‘Tis the Christmas season when we dare to mingle publicly for the first time since the novel coronavirus – COVID-19 – arrived New Year’s Eve 2019

Four very long years, indeed.

Now, make mine, a “sinful servant” of the Church Militant on Earth, a Smoking Bishop, a mulled wine wassail, this festive season at university and church potlucks. Even an eggnog will do.  O come, O come, O Sapientia (O Wisdom); O Adonai (O Ruler of the House of Israel); O Radix Jesse (O Root of Jesse); O Clavis David (O Key of David); O Oriens (O Rising Dawn); O Rex Gentium (O King of the Nations); and O Emmanuel (O God With Us).

We now work and socialize for the most part without masks. But the sensible among us (apparently not a particularly large cohort, with only about 15.4 per cent of Manitobans, as a cumulative percentage of the population, vaccinated as recommended by the National Advisory Committee on Immunization (NACI), an external advisory body that provides the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) with independent, ongoing and timely medical, scientific, and public health advice in response to questions from PHAC relating to immunization) still get our latest COVID-19 updated vaccinations. I had my seventh shot on Oct. 25. A couple of days later, I learned of the new COVID-19 subvariant HV.1. Hard to know these days exactly how many new COVID-19 infections the new subvariant is responsible for, but a reasonable guess is at least somewhere between 30 and 50 per cent – and soon, if not already, probably the majority of new COVID-19 infections in Canada.

Take heart though. The Justinian Plague erupted in the Egyptian port city of Pelusium in the summer of 541 AD and went through 18 waves until 750 AD.

 Pandemics kind of fade away, they don’t really end. And even the fade-away is far from a straight-line exit back from a pandemic world to a pandemic-free world. COVID-19 is here to stay for the foreseeable future, manufacturing new subvariants along the way. We have been fortunate so far that while many of the subvariants that have emerged over the last four years have been more contagious than their predecessors, they have not been more deadly. There is no guarantee that pattern will continue.

“The world has emerged from the COVID pandemic, but it’s still under its tremendous impacts.  The global economy is recovering, but its momentum remains sluggish.  Industrial and supply chains are still under the threat of interruption,” U.S. President Joe Biden told President Xi Jinping of the People’s Republic of China Nov. 15 before their bilateral meeting in Woodside, California.

Biden has it about right.

While COVID-19 is still a global pandemic, it is no longer a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC), defined by the World Health Organization (WHO) as an extraordinary event, which is determined to constitute a public health risk to other countries through the international spread of disease and to potentially require a co-ordinated international response After a five hour meeting in Geneva – its 15th regarding COVID-19 – the WHO’s International Health Regulations (2005) (IHR) Emergency Committee recommended on May 4 “that it is time to transition to long-term management of the COVID-19 pandemic” and advised “the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic … is now an established and ongoing health issue which no longer constitutes a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. WHO Director-General, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesu, who has the final say, concurred with the committee.

“While we’re not in the crisis mode, we can’t let our guard down,” said Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO’s Covid-19 technical lead and head of its program on emerging diseases. She added that the disease and the coronavirus that causes it are “here to stay.”

The COVID-19 worldwide death toll as of Dec. 6 stood at 6,985,964 deaths, the WHO reports. The United States had seen 1,144,877 COVID-19 deaths by Dec. 6, and in Canada the number is around 53,000 deaths.

On May 11, the United States ended its own federal public health emergency declaration, which dated back to Jan. 31, 2020.

The National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI) at Fort Detrick, Maryland warned as far back as November 2019 that a contagion was sweeping through China’s Wuhan region, changing the patterns of life and business and posing a threat to the population. The report was the result of analysis of wire and computer intercepts, coupled with satellite images. The medical intelligence (MEDINT) cell within Canadian Forces Intelligence Command (CFINTCOM) gave a similar warning in January 2020.

The the most chilling thing that I’ve heard to date during the COVID-19 pandemic, was this audio clip posted on Twitter March 21, 2020. I heard this brief 30-second clip on Twitter March 24, 2020, the day after the “surge” hit New York City. Tim Mak is National Public Radio (NPR’s) Washington investigative correspondent – and an emergency medical technician (EMT), which is how he got the message. Aside from the subject matter, there is something eerie about that electronically-generated voice on the automated message that went out, with this message:

“This an emergency message. This is a priority request for D.C. MRC volunteers (District of Columbia (DC) Medical Reserve Corps (DC MRC)…” (https://twitter.com/i/status/1241471610395267084)

The District of Columbia (DC) Medical Reserve Corps (DC MRC) supports the DC Department of Health (DC Health) in its role as lead for public health and medical emergency preparedness, response and recovery by recruiting, training, and deploying medical and non-medical volunteers to assist with planned events and emergencies.

