Northern Canada’s small-cities trifecta of Thompson, Manitoba and North Battleford and Prince Albert, Saskatchewan again top Violent Crime Severity Index (CSI) in that 1,2,3 order

Thompson, Manitoba has again topped Statistics Canada’s annual Violent Crime Severity Index (CSI) for police services policing about 300 communities over 10,000 in population. This year’s report was issued July 27, with statistics from 2022.

The trifecta of Northern Canada’s small cities that have usually rotated in the top three spots for the Violent Crime Severity Index over most of the last two decades are Thompson, Manitoba, and North Battleford and Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. Years ago, Williams Lake, British Columbia would often be a contender for a top three spot, but not so much lately it seems. Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories, where I also lived, and Wetaskiwin Alberta, also often place high on the Overall Crime Severity Index.

The Violent Crime Severity Index this year was again topped by Thompson, followed by North Battleford and Prince Albert, the same top three order they finished in last year.

There are three components: the Violent Crime Severity Index, the Overall Crime Severity Index and the Non-Violent Crime Severity Index. Not surprisingly, many people pay closest attention to the Violent Crime Severity Index component, although the same cities often also top the Non-Violent Crime Severity Index, sometimes in a slightly different order. As Ian Graham, former editor of the Thompson Citizen, explained last year, “CSI scores are calculated using a formula that applies different weights to different types of crimes, based on the relative severity of sentences handed out to people who are convicted of them. Under this formula, which doesn’t look only at how much crime occurs but at the relative seriousness of that crime, a murder carries a lot more weight than an assault, for example.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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‘Repair my house, which is falling into ruin’: The legacy of Father Guna at St. Lawrence

Photos by Jeanette Kimball                        

“For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven” it is written in Ecclesiastes. And so it is that on this day, the Feast of the Epiphany, Father Guna Pothula, the pastor who has shepherded St. Lawrence Roman Catholic Church here in Thompson, Manitoba since July 2012, making him the longest-serving clergy here, said his last Sunday mass and said goodbye to parishioners before departing home to India this week to be closer to his ageing mother, and begin a new mission. Godspeed, Father Guna.

The presence of the Catholic Church in the Thompson area dates back to 1958 when visiting priests from Thicket Portage, Pikwitonei, Wabowden and The Pas attended Thompson to celebrate mass at least once a month. At first masses were celebrated in a private home on Poplar Crescent. Later masses before a church was built were celebrated at Juniper School, the Inco camp, the Midwest Drilling Camp, the Patrick Harrison Camp, and at the Strand Theatre. The rectory and the present-day parish hall (which served as the first church) were built in 1960, while the new adjacent church on the Cree Road site opened six years later.

Churches have a season where they, too, must be rebuilt and repaired, both physically and spiritually. As Father Guna departs, St. Lawrence ends such a season of renovation and renewal to the church and parish hall, which has taken almost a decade and cost about a million dollars to complete. While his spiritual legacy as pastor and confessor is written privately on the hearts and souls of parishioners, past and present, his public legacy will be the rebuilding of St. Lawrence, a process planning began for in 2013, the year after his arrival, and concluded with the reopening of the church last June and the parish hall today. No small achievement during a global pandemic that has stretched on now for three years.

“I wasn’t going to leave until the renovations were complete,” Father Guna said today, “The roof was leaking when I arrived and it was raining in God’s house.” He noted the generosity of St, Lawrence parishioners, who “never grumbled” about years of monthly “second offertory collections” to make the roof repairs, along with donations in time and money from Knights of Columbus Thompson Council #5961, a Catholic fraternal benefit organization chartered locally with 59 members on May 6, 1967, the 31st council in Manitoba to receive its charter. Among the other funding sources was grant money from the Thompson Community Foundation, as both the church and hall serve larger public needs beyond Thompson’s Catholic community, and insurance proceeds to renovate the parish hall.

