computer News (GCN), where he reviewed thousands of products aimed at the U.S. federal government – everything from notebooks to high-end servers – and at the same time decoded highly technical topics for broad audiences, wrote about the topic in an Nov. 18, 2011 article for GCN.

“My biggest problem with Word is that there are some words that simply trip it up,” Breeden wrote. “When writing about temperature for our many rugged reviews, I always put ‘Farenheight,’ which Word thinks should be changed to ‘Fare height.’ That doesn’t help at all.

“However, when the same misspelled word is pasted into Google, it says, ‘showing results for Fahrenheit instead.’ There are quite a few other words that confuse Word but not Google. They are not difficult to find.

“I have to wonder why Google is so smart when it comes to figuring out what word a user wants to use. My guess is that the database Google is pulling from is so massive that it’s probably seen a lot of the same basic spelling mistakes. There are probably a lot of people who have wanted to search for Fahrenheit but typed in ‘Farenheight’ instead. Nice to know that I’ve got company.

“You would think it would be simple for word processors to use the same type of technology to improve their accuracy, but I suppose that would involve capturing data from their users and then making the connections between common mistakes and the accurate spelling.

“I thought that is what spell check was supposed to do, but instead I think it just matches the misspelling with words that are somewhat close to what you’ve typed. And Google obviously goes beyond that to associate common mistakes with actual words.”

An anonymous poster at Quora, a question-and-answer website where questions are asked, answered, edited and organized by its community of users, wrote on Sept. 1, 2012 in response to the question, “How is google so good at correcting spelling mistakes in searches?”:

“Google (search engines in general) has clusters processing tons (TB’s) query logs, which try to learn the transformation from original misspelled sentence to the corrected one. These transformation schemes are fed into the front end servers which serve the auto completion (and/or corrections to queries). “Also these servers have lot more processing power and memory and disk space of course will not be an issue at all (for the learned transformations). “Also since Google crawls the entire web regularly it will learn new words and suggest corrections Word can’t do till next release.”

Quora also aggregates questions and answers to topics.

“Desktop software usually have tight constraints on processing power, memory or disk space they could use to run compared to that of server based applications and usually are expected to keep the internet usage to a minimum (at least for MS Word.) “They use static resources (dictionary that might only be current at the time of launch) and can’t employ complex algorithms due to the above said restrictions and hence employ heuristic algorithms which may not [be] very predictive of the correct word.”

Cosmin Negruseri, vice-president of engineering at Addepar, an investment management technology company, formerly worked at Google (both companies are based in Mountain View in Santa Clara County, California) as an engineer, working on ads, search and Google Code Jam, an international programming competition hosted and administered by Google, replied the same day, writing: “The main insight in modern spell correctors is using context. For example New Yorp is a misspelling of New York with a high probability.”

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Standardizing time: Canada’s Sir Sandford Fleming

Thank Scottish-born Canadian surveyor, engineer and inventor Sir Sandford Fleming if you’re getting an extra hour of snooze time Sunday morning.

“Under the Official Time Act,” the Province of Manitoba helpfully reminded me in an e-mail Thursday, Oct. 29, 2015 at 2:06 p.m. (CDT), “daylight saving time ends on the first Sunday in November and resumes the second Sunday in March.The official time change back to standard time will occur this year at 2 a.m., Sunday, Nov. 1 at which time clocks should be set back to 1 a.m.”

While it has been gradually getting darker earlier in the evening since late June here in the Northern Hemisphere, the fact many of us can still travel home in waning daylight from work or school in the late afternoon in late October is in itself a credit to George Vernon Hudson, an English-born New Zealand amateur entomologist and astronomer who gave the world Daylight Saving Time (DST), a decade or so after Fleming’s development of Standard Time. Hudson’s day (and sometimes night) job was as a clerk (eventually chief clerk) in the post office in the capital of Wellington on North Island. Hudson’s shift-work job gave him enough leisure time to collect insects, and led him to value after-work hours of daylight for that pursuit when he was working days. On Oct.15, 1895, spring in New Zealand, he presented a paper called “On Seasonal Time-adjustment in Countries South of Lat. 30°”  to the Wellington Philosophical Society, proposing a two-hour daylight-saving shift, and after considerable interest was expressed in Christchurch on South Island, where 1,000 copies of his paper were printed in 1896, he followed up on Oct. 8, 1898 with a second paper, “On Seasonal Time,” also presented to the  Wellington Philosophical Society in springtime, and which can be found in the Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand, housed at the National Library of New Zealand in Wellington.

It is Fleming, however, who deserves most of the credit for both the international dateline, and standard time zones, conveniently divided into hourly segments, dating back to October 1884 and the International Prime Meridian Conference attended by 25 nations in Washington, D.C. Before Fleming invented standard time, noon in Kingston, Ontario was 12 minutes later than noon in Montréal and 13 minutes before noon in Toronto. Noon local time was the time when the sun stood exactly overhead. As for the international date line, it is an imaginary line at the 180º line of longitude that runs from the South Pole to the North Pole separating two consecutive calendar days.

