End of an era for Thompson, Manitoba as Nickel Belt News to cease publication April 22

By now it is no big surprise to read or hear that a newspaper is ceasing publication. That’s been old news now for a very long time. Still, when a newspaper’s birth very much mirrored the birth of a community, I think it is worth noting before it (the newspaper) passes into history forever.

Both W.H. “Duke” DeCoursey’s Thompson Citizen, first published on Friday, June 3, 1960, and Grant and Joan Wright’s Nickel Belt News, which came off the press for the first time less than a year later on March 24, 1961, have played an important, indeed vital, role, in chronicling Thompson for more than 60 years.

DeCoursey, who was based in Dauphin in 1960, through his Parkview Publishing Limited, formed in May 1960, first produced the Thompson Citizen from there. Grant Wright himself described DeCoursey as “the pioneer publisher in Thompson.” DeCoursey would become proprietor of the Northlander, Thompson’s first confectionary store, and located both the candy and newspaper operations originally in the basement of the Strand Theatre building.  Wright’s Nickel Belt News was first published out of The Northern Mail in The Pas, and later on Kelsey Bay here in Thompson, underneath what is now the front entrance of the City Centre Mall.

The two families merged ownership of their weeklies in 1967 as the Precambrian Press Ltd., with the Thompson Citizen becoming a paid circulation daily for a time, while the Nickel Belt News remained weekly but became free distribution. DeCoursey served as the first editor of the combined publications. The papers moved to their current Commercial Place home in 1970. DeCoursey had retired in 1969, selling his interest in the business to Joan Wright, who repaid him within 20 years, and moved to British Columbia.

Glacier Media Inc. of Vancouver bought both publications from the Wright family in January 2007.

The Northern Manitoba newspaper pioneering DeCoursey and Wright families had American roots. Duke DeCoursey was born in Montana. Grant Wright was born Flin Flon to Molly and Orson Wright, who were lawyers. Orson Wright was Crown Attorney for the Northern region. He was born in Dayton, Ohio. As well as serving as Crown Attorney, he was a prominent local Liberal Party member, who also served as mayor of Flin Flon between 1941 and 1943, and became a district coroner in 1942.

Grant Wright attended Brandon College and the University of Winnipeg where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree. He then moved to Columbia, Missouri to study journalism at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, founded in 1908, and one of the oldest and best formal journalism schools in the world. But Wright dropped out a few credits short of obtaining his degree, and came home to Manitoba to marry his childhood sweetheart, Joan Brownell. After their marriage, the couple moved to The Pas, where Grant became editor of The Pas Herald. After a year, they moved to Thompson in 1961 to make their millions on the “three-year plan,” like so many other Northerners who have stayed and raised their families in the North.

As a teenager, Grant, who died in 2002, contracted polio. He wore braces and used crutches for the rest of his life, remaining fiercely independent – perhaps even cantankerous at times – some might say. He was a proud Rotarian.

There were several key dates in Thompson’s early history: Borehole 11962 – the so-called “Discovery Hole” at Cook Lake, a diamond drill exploration hole – was collared Feb. 5, 1956 and assayed positive for nickel. The City of Thompson and the main orebody of Inco’s Manitoba operations (now owned by Vale) were named after John Fairfield Thompson, the chairman of INCO when Borehole 11962 was collared and assayed. There’s also the Dec. 3, 1956 signing of the founding 33-page typewritten double-spaced agreement creating Thompson between the Province of Manitoba’s F.C. Bell, minister of mines and natural resources, and International Nickel Company of Canada Limited’s Ralph Parker, vice-president and general manager, and secretary William F. Kennedy. And there was Manitoba Liberal-Progressive Premier Douglas Campbell driving the last spike in the Canadian National Railway (CNR) 30-mile branch line from Sipiwesk to Thompson Oct. 20, 1957.

Thompson, originally a townsite within the newly-created 975-square-mile Local Government District (LGD) of Mystery Lake, within the Dauphin Judicial District, from 1956 to 1966, became a town on Jan. 3, 1967 and a city just 3 years later on July 7, 1970.

The Nickel Belt News came into existence on March 24, 1961 – one day before Manitoba Progressive Conservative Premier Duff Roblin “cut the nickel ribbon to officially open the town” of 3,800 residents, Wright wrote a few days later on March 29, 1961 in only the second edition of our sister paper. Roblin and a who’s who of government and mining crème de la crèmes – opened the $185-million smelter and refinery, the world’s first fully integrated nickel operation and second in size in the “free world” only to Inco’s Sudbury operations. Coincidence? Hardly. Without the smelter and refinery and its 1,800 employees on that long ago day in 1961, there would likely never have been a Nickel Belt News – ditto for a lot of other businesses that would arrive in Thompson in the years to follow.

The newspaper, the City of Thompson, many businesses, and mining in Northern Manitoba have all fallen to various degrees on hard times in recent years. In 2007, nickel briefly sold on the London Metal Exchange (LME) that May for a then record high of $25.51 per pound. And in November 2007, Vale announced a $750-million expansion of its mining, milling, smelting and refining operations here, aimed at boosting Thompson production by about 36 percent over the coming decade. The cost of the refinery modernization project over five years was estimated to be about $116 million.

The Thompson Citizen had 11 full-time staff in the Summer of 2007.

Rather than expanding smelting and refining operations here, Vale would wind up closing both the smelter and refinery in 2018.

The Thompson Citizen now has three full-time staff. When the Nickel Belt News ceases publication April 22, the free-circulation Thompson Citizen will move from its Wednesday publication day to the Nickel Belt News‘ old publication day of Friday. The two papers have been publishing a merged edition on Wednesdays since 2020.

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USW Local 6166 members accept Vale’s final offer despite their bargaining committee’s unanimous recommendation to reject it

USW Local 6166 members yesterday voted to accept Vale’s final offer despite their bargaining committee’s unanimous recommendation to reject it.