It was ProMED (Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases)-mail, a program operated by the Boston-based International Society for Infectious Diseases, which served as the early warning disease surveillance network that alerted the world to the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in an alert issued one minute before midnight China Standard Time (CST) on Dec. 30, 2019. 

What does living in a world where the COVID-19 pandemic continues but is no longer considered by the WHO as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern look like?

Different than the world up to 2020, but also closer to that not-so-long-ago world than we were for most of 2020, 2021 and 2022. I’ve been to two in-person meetings so far this week; that would have been questionable and unlikely last year, and unthinkable and probably illegal in many places in 2020 and 2021.

Last Saturday, we were out at “A Community Christmas Evening,” sponsored by the Thompson Seniors Resource Council, and formerly known as the Old Fashioned Christmas Concert.  It was my first visit inside the Letkemann Theatre at R.D. Parker Collegiate since before the pandemic in 2019. Two weeks earlier, we were out at the Thompson Kin Club Fall Harvest Party dinner.

So far more socializing, mask-free and fully vaccinated (epidemiologists really must shake their heads at human behaviour, I know), than at any point since the fall of 2019. All, of course, with an eye turned to my Facebook page, where I can read friends daily posts about getting COVID-19 recently for either the first or umpteenth time, depending, on what their … what … luck has been? 

That’s the kind of fall and festive season it has been here in Thompson, Manitoba in 2023. Lots of public socializing, vaxxed but unmasked, with one eye on the ever-spinning COVID-19 roulette wheel never too far in the background. 

It it is in that spirit we offer you this recipe for a Smoking Bishop, courtesy of Cedric Dickens, a great-grandson of Charles Dickens, published in his 1988 book, Drinking with Dickens:

“A merry Christmas, Bob!” said Scrooge, with an earnestness that could not be mistaken, as he clapped him on the back. “A merrier Christmas, Bob, my good fellow, than I have given you, for many a year! I’ll raise your salary, and endeavour to assist your struggling family, and we will discuss your affairs this very afternoon, over a Christmas bowl of Smoking Bishop, Bob!”

Smoking Bishop

6 Clementines
1/2 C sugar
30 cloves
8 C moderately sweet red wine
1 bottle ruby port

Bake the oranges in a medium oven for about 20 minutes. Stick cloves into the oranges and then put them into a large bowl. Pour the wine over them and add the sugar. Cover and leave in a warm place for 24 hours. Squeeze the juice from the oranges and mix it with the wine. Add the port and heat the mixture in a pan. Do not boil. Serve hot.

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Donna Wilson: True stories, some names withheld to protect the guilty

Donna Wilson decamps from Paint Lake and Thompson to Sanford on the LaSalle River, 15 minutes southwest of Winnipeg, this Sunday, where her lovely parents, Dorothy and Jack Dyke, have lived for several years now. After more than six years at the helm, today marks her last official day as general manager of Quality Inn & Suites Thompson, although she gave up her office a couple of weeks ago for her longtime number one, assistant manager Destinee Perry, to move up to the big chair as general manager.  Both have been with the hotel since 2013.

Donna Wilson. She knows everyone in Thompson. True fact, or pretty darned close.

Now, you’ve probably heard a lot over the years about Donna’s decades of volunteerism and service on what sometimes seems like every community service not-for-profit board in Thompson, including her signature annual cancer-fighting event, Relay for Life every April, followed closely in recent years with her involvement in Thompson Playhouse, as president,  and sometimes in the director’s chair, after making her directorial debut in 2011 with Dixie Swim Club, and since 2009, her Old Fashioned Christmas Concert every December in R.D. Parker Collegiate’s Letkemann Theatre Her “Out & About” column, summed up pretty much in the name, has run occasionally in the Thompson Citizen since 2007.

