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.

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thompson gets a nice bounce up to 132nd spot in annual MoneySense survey released June 8 after its worst worst-ever finish in 177th place last year

Every spring for the last 11 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 this year’s survey published nationally June 8 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 last year. MoneySense also ranked eight more cities and towns this year, meaning the list has grown to 219 communities in its annual snapshot of Canada.

Thompson has a history of bouncing around, both up and down from year to year, in the numbers. In 2014, we finished in 121st place out of 209 cities ranked, while in 2013 finished 164th out of 200 cities ranked, it’s second-lowest ever ranking.

Ottawa, as well as Burlington and Oakville, also in Ontario, followed by St. Albert, Alberta, and Boucherville, Québec, finished one to five in that order in this year’s 2016 rankings for “Canada’s Best Places to Live.” Winnipeg slipped to 29th spot from 24th last year, while Brandon took a big dive down 82nd spot from 26th last year.  Brandon had finished 42nd in 2014 and 91st in 2013. Steinbach continued to tumble this year, ranked at 170 compared to 149 last year, after finishing in 85th spot in 2014 and 61st place in 2013. Portage la Prairie improved marginally to 168th place after finishing in 170th spot last year, compared to 144th in 2014, while Selkirk was in 169th place, down from 155th place last year.

Staying on top is a tough gig with the ever-fickle MoneySense. Last year, the magazine ranked Boucherville, Que., a suburb of Montreal, just across the St. Lawrence River with a population of 43,000, as the best place to live in Canada, after Boucherville had finished sixth overall in 2014.

“We’re seeing low unemployment, high incomes, affordable housing, [and] solid population growth, which are some of the key areas we look at, along with good access to transit and a vibrant arts community,” said Mark Brown, MoneySense reports and rankings editor in June 2015, explaining Boucherville’s topping the survey.

This year, Boucherville slipped back down to fifth place.

MoneySense is published seven times a year by Rogers Publishing Limited, a division of Rogers Communications in Toronto. The “Best Places to Live” survey continues to grow in terms of number of cities compared. There were 123 cities compared in 2007; jumping to 154 in 2008 and 2009; increasing again to 179 in 2010 and up to 180 in 2011, and then in increments of 10 to 190 in 2012, 200 in 2013, 201 in 2014 and 209 in 2015. Thompson finished 103rd in 2012. We were 43rd in 2011, finished 58th in 2010, in 88th place overall in 2009, a year after the city’s highest ranking of 19th place overall a year earlier in 2008. Thompson ended up in 25th place in 2007.

MoneySense estimated Thompson’s unemployment rate has decreased over the last year from 6.56 per cent to 5.1 per cent. “Average value of primary real estate” was pegged at $197,812 here this year. Median household income came in at $90,738, while average household discretionary income was calculated at $50,202.

MoneySense says its survey “is the most comprehensive data-driven snapshot of Canadian cities you’ll find anywhere.”  There are 35 separate categories being measured. They include factors such as household income, population growth, unemployment rate, cost of housing, crime rates, number of rainy days, number of doctors per 1,000 residents and the percentage of the population that walks, bikes or takes public transit to get to work.

Brown says, “While we can’t gauge many of the elements that people enjoy in their cities, the nearness of family, the friendliness of neighbours or even great sunsets, we have measured what can be measured and compared what can be compared from towns and cities across our provinces and territories.”

In 2014, Brown noted, “Critics of our best places ranking routinely point out that we don’t incorporate intangible considerations – like the best scenery or hottest attractions – into our methodology. It’s true, we don’t take any of these things into account. Out east, for example, the Nova Scotia community of New Glasgow doesn’t place highly on our ranking, despite being home to some of the finest river and deep-water fishing spots in the country.

“But such characteristics – no matter how appealing – aren’t the point of this exercise,” said Brown at the time. “This isn’t the best places to visit, it’s the best places to live. If you’re going to plant roots somewhere we think there should be good access to medical care, low crime, good public transportation and, yes, nice weather. Above all, the best places in Canada have to be affordable. That’s why measures like housing prices, employment and wealth are particularly important, and are given the greatest weighting in our methodology.”