Members at Manitoba Operations in Thompson ratified a five-year contract offer made Sept. 11, which essentially creates two tiers of employees – existing employees and new hires – and will extract significant concessions from current workers in terms of drug and dental benefits in terms of deductible co-pays, while new hires are now ineligible for both as retiree benefits. Current workers will continue to be eligible for them as retiree benefits.

The new contract, which expires Sept. 15, 2024, gives unionized workers a 1.25 per cent wage increase effective tomorrow, as well as further percentage increases annually over the life of the agreement.

The offer also  included a $4,000 ratification bonus payable Sept. 20 and a $2,000 benefits transition payment, also payable the same date.

The company said recently the retiree benefit liability for Vale’s Manitoba Operations is currently $163 million and is growing annually. Vale said the old healthcare plan design “had not been updated for over 50 years” and was not sustainable.”

This year’s contract talks mark the first round of bargaining between the company and the union since the Thompson smelter and refinery, which had opened in March 1961, were permanently shut down in July 2018. Since the previous contract was signed five years ago in September 2014, USW Local 6166 at Vale has lost about half the number of unionized workers it represented then – shrinking to about 600 members from around 1,200 in 2014.

There hadn’t been a lockout or strike at Vale’s Manitoba Operations here in Thompson in 20 years since September 1999 when Inco locked out its unionized workforce for 11 weeks between September and December 1999.

“Although you’re bargaining committee unanimously recommend that the membership strike down the company’s final offer, we understand the pressures that you have been under and accept your voice as our own” Local 6166 said last night in a statement posted on its website, adding “you’re bargaining committee and local union executive dedicate ourselves to standing with you 100 per cent going forward and representing your best interests in the future. We would like to thank all of you who showed support, voiced your opinion, attended meetings, read release’s, questioned the circumstances, cast your ballots and informed yourselves.

“It is time to set our sights on the implementation of this new contract and prepare for the next round of negotiations, remember with preparation and education we can achieve the best results for ourselves and our communities.”

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USW Local 6166 votes on Vale’s final offer: New hires would bear initial brunt of concessions

USW Local 6166 members at Vale’s remaining mining and milling operations in Thompson, Man. wrap up two days of voting today on the Brazilian mining giant’s final five-year contract offer made Sept. 11, which essentially would create two tiers of employees – existing employees and new hires – and demands significant concessions from current workers in terms of drug and dental benefits in terms of deductible co-pays, while new hires would be ineligible for both as retiree benefits. Current workers would continue to be eligible for them as retiree benefits. The current five-year collective agreement expires tomorrow.

Voting by USW Local 6166 members continues until 8 p.m. Remote voting is available through email and text for those who are unable to make it to the Steel Centre union hall at 19 Elizabeth Dr.

The retiree benefit liability for Vale’s Manitoba Operations is currently $163 million and is growing annually.

“While $163 million sounds like a lot of money, the union can assure you that your health while working and into retirement is worth more,” says the union bargaining committee. “This should never be a point of debate in the industry we work in. This is the cost of doing business for Vale. ”

The union bargaining committee has accepted all of the benefits changes the company proposed in its final offer except for the closure of the retiree benefits plan for new employees hired after Sept. 15.

The USW bargaining committee is not recommending members accept the contract. If members turn the proposed contact down, the bargaining committee plans “to request to continue negotiating a fair and reasonable contract that the parties can come to terms on while working under the current contract.” If members do turn down the company’s final contract offer, the company could agree to such a proposal from the union to continue working and bargaining under the current collective agreement, or they could alternatively simply lock workers out after the contract expires.

This year’s contract talks mark the first round of bargaining between the company and the union since the Thompson smelter and refinery, which had opened in March 1961, were permanently shut down in July 2018. Since the current contract was signed five years ago in September 2014, USW Local 6166 at Vale has lost about half the number of unionized workers it represented then – shrinking to about 600 members from around 1,200 in 2014.

There hasn’t been a lockout or strike at Vale’s Manitoba Operations here in Thompson in 20 years since September 1999 when Inco locked out its unionized workforce for 11 weeks between September and December 1999.

The Union of Mine, Mill & Smelter Workers was the first bargaining agent here in Thompson when Inco workers unionized and had negotiated a contract with Inco that ran through 1964. United Steelworkers of America Local 6166 received its charter of affiliation from the international on Jan. 3, 1962 and the USWA was certified by the Manitoba Labour Board as the bargaining agent for Inco employees in Thompson on May 31, 1962.

Vale outlined its final offer directly to employees in a memo released Sept. 13. “The old healthcare plan design has not been updated for over 50 years and is not sustainable,” Vale says. “The new plan design allows the company to provide generous benefits to you during your active employment and into your retirement.”

The offer includes a $4,000 ratification bonus payable Sept. 20 and a $2,000 benefits transition payment, also payable the same date.

In response, later in the day yesterday, USW Local 6166’s six-member bargaining committee, led by local president Warren Luky, issued its own update for members:

“We discussed at the table the benefits that Vale was offering the membership, the most contentious of all concessions they brought was the co-pay component and post-retirement benefits for new hires. The co-pay means that our members will now have to pay part of their drug costs. As discussed at the meetings held at the Royal Canadian Legion on Thursday, Sept 12, Vale wants to pass on the $163 million liability to YOU and renege on that same $163 million promise. We all know that this is a concession!  One, that we warned the company that we did not think our membership would accept no matter how much we attempted to reduce the out of pocket hit to our members.

