Father Laurent Alarie, longest-serving pastor in the history of St. Lawrence Roman Catholic Church in Thompson, Manitoba, has died in Winnipeg at the age of 98

Father Laurent Alarie, a member of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate (OMI), commonly known as simply the Oblates or OMI, and the longest-serving pastor in the history of St. Lawrence Roman Catholic Church in Thompson, Manitoba, died in Winnipeg March 16 at the age of 98.

The funeral Mass for Father Alarie will take place March 24 at 1:30 p.m. at Despins Residence at 151 Despins St. in Winnipeg, followed by burial in Saint-Boniface Cemetery.

Father Alarie was a retired member of OMI Lacombe Canada’s District Taché, based in Winnipeg, where he lived. He was born in 1925 in Sainte Agathe, Manitoba. Father Alarie took his first vows on Aug. 15, 1947, and was ordained June 15, 1952. He served in the missions of Lestock, Sandy Bay and Fort Alexander before teaching in Winnipeg at the newly-opened Assiniboia Residential School on Academy Road. An old army barracks, it was converted into the first Catholic high school meant exclusively for Indigenous students in Manitoba and opened in June of 1958 in Winnipeg. More than 750 Indigenous students from across Manitoba, Saskatchewan and northwestern Ontario were sent to live at the school between 1958 and 1973. Father Alarie taught and served as school counsellor and later principal there between 1958 and 1973, when it closed its doors. He was then posted to Fort Frances, Ontario where he served as a curate, missionary and priest at St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church from 1974 to 1987.

He became pastor of St. Lawrence Roman Catholic Church in Thompson in 1988 and remained until 2001.   

Les Oblats de Marie Immaculée, or the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate (OMI), established their first mission in the present day Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Keewatin-Le Pas at Ile-À-la-Crosse, now known as Beauval, Saskatchewan, in 1860.

The archdiocese takes in takes in some 430,000 square kilometres and stretches across the northern parts of three province – Saskatchewan, Manitoba and a small portion of Northwestern Ontario. The farthest point west is La Loche, Saskatchewan, near the Alberta border. The farthest point north is Lac Brochet here in Manitoba and the farthest point east is Sandy Lake in Northwestern Ontario.

Eugene de Mazenod founded the Oblates order in Aix-en-Provence in the south of France. Pope Leo XII approved the new congregation on Feb. 17, 1826. De Mazenod served as Bishop of Marseille and was elected superior general of the Oblates. He was canonized a saint by St. Pope John Paul II on Dec. 3, 1995.

He retired from St. Lawrence in September 2001 at the age of 76. There was a large community celebration to mark the occasion nine months later in June 2002 at St. Joseph’s Ukrainian Catholic Hall, across the road from St. Lawrence. Entertainment was provided by the choir, volunteers who performed a skit, and the late Sister Andrea Dumont, and her square dance troupe.

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

 

 

Remembering Sister Andrea

Sister Andrea Dumont, the longest-serving religious in Thompson by far when she retired back to Ontario in mid-June to live with other members of her order in a residence in Toronto, at the insistence of her general superior, has died at the age of 86.

Originally from St. Catharines, Ontario. and a member of the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Toronto, Sister Andrea arrived in Thompson in 1991 and spent 29 years working here.

Her parents, William Dumont and Orienne Gauthier, were from Quebec.

Sister Andrea graduated as a registered nurse from St. Joseph’s Hospital School of Nursing in Toronto in 1955. She worked as a nurse in Windsor and then at the emergency department and in the nursing service office at St. Joseph’s Hospital before seeing a notice from the sisters seeking volunteers for some missionary work, Thompson Citizen editor Ian Graham wrote May 28 in a nice piece on her impending retirement (https://www.thompsoncitizen.net/news/thompson/after-29-years-in-thompson-sister-andrea-dumont-returning-to-toronto-1.24143006).

Sister Andrea entered the Sisters of St. Joseph of Toronto in February 1956, and received the habit in August 1956. She made her final profession in August 1961 and celebrated her diamond jubilee in June 2016.

Sister Andrea spent 14 years in Guatemala until the mission closed and after returning to Canada lived in Grand Rapids, Easterville and Thompson, where the main focus of her work was in adult education, which included training lay presiders for times when there is no priest available, organizing and instructing in the various ministries, sacramental preparation and RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults). There are no parochial Catholic schools in the area. As well as Guatemala, the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Toronto at one time also had foreign missions in Hong Kong, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Nicaragua, Honduras and Haiti. They continue to serve in Honduras and Haiti.

In April 2015, she received the St. Joseph Award, the highest honour Catholic Missions in Canada bestows for outstanding missionary work. The Catholic Missions in Canada was founded in 1908 as The Catholic Church Extension Society of Canada. The organization comes to the aid of isolated missions across the country where a lack of resources makes it impossible to maintain a Catholic presence without outside financial help.

