Another anniversary in the 33-year-old cold case slaying of Kerrie Ann Brown

Another year has come and gone in the Oct. 16, 1986 slaying of 15-year-old Kerrie Ann Brown, Thompson’s oldest unsolved murder case, which many 33 years later still believe is surrounded be a conspiracy of silence. But it was a year that saw the most comprehensive media ever done on the case, primarily by David Ridgen, a documentarian filmmaker whose original true-crime podcast “Someone Knows Something” spent season five looking at the Brown case. “Someone Knows Something” examines unsolved cases of missing or murdered individuals, and it is produced by CBC Radio One.

Ridgen’s earlier work has been credited with reopening other cold or historical cases, which have led to arrests and convictions (Mississippi Cold Case, Confession to Murder and A Garden of Tears).  In August, Ridgen noted he was working on season six, as well “as working on a new season five episode.”

“Someone Knows Something” is CBC’s most-downloaded original title, the network said Aug. 15. In its first-ever development slate of podcast-to-television series, the public broadcaster plans to adapt five popular, original CBC Podcasts, including “Someone Knows Something” with First Generation Films, a Toronto-based multi-media production company founded by Canadian producer Christina Piovesan, for the screen as a TV dramatic series.

Ridgen’s work last year on the Brown case featured a fascinating at-length interview with a key 1987 preliminary hearing Crown witness, Sean Simmans, living in Melfort, Saskatchewan at the time of the interview, as well as shining a spotlight on the early police investigative work done in 1986 by then Corp. Dennis Heald, and Const. John Tost, the two original lead investigators from the Thompson RCMP detachment, and Marnie Schaefer, a civilian RCMP telecom operator in Thompson at the time of the murder. Ridgen also took the investigation closer to home, talking to Ian Brown, Kerrie’s older half-brother, on a trip to Selkirk with their brother, Trevor Brown (https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1362084931649)  about his whereabouts the night Kerrie disappeared. Trevor was a year older than Kerrie.

Ridgen was also contacted by a woman in Thompson who said she remembers hearing her former boyfriend in Nelson House, Fred Spence, making reference to a white girl getting killed. Fred Spence has denied any involvement in Brown’s murder.

Schaefer, the former RCMP telecommunications operator, said she was working the night shift when the phone rang with an unknown caller around 2 a.m.

“He had said that he had just killed someone,” Schaefer recalled. “Seemed to be terrified that I was recording the conversation that we were having,” she told Ridgen.

The call came two hours after Kerrie Ann Brown vanished from the house party on Thursday, Oct. 16, 1986 – and almost 14 hours before she was reported missing.

That call may or may not have been followed up on, depending upon which RCMP officer you believe listening to “Someone Knows Something.”

Brown was slain sometime after attending a party at Doug Krokosz’s residence on Trout Avenue in Westwood on Thursday night Oct. 16, 1986.  Most of those in attendance at the Trout Avenue party were from ages 14 to 17. The party was held on a Thursday night because there was no school the next day for Kerrie and the others at R.D. Parker Collegiate. A 12-year-resident of Thompson at the time of her death in 1986, Kerrie’s family came to Thompson from Burk’s Falls, Ontario.  A Grade 10 student at R.D. Parker Collegiate, she had previously attended Juniper and Eastwood elementary schools. Her mom and dad, Ann and Jim Brown, had moved to Thompson like many so Jim could work in the mine at Inco, while Ann worked at Thompson General Hospital as a medical transcriptionist. Ann Brown died of cancer 15 years after Kerrie’s murder.

Kerrie was to walk home from the Trout Avenue residence that night with Nicole Zahorodny, who was the last person to see Kerrie at the party the night that she disappeared, but Zahorodny went back into the party for a few minutes. Krokosz, a year older than Kerrie, recalled for Ridgen trying to convince Kerrie to wait for Nicole instead of walking home alone. Kerrie asked Krokosz to find Nicole for her, he said, which he did while Kerrie waited at the stairs. When he returned some time later, Kerrie was gone, after stepping outside apparently to wait. When Zahorodny returned, Kerrie was gone. Several witnesses reported Kerrie was seen getting into a van between 10:30 p.m. and 11 p.m. Others believe she took a taxi to Brandon Crescent just before midnight. Or she may have walked somewhere from the party.

