All the city council news that’s fit to print (or not): Social media v. mainstream media

There have always been Facebook groups in Thompson, at least since my arrival in 2007, with lots of members who complain, sometimes with good reason and sometimes with no reason, about the state of affairs in the City of Thompson, with city council, no matter who is on it at the time, being a favourite target, both as a corporate entity, as well as a bullseye painted on the mayor and individual councillors in office at the time.  These Facebook groups come and go over time. Administrators change or burnout, folks interests switch, whatever. Most of the groups are gossipy with their requisite share of trolls, neanderthals and other malcontents. But truth be told, the membership of most of these groups is made up largely of pretty ordinary concerned Thompsonites or former Thompsonites who truly care about their community. I know many of these people. Some are friends. They don’t (for the most part anyway) just sit in the dark in their basements posting Facebook rants at 3 a.m. They volunteer. They vote. They write letters to the editor. And, yes, sometimes they rant.

But what I am seeing recently for the first time is one of these Facebook groups performing an alternative watchdog role to the mainstream media when it comes to the goings-on at city council. The approach is still a bit scattershot, but they do know how to link to real municipal documents, including juicy correspondence at places like the City of Thompson’s website, All-Net, a Winnipeg municipal software company, which began in 1999 as NewWave Communications, as well as court documents found online at the Manitoba Court of Queen’s Bench court registry.

Christine Auger, a Thompson property owner and former owner of Speedpro Signs on Hayes Road, who now lives in my hometown of Oshawa, Ontario, started the closed Facebook group Thompson Taxpayers on April 8, 2016, and serves as its administrator. As of this writing, it has 309 members, not a large number even by various Thompson Facebook group comparisons, some of which have 10 or even more times members, but Thompson Taxpayers is starting to punch above its weight in numbers, to use an old boxing metaphor.

The Thompson Citizen, which I edited between 2007 and 2014, still does a pretty decent paper-of-record sort of coverage of actual city council meetings, as does Shaw Cable TV through its local community access channel in its TV coverage of same. But Thompson Taxpayers on Facebook is mining rich material – some of it surely news material – in city council correspondence.

Earlier this year, Coun. Duncan Wong, a first-term councillor best known as a local restaurateur who owns Wongs Asian Bistro, opined at a council meeting that “in Thompson we have a lot of snow usually and to buy a two-wheel drive especially, I’m going to do a comparison about the weight. The half-ton truck we’re talking about 5,000-plus pounds. The three-quarter ton truck we’re talking about 6,000-plus pounds, a thousand pounds more for people to get unstuck is pretty hard especially we do have a female employee working for the public works so they do drive the half-ton or three-quarter ton. Imagine if they got stuck it would cost so much time and effort to get it out.”

Whether some of us are becoming too oversensitive and easily hurt is a debate being thrashed out perhaps a bit too nastily by both sides for my own personal taste on Thompson Taxpayers right now, but what is not debatable is that Wong’s last two sentences touched off a firestorm with very real repercussions. Kate Whitton, president of the board of directors of YWCA Thompson, wrote to Mayor Dennis Fenske on May 25 – just two days before the annual YWCA Women of Distinction awards dinner – asking that Coun. Judy Kolada, scheduled to bring official greetings to the event on behalf of the City of Thompson, be replaced by another councillor who shared the YWCA gender equality values, both for allegedly associating herself with Wong’s “sexist” remarks, and making her own “sexist, discriminatory and inappropriate” at the May 8 council meeting. Heavy stuff, serious allegations. And with several added elements that Thompson Taxpayers have picked up on, unlike the mainstream media, including Kate Whitton being formerly known as Kate Fenske. On May 25, she was writing in her official capacity as president of the board of directors of YWCA Thompson to her father Dennis Fenske, in his official capacity as mayor of the City of Thompson, about Coun. Judy Kolada, who  – wait for it  –  happened to work on a three-year contract as the executive director for YWCA Thompson YWCA after she retired from working as a provincial civil servant in 2008.