Rebuild. Fix where needed. This is our Catholic way. In 1205, Francis was  praying in front of a crucifix at the abandoned San Damiano chapel near Assisi. There he had a vision in which God said, “Francis, repair my house, which is falling into ruin.” Francis listened, looked around at the crumbling chapel, and then sold some of his possessions in order to help rebuild it. He was canonized as a saint just two years after his death, on July 16, 1228, by Pope Gregory IX. Today, we know him as Saint Francis of Assisi.

More than 800 years later, another St. Francis – St. Francis de Sales – would be integral here on the other side of the world in rebuilding God’s church in a place that stands at the centre of Canada – north to south, east to west – St. Lawrence Roman Catholic Church in Thompson, Manitoba.  

Francis de Sales was born in France and lived at the time of the Protestant Reformation, becoming Bishop of Geneva. He had lots of exposure to Calvinism and predestination and was noted for his diplomacy in the volatile, heated religious climate of the day in Switzerland. He’s honoured as one of the doctors of the Catholic Church and the worldwide Anglican Communion.

The Congregation of the Missionaries of St. Francis de Sales was founded by Father Peter Marie Mermier from Vouray in the parish of Chaumont en Genevois and the Diocese of Annecy in the Savoy region of France in October 1838 for parish mission, foreign mission and youth education. They are also known as the Fransalians. Pope Pius XI proclaimed St. Francis de Sales in 1923 as the patron saint of writers and journalists.

After more than 11 months without a parish priest, in July 2012 two priests from India, Father Guna, and Father Subash Joseph – both members of the Congregation of the Missionaries of St. Francis de Sales, also known as the Fransalians, travelling two by two – arrived, and would be soon tasked, as Francis of Assisi was, with repairing God’s house both physically and spiritually here in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Keewatin-Le Pas, a vast land, which takes in some 430,000 square kilometres and stretches across the northern parts of three provinces – Saskatchewan, Manitoba and a small portion of Northwestern Ontario, and whose past includes Indian residential schools, while our present and future calls to us to bear witness in acknowledging and speaking often painful truths in the ongoing work of reconciliation with the Indigenous peoples here on the traditional treaty territory and homeland of the Nisichawayasihk Cree Nation, who have existed here since time immemorial, as well as later becoming home to other Indigenous peoples, including Métis.

The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Keewatin-Le Pas, in Thompson in particular, is on the cutting edge of a trend that is likely to dominate the missions field in the Canadian North for perhaps the remainder of the 21st century: The re-evangelization by those once colonized, as priests from countries the church in Canada sent missionaries to in the 19th and early 20th centuries, now send their missionaries here as vocations to the priesthood in the western world have been nowhere near the necessary replacement rate since shortly after the Second Vatican Council ended in 1965.

A very different story in terms of vocations to the priesthood, however, has played out in places like Africa, parts of Asia, including the Indian subcontinent, and other areas of what are sometimes referred to as the “Global South.” There, vocations have boomed over the last 50 some years; hence the arrival of Father Guna and Father Joseph in Thompson in 2012.

Father Guna, from the village of Chennamanayunikota in Andhra Pradesh in southeastern India in the Archdiocese of Kurnool, was ordained on Feb. 10, 2007 by Bishop Paul Maipan of the Diocese of Khammam. He attended ATPM High School in Gunter in Andhra Pradesh until he joined the seminary at the age 16 in 1996. Seminarians remain in seminary for 12 years if they decide to pursue their full studies and call to ordination, Father Guna said, although some decide to leave the seminary along the way, discovering holy orders is not their calling.

After ordination, Father Guna was appointed as the assistant pastor of Nunna, in the Diocese of Vijayawada from June 2007 to May 2008. He was then appointed to the Fransalian Vidya Jyothi, Nidadavole as the procurator and was asked to teach the seminarians from June 2008 to May 2010. He also held appointments at the St. Francis de Sales High School in the town of Pamidi in the Anantapur District of Andhra Pradesh, teaching and serving as the administrator and procurator of the school.