For years, Donna, and her good friend, Wally Itson, who retired as principal of R.D. Parker Collegiate in 2014, and then wound up running Thompson Gas Bar Co-op, would emcee many community events together annually, as well as providing sideline coverage for Paul Andersen’s Shaw Cable TV coverage of the Nickel Days Parade in June and Santa Claus Parade in November.

“Growing up I hadn’t heard much of cancer other then my mom mentioning her friend Daphne who had died of it,” Wilson said in connection with her Relay for Life involvement on her Canadian Cancer Society personal web page in 2012. “Then that word came around again when my best friend Cindy’s mom was diagnosed. It was pretty traumatic for us. Cancer took over her life. Years later my mom lost another friend, Regina.” Started in 1985 by Dr. Gordy Klatt, a colorectal surgeon in Tacoma, Washington, Relay for Life was first held in Canada in 1999. Relay for Life made its debut in Thompson in 2001 and has been held since then annually, with the exception of 2008 when it was postponed for a year because of extensive renovations to the C.A. Nesbitt Arena.

But many local readers know these things. Some will also have noticed Donna very gradually scaled back on sitting on some of those board and other public gigs she would do in recent years, knowing moving day was only a few years off, and giving the various boards plenty of time to recruit. I also saw a somewhat quieter, more reflective Donna, after her younger brother, Eric, was paralyzed after falling off a roof in Palm Springs, California in February 2017. Eric survived, but it was far from a given he would at the time. Today, he has made an amazing recuperation through lots of hard work by himself and with dedicated therapists, the support of family and friends, and God’s abundant grace, but becoming a paraplegic is a life-changing event for Eric and his family and friends. And for Donna Wilson, her family is EVERYTHING. Has been since the day she first became my boss and soon friend way back on July 4, 2007, and long before no doubt. Since Eric’s accident, Donna has become a fierce advocate for wheelchair users; want to know why you should observe painted lines and signage in a parking lot? Donna will tell you, probably on her Facebook page, what it means to wheelchair users when drivers don’t. She’s all in.

Donna has been an outstanding boss for seven of my almost 12 years to date in Thompson at two different jobs, and a friend for the entire dozen years. Through whatever quirk of fate, I may have worked for Donna longer than any other employee in Thompson over the last dozen years when you total both the newspaper and hotel jobs. No one, and I mean no one, throws a Christmas staff party like Donna! And no one, but no one, I suspect, has stories like those of us who have worked in both the newspaper and hotel industries in Thompson. Most of which, of course, aren’t suitable to be re-told publicly. To protect the guilty.

Donna, as I have said publicly many times, is the best boss I have worked for. People work for people, not positions, at least if they stay long, just like they leave bosses, not jobs, although I have joked with Donna more than once at the hotel, please don’t move next-door to Minute Muffler on Moak Crescent because I’m not sure I’m up to working in a muffler shop. But I did work for Donna for more than three years as editor of the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News when she was general manager (we started within weeks of each other in June and July 2007). I arrived knowing a lot about print journalism across the country, but next to nothing about Thompson. Donna was my remedy for that. She could unfailing predict in our meetings which story was going to explode when we published it, even if I thought it was innocuous, and which stories would fly OK, even if I thought they might be controversial. The amazing thing is she always had my back. If a hard story needed to be published in the public interest, we published it. Always. She never spiked stories even when she knew local advertisers were going to be sending her into damage control mode, ringing her phone off the hook first thing the morning the paper hit the street.

Mind you, after I wrote a fairly hard-hitting editorial in October 2008 about Spirit Way and delays in Phase 2 of expanding the 27-foot wide rockface sculpture to see five more wolves mounted, making it an additional 80 feet wide, which would have meant the largest rockface sculpture in Canada, Donna limited my vacation starts to leaving after my editorials were in print. You see, Jeanette and I had conveniently enough hopped on a plane for a short vacation, as she was running in the Prince Edward County half-marathon in Southern Ontario, after the editorial was written but yet to be published in print (the paper didn’t go online until the following year in June 2009.) When the paper hit the streets, it was a case of, as the late singer-songwriter, Warren Zevon, once so appropriately put it, “Send lawyers, guns and money. The shit has hit the fan.”

Lesson learned: Never, ever criticize a volunteer effort in Thompson unless you are prepared to delay the start of your vacation.