“Vale seems to continue to mislead the membership with their statements, there is no secret Vale came to the table seeking changes to our benefits, there is no secret that the union bargaining committee discussed benefits at the table including co-pay, generic drugs, over the counter etc. to identify how far and how deep Vale was attempting to take from you. We understand they are fearful that this offer will be turned down and that the union will then request to continue negotiating a fair and reasonable contract that the parties can come to terms on while working under the current contract. At the end of the day, the Union has not agreed to the offer before you. That is why your bargaining committee has not recommended this offer to our membership. The ‘generous benefits’ Vale is offering is a concession of what we currently have. It is important to understand that this is Vale’s final offer, not a mutually agreed and negotiated contract that you are voting on.

“At no point did the union consider no post retirement benefits for new hires. It may not affect you now, but after time we will be sitting at the table bargaining and find more members that don’t have post-retirement benefits than those who do have them. Do you think they will fight for something that they don’t have? That we let the company take from them????

“At this point in bargaining we have to make a choice to try get the best overall deal we can at the table. A deal that puts enough money in our member’s pockets to offset the cost of the concessions, the rising cost of living and inflation, increasing tax base due to the shrinking of employment etc. We worked very hard to do this. We respected the process and maintain the moral high ground throughout. You now have the choice to take the final offer or have us get back to the table to get what is fair and reasonable for all.”

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Ryan Land decamps to Sudbury for new Vale gig

Ryan Land, who arrived in Thompson nine years ago this month to become principal of R.D. Parker Collegiate, moves now to Sudbury for an expanded role with Vale. He joined Vale in May 2011 and has spent recent years as Manitoba Operations’ manager of corporate affairs, organizational design and human resources. Land became Vale’s manager of corporate affairs for Manitoba Operations May 9, 2011.

In an Aug. 27 Vale human resources bulletin sent to employees in Ontario and Manitoba, Angie Robson, based in Sudbury, and manager of corporate affairs and sustainability for Vale’s North Atlantic Operations and Asian refineries, said that Land will be the manager of corporate and indigenous affairs for Ontario and Manitoba effective Sept. 4. Robson said Land will report directly to her.

In between working for the School District of Mystery Lake and Vale, Land worked out of Thompson briefly in the run-up to the 2011 federal election campaign for then Elections Canada assistant returning officer Lou Morissette as a training officer looking after all the inland training for the polls.  A bit earlier, Land had been offered the position of part-time vice-principal of Hapnot Collegiate in Flin Flon, but turned it down, trustee Glenn Smith, chair of the Flin Flon School Division board of trustees, told the Flin Flon Reminder at the time.

Before becoming principal of R.D. Parker Collegiate in August 2009, Land had spent the previous academic year in West Africa as principal of the Canadian Independent College of Ghana in Accra, a Canadian university preparatory co-ed college day and boarding school. Land completed one year of a five-year contract in Ghana, but, as was allowed in his contract, resigned from the position for family-related reasons.

The Canadian Independent College of Ghana is a licensed sister campus to the Canadian Independent College (CIC), a co-ed university preparatory college, formerly known as the North Wilmot School, which opened in 1964 and is located in Baden, Ontario. It is a member of the Council of Advanced Placement Schools in Ontario.

On April 27, 2010 trustees from the School District of Mystery Lake took the extraordinary step of publicly rebuking Land during a board meeting and announced that his probationary status as principal of R.D. Parker Collegiate which would normally be one year in duration, was being extended another year after a unanimous vote by the board of trustees, who had considered the option of terminating Land’s employment, but ultimately decided not to.

Trustees then twice in identical 5-2 splits on Feb. 22 and April 5, 2011, voted to remove him as probationary principal.

Then in mid-June 2011, trustees subsequently fired Land for cause – four months after they had removed him as probationary principal. At a trustees meeting the day before graduation, former superintendent Bev Hammond provided details of an investigation she said she had conducted, which she said found that students had had marks changed without doing remedial work, responsibility for which she later laid at the feet of Land in an interview with the Thompson Citizen. Hammond’s marks-changing investigation focused only on the years that Land was principal.

A year later, the saga, which generated strong feelings and emotions, with plenty of both pro and anti-Land sentiment, and national media coverage, ended when the school board and Land reached a deal, resulting in an arbitration hearing that had been set to begin June 18, 2012, being cancelled. Both Land and the SDML withdrew all claims against each other and ended litigation between the parties.

Land offered his resignation to the SDML June 14, 2012, effective Nov. 18, 2011. The school board accepted Land’s resignation and rescinded his termination.

Two years later, in what supporters saw as a rich case of poetic justice, Land would run for a trustee’s seat in the October 2014 municipal election for school board, where he not only won a seat, but was the top vote-getter among all candidates picking up 2,177 votes.

While his seven-year tenure as Vale’s often public face in Thompson has been marked by substantial downsizing, first announced by the company in November 2010, Land himself has not been involved in  controversies or gaffes, and moves onto his new posting with an able record at Vale’s Manitoba Operations.

Land’s role within Vale that will be based in Sudbury, but he posted on Facebook Aug. 25 that he “will be in Thompson approximately 50-50 over the next few months (with accountabilities in Manitoba in the new role over the longer term).”

While most of the focus over the last year has been on the approximately 187 USW miners and above-ground workers laid off to date with Birchtree Mine being again placed on “care and maintenance” and the smelter and refinery being permanently closed, Land’s transfer to Sudbury is part of a Vale back story on office staff reductions, too, locally, as Thompson is no longer a fully integrated nickel operation for the first time since March 1961, and logically no longer requires the same level of daily on-site support based here in Thompson as a fully integrated operation did.

Mark Scott’s employment, as Vale Manitoba Operations vice-president, ended July 20 as the company has reorganized the management structure for its North Atlantic operations and Asia refineries division and eliminated the position Scott held at the top of the local Vale hierarchy.

Alistair Ross, previously the director of Ontario mining operations, also based in Sudbury, is now in charge of mining operations for the North Atlantic division, including mines in Sudbury and mining and milling operations in both Thompson and Voisey’s Bay.