Two days after the party, Donna Covic, and another woman from the riding stable, discovered Kerrie’s nude body in a wooded area close to the hydro line between the horse stable and the golf course access roads. Her body was found on Saturday, Oct. 18, 1986, around 2 p.m. Brown had been sexually assaulted and severely beaten, bludgeoned repeatedly about the face and head causing massive injuries. A large, bloodstained stick was found at the scene.

A vehicle got stuck in the mud there and a blue and red air mattress and a black rubber floor mat were used to try and gain traction and extricate the vehicle, RCMP said publicly in 1996. Two eyewitnesses had spotted a white van and an older model mid-60s green sedan-type car at the scene just hours after Brown, who had been wearing a Pittsburgh Penguins hockey jacket earlier in the evening, disappeared from the party. Crime scene DNA samples gathered in 1986 came from at least two different men RCMP said in 1996, adding they have always believed more than person was involved in the killing.

In 2012, the RCMP began conducting a full review of Kerrie Ann Brown’s murder investigation. They rehired a retired homicide investigator, Sgt. Bert Clarke, who retired in 2009 as the commander-in-charge of the RCMP’s homicide unit in Manitoba, to assist in the review of the investigation, along with a second rehired former homicide investigator.

The two retired homicide investigators did not work on the Brown murder originally, although they were aware of it, but were brought into assist the historical case unit, which is the official RCMP name for Manitoba’s cold case squad, by bringing their expertise to the complex case by taking a fresh look at it. A daunting task given there were more than 2,000 subjects recorded and documented in the file.

DNA samples searching for suspect matches have been taken, most voluntarily, some pursuant to court orders, from more than 100 people across Canada in the decades since the crime. Administrative personnel were assigned to the case to “digitize” the investigation for present and future purposes.

The Brown cold case is the largest unsolved homicide investigation (more than three dozen banker boxes of investigative file material) that the RCMP have in Manitoba.

A remarkable letter to the editor of the Thompson Citizen appeared in the newspaper a few days after Kerrie Ann Brown’s murder. Written anonymously and signed with the nom de plume, “From her friends who want justice,” the author says in the singular that she is a 14-year-old girl and was a “good friend of Kerrie Brown.” She goes onto write – and remember, this appeared in print, published as a letter to the editor: “I have also heard that their (sic) was another murder on Wednesday [Oct. 15, 1986] and if that is true, how come we weren’t warned. I can understand trying to keep the whole thing quiet, but not warning the public just doesn’t seem right to me.” The same woman, age 20, apparently wrote a second letter to the editor six years later, signed again anonymously, but this time with a slight variation and the nom de plume being, “Her friends who believe in justice. ”

Shortly after Kerrie Ann Brown’s murder, Krokosz, Zahorodny, Brian Lundmark, now a Thompson city councillor, Vince Nowlin, who served as a trustee for School District of Mystery Lake school board between 2010 and 2014, Craig Jordan, Guido Oliveira, also a trustee, who who now chairs the finance, property and personnel committees of the School District of Mystery Lake, Kathy McGee and Janet McGee, were among those who formed an ad hoc group called “Youth for Tomorrow,” and began to raise money to create the Kerrie Brown Memorial Scholarship.

It was Brian Lundmark and Geraldine Hornan who came to the Brown residence about an hour after Kerrie’s body was discovered and told Trevor the news that a body had been discovered.

Ridgen also learned in the course of his investigation that there is no transcript of the 1987 preliminary hearing for a man charged with Kerrie Brown’s murder – the charges were dismissed by the judge due to lack of evidence.

Patrick Sumner, the only suspect ever charged to date in connection with the case, still lives in Thompson. His family moved here in 1968. He was 22 when he was charged in 1986 days after the crime with first-degree murder in connection with Brown’s murder in a case that was largely circumstantial. There were about 120 people in the courtroom for Sumner’s arraignment in 1986, while another 60 or so waited outside.

Sumner was freed four months later after being discharged by provincial court Judge Charles Newcombe without being committed to trial after a three-day preliminary hearing ended Feb. 20, 1987. Crown attorney Dale Perezowski prosecuted the case at the preliminary hearing. Richard Wolson, a Winnipeg criminal lawyer, recognized as one of the best in the country, represented Sumner. Newcombe ruled there wasn’t admissible evidence upon which a reasonable jury properly instructed could return a verdict of guilty, which is the legal test in Canadian law for committal to trial. Then NDP Manitoba attorney general Roland Penner did not exercise his discretion to issue a rare preferred indictment, which would have sent the case directly to trial, although his department considered that option. Ridgen also learned that the Brown family can’t obtain a new copy of her autopsy report to replace the one they lost. “The RCMP have told the chief medical examiner not to give it to us,” Trevor Brown said last year.