A second letter was written May 30 by Emily Pruder, addressed to Mayor Fenske and councillors, requesting “a public apology at the next regular meeting of council from Councillor Wong for his comments. I would also like to request that Councillor Wong undertake sensitivity training specifically focused on sexism in the workplace. His comments were not merely a poor choice of words; they are reflective of his beliefs about the capabilities of women employed by the Public Works Department and working women in Thompson.”

Emily Pruder won the YWCA Chantelle Chornoby Memorial Award in 2016 for Young Woman of Distinction, an award given for “an exceptional young woman aged 30 or under who demonstrates leadership, maturity and compassion. Through her commitment to a cause or pursuit of a personal dream, this young woman has shown perseverance, innovation and a keen understanding of community issues.” Pruder, 22 at the time of her win, was described by Whitton at the time as “a community leader, a trailblazer for human rights, advocating for equality of marginalized groups and dedicated to the empowerment of young women and girls.”

Pruder began her volunteering with the R.D. Parker Collegiate Music Students Association, and helping to clean up a selected neighbourhood every spring. Pruder had also been both a leader and active recruiter for Thompson’s Girl Guides, tripling the program’s participation over the course of three years. She had also quickly stepped in to co-ordinate Thompson’s Community Christmas Dinner, and is a founding member of Thompson’s LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered and queer) advocacy group, Pride 55, the first of its kind in the region.While I think Pruder’s May 30 letter, as a matter of public record, is absolutely newsworthy, I would not associate myself with some of the outraged and uncharitable posts about it in the Thompson Taxpayers Facebook group. Same for the Whitton letter, too. Why? While the comments are legally well within the libel definition of fair comment, every journalist knows you don’t publish something just because you can. There should always be other considerations to be weighed and balanced. This is something the mainstream media usually, though not always, still does better than social media.

This is a small community. Most of us after a time know each other, if not directly, indirectly. So I ask myself? How do I speak the truth yet not be unkind in my words? While I don’t know Emily Pruder much personally, I have always had great admiration for her stepping up to the plate to co-ordinate the Thompson Community Christmas Dinner at a time when no one else was volunteering. I know her mom and dad, especially her dad. I ran into Nelson just a couple of weeks ago for the first time in a long time at Wal-Mart near the sporting goods department and we chatted about snow clearing, grass cutting, fishing and archery (ask Nelson about the latter). Ironically, we also chatted a bit about the decline of civility in politics, and while we’re both a bit farther to the left ourselves, lamented the passing into history of the Progressive Conservative “Red Tories” we remembered from our youth.

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

 

 

223 voters turn out Oct. 13 for Thanksgiving holiday advance municipal and SDML election poll

A total of  223 voters turned out Oct. 13, either before of after their Thanksgiving holiday  turkey, to vote at the 12-hour advance poll from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. at City Hall on Mystery Lake Drive, senior election official Dave Turpie reports. Voters could choose one of two candidates for mayor; up to eight of 18 candidates for city council; and up to seven of 11 candidates for trustee spots for the School District of Mystery Lake.

A second and final advance poll is set for Oct. 17 at City Hall, again on the ground floor foyer. Voting time Friday is from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. For those unable to vote at either the advance poll or the general poll on election day Oct. 22, mail-in ballots are available from Turpie. He can be contacted by cell phone at: (204)  679-1000 or by e-mail at: canturp@mymts.net

Monday’s voting marked the debut of Dominion Voting Systems Inc. vote-counting machines in Thompson, intended to be much faster delivering results on election night than manual hand counting, although the advance poll ballots still won’t be tabulated electronically until the general poll closes at 8 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 22. Dominion Voting Systems is a privately owned Denver-based company, founded in Toronto in 2002 by John Poulos and James Hoover.

Dominion’s system  is a paper-based, optical scan voting system, mixing electronics and paper, by combining an analog paper trail of each person’s vote with quick digital tallying. The vote-counting machine rests atop a two-compartment ballot box, with one compartment used to hold ballots that have been tabulated and the other for the temporary storage of completed ballots in the event that the counting machine stops functioning. The machine alerts voters in the event that their votes could not be counted because they were blank or contained too many marks or were marked outside the voting area. Voters who make an error marking their ballots can request a new ballot from a poll clerk and have the original marked spoiled.