Father Guna’s paternal grandfather was Hindu before converting to Catholicism and he still has many Hindu relatives.

Father Joseph, at his request, in 2015 was transferred to the also repair-challenged Church of St. Gertrude in Pelican Narrows, Saskatchewan, located 120 kilometres northwest of Flin Flon; 388 kilometres northeast of Prince Albert and 525 kilometres northeast of Saskatoon, and the Church of Our Lady of Seven Sorrows in Sandy Bay, at road’s end for the gravel winding road, 72 kilometres north of Pelican Narrows.

And, as the seasons once again change, Father Joseph now returns here to St. Lawrence, as pastor.

Goodbye, and our eternal thanks, Father Guna. Welcome, home, Father Joseph. Our fishing rods await your return!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gostrArMqM

John Barker has been a member of  the Parish of St. Lawrence Roman Catholic Church in Thompson, Manitoba since July 2007 and a member of Knights of Columbus Thompson Council #5961 since April 2013.

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Ryan Land leaves Vale after 8½ years to ‘pursue the next chapter in my career story’

Ryan Land has left Vale after 8½ years.

Land joined Vale, becoming manager of corporate affairs for Manitoba Operations, on May 9, 2011. He spent most of his time with the Brazilian mining giant working in Thompson, with his role growing to include managing organizational design and human resources. He was transferred to Sudbury, Ont. 14½ months ago in September 2018 for an expanded role with Vale as manager of corporate and indigenous affairs for Ontario and Manitoba.

He has also served as chair of the aboriginal relations committee of the Mining Association of Manitoba since April 2013, and as a member of the aboriginal affairs committee of the Ottawa-based Mining Association of Canada since October 2018. He has been a member of the aboriginal relations committee of the Ontario Mining Association since October 2018. As well, Land has been a member of the Manitoba liaison committee on mining and exploration since last June.

Land arrived in Thompson originally in August 2009 to become principal of R.D. Parker Collegiate.

In a public Facebook posting Nov. 14, Land says,”I am officially leaving Vale to pursue the next chapter of my career! I am taking this step without knowing what (or even where – though our first choice is Sudbury as we are thoroughly enjoying it here and the kids are thriving) is next. Even though it was time for a change, it is bittersweet for sure as I am so grateful for the opportunities, challenges and growth that Vale afforded me. I’ve worked with amazing people and from the beginning the company (and a key leader or two – they know who they are!) took a chance on me and allowed me to influence outcomes, innovate and become a champion for the success of others. No regrets, and also no idea what’s next. Yikes!”

Land ends his brief post by wryly quipping, “Another of my favourite quotes is by Emily Dickinson who said ‘The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.’ Soul ajar. Hopefully the ecstatic experience covers the mortgage!”

Land posted a similar public message on LinkedIn last week to his one on Facebook.

“As some of you already know, I have left Vale to pursue the next chapter in my career story,” Land wrote. “The move from educational leader to corporate affairs at a mining company was an enriching, challenging and ultimately rewarding career pivot and I am so very grateful for having had the opportunity. I worked with, for and alongside so many remarkable people and the last (nearly) 9 years provided me with a real chance to grow, stretch, collaborate, influence outcomes, build meaningful relationships and work on being a champion for the success of my colleagues, our stakeholders and rights-holders, and the communities we work in and near. Importantly, it afforded me a real chance to deepen my understanding of truth and reconciliation, and my responsibility within it.

“I am not in a rush, but I feel like excited about what might be next. We have grown to love Sudbury and the region and we’d love to stay, but I’m anxious to invest myself as a servant leader in a great organization and I appreciate that the best opportunity may not be close to our current home. I’d love to hear about possibilities and ideas you have for me, so please message me if you have advice, coaching or suggestions.”

His wife, Carmilla Land, has been a registered nurse since 2016.

A number of Land’s former Vale colleagues posted their well-wishes on LinkedIn in response to his departure from the company.