Carlton Jackson and Robert Delaronde were also looked at as persons of interest by Ridgen.

Jackson was questioned following Kerrie’s disappearance, according to her brother Trevor and father Jim, and afterwards came to their house to tell Jim that he had nothing to do with her killing. Delaronde was implicated after the fact, mainly due to the fact that he had a somewhat violent history and had hanged himself in 1992, leading people to speculate that he may have been involved, though he was also diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

Ridgen was told that Delaronde’s parents had not consented to his DNA being taken because they were worried that police would try to pin the crime on him after Sumner’s experience. Delaronde’s former girlfriend Heather McIvor also said that she had not let police take DNA from the child she had with Delaronde when police begin re-investigating the case more thoroughly several year’s after Delaronde’s death.

McIvor said Delaronde had been having a party on the night of Kerrie’s disappearance and that he had noticed Jackson and another man in attendance had left for a long time before returning.  Ridgen was told that Jackson may not have been able to remember what happened back then after receiving a blow to the head in a beating, but Delaronde’s sister told him that she had been recognized by Jackson in Winnipeg and that she didn’t notice anything off about him.

Trevor Brown first contacted David Ridgen to see if he would be interested in investigating the case in the spring of 2017, CBC says.

Ridgen, who first became involved in investigating unsolved crimes while working on a documentary about civil rights workers killed in Mississippi in 1964 by the Ku Klux Klan, said he was aware of the case before Brown reached out to him, but when he was contacted it hadn’t moved from the pile of possible Canadian crimes to investigate onto his active investigation subjects.

In early January, “Snow Day Podcast,” a local society and culture podcast, featuring Bruce Krentz, Les Hansen, George Alvarez, and special guest, Guy Hansen, which has been broadcast since early 2017, took a look at the case (https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-iiy7w-a4270a?fbclid=IwAR1DApTH4ZrfpVfx_qg2zBmlOWNQ3xbO2hx8LHcAgtt-aJfSfYmDyosiJj0#.XEdxdR4XmdM.facebook), offering an insightful discussion of the mindset, worldview, class issues, and historical issues at play among Kerrie Ann Brown’s high school peers in October 1986. It no doubt broke some previous taboos regarding what was and was not discussed around the kitchen table, and why or why not, in Thompson that long-ago fall.

Darren Lovell from Wimborne Minster, a market town in East Dorset in southwest England, has recently  written a song as a reflection about the unsolved murder of 15-year-old Kerrie Brown. You can listen to it at: https://soundcloud.com/darrenwlovell/kerrie-brown?fbclid=IwAR3Q95S43q8THHTi2Zi3mRPHjhYdYAy8NE-n5OvwlPWWGGq1EOJKdqK8PlI

Lovell says he was inspired by season five of “Someone Knows Something.”

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Demagoguery and demonization pass for discourse and civility vanishes from the public stage

Consider the headlines for Sunday, July 17, 2016: CBS News is reporting in a July 16 its headline “W.Va. lawmaker: Hillary Clinton should be ‘hung’ on National Mall.” The story goes onto say, “A member of the West Virginia House of Delegates is causing a stir after tweeting that Hillary Clinton should be ‘hung on the Mall in Washington, DC.’

“CBS affiliate WOWK-TV reports that Michael Folk, a Republican legislator who is also a United Airlines pilot, posted a tweet Friday night saying: ‘Hillary Clinton, you should be tried for treason, murder, and crimes against the US Constitution… then hung on the Mall in Washington, DC.’”

Meanwhile, Charles P. Pierce has a July 14 piece in Esquire magazine, headlined, “This Isn’t Funny Anymore. American Democracy Is at Stake.” The subhead reads: “Anyone who supports Donald Trump is a traitor to the American idea.” Pierce writes at the top of the story that not “until Wednesday did we hear clearly the echoes of shiny black boots on German cobblestones.”

Really?