Turpie determined the name placement of candidates on the ballot by random lot Sept. 19 with the order being Coun. Dennis Fenske at the top of the mayoral ballot followed by Coun. Luke Robinson and for council the order of precedence as it appears on the ballot is: Kathy Valentino, followed by Coun. Judy Kolada, Julyda Lagimodiere, Blake Ellis, Paullette Simkins, Coun. Penny Byer, Lydia Blais, Malanie Bercier-Cutler, Erika McCarthy, Audrey Dufour, Coun. Brad Evenson, Robert Chuckrey, Colleen Smook, Dennis Foley, Ron Matechuk, David Erickson, Duncan Wong and Christa Herkert. On the school board ballot the order of names in  precedence in which names appear is  Sandra Fitzpatrick at the top of the ballot, followed by Clint Saulteaux, Doug Krokosz, Vince Nowlin, Janet Brady, Caroline Winship, Liz Lychuk, Leslie Tucker, Don MacDonald, Guido Oliveira and Ryan Land.

The City of Thompson and School District of Mystery Lake are splitting 50-50 the projected cost of approximately $62,500 – about 50  per cent more than the cost of the 2010 election – for the ImageCast hardware rental, software licence and service agreement for both this month’s election and the October 2018 municipal and school board elections.

The cost for the last manually hand-tabulated municipal 2010 general election, also split between the city and school district on a 50-50 basis, was just under $42,000, but it took more than fours hours after the polls closed   – until after midnight to determine some of the winners. The number of poll clerks hired for the 2014 election is expected to be around 25 compared to 60 in 2010.

The turnout for that election in 2010 was 41.1 per cent of the names on the eligible voters’ list showing up to vote. That figure equated to 3,638 Thompsonites – 3,536 with valid, accepted ballots, 26 voters who declined their ballots – which they can still do simply by writing “declined” on the back of the ballot and then inserting it into the vote-counting machine– and 76 spoiled ballots. Many voters did not vote for an entire slate of eight council candidates, with the average ballot featuring only 5.8 votes for members of council.

There were 433 votes cast in advance polls in 2010 compared to 250 in 2006.

On election day Oct. 22  there will polling stations set up from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. in the gymnasiums of  Juniper Elementary School; Ecole Riverside Elementary School; Wapanohk Community School;  Deerwood Elementary School; Burntwood Elementary School;  and Westwood Elementary School.  Additional polling stations have now been established also for Rotary Place (10.am. to 12 noon); Thompson General Hospital (1 p.m.  to 3 p.m.) and Northern Spirit Manor (3:30 p.m. to  5:30 p.m.)

Not running: The big story of Thompson city council and School District of Mystery Lake elections Oct. 22

Elections are very often referendums on the incumbents seeking re-election. Voters are as likely to be voting against something or someone as for anything. But not always. The real  story of the upcoming Oct. 22 municipal election in Thompson is not so much the newcomers seeking office, but the vast number of city councillors and School District of Mystery Lake (SDML) trustees who are not seeking office and will complete their terms at 11:59 a.m.Thursday, Oct. 23, including Mayor Tim Johnston, a two-term mayor and one-term councillor, first elected in 2002, and SDML chair Rob Pellizzaro, a local lawyer, who was first elected in 1998, and is the longest serving trustee on the board.

Thompson had a strong turnout for the last municpal election in 2010, with 41.1 per cent of the names on the eligible voters’ list showing up to vote. That figure equated to 3,638 Thompsonites – 3,536 with valid, accepted ballots, 26 voters who declined their ballots – led by 12 decliners at the Riverside poll – and 76 spoiled ballots. Many voters did not vote for an entire slate of eight council candidates, with the average ballot featuring only 5.8 votes for members of council.

In April 2009, council invoked Section 78 of the Municipal Act to add an eighth councillor as of the October general election, along with the mayor, for a nine-member council, reverting to the size council was until the early 1990s when they dropped a seat.

City councillors are elected at-large in Thompson.