“You are one stubborn man but we always managed to work it out and I’m so happy to have you as my friend” Donna wrote several weeks ago. “Donna wrote that you are stubborn,” Jeanette laughed, thinking it an amusing and not untrue statement. While I never changed my mind about the rockface editorial, and continue to stand by it almost 11 years later, I did come to have a bigger picture view of Spirit Way in general over the years, and in particular Volker Beckmann, who might well be considered kind of a stubborn guy himself at times. I would go onto write several editorials praising Volker as a “visionary,” and suggesting Thompson could use a few more visionaries like him. As recently as May 25, I wrote on Facebook, “While we don’t see eye-to-eye always, or agree on some issues, Volker is a much needed and often under-appreciated visionary (“Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in his hometown”: Luke 4:16-30). Well-deserved recognition in the Manitoba Legislature from Thompson PC MLA Kelly Bindle, causing me to do what I might have otherwise thought unlikely; share a YouTube video from the Manitoba PC Caucus.”

Before I met her, Donna had done a good-length stint as a morning show host for Tom and Sue O’Brien over on Cree Road at what was then Arctic Radio CHTM-610 AM. She also ran Ducky Promotions, and later, Beautiful Plus Fashions, on Fox Bay.

Between leaving the paper in 2010 and becoming general manager again, but this time of a hotel, Donna indulged her love for all things Newfoundland and Labrador, her home country (oops … province) serving up her own signature dish of “Uptop Fries,” featuring French fries, topped with dressing, onions, bologna and gravy, at Nanny’s Diner-Baking Catering at Westwood Shopping Mall. “Back home in St. John’s my father used to always talk about being on the boat called the Uptop, so I named the dish after the boat,” said Wilson. She also once worked as a cook at the old Highway Inn here, and wrote her own cookbook, which she sold for charity in 2010 to help raise funds for A Port in the Storm in Winnipeg.

She operated Nanny’s between December 2011 and May 2013, when she was recruited by Dr. Alan Lagimodiere, a veterinarian, and since 2016 PC MLA for the provincial constituency of Selkirk, and Al’s wife Judy, to run the Quality Inn & Suites Thompson. The Lagimodieres are among the Accommodations North ownership group which owns the Choice Hotels Quality Inn & Suites Thompson franchise.

Discretion is of paramount importance in the hotel business, so alas no juicy hotel stories to share here. Not that they don’t exist, just not here. Donna calls them our “headshaker” memories … like that time a guest stepped off the elevator at 5 a.m. and was … ah, yes, you can’t work together at a hotel and a newspaper and not have a few headshaker memories.

But newspapers are a bit different, as tell-all beasts, so I suppose one  brief remembrance of things past wouldn’t be too far out of line perhaps.

We needed one of our reporters one morning for a deadline story. He was a talented reporter, but he liked to stay very late at the paper most nights, obsessing over multiple drafts and rewrites of his stories before turning them in, making sure they were just right. More like a novelist then your typical first draft of history type journalist. This, of course, sometimes meant he was very sleepy. Too sleepy to make it into the office the next day for 8 a.m., 9 a.m. or even 10 a.m. Unable to raise him on the phone, we drove over to his apartment, and tossed pebbles at what we figured was his upper-floor window to rouse him, which we did eventually. This was a career first for me. In 25 years of journalism, I had never before tossed pebbles at a reporter’s window to rouse him or her from sleep. He indicated he’d be ready shortly, and buzzed us through the security door into the building. So far so good. Except in the lobby we somehow mixed the apartment numbers up, and wound up banging on the wrong door it turned out.  That’s odd we both thought. No answer. Surely he couldn’t have fallen back to sleep after just buzzing us in. And that would be right about the time the door slowly opened, and we were looking into a very darkened apartment. And a woman, unknown to me, standing in her doorway looking very sleepy and confused.

The woman, of course, was not unknown to Donna Wilson. “I’m sorry,” Donna gasped. “We’ve got the wrong apartment.” Without missing a beat, the woman stepped out of the shadows into some hall light. “Would you both like to come in for a cup of tea, Donna?” the woman asked. Turns out she was a police matron for the RCMP holding cells, and had just recently gone to sleep after working an overnight shift. But she had known Donna for years, and thought maybe we were just drooping by, although Donna hadn’t known until that moment the woman lived there at the time. Or we wouldn’t be waking her up.