Sister Andrea’s order also included some of the same sisters – a fact I only learned here in Thompson years later – that taught some of my high school classes from September 1971 to June 1976, when Sister Conrad Lauber was principal, and Sister Dorothy Schweitzer taught me several English and math classes  at Oshawa Catholic High School (now Monsignor Paul Dwyer Catholic High School). Both Sister Conrad and Sister Dorothy, so it turned out, happened to be good friends of Sister Andrea.

About 10 years ago, I asked Father Eugene Whyte, then pastor of St. Lawrence Church here in Thompson, and a member of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, about the prospects of a particular sister soon retiring. Without missing a beat, Father Eugene’s deadpan reply was, “Nuns don’t really retire, John. Ever.”

I wasn’t quite sure then that was quite literally true, but pretty darn close, I thought as I caught Father Eugene’s drift.

For my Catholic friends, it will come as no surprise for me to say there are at least two other truths in addition to non-retirement about Catholic nuns, always worth remembering: you don’t want to incur their wrath and you can never say “no” to a request from a sister, which usually is stated more in the form of a direction assuming compliance, than an actual question. Such, of course, was the case in my relationship with Sister Andrea.

In November 2010, I had Ryan Flanagan, a new reporter at the Thompson Citizen, which I was editing at the time, write a story on charitable organizations who sold homemade goodies at community events as fundraisers for their many good works. One of his stops that crisp fall Saturday morning was the St. Lawrence Pastoral Centre, where Sister Andrea and other volunteers were making their famous perogies for the upcoming Catholic Women’s League (CWL) Annual Christmas craft sale and raffle, scheduled to be held a few short weeks at St.. Lawrence Parish Hall, and the premier fundraising event of the year for the CWL.

Sure enough, Ryan, would wind up writing, “Among the guidelines are that the event must be registered with Public Health at least 14 working days before it begins, that the event operator must maintain a list of all vendors including contact information, and that any food qualifying as ‘potentially hazardous’ must be prepared and packaged in an approved establishment. Foods qualifying as ‘potentially hazardous’ include antipasto, cabbage rolls, chocolate (unless it has been heated as an ingredient in, for example, chocolate chip cookies), coleslaw, pastries filled with cream or custard, dairy products, fish, garlic spreads, homemade soups, meat or meat products, perogies, pickled eggs, pumpkin pie or any pie with meringue, salsa, ungraded eggs, and whipped butter. None of these foods can be sold unless they were prepared in a facility that has been approved by the province as a food handling establishment” (https://www.thompsoncitizen.net/news/thompson/strict-public-health-rules-in-place-for-volunteer-groups-food-and-bake-sales-1.1368718).

I found myself in Sister Andrea’s “if-looks-could-kill” deep freeze for several months. The gradual thaw came a few months later, as Father Eugene made a point of being extra nice to me (no small feat perhaps, as Father Eugene’s opinion of the media wasn’t so very removed from Sister Andrea’s in general, as I recall, from our many conversations) when Sister Andrea and I were sharing the same space, such as reaching extra far to shake my hand when he was processing at the beginning of mass and I was standing near the end of a pew, perhaps suggesting to Sister Andrea that despite apparent evidence to the contrary, I might not be quite beyond redemption.

Sister Andrea, of course, forgave me in time, which is what sisters do. Within a couple of years she was swapping movie lists with Jeanette and I.

She may have also had the last laugh, as it were, a few years later, although she was also may have just been being practical and solving a problem on the fly on short notice. Or a little of both maybe.

In May 2013, The Christophers, a non-profit organization founded in 1945 by Maryknoll Father James Keller, were in Thompson to offer a Christopher leadership course. The ancient Chinese proverb – “it’s better to light one candle than to curse the darkness” – guides the organization’s programs. The name of the group is derived from the Greek word “christophoros,” which means “Christ-bearer.”

The Christopher leadership courses teaches participants speaking skills to organize ideas an think on their feet; conquer shyness or fear of public-speaking; speak with conviction and “captivate” their audience; and effectively express themselves in business, socially, in the community and in the larger world.

The New York City-based Christophers emerged in the wake of the Second World War, with the rapid dawn soon after of the Cold War, as periodic historical suspicions of Roman Catholic loyalties in the United States re-emerged in the public conspicuousness. In response, a number of Roman Catholics began to find new ways of commending the Church to the public, including the new medium of television. The most popular and influential television presentation was The Christophers, a weekly half-hour program aired on ABC beginning in 1945. The Christophers, as Keller, from Oakland, California envisioned it, would have no formal organization, no memberships, and no dues. “The reason for this somewhat unusual formula,” he explained, “was to focus attention on personal responsibility.”