Dating back to 1867 and the British North America Act,  which sets out our basic post-Confederation governance structures, municipalities are creature of the provinces and the most junior level in our three-tier federal, provincial and municipal governance system. Without the consent of the Province of Manitoba, there is nothing the City of Thompson or any other Manitoba municipality can do.

It  was the second-highest voter turnout in Thompson history – the record still belongs to the 1986 general election, where 42.4 per cent of registered voters showed up to re-elect then-mayor Don MacLean to a fourth term, but 2010 did finish just ahead of the 41 per cent turnout from 2006, which had been in second place.

Born and raised in Thompson, Johnston is the son of Dr. Blain Johnston, a former city councillor who was the first regular, full-time doctor in Thompson. He graduated from R.D. Parker Collegiate in 1980. After graduating from the University of Winnipeg with a degree in administrative studies and working in Winnipeg for several years, Johnston returned to Thompson in the late 1980s, when he purchased J.B. Johnston Ventures Ltd. from his parents. A past president of the Thompson Chamber of Commerce, in 1999 and 2000, Johnston is the manager of North Central Community Futures Development Corporation, and plans to remain there and continue to live in Thompson, he has said.

Also leaving city council is its longest serving-member, Coun. Stella Locker, a registered nurse as well as real estate broker,  who chaired the city planning commission from 1967  to 1972 and chaired the industrial commission from 1982 to 1984. She was first elected to city council in 1989 and served as deputy mayor. In the last election in 2010, Locker finished on top at nearly every polling station, only finishing outside first place once – coming in third at Wapanohk in Eastwood.

Also stepping away is two-term Coun. Charlene Lafreniere, director of institutional advancement at the University College of the North (UCN) since September 2010, and previously executive director of the Thompson Neighbourhood Renewal Corporation (TNRC) and director of justice at Manitoba Keewatinowi Okimakanak (MKO).  Lafreniere, who topped the polls in the 2006 council race, was re-elected, but with less support, in 2010.

Coun. Erin Hogan, first elected to city council in a city-wide byelection in December 2009 to replace Coun. Cory Young, was re-elected 10 months later in the October 2010 general municipal election. She is pregnant and expecting twins. During her almost five years as a councillor she served as a Manitoba board member on the  Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) national board of directors and was vice-chair of the standing committee on increasing women’s participation in municipal government. She works as a policy analyst in the aboriginal relations division of Manitoba Hydro.

The three incumbents seeking re-election as councillors are Penny Byer, first elected in 2010 also, Coun. Brad Evenson, a one-term councillor first elected four years ago, and owner of Patent Electric and former managing partner with the Wescan Electrical Company, who also served for four months in 2007 as  president of the Thompson Chamber of Commerce, and Coun Judy Kolada, the second-longest serving member of council, first elected in 1994.  She came to Manitoba from the south shore of Nova Scotia in the 1960s, following her graduation from Bridgewater Commercial College. She is a former executive director the YWCA of Thompson and before that retired from the provincial government, where she worked for the Department of Northern Affairs as a local government co-ordinator and the Department of Labour as a labour standards officer.  Byer  retired in April 2013 as Vale’s Manitoba Operations as corporate affairs co-ordinator, who moved to Thompson in 1978 to open up the CBC North Country studio and has a diploma in creative communications and certificates in marketing, public relations and journalism,

Two first-term incumbent councillors, Dennis Fenske and Luke Robinson, are seeking the mayor’s chair, meaning the loser will no longer sit on council.

Fenske, currently serving as deputy mayor, also controls DDAK Developments Inc., a family real estate development and holding company, and is a long time resident of Thompson. His parents, Len and Mary Fenske arrived in 1961 with six children planned to stay a couple of years until farming in Saskatchewan rebounded, he says on his Dennis Fenske for Mayor page on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/pages/Dennis-Fenske-for-Mayor/1558721681016070

A centre, who shoots left, Fenske played three seasons of Junior B hockey in British Columbia for the Victoria Cougars  from 1975 to 1978, and three more seasons between 1983 and 1986 for the University of Saskatchewan of the Canada West Universities Athletic Association (CWUAA). He returned to live in Thompson in 1988. Upon his return, he was hired by the City of Thompson as a recreation programmer for the Department of Recreation, Parks and Culture. In 1990, he was promoted to director, and served in that position until 1999. He then transferred to City Hall as the director of community development and human resources. He left the City of Thompson in the fall of 2007 for Vale where he is currently employed as engineering supervisor of support services for central engineering and the project management office.