In fact, New Glasgow was dead last in 219^th place again this year in the MoneySense survey. That’s after being dead last year, finishing 209 out of 209. New Glasgow finished in 198th spot out of 201 places in 2014, after finishing 196th in 2013 out of 200 spots. It also finished last at 190 of 190 in 2012 and 180 out of 180 in 2011. In 2010, it managed to creep out of the cellar to rank 177th out of 179 after finishing dead last also in 2009 at 154th out of 154 places. In 2008, New Glasgow was 151 out of 154. The Census Agglomerate for New Glasgow includes New Glasgow, Stellarton, Trenton, Westville, Merigomish Harbour, Fisher’s Grant, Pictou Sub Division C and Pictou Subdivision. B.

You can check out the full 219 rankings in detail at: http://www.moneysense.ca/canadas-best-places-to-live-2016-full-ranking/

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The train whistle carries on the east wind

I wrote the time down: 12:47 p.m. Yesterday. I wanted to make a note of it because I so seldom hear train whistles up here in Thompson, Manitoba. The wind has to be blowing in just the right direction at the right time.

Thompson is pretty much at the dead centre of Manitoba, Canada and North America, give or take a few kilometres here and there. Halfway north, halfway south, halfway east and halfway west, I have to remind myself at times. In the winter, we feel (quite literally with our legendary -40°C/-40°F temperatures) more connected to our northern geography. But conversely in summer, when July temperatures average 23°C and temperatures of 30°C and even higher are registered, we’re more aware of our southern connections to the Prairies of Southern Manitoba.

The bonus of a 30°C day in Thompson in July is that the humidity, with the exception of a few days usually each summer, remains relatively low and bearable compared to what I lived with for years in Southern Ontario. The only relief from that stifling summer heat for me for many years was annual trips to the Maritimes, when you knew that once you got just past Quebec City on the St. Lawrence River, somewhere between Montmagny, Kamouraska and Notre Dame du Portage, the air was going to clear of humidity and the temperature drop, making for pleasant driving for the rest of the evening to Edmundston, New Brunswick, gateway to the Atlantic time zone and jumping of point for all places in the Maritimes. Here in Thompson, the air cools off routinely at night to at least as low as 12°C or 13°C, even after a 30°C day, and the number of nights the temperature has been above say 20°C still at midnight, I could probably count on the fingers of one hand in my more than eight years living here now. Certainly, I’ve never needed a fan or air conditioning, although life-long Northerners tend to make a run on both here at Wal-Mart or Canadian Tire if they notice the thermometer is predicted to head up to 27°C or 28°C for more than a day or two.

Even in summer, we’re just close enough to Hudson Bay that a deep low pressure system with a strong counter-clockwise rotation, can send our temperature abruptly back down to 8°C for a day or so, reminding us the polar bears are never really that far away

As for train whistles, I’ve always found them to have a haunting, slightly distant sound that engages the soul instantly. All through my childhood, growing up in Oshawa, just east of Toronto, an east wind invariably meant two things: You could hear the train whistle from the CN tracks well south at Bloor Street, and rain, long steady rain, was an hour or two, not much more, away. You could not hear the train whistle at any other time from the house I lived in from the age of six to 19, and while it rained at other times, especially with summer thunderstorms, with winds from other directions, that was more unpredictable. An east wind started the clock running for the countdown to rain. For me, east winds and train whistles are so internalized they’re still part of my chronobiology at some deep level.