The wrap-up to the Thompson Christopher leadership course seven years ago was to be held on Saturday, May 4, and was to feature a keynote speech from Archbishop Sylvain Lavoie, who had just recently become the most recent archbishop emeritus of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Keewatin-Le Pas.  However, plans changed at the last minute, and His Grace was unable to keep the speaking engagement.

Sister Andrea telephoned me around mid-afternoon on Friday, May 3 in my office at the paper. And that was how I came to fill in with less than 24 hours notice for the archbishop – a sad disappointment I’m sure to unsuspecting participants – as the keynote speaker for the wrap-up session.

I’m not sure, but I could swear I saw a grin on Sister Andrea’s face, as I mercifully finished up, and heard from somewhere above me a good-natured celestial “got you.”

The last time I wrote about Sister Andrea until today was in an email I sent to Thompson Mayor Colleen Smook May 30:

“I was thinking about the departure of Sister Andrea next month back to Toronto, after being recalled at the age of 86, after 29 years in Thompson  by her religious order, the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Toronto, and it occurred to me that I could think of no one any worthier to receive a Key to the City of Thompson than Sister Andrea. I also know it is an infrequently bestowed honour, but having known several of the previous recipients over the last decade – Dr. Alan Rich, when he departed for Swan River in 2014, and provincial court Judge Murray Thompson, and his wife, Linda Webstob, when they moved to Winnipeg the same year – left me thinking  Sister Andrea would be in good company with those keyholders of high character and purpose, and vice versa.”

I don’t know if the City of Thompson has ever awarded a Key to the City posthumously, but I think, if not, Sister Andrea would still be a good candidate for one, after touching so many lives, Catholic and non-Catholic, during her 29 years of service in Thompson, Manitoba.

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

Time After Time: The second hand unwinds in Northern Manitoba

Only took one book out June 16 from the University College of the North’s (UCN) Wellington & Madeleine Spence Memorial Library on the Thompson campus, as it has been officially named since Aug. 25,  and the place where I work for UCN, as I began my annual summer leave of absence – Don Gillmor’s novel Long Change, which was published last August.

Gillmor tells the story of Ritt Devlin, a Texan-turned-Canadian-turned-international oilman.  Given that Long Change is due back Sept. 6, as am I, there’s nothing like a  looming summer term loan deadline, I’ve found, to focus the mind. Sort of a derivation on Samuel Johnson’s famous quote, “When a man knows he is to be hanged … it concentrates his mind wonderfully” in reference to Anglican clergyman William Dodd, who was executed by hanging at England’s Tyburn Prison on June 27, 1777.

Long Change is a fine read so far. One of the early chapters, called “Mackenzie River, Northwest Territories, August, 1959” about a canoe trip up the river to the Mackenzie Delta, took me back to 2002 and Inuvik.

A year before Inuvik, I well I remember arriving in Yellowknife – and seeing rock outcroppings everywhere. I had never seen a place with so little grass that was so beautiful. Having moved from Halifax only a couple of weeks after being offered the job, I knew almost nothing about Canada’s North, save for a few Pierre Berton and Farley Mowat books I had read years before. So I was like a sponge soaking it all in. I’d come home from work that first October in 2001 to my apartment on the shores of Great Slave Lake, and read more and more of  Bern Will Brown’s Arctic Journal and  Arctic Journal II (a colleague had wisely recommended Brown’s writing as a good introduction to the Northwest Territories).

Brown, who died at his Sahtu home at the age of 94 in Colville Lake, a Hareskin Dene community, called Kiahba Mi Tuwe in Dene, in July 2014, over the course of his long life was a priest, a bush pilot, a dog musher, a painter, a journalist and a storyteller. He was born in Rochester, New York in 1920 and came to the Northwest Territories in 1948 as a priest with the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate. He built our Lady of the Snows log Roman Catholic Church in Colville Lake, which is 745 air kilometres northwest of Yellowknife, and ministered to a number of other remote First Nations communities in the Northwest Territories,  northern Alberta and Saskatchewan, often travelling by dog team. He was laicized from the priesthood in 1971 and married Margaret Steen from Tuktoyaktuk.

After Brown left the priesthood, he became a bush pilot. Along with Margaret, they established Colville Lake Lodge, a hunting and fishing resort.

Gillmor’s novel Long Change, set between 1951 and 2014, has some overlap in time and place with the world of the real life Brown. The fictional Ritt Devlin may have got his start on the oil rigs of West Texas at the tender age of 15, but a few years later he will be working in the oilfields around Leduc, Alberta, and once there looking ever further north to the geological oil and gas bounty of the Mackenzie River, Mackenzie Valley and Mackenzie Delta,  North of 6o in the Northwest Territories.