It was Hipparchus of Nicea, a Greek mathematician and astronomer, who around 150 BCE, proposed a global grid of longitude and latitude lines to measure position. It was a coordinate system for locating points on the surface of a sphere. The vertical axis measured “latitude,” and the horizontal axis “longitude.”

Immediately to the left of the international date line the date in the Eastern Hemisphere is always one day ahead of the date (or day) immediately to the right of the international date line in the Western Hemisphere. There is no regulatory body or agency that can say “yes” or “no” if a country wants to switch sides. The country simply lets the international community and mapmakers know. It is not a perfectly straight line, however, and has been moved slightly over the years to accommodate needs of varied countries in the Pacific Ocean. The Midway Islands are in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) -11, and the Marshall Islands are in UTC+12. The two group of islands, on different sides of the international date line, share the same day and date for the last hour of the day. Samoa, which happens to sit in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, just 32 kilometres, or 20 miles, east of the international date line, went directly from Thursday – on Dec. 29, 2011 – to Saturday, Dec. 31 – without a Friday, Dec. 30. Talk about being anxious to party New Year’s Eve!

Kiribati, north of Samoa and near the equator, south of Hawaii, previously straddled the dateline. The eastern part of Kiribati was a whole day and two hours behind the western part of the country where its capital is located and a time difference of 23 hours between neighbouring islands. There were nine islands on the eastern side of the international date line, and 20 per cent of the population. On Jan. 1, 1995 it added an eastward extension to its section of the dateline so all 33 of its islands would have the same date and all of Kiribati would be in the Eastern Hemisphere.

Since 1892, when Samoa had two Monday, July 4ths, it had been east of the international date line until Dec. 29, 2011, after switching sides to coincide its days better with trading partners in the United States and Europe. Now, Samoa does a lot more business with New Zealand, Australia, China and Pacific Rim countries such as Singapore, so it switched back to the western side of the international date line.

After missing a train in 1876 in Ireland because its printed schedule listed p.m. instead of a.m., Fleming proposed a single 24-hour clock for the entire world with 24 time zones and within each zone the clocks would indicate the same time, with a one-hour difference between adjoining zones. Usually, when one travels in an easterly direction, a different time zone is crossed every 15 degrees of longitude, which is equal to one hour in time. Usually. China, however, has just one time zone, which makes the time zone uncommonly wide. In the extreme western part of China the sun is at its highest point at 3 p.m. and in the extreme eastern part at 11 a.m. In 1912, the year after the collapse of the Qing Dynasty, the Republic of China had created five time zones in the country, ranging from five and a half to eight and a half hours past Greenwich Mean Time. But in 1949, as the Communist Party consolidated control of the country, Chairman Mao Zedong ordered that all of China use Beijing time.

Fleming was born on Jan. 7, 1827 in the town of Kirkcaldy in the lieutenancy area of Fife on the east coast of Scotland. He emigrated to Canada in 1845, settling in Peterborough in southeastern Ontario.

This year, as we shift back to Standard Time from Daylight Saving Time at 2 a.m. tomorrow, which means an extra hour of slumber for many, but also causes me to ponder the potential complications of moving the clock back an hour and repeating the hour from 1 a.m. to 2 a.m. What happens when the clock jumps backward at 2 a.m. again to 1 a.m. for the second time that night and then repeats the hour? Would you have official log chronologies showing 1:13 a.m., 1:37 a.m., 1:56 a.m., 1:03 a.m. and 1:12 a.m. with the later two actually coming after the first three because they came after the clock fell back an hour? How would you distinguish which came first if need be, if someone needed to inspect the log months later (add the annotation 1:13 a.m. CDT or 1:03 a.m. CST?)

Most of Canada’s time experts work in a place called Building M-36 (which involuntarily conjures up for me visions of the X-Files and Area 51.) They work in the Frequency and Time program in the Measurement Science and Standards portfolio with the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) on Montreal Road in Ottawa. Physicist Rob Douglas, the principal research officer, however, can be found on Saskatchewan Drive in Edmonton.

Douglas explains that “in a handwritten log the hour of ambiguity to which you refer can be simply resolved by appending the time zone (e.g. CST or CDT) to potentially ambiguous entries … e.g. “01:32 CDT” for the first pass through the hour of ambiguity and “1:32 CST” during the second pass.

“By explicitly writing the time zone as part of the time entry,” Douglas he added, “you also bypass the time acts’ defaults for official time – as you might wish to do if you are making agreements across a time zone boundary where there is the possibility of geographic ambiguity of time zone.