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The Red Velvet Cake War: Thompson Playhouse returns with Southern fare and flare in its third Jessie Jones, Nicholas Hope and Jamie Wooten production in four years

Comedy of a certain south-of-the-Mason-Dixon-Line type plays very well here North of 55 in Thompson, Manitoba. By way of parallel, it would be like community theatre audiences in Georgia or Texas falling in love with the Trailer Park Boys from fictional Sunnyvale Trailer Park in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, if it was a play, although the Jessie Jones, Nicholas Hope and Jamie Wooten fare on offer here is a tad less ribald, if only because it would be hard to match Ricky’s four-letter word vocabulary even in a NC-17 production, much less PG-13, if Jones, Hope and Wooten were writing movie scripts rather than plays, which they’re not. I’ve lived in Nova Scotia. And I’ve lived in the United States south of the Mason Dixon Line, so I think I get some of this. A more detailed explanation of why Northern Manitobans like Southern comedy is an interesting question for another day perhaps. But not today. For now, let’s just say it has something to do with universal appeal and mass audiences.

Give the Thompson Playhouse credit for having found a tried-and-true winning formula when it comes to selecting comedy.  Jessie Jones, Nicholas Hope and Jamie Wooten are three of America’s most prolific and popular playwrights and this weekend at R.D. Parker Collegiate’s Letkemann Theatre, on both Friday, Nov. 21 and Saturday, Nov. 22, at 7 p.m. sharp both nights, Thompson Playhouse is mounting a production of The Red Velvet Cake War, which had its debut in October 2010 with  Johnson City Community Theater in Johnson City, Tennessee. Tickets are $10 each. The producer is Wally Itson, recently retired principal of R.D. Parker Collegiate and now back to work general manager of  Thompson Gas Bar Co-op Ltd. at Cree Road and Thompson Drive, while Donna Wilson,  former general manager of the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News, who is now the general manager of Thompson’s Quality Inn & Suites on Moak Crescent, directs. By happy coincidence you can pick up your tickets for The Red Velvet Cake War at … Thompson Gas Bar Co-op Ltd or Thompson’s Quality Inn & Suites. Tickets are also available at Don Johnson Jewellers in City Centre Mall and from some cast members.

Last November, Wilson, who is also president of Thompson Playhouse, directed a Jones, Hope and Wooten production of  Dashing Through the Snow, set four days before Christmas in the tiny fictional town of Tinsel, Texas where a colourful parade of eccentric guests arrive at the Snowflake Inn.

Wilson made her directorial debut three years ago in November 2011 with Dixie Swim Club, also a Jones, Hope and Wooten production set on North Carolina’s Outer Banks. The playwriting trio of Jones, Hope and Wooten have more than 2,500 productions to their credit and counting and are among most produced playwrights in America.

In November 2012, Thompson Playhouse changed the script slightly and offered a production of Chicago playwright Jack Sharkey’s (aka Rick Abbot’s) 1980 comedy Play On!, which Wilson co-produced with Itson.

While there are always some new faces, look for some familiar ones in The Red Velvet Cake War this weekend. Coral Bennett, who has acted in previous plays and made her directorial debut alongside Sue Colli, who has since retired to  Cape Forchu, Nova Scotia, near Yarmouth, with Dixie Swim Club, is back on stage.  As is local lawyer Serena Puranen; Kevin Hopton, a technology and trades instructor at the University College of the North here; teacher Ryan Barker, husband of Churchill riding NDP MP Niki Ashton; Delsie Jack;  teacher Robyn Foley; and the real-life husband-and-wife team of writer Angela Wolfe and Anthony Wake.

In The Red Velvet Cake War, the three Verdeen cousins – Gaynelle, Peaches and Jimmie Wyvette – decide to throw a family reunion in the fictional small town of Sweetgum, Texas. Having “accidentally” crashed her minivan through the bedroom wall of her husband’s girlfriend’s double-wide trailer, Gaynelle is close to … well, a meltdown. Peaches, the top mortuarial cosmetologist in a three-county area, is struggling to decide if it’s time to have her long-absent trucker husband declared dead. And Jimmie Wyvette, the store manager of Whatley’s Western Wear, is resorting to extreme measures to outmaneuver a “priss-pot” neighbor for the affections of Sweetgum’s newest widower, as the eccentric Verdeens gather on the hottest day of July, smack-dab in the middle of Texas tornado season.