Patti Pegues, mine planning manager for Vale North Atlantic, wrote, “Best of luck Ryan. It has been a real pleasure working with you.”

Said Anuj Agarwal, manager of mines and technical standards, North Atlantic at Vale Canada: “You will be missed. It was a pleasure to know you and work alongside you.”

Whether it is a local day trip travel fall colour adventure to Onaping Falls, near Sudbury, or an international summer jaunt from San Sebastián to Tuscany to Prague to Brussels, Land is well known to friends and colleagues as a bon vivant, who immensely enjoys adventuresome travel, sampling fine local cuisine wherever he lands, and a suitable craft brew to complement the rest.

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. 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.

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.

Aside from Accra and Thompson, Land was a teacher and eventually a principal in schools in a number of communities, including a Dené community, Leicester in England, rural Saskatchewan, and Steinbach and Winnipeg in Manitoba. He has a masters degree in educational leadership and undergraduate bachelor degrees in education and the arts.

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.

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.

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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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Friesen Historical Collection opens Oct. 16 at UCN’s Wellington & Madeleine Spence Memorial Library in Thompson

The Friesen Historical Collection, a new special collection that is housed on the Thompson Campus of the University College of the North (UCN), will officially open Oct. 16 at 4 p.m. in the Wellington & Madeleine Spence Memorial Library. Library Director for UCN Libraries Heather Smith, and Meaghan Buchanan, UCN’s archivist and Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FIPPA) officer, both plan to travel from the Oscar Lathlin Research Library at UCN’s campus in The Pas to Thompson to be on hand for the opening ceremony.

Gerald Friesen, 76, professor emeritus of history and a a retired senior fellow of St. John’s College at the University of Manitoba donated the collection. He is an expert on Western Canada, Manitoba, labour history and communication history, and taught in the History Department at the University of Manitoba for 40 years. Friesen has written extensively on Western Canadian history from a social history perspective. Friesen is the author of several books, including The Canadian Prairies: A History; Citizens and Nation: An Essay on History, Communication, and Canada; The West: Regional Ambitions, National Debates, Global Age; Prairie Metropolis: New Essays on Winnipeg Social History; Rural Life: Portraits of the Prairie Town, 1946; and River Road: Essays on Manitoba and Prairie History.

Selkirk, Manitoba historian Stephen C. Sharman, in reviewing Toward Defining the Prairies: Region, Culture and History, which contains a selection of the papers presented at a conference of the same name held at St. John’s College in September 1998, and edited by Robert Wardhaugh, a Canadian political and regional historian at the University of Western Ontario (UWO), also now commonly known as Western University, in London, Ontario, whose research interests include the era of Mackenzie King, federalism, the Second World War, political parties, political culture, the 1920s, and the Prairie West, wrote of Friesen’s paper, “Defining the Prairies: Or Why Don’t the Prairies Exist” that he challenged “his readers to re-examine their understanding of Prairie identity, rural, agricultural and nostalgic in the light of new political and economic realities.” Sharman’s review appeared in the peer-reviewed journal Manitoba History Number 44, Autumn/Winter 2002-2003, published by the Manitoba Historical Society since 1980.

“The rural agricultural world still exists but it is now overshadowed by an urban and industrial world,” Sharman noted in reviewing Friesen’s paper. “Nostalgia reminds us of our roots but the Prairies belong to a new world of Western Canada which includes British Columbia. Friesen concludes: “It is time to take stock of a new west. It is time to leave behind the imagined prairie region. The new ways of thinking about this part of the country are the result of changes in western economy, in the structure of government, and especially in the cultural and communication contexts of contemporary life.” With this challenge to an accepted understanding of prairie identity, the book begins, writes Sharman.

Friesen was born in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. He graduated with a B.A. Honors in history from the University of Saskatchewan in 1965.

He received his masters’ degree from the University of Toronto in 1966 and his Ph.D. in 1974. Friesen began teaching at the University of Manitoba in the fall of 1970. In 1976 he was the recipient of the Dr. and Mrs. H.H. Saunderson Award for Excellence in Teaching

Friesen was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2002 and served as president of the Canadian Historical Association from 2003 to 2005.