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Vale’s Long Goodbye: 2,814 days adding up to 7 years, 8 months and 15 days

The Sword of Damocles dangles no longer.

Today is the day Tito Martins, then president and chief executive officer of Vale Canada and executive director of base metals for the Brazilian international parent company, told us was coming on Nov. 17, 2010 – 2,814 days ago, or expressed another way, seven years, eight months and 15 days ago. The day the Thompson smelter and refinery officially cease production and Thompson ceases to be a fully integrated nickel operation for the first time since March 1961.

Mind you, July 31, 2018 – today – is something of an arbitrary bookkeeping sort of marker. At the time of Martins’ 2010 announcement, the closing date was announced as 2015, so we’ve had about three extra years of nickel smelting and refining. As for the actual ramp down, the last furnace tap from the one remaining furnace in operation and anode cast from the smelter and the last cathode pulled from the refinery happened earlier this month. The recently completed Thompson Concentrate Loadout Facility, a fully functioning de-watering and loadout facility, will continue to ship Manitoba-source nickel concentrate from the Thompson Mill for further processing to Vale’s hydromet processing facility in Long Harbour in southeast Newfoundland on Placentia Bay on the western Avalon Peninsula, about 100 kilometres from St. John’s, as milling and mining continue in Thompson, albeit with a much smaller economic, and employment footprint, with just under 600 unionized Steelworkers remaining at Vale here by the end of the year.

Nickel smelting and refining here in Thompson has been a long and glorious run of value-added jobs, producing some of the finest electrolytic nickel plating in the world since Sept. 10, 1960 when the Thompson Smelter produced its first Bessemer nickel matte, and about six months later on March 30, 1961, when the Thompson Refinery produced its first nickel cathodes. At its peak, the smelter operated five furnaces, four nickel and one copper, and between September 1960 and July 2018 produced more than 16.6 million anodes. Between March 1961 and July 2018, the refinery produced more than five billion pounds of electro-nickel, with more than 90 per cent of the nickel produced being plating-grade quality.

There were several key dates in Thompson’s early history: Borehole 11962 – the so-called “Discovery Hole” at Cook Lake, a diamond drill exploration hole – was collared Feb. 5, 1956 and assayed positive for nickel. There’s also the Dec. 3, 1956 signing of the founding 33-page typewritten double-spaced agreement creating Thompson between the Province of Manitoba’s F.C. Bell, minister of mines and natural resources, and International Nickel Company of Canada Limited’s Ralph Parker, vice-president and general manager, and secretary William F. Kennedy. And there was Manitoba Liberal-Progressive Premier Douglas Campbell driving the last spike in the Canadian National Railway (CNR) 30-mile branch line from Sipiwesk to Thompson Oct. 20, 1957.

Thompson, originally a townsite within the newly-created 975-square-mile Local Government District (LGD) of Mystery Lake, within the Dauphin Judicial District, from 1956 to 1966, became a town on Jan. 3, 1967 and a city just three years later on July 7, 1970.

But the key date in Thompson’s history, at least before today? That would be March 25, 1961, when Progressive Conservative Premier Duff Roblin “cut the nickel ribbon to officially open the town” of 3,800 residents Nickel Belt News founding publisher and then owner Grant Wright wrote a few days later on March 29, 1961. The Nickel Belt News came into existence on March 24, 1961 – one day before Roblin and a who’s who of government and mining crème de la crèmes – opened the $185-million smelter and refinery, the free world’s first fully integrated nickel operation and second in size in the “free world” only to Inco’s Sudbury operations. Brazilian mining giant Vale purchased Canadian nickel producer Inco Ltd. in 2006 in an $18.2 billion takeover.

“The establishment of this new, major industry is another step in the developing economic might of the nation,” said Roblin standing at the Inco refinery and smelter site here March 25, 1961. “Indeed, through its products it will contribute to the advancement of the free world. With the need to create new international markets to sustain our economic growth, the export of a finished product – electrolytic nickel – has important ramifications.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This year? Time will tell soon enough.

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

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

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Soundingsjohnbarker: ‘You can write that?’ You bet

https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/) debuted as a WordPress blog two years ago today with a small post headlined “Labour history: Mine-Mill v. Steel” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/03/labour-history-mine-mill-v-steel/) on September 3, 2014 about Mick Lowe’s The Raids, a 295-page fictionalized work centred on the epic battle in Sudbury in the late 1950s and early 1960s in relation to the Cold War, international politics, McCarthyism, Communism, and the inter-union rivalry between the United Steel Workers of America (USWA) and the International Union of Mine, Mill & Smelter Workers Local 598, which had just been published that May by Robin Philpot of Baraka Books in Montreal. Here in Thompson there is a still partially untold story of that same inter-union rivalry between the Union of Mine, Mill & Smelter Workers and United Steelworkers of America between 1960 and 1962. Mine-Mill was the first bargaining agent here in Thompson when Inco workers unionized and had negotiated a contract with Inco that ran through 1964. But the USW was certified by the Manitoba Labour Board as the bargaining agent for Inco employees in Thompson on May 31, 1962. Because the USW itself went on to merge five years later with the United States section of the International Union of Mine, Mill & Smelter Workers in Tucson, Arizona in January 1967, a lot of that nastiness has been papered over, at least publicly.

There was also a post that day headlined “Black Death: Not so bad?” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/03/black-death-not-so-bad/) which went onto explain a new study in PLOS ONE, an international peer-reviewed journal, authored by University of South Carolina anthropologist Sharon DeWitte, which suggested that people who survived the medieval plague, commonly known then as the Black Death, lived significantly longer and were healthier than people who lived before the epidemic struck in 1347. The Black Death killed tens of millions of people, an estimated 30 to 50 per cent of the European population, over just four years between 1347 and 1351, which, it turns out, may not have been such a bad thing after all.