Is this the best we can do in terms of civics and public discourse in 21^st century America? Call anyone we disagree with a traitor and perhaps for extra outrage allude to Hitlerism and Nazism? Is demagoguery the only currency we traffic in for what passes as ideas?

We stand at a dangerous international moment in history when an intersection of events conspire to resurrect Fascism on a scale not seen since the 1930s.

But the American republic can survive this difficult historical moment. Right-wing populism is not centralized authoritarian Fascism.

If Donald Trump wins the presidency in November, the world won’t end. I may not much like a Trump presidency, but the Supreme Court and Congress will not be dissolved [although Trump will probably make several nominations for upcoming vacancies on the bench that will make me wish the court had been dissolved. But that’s OK; Republican life appointments to the highest court in the United States often prove over time to be stubbornly independent, demonstrating you couldn’t have asked more from a Democratic appointee. It’s kinda complicated.]

Trump’s also unlikely to push the hot-war nuclear button, should he find himself ensconced in the Oval Office next January.  Want to know what was really dangerous? The dance Democratic President John F. Kennedy, the living Legend of King Arthur and Camelot, had with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. That was the almost the end of the world as you knew it. Right then and there. Not Donald Trump hyperbole.

There are plenty of examples in recent American history before where the crème de la crème cluck their tongues in displeasure at the electoral wisdom of the hoi polloi [think Brexit for the current British equivalent.] So what? Minnesota didn’t wind up seceding to Northwestern Ontario and amalgamating Duluth with Kenora when pro wrestler Jesse Ventura was elected and served as governor of Minnesota from January 1999 to January 2003.

California survived when Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Austrian-born American professional bodybuilder and movie actor wound up getting himself elected to serve two terms as governor of California from November 2003 until January 2011.

And speaking of California, an earlier Republican governor, Ronald Reagan, also a movie actor, went on from the statehouse to the White House, elected to terms who served two terms as president between January 1981 and January 1988. Each time – when Reagan, Ventura and Schwarzenegger were elected – Henny Penny cried out the sky was going to fall. It didn’t.

I was living in Somerville, Massachusetts in November 1980 when Ronald Reagan was elected president.

I had been working as supervisor for Cambridge Survey Research where I oversaw telephone call center employees for Democratic National Committee (DNC) pollster Pat Caddell’s firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts during the 1980 Jimmy Carter-Ronald Reagan presidential election campaign.

We lost the election. Big time. I well remember going to work a few days after, late in the afternoon, riding above ground aboard a subway car on the Red Line “T.” The November sky was a foreboding steel-gray, with leaves all fallen now from the trees. And there it was, as we headed into Harvard Yard, giant spray –painted graffiti on a cenotaph proclaiming “Ray-Gun” had been elected.

As it turned out, Reagan did have a fondness for his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), nicknamed Star Wars. But the dreamed-for global missile shield didn’t come to fruition. Instead, Reagan, along with Mikhail Gorbachev, general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, managed to end the Cold War with perestroika [restructuring] and glasnost [openness] becoming part of the everyday vocabulary of Americans by the late 1980s, rolling from their tongues as if they had been saying the two Russian words forever.

Demagoguery, while deeply disappointing as it is being manifested by Trump and his supporters, is neither new nor fatal to American politics. It is also not surprising when people feel that politics is a rigged game they can’t possible win at under the normal rules of the political elites.

As I wrote earlier this year, “In an age-before-Trump, you need only to look back to the 1930s and the Canadian-born “Radio Priest” Father Charles Coughlin, from Hamilton, Ontario, later based at Royal Oak, Michigan in the Archdiocese of Detroit, and the anti-Communist and equally anti-Semitic Christian Front he would be the inspiration for in November 1938.” It was the age of demagoguery in American politics. And it was the year 1938.

Although he didn’t personally belong to the organization, and denied that he was anti-Semitic. Historical opinion is divided on whether, or to what extent, Coughlin was anti-Semitic, but it is an uncontested fact his weekly magazine Social Justice reprinted in weekly installments in 1938 the fraudulent and notoriously anti-Semitic text, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Russian forgery first published in 1903 that purports to expose a Jewish conspiracy to seize control of the world.