Years removed from Oshawa, I would still notice the haunting but not at all unwelcome sound of the train whistle when I would visit my mother, who by then lived on Fort Lawrence Road, east of Exit 1, as the Via Rail Ocean passenger train, en route from Montréal to Halifax, or Halifax to Montréal, crossed the saltwater Tantramar marshes between Amherst, Nova Scotia and Sackville, New Brunswick, a stone’s throw from the Missiguash River, bordering New Brunswick and Nova Scotia and connecting the Nova Scotia peninsula with those who come from away elsewhere in North America. The saltwater Tantramar marshes, sometimes referred to singularly as the Tantramar Marsh, is a very special place indeed, and was even long before the first train crossed it in the 19th century. Memory surrounds you everywhere in Nova Scotia. This is the soil my Acadian ancestors lived and laboured on. All I have to do is close my eyes for but a moment listening to Lorena McKennitt’s The Mystic’s Dream and I clearly hear the words, “All along the English shore,” and in my mind’s eye I see the Acadian tricolor of blue, white and red, the gold star Stella Maris at top left, seeking the guidance and protection of the Virgin Mary, patron of the Acadians. This is Aulac Ridge, a prominent rise running west to east across the Tantramar marshes on the Isthmus of Chignecto, just west of the Missaguash River. This is the demarcation line between Fort Lawrence and Fort Beauséjour, New France and British North America, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, overlooking the Cumberland Basin of the Bay of Fundy.

Nowhere, of course, in the song are the words, “All along the English shore” actually heard, not even as a mondegreen where you mishear the lyrics to a song, which is a sort of aural malapropism, where instead of saying the wrong word, you hear the wrong word as a result of near-homophony, in a way that gives it a new meaning. No, this, as it was for Marcel Proust, is remembrance of things past.

Train whistles, which were also called steam trumpets, originated in England in 1832 with the stationmaster at the Leicester and Swannington Railway opening, who suggested that trains should have an audible signaling device. A local musical instrument maker was commissioned to create a steam trumpet for the steam locomotive. The proportional tracker action of the steam calliope in those days allowed for the engineer to individualize to some extent the expression of the sound and many locomotive operators would have their own style of blowing the whistle so it would be often be known who was operating the locomotive by the sound.

The purpose of the train whistle was to serve as an audible warning device, which it still does, and as a way to signal to other rail workers up and down the railway track, which, of course, in the latter case today has been supplemented, although not replaced, by two-way radios and even smartphones and text messaging. And train whistles to this day are still seen as an inexpensive warning device compared to other options, such as elevated rail crossings where tracks intersect with roads used by motor vehicles. Under Transport Canada’s Canadian Rail Operating Rule (CROR 14), a combination of two long whistles, followed by a short whistle, then followed by another long whistle, indicates that a train is approaching a public grade crossing.

Both the old steam whistle and today’s compressed air whistle waver in pitch, suggesting a cry or wail, giving them that distinct haunting, lonesome or melancholic sound often ascribed to them. In the United States in the 19th century, different whistle sounds were created for different railroads (the preferred term rather than railway in the U.S.) in order to distinguish them, ranging from high pitched to deeper tones.

When I lived in Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories, I found that to be an exception to the east wind-means-rain rule. There, deep in the continent, like here, but without the proximity of meteorological effects emanating from Hudson Bay, an east wind off Great Slave Lake and Yellowknife Bay, which I could see down the road from my place, often meant high pressure and plenty of sunshine and fine weather, especially in the summer. As for trains, they only ran as far north as Hay River in the Northwest Territories, as I recall. There were no train whistles to be heard in Yellowknife.

Here in Northern Manitoba, Via Rail Canada Train  693 runs north between Winnipeg and Churchill, stopping in Thompson, while Train 692 runs south from Churchill to Winnipeg, also making a stop in Thompson, As well, Hudson Bay Railway (HBR), which owns the track and is a wholly-owned subsidiary of  OmniTRAX Canada, runs its own freight Train 295 from its interchange with CN Rail and its railhead at The Pas along the route. OmniTRAX Canada is in turn a wholly-owned subsidiary of Denver-based shortline railroad OmniTRAX, Inc., an affiliate of The Broe Group, which was founded in 1986 and is privately owned by Pat Broe, who founded the company in Denver in 1972 as a real estate asset management firm.

Via Rail Canada stations and stops along the Winnipeg to Churchill route in Manitoba and Saskatchewan include Portage-La-Prairie, Gladstone, Plumas, Glenella, McCreary, Laurier, Ochre River, Dauphin, Gilbert Plains, Grandview, Roblin, Togo, Sask., Kamsack, Sask., Veregin, Sask., Mikado, Sask., Canora, Sask., Sturgis, Sask., Endeavour, Sask., Reserve, Sask., Hudson Bay, Sask., The Pas, Prospector, Root Lake, Wanless, Atik, Simonhouse, Cranberry Portage, Optic Lake, Heming Lake, Sherridon, Ruddock, Charles, Pawistik, Mile 151.8, Pukatawagan, Orok, Halcrow, Cormorant, Dering, Dyce, Wekusko, Turnbull, Ponton and Pipun.