Finally, on Sept. 3, 2014, soundingsjohnbarker had a third posting headlined “A bigger picture,” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/03/a-bigger-picture/) which focused on Samaritan’s Purse’s “Operation Christmas Child,” which was started in 1990. By 1993, it had grown to the point it was adopted by Samaritan’s Purse, a Christian organization founded by Dr. Bob Pierce in 1970 and now run by Franklin Graham, son of 97-year-old Asheville, North Carolina evangelist Billy Graham.  While “Operation Christmas Child” has its share of supporters and critics with meritorious arguments on both sides for and against its “shoebox” gifts collected and distributed in more than 130 countries worldwide each Christmas [each shoebox is filled with hygiene items, school supplies, toys, and candy. Operation Christmas Child then works with local churches to put on age-appropriate presentations of the gospel at the events where the shoeboxes are distributed], Samaritan’s Purse is about much more than Operation Christmas Child, whatever your views might be on that, I pointed out. In the midst of the deadliest Ebola viral hemorrhagic fever outbreak recorded in West Africa since the disease was discovered in 1976, Samaritan Purse’s Ebola care centre on the outskirts of the Liberian capital of Monrovia was right on the front lines. Dr. Kent Brantly, the medical director of the centre, contracted Ebola and was medically evacuated to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, the first patient ever medically evacuated to the United States for Ebola treatment, where he was given ZMapp, an experimental drug treatment produced by U.S.-based Mapp Biopharmaceutical, while Nancy Writebol, who was with Serving in Mission, (SIM), which runs the hospital where Samaritan’s Purse has the Ebola care centre, was also medically evacuated to Emory University Hospital and treated with ZMapp.  Both Brantly and Writebol survived their brush with death Ebola experiences and returned to Liberia.

So that was Day 1 for soundingsjohnbarker on Sept. 3, 2014. And in some ways it set the tone for the 226 posts that have followed since over the last two years. Some of them tell Thompson stories but many don’t. Some (OK, many) are offbeat and the range of topics that has struck my fancy to write about has been eclectic, if not downright eccentric at times. I explained some of my thinking behind how I choose what to write about in a blog post March 7 headlined “Tipping points and blogging by the numbers” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2016/03/07/tipping-points-and-blogging-by-the-numbers/) where I noted, “Write local if you want some big numbers on a given day. While I do from time to time, if some local issue or story interests me in an unusual way, I stay away from that kind of writing for the most part. For one thing, those kind of stories, I find, have little staying power, with three or four rare local exceptions (an unsolved murder story; a story about Dr. Alan Rich’s retirement and local lawyer Alain Huberdeau’s appointment to the provincial court bench; and several Vale stories come to mind). But most of them are one or two day wonders. It’s the more eccentric pieces on other places and even times that have a deeper and wider audience in the long run. Fortunately, I prefer to write on more eclectic things these days without any particular regard for geography or subject matter if the topic strikes my interest. Thompson city council may well make decisions that affect me in myriad ways, not the least of which is in the pocketbook as a local taxpayer, but even that can’t remove the glaze from my eyes long enough to write much about local municipal politics, although our water bills are tempting me to make an exception. But reading newspaper accounts of such goings on is usually painful enough. Mind you, I realize what strikes my fancy to write about when I don’t write local, is not for everyone, and I have no doubt that I’ve created some eye glazing of my own especially when I write on eschatology or some other arcane to some of my local readers religious topic.”

That’s not to say I’ve lost my interest in local affairs. I live here after all. But I don’t have the inclination, or time even if I had, to write about all of them. So, pretty much like everyone else in Thompson, I rely on the local media, including the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News, CBC Radio’s North Country, Arctic Radio’s thompsononline.ca and Shaw TV to keep me informed with occasional stories about Vale’s proposed Thompson Foot Wall Deep Project, at the north end of Thompson Mine, previously known as Thompson (1D), and what the chances of the 11 million tonnes of nickel mineralization, which form a deep, north plunging continuation of the Thompson deposit, have of being developed into a new mine that will sustain the Thompson operation for up to 15 years when nickel is selling on the London Metal Exchange (LME) for US$4.5269/lb, with the refinery and smelter, which opened March 25, 1961, set to close sometime in 2018, resulting in lost jobs – don’t kid yourself and think otherwise – as more than 30 per cent of Vale’s production employees in Thompson work in the smelter and refinery.

Take away nickel mining, which isn’t destined fortunately to happen for at least several decades yet in even the most pessimistic scenario, and there’s not much reason for Thompson, at least as we have all come to know it, to exist, all mindless happy talk from politicians, newspaper publishers and other spin doctors aside. Mind you, I have admittedly been a tad critical of newspaper publishers in this space before, writing on Sept. 14, 2014: “In the old days, publishers and newspaper owners would from time to time ‘kill’ a writer’s column before publication. Despite their ballyhoo and blather about freedom of the press, publishers and newspaper proprietors are almost universally in my long experience with them a timid lot, if not outright moral cowards at times, always afraid of offending someone.”(https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/11/retroactively-spiked-the-post-publication-killing-of-msgr-charles-popes-blog-post-on-new-york-citys-st-patricks-day-parade/).

But if you think being a regional hub for Northern Manitoba, or tourism, or even both, is going to give Thompson a new raison d’etre for continued existence at its current size and state in a somehow magically more diversified local economy sans nickel mining some day in the near-to-mid future, I’m afraid you’ve been drinking too much of the Thompson Economic Diversification Working Group (TEDWG) Kool-Aid.

I’m a bit of a contrarian when it comes to the local good news peddlers of all stripes. So it’s perhaps best for everyone’s peace of mind, mine included, if I stick these days to writing mainly about the faraway and eclectic. Bad news prophets have a short best-before date at home.

