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

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

 

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This year? Time will tell soon enough.

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

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

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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