“The above procedure is very clear in Canada, but unfortunately less so in the USA,” said Douglas. “We in Canada can refer to ‘official’ or ‘legal’ time, which can alternate between being a ‘Standard Time’ or being a ‘Daylight Time.’ In the USA, to allow regulation by the federal government, both ‘Standard Time’ and ‘Daylight Time’ must be considered a ‘standard’ to avoid having time changes be a state responsibility under the residual powers clause of their constitution. If you think you may have to deal with the American ambiguity, it may be worthwhile to include an explanatory note in the log, such as ‘CST is defined as UTC-6h, and CDT is defined as UTC-5h.’

“If the times are being logged in a permanent logbook, with entries in chronological order for a fixed reckoning of time (i.e. in the absence of clock adjustments), then a simple way of removing the ambiguity is to include in the appropriate place in the log an entry such as “02:00 CDT – log’s clock changed from CDT to CST – 01:00 CST.

“If the log is a computer log, by using the operating system’s timestamps (for example as the time recorded for a file’s modification) the problem disappears since these timestamps are recorded as Coordinated Universal Time (UTC – the modern version of Greenwich Mean Time) which is never subjected to Standard/Daylight changes. The operating system re-interprets these timestamps into its version of the correct local time in effect for the particular UTC timestamp, and this re-interpretation may unfortunately still be expressed ambiguously, but the underlying UTC timestamp can be used to resolve any ambiguity about time zones and Daylight/Standard time.”

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1957 settled the dates for Thanksgiving in both Canada and the United States, but make mine Thanksgiving on Sunday, not Monday or Thursday, this year

If I had my druthers, all things being equal, I’d probably be waiting until Monday night to sit down to my Canadian Thanksgiving turkey dinner.

My general preference over the years has been to celebrate the Thanksgiving feast on, well, Thanksgiving, which if you’re in Canada, has meant on a Monday, more specifically, the second Monday of October since Jan. 31, 1957. While that’s been the settled date now for close to six decades, such has not always been the case.

Historically, up until 1957, the Thanksgiving holiday – and even the word “holiday” might be bracketed by quotation marks – was somewhat of a moveable feast, and in that way not dissimilar to the American Thanksgiving holiday, which, while it falls later than our annual harvest observance, also moved around until 1957 when it began to be consistently celebrated on the the fourth Thursday in November across the United States.

None of that is going to matter too much this year because I’ll be marking Thanksgiving on Sunday a day early (truth be told, a lot of Canadians seem to have their turkey dinner on Sunday rather than Monday, especially if travelling has been part of the equation.) In my case, it’s not travel causing the change; it’s the fact I am now a public sector worker, who belongs to the Manitoba Government and General Employees’ Union (MGEU) and is employed technically by the governing council of the University College of the North (UCN), and tasked with … opening the Thompson campus library on Monday evening, as it is part of my normal work schedule. This requires two forms and two approvals (by only one supervisor, however): one for personal unpaid leave at my request for Sunday evening, when I also normally work, so we can keep the library closed when it would otherwise normally be open, and another for paid overtime authorization for the statutory holiday Monday. My contribution to simplicity this year will be to eat my Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow instead of Monday.

Whether you celebrate Thanksgiving this year on the second Sunday of October tomorrow or second Monday Oct. 12 or on the fourth Thursday in November, as our American friends will on Nov. 26, celebrate Thanksgiving for exactly what the holiday, a moveable feast date, says it is – a time to give thanks for our abundance, our bounty and great good fortune to live in these two richly blessed lands of plenty

The history of Thanksgiving in Canada goes back to the English explorer, Sir Martin Frobisher, who had been trying to find a northern passage to the Orient. Frobisher didn’t succeed but he did establish a settlement in Northern America. In the year 1578, he held a formal ceremony, maybe in the eastern Arctic, maybe in what is now Newfoundland and Labrador, to give thanks for surviving the long journey.

The second Canadian Thanksgiving after Frobisher’s in 1578 was held in Nova Scotia in the late 1750s. Residents of Halifax also commemorated the end of the Seven Years’ War and the Treaty of Paris of 1763, where France formally ceded Canada to the British, with a day of Thanksgiving.

We celebrated Thanksgiving in Upper Canada on June 18, 1816 to mark both the  Treaty of Ghent on Dec. 24, 1814, which ended the War of 1812, and another Treaty of Paris almost 11 months later on Nov. 20, 1815, ending the war between Great Britain and France. Lower Canada had already had their Thanksgiving celebration almost a month before Upper Canada on May 21, 1816.

The cessation of the 1832 cholera epidemic, which claimed 9,000 lives, more than half of them in Lower Canada, was reason enough to have Thanksgiving on Feb. 6, 1833. The restoration of  peace with Russia at the Congress of Paris and a third Treaty of Paris after the three-year Crimean War was enough for the United Province of Canada, made up of Canada East and Canada West, to have Thanksgiving on June 4, 1856. The first Thanksgiving Day after Confederation was on April 15, 1872, to give thanks for the recovery of the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII) from a serious illness.