Friesen has also served on the executive of the Manitoba Historical Society and Société Historique Saint-Boniface, as well as treasurer of the Manitoba Federation of Labour’s Education Centre.

He served as a board member board for Canada’s Visual History/L’Histoire Visuelle du Canada (National Museum of Canada and the National Film Board) and as an advisor to CBC’s Canada: A People’s History film project.

Friesen has spoken at the Centre for Human Rights Research annual “Critical Conversations” seminar series at Robson Hall on the University of Manitoba’s Fort Garry Campus on “Residential Schools and Saskatchewan Cree Collective Memory” as part of a seminar on “Residential Schools: Memories and Histories.”

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Dr. Alan Rich, who served longer than any other doctor in Thompson, has passed away

Thompson’s best-loved doctor has passed away.

The legendary, and at times controversial, Dr. Alan Rich, who still holds the record as Thompson’s longest-serving physician, having practiced medicine here for more than 40 years, died earlier today.

Dr. Rich, who died in Swan River, was 73. There will be visitation at the Boardman/Northland Funeral Home at 28 Nelson Rd. here in Thompson, Manitoba next Sunday evening on Jan. 27 from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. The funeral service will follow next Monday morning at 10 a.m. on Jan. 28 at St. Lawrence Roman Catholic Church at 114 Cree Rd. in Thompson. Internment will be at Thompson Cemetery.

In lieu of flowers, donations can be made in Dr. Rich’s memory to the Make-A-Wish Foundation of Canada, a registered charity founded in 1983, which helps children with critical and life-threatening illnesses live out their biggest wishes. The Make-A-Wish Foundation of Canada granted 615 wishes to Canadian children with life-threatening illnesses in 2017, spending an average of $13,268 per wish granted. Their charitable registration number is 89526 9173 RR0001 and their address is Make-A-Wish Foundation of Canada, 4211 Yonge St.,  Suite 520, Toronto, Ontario, M2P 2A9. Their website can be found at http://www.makeawish.ca

Sent packing from Thompson General Hospital into retirement in 2011 after a high-profile dispute with two other doctors on the old Burntwood Regional Health Authority (BRHA) medical staff, just three years later he was presented with the Key to the City of Thompson on Oct. 6, 2014, the city’s highest and infrequently bestowed honour, by then Mayor Tim Johnston and then Coun. Stella Locker, a registered nurse, who was council’s longest-serving member at the time. Dr. Rich had moved to Swan River a number of years ago.

“Al, from me to you, I want to say thank you for your commitment, thank you for your dedication, and I am happy to say that no one has played more of an important role in the health care of Thompsonites, and Northerners, than Dr. Alan Rich. You are to be thanked for the commitment you made,” the mayor said at the awards ceremony at city hall in 2014.

Even after his departure from Thompson General Hospital, Dr. Rich continued to practice medicine for quite a while from both from his office in the Professional Building on Selkirk Avenue, where he had been a long-time tenant of J.B. Johnston Ventures Limited, Tim Johnston’s family property holding company, and in his new home in Swan River, where Prairie Mountain Health (PMH) granted him hospital privileges at Swan River Valley Hospital. Born and raised in Thompson, Tim Johnston, of course, is the son of Dr. Blain Johnston, a former city councillor who was the first regular, full-time doctor in Thompson.