And besides there is something just plain fun about writing about the weird and whacky. It’s a good antidote to taking either yourself, or life for that matter, too seriously. Hence I’m just as incorrigible when it comes to posting stories or links from others about the offbeat and odd on Facebook, as I am about my own blog post writing, I must confess. “The internet has been aflame this summer with predictions the Antichrist was coming Aug. 30,” I mentioned in a Facebook posting Aug, 31, noting I had forgotten all about it until the next day. “Me bad,” I wrote. When my old friend from Iqaluit Michèle LeTourneau found herself among those who couldn’t resist joining the thread to comment, she observed “OK. I think I just officially outed myself as a weird nut that posts really weird things on Facebook. Maybe I am. Maybe I’m not.” I reassured her by replying, “I think I could give you a bit of competition for the ‘weird nut Facebook poster’ title, Michèle!”

Locally, the Thompson Citizen was moved to editorialize Aug. 31 that “Northern Manitoba’s summer of woe turned [a] deeper shade of blue with the announcement Aug. 22 that Tolko was shutting down its operations in The Pas.”

Tolko Industries said they were going to pull the plug Dec. 2 on their heavy-duty kraft paper and lumber mill in The Pas after 19 years, 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.

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. OmniTRAX bought most of Northern Manitoba’s rail track from The Pas to Churchill in 1997 from CN for $11 million. 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.

At the time the cancellation was announced, 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. When the Canadian Wheat Board lost its grain monopoly, creating a new grain market several years ago, and was renamed G3 Canada Ltd. by its new owners, the newly-minted G3 Canada Ltd. began building 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. Surprise.

While 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, the deal has not been completed to date, and its future looks murky to non-existent. Rail freight shipments measured by frequency along the Bayline have been cut in half by OmniTRAX this summer.

“Government announces more grant money to develop tourism during visit to Churchill” headlined the Nickel Belt News in an unbylined front page story Sept. 2.  Don’t get me wrong. I love Beluga whales and polar bears. I’ve seen both visiting Churchill (known as Kuugjuaq in Inuit.) And guess what? While Beluga whales and polar bears will support some local tourism and related businesses, it’s still not enough to make for a local sustainable economy of any scale in the community of less than 800 permanent residents now along our Hudson Bay coast.

That’s about as likely to happen as calling itself the “Wolf Capital of the World” is going make a game-changing difference to Thompson’s economic future. A difference, sure. Great. But don’t bet Northern Manitoba’s future on tourism. We’re still either a resource-based economy or no economy to speak of.  If it’s any comfort that remains largely true for most of our provinces and territories and Canada as a whole. Sure there’s the capital cities and a few other kinda largish provincial cities – Victoria, Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Regina, Winnipeg, Toronto, Ottawa, Montréal, Québec City, Moncton, Saint John, Halifax and St. John’s (this is a very generous reading BTW) – and even a few more genuine high-tech areas such as Gatineau, Québec and Kanata, Ontario on either side of Ottawa, along with Kitchener, Ontario and elsewhere in the Regional Municipality of Waterloo, all of which are exceptions to the hewers of wood and drawers of water reality, but the exceptions are few and far between.

Oops … did I say that out loud? Me bad.

Kool-Aid anyone?

I may need to quench my thirst unless I intend to pen my next post on UFOs, eschatology or perhaps some virulent disease, preferably a safe distance from Thompson.

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China Syndrome stock market meltdown: ‘This is like déjà vu all over again’

“This is like déjà vu all over again,” said baseball legend Yogi Berra in his famous and oft-quoted malapropism.  We haven’t had that feeling here since … 2008.

Over the past two weeks, China’s currency,  known as the yuan or renminbi, fell in value more than it did in the previous two decades.  The Shanghai Composite Index tumbled 8.5 percent Monday – erasing the last of its gains for the year in its biggest single-day loss since 2007.  Within minutes after the opening bell, the Dow Jones plummeted 1,089 points, the largest point loss ever during a trading day, surpassing the trillion-dollar “Flash Crash” of May 6, 2010,  which started at 2:32 p.m. EDT and lasted for approximately 36 minutes, sending the Dow down 998.5 points, its biggest intra-day trading drop until Monday. The Dow closed down 588 points Aug. 24, the worst one-day for the Dow since August 2011.

Brent crude, the benchmark for oil prices worldwide, closed Monday at $42.80 a barrel, its lowest close since March 11, 2009. Oil prices tumbled more than five per cent Aug. 24, with U.S. light crude closing at $38.24 a barrel, its lowest close February 2009. Last week marked oil prices’ longest weekly losing streak since 1986.

So perhaps it is “déjà vu all over again,” as Yogi said. Or perhaps it is déjà vu with a China wildcard difference seven years after 2008.

The Great Recession began the night before my holidays began in 2008, although no one quite knew it yet that Sunday night. I was browsing the news headlines that evening on Sept. 14, 2008. But in fact, the dominoes were starting to tumble. The failures of massive financial institutions in the United States began, due primarily to exposure of securities of packaged subprime loans and credit default swaps issued to insure these loans and their issuers, rapidly devolving into a global economic crisis resulting in a number of bank failures in the United States and Europe and sharp reductions in the value of stocks and commodities worldwide.

The failure of banks in Iceland resulted in a devaluation of the Icelandic króna and threatened the government with bankruptcy. Iceland was able to secure an emergency loan from the International Monetary Fund in November. In the United States, 15 banks failed in 2008, while several others were rescued through government intervention or acquisitions by other banks. On Oct. 11, 2008, the head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) warned that the world financial system was teetering on the “brink of systemic meltdown.”

Some phrases become indelibly inked in the public consciousness in association with a single idea or event.

Lehman Brothers are two such words.