In 1879, Parliament declared Nov. 6 a day of Thanksgiving and a national holiday.

Over the years many dates continued to be used for Thanksgiving, the most popular for many years being the third Monday in October. After the end of the First World War, both Armistice Day, as it was then known, and Thanksgiving were celebrated on the Monday of the week in which Nov. 11 fell.

Ten years later, in 1931, the two days became separate holidays and Armistice Day was renamed Remembrance Day.

Finally, on Jan. 31, 1957, Parliament proclaimed, “A Day of General Thanksgiving to Almighty God for the bountiful harvest with which Canada has been blessed … to be observed on the second Monday in October.”

In the United States, Thanksgiving is also a complex feast, perhaps even more so than in Canada. Originally, the Pilgrim Puritans of Massachusetts Bay Colony celebrated their first Thanksgiving Day on July 8, 1629. The following year, John Winthrop gave his famous sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity,” where he rightly predicted the colony would be metaphorically, as from salt and light in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, as recorded in the Gospel of Matthew, known as the “city on a hill, ” watched by the world.

“For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill,” Winthrop said. “The eyes of all people are upon us … we must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience, and liberality. We must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body.”

Almost four centuries later, their purposes perhaps not quite as lofty, Americans now celebrate Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of November. It is the single-biggest domestic travel weekend of the year for Americans going home, wherever that might be, to visit family. While technically speaking, American Thanksgiving is a one-day holiday, like here in Canada, except on a Thursday instead of a Monday, for all intents and purposes it is part of a very long weekend (officially the Wednesday and Friday are not holidays in the United States, just the Thursday, but virtually no one – aside from unfortunate retail store clerks – works the Friday, as those of us who have lived there know.) Just try and get a government official on the telephone after mid-afternoon Wednesday, or all day Friday of American Thanksgiving week if you wish to test this hypothesis.

While the fourth Thursday in November is also often the last Thursday as well (as it is this year), even a cursory glance through the years of our Gregorian calendar reveal some years, of course, have five Thursdays. Such was the case in 1939, the last year of the Great Depression, when Thanksgiving was scheduled to fall on Nov. 30, not only on the fifth Thursday of November but the very last day of November as well in fact, and less than a month before Christmas, causing President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat, to use the moral authority of his office by proclamation to move Thanksgiving up a week to Nov. 23 at the initiative of Lew Hahn, general manager of the Retail Dry Goods Association, who had warned U.S. Secretary of Commerce Harry Hopkins as early as August that the late calendar date of Thanksgiving that year could have an adverse effect on retail sales, and that an earlier Thanksgiving could perhaps boost the bottom line.

To understand the rationale more fully, harken back to that bygone era where it was quaintly considered bad form for retailers to display Christmas decorations or have Christmas sales before the celebration of Thanksgiving, as opposed to the current day-after Halloween kick-off. Or is it the day after Labor Day now Christmas sales start? One of the two methinks.

Roosevelt, however, had waited until Oct. 31 to announce his thinking on the matter of moving up Thanksgiving by a week 23 days later. The short-notice change in dates affected the holiday plans of millions of Americans; while there was plenty of confusion and many were inconvenienced, others hit pay dirt.

On the downside, many college football teams traditionally ended their seasons with games against their main rivals on Thanksgiving, and had scheduled them in 1939 for Nov. 30. Some athletic conferences had rules permitting games only through the Saturday following Thanksgiving. Changing the date could mean many teams would play their season finale in empty stadiums or not at all. The change also reportedly caused problems for college registrars, schedulers and calendar makers.

The Thanksgiving winners in 1939 lived in Colorado, Mississippi and Texas. Those three states observed two Thanksgiving holidays that year; the just-proposed Thursday, Nov. 23, and then they did it all over again a week later on the originally scheduled holiday on Thursday, Nov. 30.

Now, that’s something to express gratitude for, unless your were a turkey taking a double-hit on your numbers possibly in  Colorado, Mississippi and Texas. All told, 23 states and the District of Columbia, of the 48 states in those pre-statehood days for Alaska and Hawaii (both joined the union 20 years later in 1959), recognized Nov. 23 as Thanksgiving in 1939, while 22 states stuck with the original Nov. 30 date as planned.

Gradually, the fourth Thursday in November as Thanksgiving, with some see-sawing back-and-forth and general waffling, took a more permanent hold throughout the United States. Texas was the last state to change its holiday law, observing the last Thursday in November as Thanksgiving when there are five Thursdays in the month for the final time on Thursday, Nov. 29, 1956.