Dr. Rich graduated from the University of Saskatchewan as a doctor of medicine on May 13, 1971. He started practicing medicine in Thompson the following year, after completing his residency internship at Queen Elizabeth Hospital of Montreal in June 1972. Over the course of his long medical career, Rich worked as a general practitioner, worked in CancerCare, was an anesthetist, oversaw dialysis, and worked as a medical examiner. Dr. Rich had originally arrived in Thompson from Saskatchewan as a summer student to work underground at Inco. He hoped to make enough money working in the mines during summers to put himself through medical school, which he did. In Saskatchewan, Dr. Rich as a young man, had worked on the Herriman family farm in Creelman, southeast of Regina. He returned to Thompson to open up his practice after graduating. Dr. Rich was also a high-calibre judo competitor, coaching and training judo practitioners, as well as serving as team physician for the Thompson Hawks, a senior amateur men’s hockey team. Their best season was in 1974-75 when they won the Edmonton Journal Trophy (Western Canada Intermediate Championship) but lost in the Hardy Cup Championship (Canadian Intermediate A Championship) that season to the Moncton Bears, the Eastern Canada champions.

On April 9, 2013, he was presented with the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal, created to mark the 60th anniversary of Her Majesty’s accession to the throne, by Swan River Mayor Glen McKenzie.  “It was a surprise,” Twyla Machan, editor of the local Swan Valley Star & Times, quoted Rich as saying in receiving the award. “In Thompson, I was on the wrong side of political decisions, but I am a doctor with no limitations.” Discussing his move to Swan River where he set up a practice, Rich told the Star & Times he was enjoying it there. “It’s a lot of fun. This is a very good place. I retired here, and I will spend the rest of my days here I think.”

Dr. Rich always provoked strong feelings among Thompson residents, many of whom he delivered. He was legendary for making house calls or dropping by unannounced after an 18 or 20-hour day at the hospital and his office because he was concerned how a patient was doing and wanted to check in on them. He had a knack for identifying what was ailing someone when other doctors may not have been able to put their finger on the problem so quickly, as his many loyal patients attested to  over the years. He may have even saved the odd cherished pet along the way, but there is no official record of such.

While some found the bearded Dr. Rich, clad in his leather motorcycle jacket and jeans, which he was attired in when he picked up the Key to the City of Thompson in 2014, a tad brusque in his bedside manner, folks in this hardrock nickel mining town generally liked his no-BS plain-speaking ways.  Besides, his YellowPages ad did say he was “friendly, courteous and understanding.” If he had his eccentricities, don’t we all? Live and let live is a way of life in the North.

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‘A quart of wheat for a denarius, and three quarts of barley for a denarius’: Friday, Oct. 3, 2008

 

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“The first weekend of October 2008 was a point when people at the top of the global financial system genuinely thought, in the words of George W. Bush, ‘This sucker could go down,’” writes John Lanchester in his compelling July 5 essay  “After the Fall” in the London Review of Books. Lanchester, a brilliant economics writer, has also worked as a football reporter, obituary writer, book editor, restaurant critic, and deputy editor of the London Review of Books, where he is now a contributing editor. He was born in Hamburg, brought up in Hong Kong and educated in England. The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS)  “at one point the biggest bank in the world according to the size of its balance sheet, was within hours of collapsing,” he writes. “And by collapsing I mean cashpoint machines would have stopped working, and insolvencies would have spread from RBS to other banks – and no one alive knows what that would have looked like or how it would have ended.”

Lanchester’s essay brought back a flood of memories for me from that surreal time almost a decade ago. By happenstance, I was travelling both times in that 2½-week period when the global economy came within a hairbreadth of seizing up in an unprecedented credit crunch.

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.

I had watched the beginning of the unravelling Sept. 14 with the overnight Asian financial markets on the Sunday night before driving with Jeanette a few hours later from Thompson, Manitoba to Winnipeg the morning of Monday, Sept. 15. She was working that week in Winnipeg; I was tagging along with her on a week’s vacation at the Place Louis Riel Hotel.

In a spectacular stroke of good fortune, 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.

Thompson, Manitoba, in fact, remained for some time one of the premier 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 here in Thompson, along with our neighbours in North Dakota and Saskatchewan, made the Great Recession almost everywhere else in the world seem surreal at first.

On Sept. 15-16, 2008, 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. In the United States, 15 banks failed in 2008, while several others were rescued through government intervention or acquisitions by other banks.