Coughlin’s radio show was phenomenally popular. His office received up to 80,000 letters per week from listeners at its peak in the early to mid-1930s. By 1934, Coughlin was the most prominent Roman Catholic speaker on political and financial issues in the United States, with a far broader base of popular support than any bishop or cardinal at the time, with a radio audience that reached tens of millions of people every week. Historian Alan Brinkley wrote in his 1982 book Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression that by 1934 Coughlin  was receiving more than 10,000 letters every day” and that “his clerical staff at times numbered more than a hundred.”  Coughlin foreshadowed modern talk radio and televangelism.

In addition to his anti-Communist stance, and leaving himself open rightly or wrongly to accusations of antisemitism, Coughlin wasn’t the only clergyman to at least also flirt and even dance at times with Spanish fascism, German National Socialism and demagoguery in the United States in the late 1930s. American Protestant clergyman Frank Buchman founded Moral Re-Armament (MRA) in 1938, as an international moral and spiritual movement with Europe rearming militarily on the brink of the Second World War. “The crisis is fundamentally a moral one,” he said. “The nations must rearm morally,” Buchman said in London on May 29, 1938. “Moral recovery is essentially the forerunner of economic recovery. Moral recovery creates not crisis but confidence and unity in every phase of life.”

Buchman had earlier also founded the Oxford Group, in some important ways the predecessor to Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). Both the Oxford Group and Moral Re-Armament, under Buchman’s leadership, faced similar charges to what Coughlin did at times; and again, like in the case of Coughlin, historical opinion is divided, but on the evidence it is clear the German Nazi leadership was wary of Buchman and denounced Moral Re-Armament, which went onto do significant post-war reconstruction work in West Germany in the late 1940s, after the Second World War ended.

Only historical amnesia prevents us from remembering 1938. We barely know their names today, yet Coughlin had tens of millions of radio listeners in the United States, while Buchman influenced political elites worldwide.

And the legacy of Moral Re-Armament, close to home here in Northern Manitoba, is not insignificant. Just largely invisible.

Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Keewatin-Le Pas Archbishop emeritus Sylvain Lavoie, whose archdiocese includes Thompson, toured during university for seven months with “Up with People,” founded by American J. Blanton Belk in 1965, as a conservative counterweight to attract young people during the turbulent Sixties.

Belk was expected to be the heir apparent to Peter D. Howard, a British journalist, who succeeded Buchman as leader of Moral Re-Armament in 1961, but Belk broke away to incorporate Up With People as a non-profit at the encouragement of then Republican U.S. president Dwight Eisenhower, who urged Belk to distance himself from Moral Re-Armament.

And Winnipeg-born Bob Lowery, for years the Winnipeg Free Press’ Thompson-based correspondent, in a life before journalism and living in Northern Manitoba, and immediately after the Second World War ended in 1945, had joined the Moral Re-Armament crusade to help rebuild war-torn Germany, staying there for more than 20 years until 1969.

During the Second World War he had served with the Royal Canadian Voluntary Reserve. Lowery had earned a philosophy undergraduate degree from the University of Manitoba in 1937.

Robert Newton Lowery was inducted by then governor general Roméo LeBlanc as a Member of the Order of Canada in 1996. In the citation accompanying the honour, LeBlanc noted Lowery was “known for his love of the North and has demonstrated genuine concern for the residents of northern Manitoba, working to redress social, economic and cultural differences through his involvement in all aspects of community life.”

In 1997 he was recognized with a Silver Eagle Outstanding Citizen Award from the Indigenous Women’s Collective of Manitoba. A park is also named after him here in Thompson.

He had moved to northern Manitoba in 1969, the same year he left Moral Re-Armament in West Germany, and become a correspondent for the Winnipeg Free Press, based here in Thompson.

In 1982 Lowery published the book The Unbeatable Breed: People and Events of Northern Manitoba in collaboration with photographer Murray McKenzie.

Lowery retired in 1997. He died at Norway House on Dec. 17, 2000.

As Mitchell Kalpakgian noted in a July 6 essay headlined “Fanatical Ideas and Reasonable Convictions” in Crisis Magazine, a self-described “voice for the faithful Catholic laity” published in Manchester, New Hampshire, “A fanatic is a person obsessed with one idea, a monomaniac ruled by one dominant compulsion that governs all his thoughts and actions. He is enslaved by one predominant passion that dictates all his motives and decisions.”

While their ideas might differ, it is that fanaticism not Fascism that rules this American historical moment.