The considerable, and for a time in the early 1940s, still ongoing confusion surrounding when Thanksgiving should be celebrated was not surprisingly diffused in the popular culture as ripe material for laughs through cinema, as well as radio. “In the 1940 Warner Bros. Merrie Melodies cartoon Holiday Highlights, directed by Tex Avery,” Wikipedia notes, “the introduction to a segment about Thanksgiving shows the holiday falling on two different dates, one ‘for Democrats’ and one a week later ‘for Republicans.’”

In the 1942 musical Holiday Inn, starring Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire, a classic black-and-white film, which I borrowed in DVD format from the Thompson Public Library a few years ago, there is a delightful parody where a November calendar appears on which an animated turkey jumps back and forth between the two weeks, until he gives up and shrugs his shoulders at the audience.

And speaking of turkeys getting the last laugh, no discussion of American Thanksgiving is complete, of course, without addressing the issue of the Presidential turkey pardon. In a piece called “Why presidents pardon turkeys — a history” by Domenico Montanaro, PBS Newshour last November offered the comprehensive history of the practice, which you can read at http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/presidents-pardon-turkeys-history/#.VHbAtv1lVLA.facebook

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Banned and challenged books: Libraries take a stand

Spring of 1975: I was an idealistic, although in retrospect naive as to how power actually works in practice, 18-year-old advocate of intellectual freedom as Grade 12 wound down and I saw the increasing efforts of Ken Campbell and his ilk attempt to ban important literature in high school libraries and banish it from the curriculum. Campbell, a Baptist evangelical from Milton, Ontario, had founded a lobby group called Renaissance Canada a year earlier in 1974. While the library and English Department at Oshawa Catholic High School were in no way disposed to buckle under to such a censorship challenge, I saw the fight was real, especially in Peterborough and surrounding area, as downtown Pentecostals, not to mention Bible Belt evangelical adherents from Burleigh Falls to Buckhorn, on the southern edge of the Canadian Shield north of Peterborough, were making rumblings and by early 1976 would publicly launch the Peterborough Committee for Citizens on Decency as their campaign vehicle to ban Margaret Laurence ‘s The Diviners, published just two years earlier in 1974, taking their fight to the public in venues ranging from signing petitions in Peterborough churches to letters to the editor in newspapers, right up to appearing as delegations before trustees of what is now known as the Kawartha Pine Ridge District School Board. Laurence was living in Lakefield near Peterborough.

In 1968 the Ontario Ministry of Education had given local school boards the authority to determine which literary works would be used in English classes. In the winter of 1976, writes Sheila Turcon, an archivist in the Mills Memorial Library’s William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, “complaints were lodged at two Peterborough high schools against both The Diviners and Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women (1971). Both books should have been reviewed by a special committee which had been established two years earlier to review complaints against other books. However, only Laurence’s book was dealt with by the committee.

“The book had been opposed by Jim Telford, a board of education trustee and member of the Pentecostal community, and Rev. Sam Buick. They and their supporters told the Globe and Mail that the novel ‘reeked of sordidness.’ The review committee did not agree and gave its unanimous support for the retention of The Diviners.”

Buick at the time had pastored the Dublin Street Pentecostal Church in downtown Peterborough for three years since 1973.

“On April 22, 1976, the full board decided ten votes to six to keep the book on its approved textbook list,” Turcon said. “Despite this ruling, only Bob Buchanan from Lakefield Secondary School continued to teach it.”

In the end, the new Campbellites did not prevail, but the fight was very public, very protracted and very nasty.

It was in the months leading up to the emergence of the full backdrop in Peterborough, living  50 miles or so down the road to the southwest in Oshawa, I took it upon myself to form a group of high school students from the half dozen or so high schools in Oshawa at the time called the Students Against Arbitrary Censorship Committee (or S.A.A.C.C.) Not the most elegant name or acronym, but I hadn’t enjoyed the benefit of a Loyalist College advertising or marketing course at that point in my life. That would have to wait until the early 1980s when I studied print journalism. So there it was, the Catholic kid, from the faith that brought you the Index Llibrorum Prohibitorum, leading the freedom-to-read charge. Poor Sister Conrad Lauber, my erudite principal. No doubt my S.A.A.C.C. and later Grade 13 high school debating activities have been almost enough on their own to merit her a get-out-of-purgatory-free card, in the unlikely event she might some day need it, simply for enduring my campaigns and playing devil’s debating advocate under the school’s banner. And while my school, and Sister Conrad, stood up, however, uncomfortably at times for my free speech rights, not all Catholics by any means did. After one of my letters to the editor appeared in the op-ed section of the Catholic Register, a gentleman from Geraldton, Ontario took the trouble to write me a handwritten letter, sending it to my home address on Nipigon Street, telling me I was heading for hell. Anonymous telephone calls crisply conveyed similar messages. Pity my long suffering parents. Aside from The Diviners, some of the books Campbell wanted to ban 40 years ago, such as J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, have remained perennial favourites of censorship advocates, and still show up on banned and challenged book list challenges.