You can listen to a brief 32-second audio promo clip for this weekend’s production of The Red Velvet Cake by Thompson Playhouse right here: http://www.driveplayer.com/#fileIds=0ByoS9i0FECzWek4yQ0FlejFNcXRaa25sY1hob3I4WTROcXJV&userId=101189087505862053096

The most recent outing for Thompson Playhouse was May 31 when they presented Murder at the Tonylou Awards, an audience participation murder mystery – and play on their names  –  written by Tony Schwartz and Marylou Ambrose of the Lakeside Players in Tafton, Pennsylvania in 2002, as a fundraiser for the Juniper Centre, which brought in more than $7,000, Wilson said at the time.

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Back roads and country music: Jimmy Rankin and Jolene ‘Little Miss’ Higgins both Thomspson, Manitoba-bound this fall

Nokomis, Saskatchewan country blues performer Jolene Higgins, better known by many perhaps by her stage name of “Little Miss Higgins,” will be in Thompson Oct. 22 for a 7:30  p.m. show, marking the second Home Routes concert of season six here – and the second consecutive country blues artist to perform, as this year’s lineup kicked off Sept. 23 with Deep Cove, Nova Scotia area country bluesman Morgan Davis.

Home Routes house concerts are at  Tim and Jean Cameron’s place at 206 Campbell Dr. Tickets are $20 at the door and the coffee will be on, says Tim Cameron, now in his third season of organizing Thompson stops on the tour. For more information give Tim or Jean a call at 204-677-3574 or send them an e-mail at: cameron8@mymts.net

All the money goes to the performers, some of whom would likely never pass through Thompson without the concert series. Performers typically do 11 shows in 14 days at their stops along Home Routes Borealis Trail circuit in Northern Saskatchewan and Manitoba, which Thompson is part of . Other stops on the Borealis Trail beside Thompson include Flin Flon, The Pas and Minitonas and Swan River Valley in Manitoba and in Saskatchewan, Buena Vista, Annaheim, Prince Albert, Napatak, Melfort and Greenwater Lake Provincial Park. Other circuits on Home Routes include the Yukon Trail; Salmon-Berry in British Columbia; Cherry Bomb and Blue Moon in British Columbia and Alberta; Chautauqua Trail in Saskatchewan and Alberta; CCN SK in Saskatchewan; Central Plains in Saskatchewan and Manitoba; Jeanne Bernardin in Manitoba, Agassiz in Manitoba and Ontario; Estelle-Klein in Ontario and Québec and the Maritimes in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island.

Brooks, Alberta-born Higgins was raised in Independence, Kansas, named in commemoration of the July 4, 1776 United States Declaration of Independence.  For her newest release, Bison Ranch Recording Sessions, Higgins teamed up with a quintet of musicians she calls the “Winnipeg Five”   –  Jimmie James McKee on trumpet, Eric Lemoine on banjo and pedal steel, Blake Thomson on guitar, Patrick Alexandre Leclerc on upright bass and Evan Friesen on drums. All five of them sing harmonies.

Also coming to Thompson 2½ weeks after Higgins is Mabou, Nova Scotia country and folk legend Jimmy Rankin, who first came to public acclaim as a member of the famed Celtic Rankin Family, but is also well-established over the last 15 years as a solo artist. While The Rankin Family stopped performing a group after a decade in September 1999, smaller versions still reunite from time-to-time and these days it is made up of Jimmy and his sisters, Cookie and Heather Rankin. Three members of The Rankin Family have died over the last decade and half, including Raylene, who died of breast cancer in 2012; Geraldine, who died in  2007, the result of a brain aneurysm, and John Morris Rankin, killed in a car accident on Cape Breton Island in 2000 when the  truck he was driving to a hockey game plunged off a cliff into the Gulf of St. Lawrence after he swerved to avoid a pile of salt on the highway.