Quoting G.K. Chesterton, the Catholic convert and apologist, Kalpakgian notes in a chapter entitled “The Maniac” from Orthodoxy, Chesterton explained that the fanatic’s thinking is too “rational” in the sense that he ‘overlooks many other considerations and ignores other evidence that surrounds him.

“The fanatic’s extreme mental concentration on one thing leads to madness at the expense of openness to larger universal truths that lead to wisdom … To think with rabid intensity on one subject consumes the mind to an unhealthy degree of concentration.

“It warps a person’s mind, making him pay undue attention to one matter and ignore objects of larger importance. The fanatic makes himself the center of the universe as only his passions count.”

Wrote Chesterton: “Are there no other stories in the world except yours, and are all men busy with your business?”

Kalpakgian writes that to be “haunted, obsessed, and enslaved by one rigid idea ultimately distorts a person’s humanity. A fanatic lives and dies for one thing only, whether it is revenge, money, work, pleasure, or fame. To think like a monomaniac eventually leads to thinking only with the head and without the conscience or the heart. Ironically, the overworking of the mind on one narrow subject breeds some degree of insanity.

“The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason,” writes Chesterton.

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Thompson, Manitoba: Home of local honey and potatoes

Potatoes come from Prince Edward Island or Idaho, right? True enough, they do. But they also come from the Thompson area in Northern Manitoba. Same for honey.

Little Farm potatoes, Yukon gold and reds, are available from Barry Little for $13 for a 35-pound box. You can call him at (204) 778-7723 or (204) 679-5349 to ask about them, while Eugene Larocque, on Manasan Drive, and his son, Steven, have their locally-produced Northern Gold Honey, with a one-kilogram jar costing $15 or a 500-gram jar for $8. They can be reached at (204) 307-6217 or by e-mail at: ngoldhoney@hotmail.com

Little, known for his agricultural projects at the old Thompson Zoo, is also an inventor and innovator, who along with Shawna Henderson, Bill Beardy and Donna Lundie, and residents of Fox Lake Cree Nation, built a hoop-style greenhouse in 2011, used to grow tomatoes and cucumbers for local residents on the reserve out of recycled trampoline frames. Little developed the innovative idea for the greenhouse based upon using the available resources in the community. In this case, he searched in different dumps for materials to build growing structures.  The total cost including hardware and lumber needed for the greenhouse was between $250 and $300.

Steven Larocque, who works for Manitoba Jobs and the Economy’s Apprenticeship Manitoba in North Centre Mall on Station Road, has been the Northern apprenticeship training co-ordinator for the last five years.

Food Matters Manitoba, a registered charity, which works to support local, affordable, nutritious food for Northern Manitobans in partnership with the province’s Northern Healthy Foods Initiative,  has long been working to get the word out when it comes to promoting locally-grown produce from North of the 53rd parallel.  The typical food item on a Manitoba table travels an estimated 2,200 kilometres before landing on the plate, the organizaton says. For a 100-day period from Sept. 1 until Dec. 9, 2007, 100 Mile Manitoba ran an “experiment in local eating … 100 people, 100 days, 100 hundred miles,” which attempted to get 100 Manitobans to eat food produced and processed within 100 miles of their kitchen table for the 100-day period.

During the Grow North Conference in Wabowden earlier this year, a kindergarten class from Cross Lake’s Mikisew School had the opportunity to see some baby chicks and learn the importance of where your food comes from and how to take care of it. Children from Cross Lake were able to participate in observing the chickens that were being raised for the Cross Lake Chicken project.
Mel Johnson School teamed up with the Bayline Regional Roundtable and co-hosted this year’s conference in Wabowden on May 22-23, with help from Frontier School Division, Food Matters Manitoba and Manitoba Agriculture, Food and Rural Development. There were 263 participants from Wabowden, Ilford, Cross Lake, Cormorant, Pikwitonei, Thicket Portage, Cranberry Portage, Thompson, South Indian Lake, Winnipeg, Ponton, Setting Lake, Manigotogan, Moose Lake, Nelson House, Sherridon, Fox Lake, York Landing, Norway House, and Creighton, Sask.