When I said earlier I was naive at 18 as to how power actually works in practice, it is because I thought things like common sense and logic would trump know-nothing ignorance in any given debate and decision, and those advocating banning a book might actually have bothered to read it first. That sort of thing. And I didn’t necessarily think this would be a life-long struggle between the forces of intellectual freedom and ignorance, not to put too fine a point on it. Of course, I was wrong on all counts. Hence the need 40 years on in the struggle to have annual events like “Banned Book Week” from Sept. 27 to Oct. 3, spearheaded by sponsoring organizations such as the Chicago-based Office for Intellectual Freedom of the American Library Association, the American Booksellers Association, the Association of American Publishers, the National Association of College Stores and PEN American Center.

While I still feel just as strongly and passionately about intellectual freedom and taking a stand against book banners, I have also these many years on, learned to see the world, dare I say it, in many more shades of grey, than my young black-and-white 18-year-old idealist self. I may still disagree with book banners, but Campbell, who I never actually met, was something of an evangelical caricature for me as a teenager. I know real-life evangelicals now and count a fair number as good friends. They’re not all book banners. And being a Protestant (or Catholic for that matter) evangelical is not incompatible with being an intellectual. Who would have thought that at 18? Not me. And even those who would still ban books I wouldn’t, I’d be hard pressed not to concede that both the world is a nastier, trashier place in some ways than it was 40 years ago (probably the lament of every aging generation, I know) and that I really can’t always accurately judge people’s motives from the outside and what’s inside their hearts, a gift I seemed to have thought I possessed in my youth.

After spending upwards of 30 years working in print journalism, with the exception mainly of the five-year period between 1990 and 1995, when I redressed my youthful lackluster academic performance in university by returning first to Trent University in Peterborough to complete my Honours B.A. in History and then on to Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, as an Ontario Graduate Scholar, for a couple of years to do a master’s degree in History, I had the opportunity to return in a small way earlier this year to academia working simply as a clerk at the University College of the North (UCN) new Thompson campus library here in Northern Manitoba. There is something so very Victorian in that word clerk that makes me want to pronounce it “clark,” as I imagine perhaps joining Charles Dickens over a Christmas bowl of Smoking Bishop, that particular concoction of Clementines, sugar, cloves, moderately sweet red wine and ruby port.

I am happy to note the “Mission of the University College of the North Libraries” explicitly affirms endorsing “the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which includes, along with the right to express thoughts publicly, the fundamental right of access of every person to all expressions of knowledge. The intellectual freedom fostered and protected by the enshrinement of these rights is basic to the proper functioning of the University and to the healthy development of Canadian society of which it is a part. The University College Libraries supports the principles of intellectual freedom as they are pertinent to all of its activities.”

The 10 books pictured here – Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, George Orwell’s Animal Farm, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath, Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Story of a Part-Time Indian, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye and D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover – are all found in our stacks for students, faculty, staff and community users to borrow and read. They are also books that have been banned or challenged, some perennially, in other places.  “A challenge is an attempt to remove or restrict materials, based upon the objections of a person or group,” says the American Library Association.  “A banning is the removal of those materials. Challenges do not simply involve a person expressing a point of view; rather, they are an attempt to remove material from the curriculum or library, thereby restricting the access of others.”

The American Library Association “promotes the freedom to choose or the freedom to express one’s opinions even if that opinion might be considered unorthodox or unpopular and stresses the importance of ensuring the availability of those viewpoints to all who wish to read them.”

You can discover the “top ten frequently challenged books lists of the 21st century” to date and the methodology used to make that determination by checking out the Office for Intellectual Freedom of the American Library Association webpage http://www.ala.org/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/top10#toptenlists

The Banned Books Week website “drew more than 92,000 users and had more than 207,000 page views in 2014,” Publishers Weekly noted Sept. 18. “, Banned Books Week 2015 will, for the second consecutive year, focus on a single category – this time young adult books, which dominates the list of the 311 challenged books in 2014, led by Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. (In 2014, graphic novels was the category of focus.) “There have been very serious flaps over why YA books have very dark themes,” noted Judy Platt, chair of the BBW co-ordinating committee and director of Free Expression Advocacy at AAP.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Louis Riel: 21st century hero to the Métis of Manitoba; Rogers Hometown Hockey tour set to roll into Thompson, Manitoba’s hockey hotbed

Louis Riel, the Métis leader hanged for high treason on Nov. 16, 1885 at Regina, was the driving force behind Manitoba becoming Canada’s fifth province and is thought of by many as to be the “Father of Manitoba,” the only Canadian province born in blood. Does that history matter today and what legacy has it left Manitobans? “Welcome to Winnipeg: Where Canada’s racism problem is at its worst,” Maclean’s, Canada’s national magazine, headlined its lead story Jan. 22.