Fenske is a widower. His wife, Don, died in May 2007 from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), sometimes called Lou Gehrig’s disease after the New York Yankees’ slugger, first baseman and outfielder who died of ALS in June 1941. Both of their daughters are R.D. Parker Collegiate graduates: Allison is a lawyer and Kate a nurse. Fenske, who was out of town Sept. 19 during the ballot draw by senior election official Dave Turpie to determine position randomly on the ballot (which Fenske won over Robinson) was away to get married, Turpie said. Fenske had been engaged to Germaine Leger, of Thompson, formerly of Winnipeg, since Oct. 12, 2013. Both are half marathon long-distance runners who have competed for several years in June in the Manitoba Marathon in Winnipeg.

Luke Robinson, who was out of the gate early, announcing his mayoral run in May, won the eighth and final seat on council in the Oct. 27, 2010 election in a nail-biter of a race all night long, with challenger Jasper Robinson and Les Ellsworth staying in the mix right until the final poll. He first ran for a council a year earlier , finishing as runner-up to Hogan in the 2009 byelection. An automotive, truck and coach heavy-duty mechanic, Robinson is a Francophone, originally from Kapuskasing, in Northern Ontario. Bilingual, he was educated in French in elementary school and finished high school in English. He moved to Thompson in 1999 with his son, Randy, and has worked at Vale since 2001, where is a mechanical underground worker at Vale. He also as a daughter, Tammy, and two stepchildren, Angela and Ryan Bonner, with his partner of 12 years, Heather Bonner, who is Métis and a community liaison worker at Ma-Mow-We-Tak Friendship Centre. Robinson says his grandson, Drayden, will be multilingual, speaking, English, French and Cree.

Robinson also has a private pilot’s licence, owns an ultralight plane, has a cabin at Turnbull Lake in Leaf Rapids, and served 12 years as a volunteer firefighter, as well as serving as a school board trustee in Northern Ontario. Robinson’s City of Thompson biographical webpage http://www.thompson.ca/index.aspx?page=162 lists him as an “active union steward with USW Local 6166,” but the Thompson Labour Committee, when it met last week decided for the first time in years to endorse none of the candidates   –  incumbents or challengers  –  who  had declared their intentions almost a week before nominations closed, and who are running for mayor, city council or School District of Mystery Lake trustee. Robinson brought greetings from the City of Thompson last Nov. 23 to the USW Local 6166 annual gala banquet and dance for their activists and stewards at the Juniper Centre.

Paul Andersen, long-time producer for Shaw TV in Thompson, Flin Flon and The Pas, is talking to Robinson at  9 a.m. today and took to Shaw TV’s Twitter account at https://twitter.com/ShawTVThompson last night to tweet, “If you have any questions to ask him, e-mail at shawcable11@yahoo.ca.”

Over at the School District of Mystery Lake meanwhile, the big news, aside from Pellizzaro not running again after 16 years on the board, is that Ryan Land and Caroline Winship are, as  reported here Sept. 14. If you missed it earlier, you can read the story here at  https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/14/ryan-land-and-caroline-winship-running-for-sdml-school-board-trustee-seats/

There are 11 candidates running for the seven SDML trustees seats.

Also stepping down after one term are 75-year-old trustee Sya Gregovski  and Alexander Ashton, who had taught at University College of the North (UCN) and is the younger brother of two-term Churchill NDP MP Niki Ashton and the son of Thompson NDP MLA and minister of infrastructure and transportation Steve Ashton and Hari Dimitrakopoulou-Ashton, an economist and university lecturer in economics, management, and women’s studies, who is also a former SDML school board trustee. Alexander Ashton plans to live abroad this coming year.