Before declaring bankruptcy in 2008, Lehman Brothers, founded by Henry and Emanuel Lehman in 1850 in Montgomery, Alabama, was the fourth-largest investment bank in the Unites States, behind Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch, doing business in investment banking, equity and fixed-income sales and trading, especially in U.S. Treasury securities, research, investment management, private equity and private banking.

At 1:45 a.m. on Sept. 15, 2008, Lehman Brothers filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection following a mass exodus of most of its clients, drastic losses in its stock, and devaluation of its assets by credit rating agencies. Lehman’s bankruptcy filing remains the largest in U.S. history

The name Lehman Brothers  would soon become shorthand for one thing – and one thing only: the collapse of the investment bank triggered the financial meltdown that resulted in the Great Recession, the most financially cataclysmic event since the decade of the Great Depression from 1929 to 1939.

In a spectacular stroke of good fortune, however, about 1,250 United Steelworkers Local 6166 workers in Thompson, Manitoba inked a new three-year collective agreement with Vale, the Brazilian mining giant, on Sept. 15, 2008 – the very day Lehman Brothers collapsed. The tentative deal had been reached three days earlier on Sept. 12. Workers voted 65.5 per cent in favour of the contract, which included wage increases in each year of the agreement consistent with their previous contract, and pension improvements.  Last night, six years later, the remaining 1,100 or so United Steelworkers Local 6166 members employed by Vale’s Manitoba Operations voted 79.8 per cent in favour of a accepting a new five-year collective bargaining agreement again reached three days earlier on Sept. 12.

The United States economy, the Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research, would later conclude, had actually been in recession since December 2007 – nine months before Lehman Brothers spectacular financial blowout, although there remained some economic outliers in North America, part of a shrinking circle that in the autumn of 2008 still included Manitoba and Saskatchewan, North Dakota and some of the high-plains Texas Panhandle. The anomaly of the good times rolling on in the fortunate outliers made the Great Recession almost everywhere else in the world seem surreal at first, although Vale did announce on Nov. 17, 2010  they planned to close the smelter and refinery in Thompson, Manitoba in 2015 – an announcement that came 17 months after the Great Recession, according to the Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research, ended in June 2009. Both the smelter and refinery are likely now to stay open until about 2019, having received several reprieves over the last five years. The December 2007 to June 2009 recession lasted 18 months, making it the longest recession since the Second World War.

For five very scary months, from early October 2008 through early March 2009, the world economy was in free fall. Terms such as deleveraging, subprime mortgage, London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR), derivatives, credit default swap and bailout became part of our everyday vocabulary.

Bloomberg L.P., one of the world’s leading English-language financial news services, based in New York City, ran a remarkable story in January 2009, totaling up single-day job losses worldwide. “At least 21,000 jobs were targeted for elimination yesterday as employers from Hertz Global Holdings Inc. to Advanced Micro Devices Inc. grappled with recession-choked demand,” was how the story opened. “More than 20 companies said they were cutting jobs, ranging from Amonil SA, Romania’s second-biggest fertilizer maker, to Fiat SpA’s Magneti Marelli auto-parts division. Hertz, the second-largest U.S. rental-car company, said it will cut more than 4,000 jobs, as businesses and consumers slow travel because of the global recession.”

General Motors shares hit a low of $1.40 in morning trading March 6, 2009, marking their lowest point since May 23, 1933, reported the Center for Research in Security Prices at the University of Chicago. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at a 12-year low of 6,547.05 on March 9, 2009 – its lowest close since April 1997, and had lost 20 per cent of its value in only six weeks.

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Agreement-in-principle reached with federal government on environmental sulphur dioxide (SO2) airbone emission standards that will allow Vale’s Manitoba Operations smelter to stay open until 2018, mayoral candidate Luke Robinson and USW Local 6166 president Murray Nychyporuk say

Vale has reached an agreement-in-principle with the federal government that will allow it to continue to operate its 53-year-old smelter in Thompson until sometime in 2018, say mayoral candidate Luke Robinson and USW Local 6166 president Murray Nychyporuk.  Pending environmental sulphur dioxide (SO2) airborne emission standards that were due to come into effect  in a few months, as applied to Vale’s Manitoba Operations, would have required its closure if Vale couldn’t meet the standards. The new standards would require a reduction in airborne emissions of approximately 88 per cent from current levels at the Thompson operation, Vale has said previously.

More than 30 per cent of Vale’s production employees in Thompson work in the smelter and refinery. Employees hired before Oct. 1, 2011, have the option to transfer to the mill or underground to the mines from surface operations when the smelter and refinery close under the company’s transition plan.

The announcement that the smelter and refinery would close was originally made on Nov. 17, 2010, with Vale saying at the time it was “phasing out of smelting and refining by 2015” in Thompson. Mining and milling operations are slated to continue.

Almost two years later, in October 2012, Vale announced a possible one-year extension for the Thompson smelter and refinery, contingent on federal sulphur dioxide (SO2) emission standards approvals, to no later than Dec. 31, 2015 because of construction delays at the now open state-of-the-art hydromet processing facility in Long Harbour in southeast Newfoundland on Placentia Bay on the western Avalon Peninsula, about 100 kilometres from St. John’s. It will also process sulphide concentrate feed produced at Voisey’s Bay in Labrador, which has been processed in Thompson. The Long Harbour plant is Vale’s first processing facility in Canada located on tidewater. Long Harbour was originally scheduled for completion in the first quarter of 2013.

Robinson, a first-term incumbent councillor, running in the Oct. 22 municipal election for the open mayoral seat being vacated by Mayor Tim Johnston, who is not seeking re-election to council, against Dennis Fenske, another first-term incumbent councillor, who is Vale’s engineering supervisor of support services for central engineering and the project management office here, said Sept. 22 at a regular council meeting Vale has reached an agreement with the federal government on the sulphur dioxide (SO2) emission standards that will allow the smelter to stay open into 2018.  Robinson is a mechanical underground worker at Vale.