Not all Manitobans, of course, share that view of Riel as victim of colonial racism by any means. But history has a way of refining our judgments and dampening or softening excessive passions. Thus, the 19th century’s traitor can be reasonably seen as the 21st century’s hero as we take a longer and more inclusive view of our collective history.

Up here in Thompson we apparently don’t have a race problem, although a regular-season hockey game last Sunday between the Thompson King Miner Midget “AA” and the Norway House North Stars was ended by officials with Thompson leading 4-2 with 8:53 left in the second period when the North Stars, who had already had a player and coach ejected, left the ice following an altercation between their goaltender and a Thompson player at the same time that a scuffle erupted in the stands, soon leading to a parade of RCMP officers in their cruisers escorting players from both teams safely out of the C.A. Nesbitt Arena at the Thompson Regional Community Centre (TRCC), after racial slurs may or may not have been uttered whiles moms and dads scrapped in the stands with their counterparts from the opposing team. Older guys in Thompson remembered decades ago similar incidents where they said they had to be escorted out of places like Norway House or Cross Lake in similar circumstances. Seventeen-year-old King Miner right winger Lucas Hanlon apparently self-identified himself as Métis to the Winnipeg-based Aboriginal People’s Television Network (APTN) in making two points: he didn’t think the Feb, 8 fracas in Thompson was about race, and, in any event, there are a lot of aboriginal players on the Thompson team.

Thompson is atop of the midget AA league standings, with a 13-4-3 record for 29 points, the same as the second-place The Pas Huskies, who have played one more game than Thompson. The King Miner’s next scheduled game is tomorrow when they are due to play the Split Lake Eagles in Split Lake.

 “I am a Metis player myself,” Hanlon reportedly told APTN “We have a lot of aboriginal players on our team,” he said. “We have just as many people with aboriginal roots in our community as anywhere else.”

Hanlon said he didn’t hear any racial taunts hurled at the Norway House players. He said the Norway House fans called him “white trash.” He said racial slurs are hurled by both sides during games. “You get kind of used it from playing against those teams for so long. It happens both ways. I personally don’t because I come from both backgrounds,” he said.

A player for the Norway House North Stars team and two parents told APTN National News Feb. 10 that some “Thompson fans hurled racial epitaphs at the Norway House team.” They also said one player was confronted by three Thompson fans, two men and a woman, who used racial slurs, and claimed one Norway House player had his helmet cracked by a slash to the head.

Hanlon told APTN he “didn’t see anyone get slashed in the head with enough force to crack a helmet: that’s reassuring. However, he was very likely on to something – something that really matters to Thompson residents, both aboriginal and non-aboriginal, when Hanlon said many in the “Thompson hockey community are now worried the planned Rogers Hometown Hockey tour stop scheduled for the community on March 7 and 8 may be scuttled because of the bad press stemming from the weekend’s incident.” It was announced last September that Ron MacLean, who has played straight man to Don Cherry on Coach’s Corner for years, will be here in 3½  weeks as part of the Rogers Hometown Hockey Tour, presented by Dodge and Scotiabank, for a weekend of hockey festivities and to host a pre-game show followed by a viewing party for a March 8 Calgary Flames-Ottawa Senators game that will be broadcast across the country.

The tour, which began last Oct. 11-12 in London, Ont., is criss-crossing Canada, stopping in Manitoba three times – it was in Selkirk for its second broadcast and in Brandon last Nov. 30 – before making the late-season trip to Thompson.

Other activities leading up to the weekend-capping broadcast will include meet-and-greet sessions with NHL alumni and local hockey heroes, a Hockey Night in Canada viewing party, a KidZone with hockey-themed activities, skills and drills competitions and live performances by local musicians, as well as ticket and merchandise giveaways.

MacLean will host a half-hour pre-game show live from the Sportsnet Mobile Studio in Thompson prior to the broadcast, and will also make appearances in intermission and post-game shows. Included on the broadcast will be interviews with local guests and grassroots hockey stories.

Should Thompson residents be worried about bad press press from the Thompson King Miner Midget “AA” and Norway House North Stars game Feb. 8 jinxing the arrival of the Rogers Hometown Hockey tour March 7? Probably not, even given the fact there are a couple of inconvenient stories from APTN now circulating on television and online, including, “Manitoba RCMP escorted First Nation hockey team from rink after game took racial turn” at http://aptn.ca/news/2015/02/10/manitoba-rcmp-escorted-first-nation-hockey-team-rink-game-took-racial-turn/ and “Metis player disputes race played role in Manitoba hockey fracas” at http://aptn.ca/news/2015/02/11/metis-player-disputes-race-played-role-thompson-man-hockey-fracas/

But long before APTN broke its two stories, Tuesday, 48 hours after the game was over, there already had been hundreds of comments and a number of photos on the emerging story on social media, mainly Facebook, by Sunday at 7 p.m., just hours after the melee at the hockey game. “Facebook,” as former Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News columnist Donna Wilson, who is now the general manager of Thompson’s Quality Inn & Suites on Moak Crescent, but who also still writes for the paper occasionally, has observed many times since 2010, “is how Thompson gets its news.”