Eighteen days after the failure of Lehman Brothers – Friday, Oct. 3. 2008 – Jeanette and me were in the air, this time abroad an Air Canada flight from Winnipeg to Toronto, where we had a scheduled layover for several hours, before continuing on a short-hop flight from Toronto to Kingston’s Norman Rogers Airport, where we were to pick up a rental car to travel to nearby Wellington for Jeanette to compete in the PEC half-marathon on Sunday, Oct. 5. This would be the weekend, as Lanchester writes in his essay, “when people at the top of the global financial system genuinely thought, in the words of George W. Bush, ‘This sucker could go down.’”  The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS)  “at one point the biggest bank in the world according to the size of its balance sheet, was within hours of collapsing,” as he notes, “And by collapsing I mean cashpoint machines would have stopped working, and insolvencies would have spread from RBS to other banks – and no one alive knows what that would have looked like or how it would have ended.”

Says Lanchester: “No one had ever lived through, and no one thought possible, a situation where all the credit simultaneously disappeared from everywhere and the entire system teetered on the brink.”

After arriving in Toronto mid-morning Oct. 3, 2008 on our flight from Winnipeg, as we sat in the pre-boarding area waiting for several hours to depart for Kingston, scores of travellers, myself included, sat with our eyes alternately glued to television screens and the airplanes out on the tarmac of Pearson International Airport. The Dow Jones industrial average lost 1.5 per cent that Friday and 7.3 per cent for the week. On a point basis, the Dow lost 818 points for the week, its biggest weekly point loss in seven years and the third biggest weekly loss ever.

The Standard & Poor’s 500 index lost 1.4 per cent on the Friday and 9.4 per cent for the week. On a point basis, the S&P lost 114 points, the worst weekly point loss in seven years and the third biggest weekly loss ever.

The Nasdaq composite lost 1.5% that Friday and 10.8 per cent for the week. The 10.8 per cent decline was the worst in seven years and fifth worst ever.

As I sat there that Friday morning almost 10 years ago now at Pearson, the possibility that there might be no money that day in the system to re-fuel the planes out on the tarmac, and a full ground stop, this time not terror-related but due to financial implosion, was every bit as likely as the ATMs ceasing to dispense cash, was no longer hypothetical or abstract. It was, as we sensed then, and know with certainty now, imminent. That’s how close a call it was. And would continue to be for five very scary months, from early October 2008 through early March 2009, as 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.

On Nov. 26, 2008, in an editorial for the Thompson Citizen, I wrote that “America may face financial tests such as of not been felt since the Great Depression. The words of Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in his first inaugural address of March 4, 1933 ring as true today as they did some 75 years ago: ‘This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today the rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods have failed, through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men.'”

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, totalling 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.

More recently, some Wall Street analysts have pondered the mystery of what appears to be seven-year economic cycles tied to shemitah years. And wondered why crashes often seem to come in September and October. Shemitahs, also spelled as shmitas, are grounded in the seventh year of the seven-year agricultural cycle mandated by the Torah for the Land of Israel and still observed in contemporary Judaism. Back beyond the five great economic crashes of the last 44 years in 1973, 1980, 1987, 2001 and 2008, during the Great Depression, a solar eclipse took place almost 87 years ago on Sept. 12, 1931 – the end of a shemitah year. Eight days later, England abandoned the gold standard, setting off further market crashes and bank failures around the world. It also heralded in the greatest month-long stock market crash calculated on a percentage basis in Wall Street history.

In the months just ahead, we will mark those days of trial and tribulation a decade ago, when the world stood on the precipice of financial ruin, a victim of investment bankers’ inestimable hubris. A cautionary tale? Probably not. “The bricks are fallen down, but we will build with hewn stones: the sycamores are cut down, but we will change them into cedars,” wrote Isaiah, the 8th-century B.C. Jewish prophet for whom the Book of Isaiah is named.