Running again is veteran trustee Guido Oliveira, who works at Vale and was the top vote-getter in the Oct. 27, 2010 election; one-term trustee Vince Nowlin, who also works at Vale; Leslie Tucker,  manager of Northern Region Training and Employment Services here for Jobs and the Economy Manitoba; and Janet Brady, who was elected in a byelection Nov. 17, 2011 to replace Valerie Wilson, who resigned and moved to Winnipeg, as a School District of Mystery Lake trustee. Brady easily swept by Julyda Lagimodiere in a 458 to 230 vote cakewalk.

Brady, 60, a Montreal native, is a product of Quebec’s Roman Catholic school system in the 1960s and early 1970s, and a senior instructor at the University of Manitoba’s Faculty of Social Work in the Northern Bachelor of Social Work program here.

A former social worker with Awasis from 1987 to 1990, Brady returned to Thompson in 2002 to teach at the University of Manitoba.

Brady has a master’s degree in social work from Carleton University in Ottawa.

In 1999, she sought the NDP nomination for the riding of Arthur-Virden for the September general election, but lost out to fellow dipper Perry Kalynuk.

She did secure the NDP nomination, however, in the riding of Turtle Mountain where she finished second, losing to Progressive Conservative incumbent Merv Tweed, now president of OmniTRAX Canada, the Bayline railway.

Other newcomers in the SDML trustee race include Don MacDonald, Liz Lychuk, Sandra Fitzpatrick, Doug Krokosz and Clint Saulteaux.  Lychuk is the manager of child and adolescent mental health programs and mental health promotion here at the Northern Regional Health Authority (NRHA),.

Among the 18 city council hopefuls for eight council seats are two former mayoral candidates, Ron Matechuk, who lost to Johnston by only 208 votes, in 2010, and Colleen Smook, owner of McCreedy Campground, who lagged well behind in early balloting last time out and finished third in the mayor’s race with a total vote count of 681. Also running are Christa Herkert, after school program director at the Boys & Girls Club of Thompson, who is also a member of the Thompson Lion’s Club, Communities in Bloom and Operation Red Nose; Blake Ellis, who began his studies last week at the University of Manitoba’s Faculty of Social Work, where he is working towards a bachelor’s degree, but is undoubtedly better known for his previous employment roles as housing co-ordinator for the Thompson Neighbourhood Renewal Program (TNRC)  Our Home Kikinaw program; spokesperson for the former Burntwood Regional Health Authority (BRHA); and as a long-time reporter and later editor with the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News, primarily when the Wright family owned it, but also for six months in 2007 after GVIC Communications Corp. of Vancouver’s Glacier Media Group bought it as part of their Prairie Newspaper Group. Ellis, who has lived here for 17 years and is from the farm country of southwestern Ontario originally, has two children and has also been involved in  Thompson Youth Bowling Council, Thompson Tumblers, Hope North Flag Football and Thompson Junior Soccer.

Also running are Julyda Lagimodiere, minister of justice and vice-president of the Manitoba Metis Federation here, who ran against Brady in the school board byelection in 2011, and also worked previously as the learners assistance centre co-ordinator at University College of the North’s Thompson campus from 1987 to 2012; Paullette Simkins, executive director of the Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA) Thompson and the Thompson Homeless Shelter; Erika McCarthy, owner of McCarthy Mobile Technology, who recently returned to Thompson after a 10-year hiatus living elsewhere and for a time contemplated running for mayor right out of the gate; Malanie Bercier Cutler; Dave Erickson, a plumber who owns Thompson Plumbing & Heating on Centennial Drive East; Rob Chuckrey; Audrey Dufour, originally from Dolbeau-Mistassini  in the Lac-Saint-Jean region of northern Quebec, who has worked as a substitute teacher for the SDML since 2012; Dennis Foley, a service writer at McKay GM but  best known these days as a mud bog impessario with the  Northern Manitoba Off Road Association , Kathy Valentino; Lydia Blais co-ordinator for Boys & Girls Club of Thompson’s inter-agency Youth At Risk North (YARN), and Duncan Wong, of Baffin Crescent, owner of Wong’s Asian Bistro in Southwood Plaza.