RCMP also seized video of the game from veteran Thompson Shaw TV producer Paul Andersen, who tweeted in his own inimitable style, “19 years of broadcasting hockey games, I have never had my footage become ‘exhibit c’ in the court of law,#norwayhousevsthompson.”

Louis Riel Day falls this year next Monday on Feb. 16. In 2008, the NDP provincial government invited Manitoba schoolchildren to name the province’s newest statutory holiday, commencing on the third Monday in February in 2009, and 114 schools responded with suggestions: of that number a dozen suggested Louis Riel Day or some close variation.

Other suggestions included Neil Young Day, Family Get Together Day, February Fun Day, (The) Polar Pause, Duff Roblin Day (Duff’s Day), Our Parents Need a Break Day and Magical Manitoba Monday.

Riel was born at Red River Settlement on Oct. 22, 1844 and educated at St Boniface. A Roman Catholic, he studied for the priesthood at the Collège de Montréal. In 1865 he studied law with Rodolphe Laflamme, and he is believed to have worked briefly in Chicago and Saint Paul before returning to St Boniface in 1868.

Without re-telling the entire history of the Red River Rebellion, or Red River Resistance, as it is also known, here or the North-West Rebellion in Saskatchewan 15 years later, the abridged version is that in 1869, the federal government, anticipating the transfer of Red River and the North-West from the Hudson’s Bay Company to their jurisdiction, appointed William McDougall as lieutenant-governor of the new territory and sent survey crews to Red River.

The Métis, worried about the implications of the transfer and wary of Anglo-Protestant immigrants from Ontario, organized a “National Committee” of which Riel was secretary. The committee halted the surveys and prevented McDougall from entering Red River. On Nov 2, 1869, Fort Garry was seized by the committee, which invited the people of Red River, however, both English and French- speaking, to appoint delegates.

When armed resistance, led by John Christian Schultz and John Stoughton Dennis followed, the federal government postponed the transfer planned for Dec. 1, 1869. Riel issued a “Declaration of the People of Rupert’s Land and the Northwest” and on Dec. 23, 1869 became head of the “provisional government” of Red River.

Meanwhile, a force of some of those who had escaped from Riel’s men earlier, mustered by Schultz and surveyor Thomas Scott, a Protestant Presbyterian Ontario Orangeman, gathered at Portage la Prairie, but were quickly rounded up by the Métis, who imprisoned them again at Fort Garry. Riel appointed a military tribunal, presided over by his associate, Ambroise Dydine Lépine, of St. Vital, to try Scott for treason. Scott was convicted, sentenced to death and executed by a firing squad in the courtyard of Fort Garry on March 4, 1870.

In Ontario, it was Riel, however, who was widely denounced as Scott’s “murderer” and a reward of $5,000 was offered for his arrest. In Québec he was regarded as a hero, a defender of the Roman Catholic faith and French culture in Manitoba.

Anxious to avoid a volatile political confrontation between Ontario Protestants and Quebec Catholics, never mind Manitoba’s Métis, Conservative Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald tried to persuade Riel, who had gone into voluntary exile in the United States, to remain there, even providing him with funds.

Instead, encouraged by supporters, Riel entered federal politics and won a seat in a byelection in October, 1873 and was re-elected in the general election of February 1874 and re-elected for a third time in the Provencher constituency in a September 1874 byelection. He was expelled from the House of Commons before taking his seat. Riel and Lépine were convicted of murdering Scott in October 1874 and sentenced to death, but Governor General Lord Dufferin commuted the sentences in January 1875 to two years imprisonment. A month later, Prime Minister Alexander Mackenzie’s Liberal government granted amnesty for Riel and Lepine, on the condition that both remain in exile for five years.

Early in 1885, then living in present day Saskatchewan, Riel seized the parish church at Batoche, armed his men, and formed a provisional government and demanded the surrender of Fort Carlton. The North-West Rebellion lasted from March 26 to May 12 before Riel surrendered at the Battle of Batoche and on July 6, 1885, he was charged with high treason.

Riel was convicted, and the federal cabinet, with Macdonald again as prime minister, declined to commute the death sentence imposed by Lt.-Col. Hugh Richardson, a stipendiary magistrate of the Saskatchewan District of the North-West Territories. Riel’s body was sent to St Boniface and interred in the cemetery in front of the cathedral.

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