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Thompson back on top in new Stats Can Violent Crime Severity Index

While the American poet T.S. Eliot told us that “April is the cruelest month” when he wrote his poem The Waste Land in 1922, that might well be modified to July for Thompson, Manitoba. The fourth week in July is when Statistics Canada typically releases its annual Juristat Crime Severity Index values for police services policing communities over 10,000 in population, including the Violent Crime Severity Index. It’s a story I have followed and written about for a decade. Even if I was somehow to forget the story one year, my “search engine terms” for https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/, which indicate what kind of things readers are searching the blog for on any given day, start to show this search term every year in late July: “juristat crime severity index,” reminding me it’s that time of year again.

Truth be told, the story hasn’t changed much since I arrived in Thompson in 2007. The usual suspects – North Battleford and Prince Albert in Saskatchewan, along with Williams Lake, British Columbia, and Thompson, Manitoba – more or less rotate the deck chairs on their version of the violent crime Titanic every year, trading spots from time to time for most violent crime community for places of similar size across Canada. Over the last three years, Thompson has finished in fourth, third – and now, as of Monday – top spot with a score of 414.95. Thompson previously had a three-year run as Canada’s most violent crime city in 2010, 2011 and 2012, before improving to a second-place finish in 2013, according to annual federal statistics.

North Battleford posted a Violent Crime Severity Index score of 337.13 for 2016. “It is very good news that North Battleford is no longer the number 1 community in Canada for violent crime,” said Mayor Ryan Bater. “We believe that is due in part to the increased patrols and added emphasis on Community Safety through our Community Safety Strategy.”

To put the new 414.95 score in some perspective, Thompson’s 2014  Violent Crime Severity Index (fourth-highest in the country) score was 227.14, while the score rose to 243.95 in 2015 (third-highest in the country.) Nationally in 2016, Statistics Canada reported July 24, “the overall volume and severity of violent crime, as measured by the violent CSI, was 75.3 and virtually unchanged from the previous year.”

The major crime severity indexes include the Violent Crime Severity Index; Non-Violent Crime Severity Index and Overall Crime Severity Index index – and scores are calculated by assigning crimes different weights based on seriousness as measured by each crime’s incarceration rate and the average custodial sentence courts mete out for each crime. The weighted offences are then added up and divided by population. The crime severity indexes are standardized to a base of 100 which is derived from the index values for the year 2006. A comprehensive review of police-reported crime statistics, the Juristat report covers crimes reported to police, rather than overall crime, which Statistics Canada reports in its General Society Survey of crime victimization undertaken every five years.

If Thompson’s score of 414.95 on the Juristat Crime Severity Index values for police services policing communities over 10,000 in population seems high – and it is – consider some of the earlier 2015 scores in Northern Manitoba: Shamattawa had a Violent Crime Severity Index score of 1,711.18 in 2015, while Leaf Rapids had a score of 1,001.25 two years ago. The score in Nelson House in 2015 was 864.70.

As well since 1962, Statistics Canada has collected information on all criminal incidents substantiated and reported by Canadian police services through its annual Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Survey. In addition to the UCR Survey, Statistics Canada also collects information on victims’ experiences with crime through the General Social Survey (GSS) on victimization, conducted every five years. Unlike the UCR Survey, the GSS collects data on victim’s perceptions of crime which include criminal incidents that may not have been brought to the attention of the police. These complementary surveys are the main sources of data on crime in Canada.

Each year, the UCR database is “frozen” at the end of May for the production of crime statistics for the preceding calendar year. However, police services continue to send updated data to Statistics Canada after this date for incidents that occurred in previous years. Generally, these revisions constitute new accused records, as incidents are solved and accused persons are identified by police. However, some new incidents may be added and previously reported incidents may be deleted as new information becomes known.

Revisions are accepted for a one-year period after the data are initially released. For example, when the 2016 crime statistics were released July 24, the 2015 data was updated with any revisions that have been made between May 2016 and May 2017. The data is revised only once and then permanently frozen.

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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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