Northern Manitobans were winners in two of seven categories at Food Matters’ 2013 Golden Carrot Awards, presented at the Manitoba legislature in Winnipeg on World Food Day last Oct. 16. This year’s  awards in a couple of weeks are on the same Oct. 16 date (a Thursday this year) and location at 9:30 a.m. in the Rotunda Hall of the Manitoba Legislative Building at 450 Broadway in Winnipeg. The Golden Carrot Awards were started in 2006 to recognize work being done across Manitoba to ensure access to healthy food for residents across the province.

Last year, Andrea McIvor’s Grade 7-9 class at D.R. Hamilton School in Cross Lake were presented the Golden Carrot in the youth category after working together to raise 50 chickens for eating and 25 layer hens, watering, feeding and cleaning their litter before participating in the final slaughter and eating of the birds.

For several years, there was a Northern Harvest Forum, co-ordinated by Food Matters Manitoba, which took place in Thompson. The Oct. 22 and 23, 2009  “Northern Food from Northern Hands” forum included the Golden Carrot Awards.

The two-day annual event, which had taken place in Thompson since 2007, featured workshops that focused on hunting and gathering traditional foods; food preservation; gardening; grocery store and healthy cooking demonstrations.

Also, a World Food Day dinner took place at the Royal Canadian Legion Branch 244’s Centennial Hall. Before moving to the Legion in 2008, the inaugural event in 2007 was held at St. Joseph’s Ukrainian Catholic Hall on Juniper Drive.

A  two-day Northern Harvest Forum and World Food Day banquet, attended by Stan Struthers, then Manitoba’s NDP minister of agriculture, food and rural initiatives, was held Oct. 19-20, 2011 in The Pas.

In October 2007, the City of Thompson became the first municipality in the province to sign the Manitoba Food Charter during the two-day Northern Harvest Forum here.

Among the steps the city committed to seven  years ago by signing the charter was to play “a more active role as the regional hub in promoting lower food prices in outlying communities” and Nunavut; and becoming a “staging centre for food distribution” through Canada Post’s Food Mail Program; and “lobby for the regulation of milk prices throughout Manitoba.”

The seeds for the Manitoba Food Charter were planted in 1992 with a document known as “An Action Plan For Food Security For Manitobans” created by the Nutrition and Food Security Network of Manitoba.

A decade later, in 2001 and 2002, a coalition known as FoodSecure Manitoba brought Rod MacRae, food policy analyst and former co-ordinator of the Toronto Food Policy Council, to Winnipeg in April 2002 for a “strategic visioning session.” Areas for concrete action were developed and the group made its first priority to be a “food security” two-day conference in 2003.

The Manitoba Food Charter project built on energy created a year later with the National Food Security Assembly in Winnipeg. During March and February 2006 a steering committee of volunteers crisscrossed the province listening to more than 70 groups of people and food security participants involved in various aspects of the Manitoba food system.

Seventeen per cent of the input came from Northern Manitoba and on May 10, 2006, more than 80 individuals from across Manitoba gathered in Winnipeg to engage in a provincial conversation on food. Community gardeners, academics, farmers, politicians, local food retailers, government folks, food activists, community health workers, neighbourhood residents, university students, and educators gathered to set priorities for future action for the Manitoba Food Charter project.

Funding for the Manitoba Food Charter project also comes from the Public Health Agency of Canada; the Rural Secretariat of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada; and Heifer International of Little Rock, Ark., a non-profit organization whose goal is to help end world hunger and poverty through self-reliance and sustainability. An American Midwestern farmer named Dan West, who was a Church of the Brethren relief worker during the Spanish Civil War, started Heifer in 1944.

In its own words, the “Manitoba Food Charter emerged from Manitobans’ common vision for a just and sustainable food system.

The charter provides a vision and a set of principles that will guide and inform strategic planning, policy and program development and practice in mutual effort toward food security and community development.”

The charter analyzes the current food situation in the province this way in part: “Manitoba’s food system has both strengths and weaknesses. We have a significant and diverse agricultural sector and many Manitobans can access the food that they want. However, agricultural communities are challenged by an increasingly urban and globalized economy. Many Northern, inner city, and low-income citizens have difficulty accessing quality food and realizing their fundamental human right to adequate food. Rural, urban and Northern communities are disconnected. Not all of our food is necessarily nutritious, not all information about our food is complete or accurate; and much of our food comes long distances.”

The “vision” the charter notes for “a just and sustainable food system in Manitoba is rooted in healthy communities, ensures no one is hungry and that everyone has access to quality food.”

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