During my time living in the Northwest Territories from July 2001 to October 2003, diamonds were the new play in the Western Arctic and the long-delayed  $16.2-billion proposed 1,196-kilometre natural gas pipeline system, known as the Mackenzie Gas Project, a partnership consortium that currently consists of Imperial Oil, the Aboriginal Pipeline Group (APG), ConocoPhillips Canada, Shell Canada and Exxon Mobil Corporation: a long-deferred dream for many; a nightmare for others.  In 1974, Justice Tom Berger, a Supreme Court of British Columbia trial division judge, began hearings for what would become the famous Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry. After travelling to more than 30 communities across the territory, Berger recommended a 10-year moratorium on the Mackenzie Valley part of the project – until land claims were settled and environmental protections were in place – and a complete halt to any pipeline building across the northern Yukon.

While Gillmor’s protagonist is an oilman, the game in the oil patch isn’t so very different than it is for any of us who earn our livelihood’s in any of the assorted and sundry natural resources extraction towns that dot the seemingly never-ending landscape of Canada’s North. I well remember July 12, 2001, flying north on First Air from Edmonton to Yellowknife for the first time, looking down at the countless lakes and tundra with the unwilling-to-set midnight sun still above the western horizon when Yellowknife finally appeared below after 11 p.m. that Arctic Summer Thursday night.

While we may not work directly in the oil patch, or underground in a gold or nickel mine, our jobs – be it in journalism, social services, healthcare, fast food, hotel hospitality, retail, you name it – exist, for the most part, because of those who do work pulling oil or hauling gold or nickel out of the ground. That’s why we’re here. That’s the raison d’etre for Fort McMurray, Yellowknife and Thompson, Manitoba’s existence. I have spent 11 of the last 16 years since the millennium living in mining towns. I’ve been down to the 4,200-level at Vale’s Birchtree Mine and up to the top in the hoistroom in Thompson and rode a man-car along the underground rail-track to the bottom of Con Mine in Yellowknife – the first gold mine to go into production in the Northwest Territories in 1938 – during its last days in 2003.

But take away the oil, gold and nickel and there’s not much reason for these towns to exist, all mindless happy talk from politicians, newspaper publishers and other spin doctors aside.

It is a lesson being re-learned again, painfully, as history repeats itself for those with no memory apparently, in Northern Manitoba this summer.

On Aug. 22, Tolko Industries said they were going to pull the plug on their heavy-duty kraft paper and lumber mill in The Pas after 19 years.

Vernon, British Columbia-based Tolko, the largest employer in The Pas, will close the Northern Manitoba mill Dec. 2, leaving all 332 employees unemployed.

The mill in The Pas has been a money-loser for years. It was conceived by the Progressive Conservative provincial government of premier Duff Roblin in 1966. The Tories struck a deal with Austrian businessman Alexander Kasser to create Churchill Forest Industries, the company that built the mill in 1966. With little oversight bout $93 million flowed from the Province of Manitoba into Churchill Forest Industries.

The Manitoba government pursued Kasser in an attempt to recoup around $30 million that he had taken from the company, but eventually settled in 1983, with Kasser pleading guilty to theft over $200 and paying $1 million in fines. The province dropped 34 related charges.

Then NDP premier Ed Schreyer called the affair the “blackest moment in Manitoba’s economic history.”

Churchill Forest Industries was the subject of a commission of inquiry that found a number of cabinet ministers, civil servants, lawyers and economic consultants failed to recognize and stop Kasser’s fraud.

In response to the fraud investigation, Manitoba took over the mill in 1973.

It was then managed by Manfor, a provincial Crown corporation,  from 1973 to 1988. During this time, Manfor lost $300 million.

Tolko’s predecessor, Repap Enterprises, bought the facility in 1989 for $132 million. Less than 10 years later, it sold the mill to Tolko for $47 million.

In 2006, Tolko threatened to close. Premier Gary Doer’s NDP government responded by providing millions in financial stabilization aid to help keep the mill running.

Four years later in 2010, when the mill was facing slumping demand for Canadian lumber in the United States, the Harper Conservative government gave Tolko Industries $2.26 million in federal monies to improve its energy efficiency under the pulp and paper green transformation program. Six years after that, Tolko pulled the plug.

Less than a month before Tolko pulled the plug on its mill in The Pas, OmniTRAX, the Denver-based short line railroad, which owns the Port of Churchill, announced on July 25 it would be laying off or not re-hiring about 90 port workers, as it was cancelling the 2016 grain shipping season. 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 last year, 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. OmniTRAX accepted a letter of intent last December from Mathias Colomb First Nation, Tataskweyak Cree Nation and the War Lake First Nation to buy its rail assets in Manitoba, along with the Port of Churchill, but the deal has not been completed to date, and its future looks murky to non-existent.

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