Jimmy Rankin, now 50,  will be performing an acoustic show in Thompson Nov. 8 at the Letkemann Theatre at R.D. Parker Collegiate. Show time is 8 p.m. and tickets are $25. The City of Thompson, which used to have a four or five-concert series every fall and winter, is bringing Rankin in. Thompson is the last stop on Rankin’s “Back Road” tour in support of his latest album, Back Road Paradise, although he is also set to perform as a guest, along with Ian Sherwood, at  Nova Scotia singer-songwriter Rachel MacLean’s “Christmas With Friends” show Dec. 7 at  University Hall at Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. Rankin’s “Back Road” tour kicks off at Western Manitoba Centennial Auditorium in Brandon Oct. 19.

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The education headlines for Manitoba: ‘Dead last’

Knowing the Toronto-based Council of Ministers of Education, Canada (CMEC) had released its 245-page  Pan-Canadian Assessment Program (PCAP) 2013 Report on the Pan-Canadian Assessment of Science, Reading, and Mathematics yesterday, I did a Google news search this morning for the phrase “Manitoba dead last for education” to see what the morning headlines were for the story. Not pretty. “About 1,900 results (0.22 seconds),” said Google. Here’s just a quick sample:

• “Manitoba students worst in Canada in math, science and reading: Manitoba teachers face more challenges, are doing ‘rockstar work’: MTS,” from CBC News Manitoba’s webpage yesterday;
• “Report puts Manitoba in last for reading, math and science,” from yesterday’s Winnipeg Sun online;
• “Manitoba ranks last among provinces in reading, science, math: study” from CTV Winnipeg.
• “Education minister promises Manitoba kids can, will do better,” from education beat reporter Nick Martin’s story yesterday in the Winnipeg Free Press;

I’ll spare you the remaining 1,896 headlines. You get the picture.

In the spring of 2013, approximately 32,000 students in Grade 8 (Secondary II in Quebec) from over 1,500 schools across the country were tested, the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada says. Science was the primary domain assessed, while reading and mathematics were the minor domains. All 10 Canadian provinces, but no territories, participated in the assessment.

The Council of Ministers of Education, Canada is an intergovernmental body founded in 1967 by ministers of education to serve as:

• a forum to discuss policy issues;
• a mechanism through which to undertake activities, projects, and initiatives in areas of mutual interest;
• a means by which to consult and cooperate with national education organizations and the federal government; and
• an instrument to represent the education interests of the provinces and territories internationally.

“The PCAP assessment is not tied to the curriculum of a particular province or territory but is instead a fair measurement of students’ abilities to use their learning skills to solve real-life situations,” the council says. “It measures how well students are doing; it does not attempt to assess approaches to learning.

“PCAP 2013 focused on science literacy, defined through three competencies (science inquiry, problem solving, and scientific reasoning); four subdomains (nature of science, life science, physical science, and Earth science); as well as attitudes about science and its role in society. Science performance levels were developed in consultation with independent experts in education and assessment and align broadly with internationally accepted practice. Provinces also worked to ensure that the unique qualities of our country’s education systems are taken into account.

“In PCAP 2013, the results for the science component are described in terms of four performance levels. These levels represent how well students are doing based on the cognitive demand and degree of difficulty of the test items. Performance level 2 is the expected level of performance for Grade 8 students. Level 1 represents the performance of students at a level below that expected of students in their grade-level group. Levels 3 and 4 represent higher levels of performance.”

For a more in-depth look, you can find the complete report here: http://goo.gl/yJ82f1

And if you are interested in discussing it locally in the lead-up to the School District of Mystery Lake (SDML) elections for the board of trustees two weeks from today on Oct. 22, I suggest you might find  an appropriate forum at the public Facebook group Thompson MUNICIPAL & SCHOOL BOARD ELECTION found at https://www.facebook.com/groups/447700612039522/

While most, if not all, of the 11 candidates running for the seven SDML trustee seats have their own dedicated Facebook pages or groups for election campaigning,  most of them also show up sooner or later, with varying degrees of frequency, to answer voters’ questions at Thompson MUNICIPAL & SCHOOL BOARD ELECTION, which had 385 members earlier this morning. While the Thompson Teachers’ Association (TTA) No. 45-3 of the Manitoba Teachers’ Society (MTS) sponsored a public forum Oct. 2 at R.D. Parker Collegiate’s Letkemann Theatre, which drew all 11 candidates but less than 100 interested voters, that was almost a week before the Oct. 7 release of the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada (CMEC) Pan-Canadian Assessment Program (PCAP) 2013 Report on the Pan-Canadian Assessment of Science, Reading, and Mathematics.

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