The Thompson smelter and refinery, which opened March 25, 1961, was the free world’s first fully integrated nickel operation and built at a cost of $185 million.

The Canada-Wide Acid Rain Strategy for Post-2000 was agreed to in 1998 by federal, provincial and territorial ministers of energy and environment to fulfill an earlier commitment in their 1994 “Statement of Intent on Long-Term Acid Rain Management in Canada,” which in turn built on the 1985 Eastern Canada Acid Rain Program.  Sulphur dioxide emissions in Canada have decreased 63 per cent since 1985, thanks mostly to a reduction of the amounts produced by base metal smelters due to a combination of a code of practice and implementation of pollution prevention plans, the Winnipeg-based Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment reported last year. The president of the council is Manitoba NDP  Minister of Conversation and Water Stewardship Gord Mackintosh.

Their 2010-2011 progress report on acid rain strategy for after 2000, released early last year, reported that  Manitoba was the third-largest emitter of sulphur dioxide (SO2) in Canada in 2010, accounting for 14 per cent of the total, behind only Alberta at 27 per cent and Ontario at 20 per cent.

SO2 emissions from Manitoba in 2010 were down 44 per cent from their 2008 level, to 197,000 tonnes from 350,000 tonnes, thanks in part to the closure that year of Hudbay’s copper smelter in Flin Flon, which was expected to reduce total emissions of SO2 by 185,000 tonnes per year. That was the largest relative decrease in S02 emissions in any province over the same two-year period.

The scheduled closure of Vale’s smelter in Thompson is expected to reduce the amount of sulphur dioxide emitted in Manitoba by another 185,000 tonnes, the report said. Together, those two smelters in Flin Flon and Thompson had accounted for the bulk of the emissions produced by the nonferrous mining and smelting sector, which was responsible for 98 per cent of all SO2 emissions in Manitoba.

Liz Dykman, programs co-ordinator for the Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment, told soundingsjohnbarker (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/) Sept. 25 the “2010/11 report is indeed the latest report on the Canada-wide Acid Rain Strategy for Post-2000.  A 2012/13 report is currently being drafted. CCME does not have any more recent reports on refinery and smelter mining operation SO2 emissions.”

USW Local 6166 president Murray Nychyporuk said in an interview Sept. 25 with soundingsjohnbarker he believes the deal with Vale the federal government, which was discussed by the bargaining teams during recent contract negotiations, is essentially an agreement-in-principle that would allow Vale to continue to operate the smelter and refinery through some point in 2018 on environmental grounds.

Nychyporuk said it’s not clear to him at this point if the deal would run right until the end of 2018 on Dec. 31.

He also said he understood agreement-in-principle means there will likely be some public comment period, for perhaps written comments or a town hall meeting, where people would have the opportunity to make representations on the issue of the new sulphur dioxide (SO2) emission standards not going into force for Vale next year, as previously expected, before the federal government grants its final environmental approval.

Nychyporuk also said it is important to keep in mind also that environmental approval is not the same thing as a business case for Vale keeping the smelter and refinery open into 2018, although he suggests it is unlikely the company would jump through all the necessary legal regulatory environmental hoops to keep the smelter and refinery open if they didn’t plan to carry on operating it during at least most of the extended three-year period. However, Nychyporuk said nickel is a cyclical market, subject to wide price swing flucations, and a big downturn in nickel prices, or the need to do major capital repairs at the smelter if something big should break down, could influence the company to close it before 2018 even with an environmental green light. Conversely, a strong market and high demand might mean Vale will want to keep the smelter and refinery open even beyond 2018, he added, saying there is just no way of knowning that this far in advance. “I don’t have a crystal ball,” Nychyporuk deadpanned.

Nickel was selling on the London Metal Exchange (LME) Sept. 25 for a  spot price of around US$7.82 per pound. At the beginning of 2014, nickel was about US$6.50 per pound, compared to just under US$8 per pound a year earlier. Nickel prices peaked at US$25.51 per pound on the LME in May 2007 just months after Vale bought Inco in a US$19.9-billion all-cash tender takeover offer deal in October 2006. Mining is a cyclical business involving finite resources. Manitoba Operations produces nickel, copper, cobalt and has associated gold, silver, platinum, sulphur, selenium and palladium deposits.

Mark Scott, general manager of mining and milling for Vale’s Manitoba Operations, sounded a cautionary note on the possibility of the smelter and refinery remaining open beyond next year when he spoke to about 30 members and guests at the Thompson Chamber of Commerce’s weekly luncheon May 28, saying the “base case remains” that they both “will close at some point in 2015.” In addition to sulphur dioxide (SO2) emission standards issues, there also remained questions over availability of nickel sulphide concentrate feed, Scott said.

Ryan Land, manager of corporate affairs and organizational development for Vale’s Manitoba Operations, said May 6,  “Vale remains very much committed to Thompson. Largely as a result of challenging market conditions, and in order to align with the ramp-up of projects (which at some point may include a concentrate load-out facility for Thompson), there may be an opportunity to keep the smelter and refinery in operation for an extended duration.

“As a result, we do continue to participate in discussions with the federal government and have requested further flexibility on the date for meeting the emissions targets. We did previously receive approval to operate the plants until the end of 2015, which is already very positive for the community and our employees. While we are hopeful that we can further extend the deadline, we will still transition to mining-and-milling-only at some point between 2016 and 2019.”

Land said in an e-mail follow-up Sept. 29, “We have a tentative agreement with the federal government to allow for the operation of the smelter up to Jan.1, 2019, until such time as the concentrate load-out facility is completed. This is subject to the completion of satisfactory terms within an Environmental Performance Agreement with Environment Canada, pending the submission and approval of a performance plan.”

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