Along the Bayline, the stations and stops include Wabowden, Lyddal, Odhil, Hockin, Thicket Portage, Leven, Thompson, Sipiwesk, Pikwitonei, Bridgar, Pit Siding, Ilford, Wivenhoe, Gillam, 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. The Bayline reached Churchill on March 29, 1929.

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Thompson tumbles in worst-ever finish: Drops from 121st to 177th place out of 209 cities ranked in annual MoneySense survey released June 1

Every spring for the last 10 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 this year’s survey published nationally today, Thompson tumbled in its worst-ever finish to 177th place from 121st place last year out of 209 cities ranked in 2015 in the annual MoneySense snapshot of Canada. Thompson’s previous lowest placing in the survey was in 2013 when it finished 164th out of 200 cities ranked.

Last year, Thompson moved up from 164th to 121st place. In this year’s MoneySense “Canada’s Best Places to Live’ ranking, Thompson was one of six Manitoba cities included in the survey. Winnipeg was 24th on this year’s list of 209 Canadian cities, down from its 19th place ranking last year, 16th spot in 2013 and 10th place finish in 2012. Brandon continued to gain ground in this year’s MoneySense rankings, moving up to 26th place from 42nd last year and 91st in 2013. Steinbach also took a big tumble this year, ranked at 149, compared 85th spot last year and 61st place in 2013. Portage la Prairie dropped to  170th spot from 144th place last year; it finished in 160th place in 2013. Selkirk was 155th.

The magazine ranked Boucherville, Que., a suburb of Montreal,  just across the St. Lawrence River with a population of 43,000, as the best place to live in Canada. Boucherville had finished sixth overall last year. “We’re seeing low unemployment, high incomes, affordable housing, [and] solid population growth, which are some of the key areas we look at, along with good access to transit and a vibrant arts community,” said Mark Brown, MoneySense reports and rankings editor, in explaining Boucherville’s topping the survey

MoneySense is published seven times a year by Rogers Publishing Limited, a division of Rogers Communications in Toronto. The “Best Places to Live” survey continues to grow in terms of number of cities compared. There were 123 cities compared in 2007; jumping to 154 in 2008 and 2009; increasing again to 179 in 2010 and up to 180 in 2011, and then in increments of 10 to 190 in 2012, 200 in 2013, 201 in 2014 and 209 in 2015. Thompson finished 103rd in 2012. We were 43rd in 2011, finished 58th in 2010, in 88th place overall in 2009, a year after the city’s highest ranking of 19th place overall a year earlier in 2008. Thompson ended up in 25th place in 2007.

MoneySense estimated Thompson’s unemployment rate has increased over the last year from 5.5 per cent to 6.56 per cent.

While 10.9 per cent of Thompson residents travel to work by walking only the most miniscule numbers commute to work by bicycling or using public transit, MoneySense found. In the case of bicycling, only 0.7 per cent of Thompson residents bicycle to work, while even fewer – 0.3 per cent – use public transit to travel to work.

MoneySense says its survey “is the most comprehensive data-driven snapshot of Canadian cities you’ll find anywhere.”  There are 34 separate categories being measured. They include factors such as household income, population growth, unemployment rate, cost of housing, crime rates, number of rainy days, number of doctors per 1,000 residents and the percentage of the population that walks, bikes or takes public transit to get to work.

Brown says, “To identify the Best Places to Live in Canada we rank each community across 34 separate categories to get a detailed picture of what life is like in each community.”

Last year, Brown noted, “Critics of our best places ranking routinely point out that we don’t incorporate intangible considerations – like the best scenery or hottest attractions – into our methodology. It’s true, we don’t take any of these things into account. Out east, for example, the Nova Scotia community of New Glasgow doesn’t place highly on our ranking, despite being home to some of the finest river and deep-water fishing spots in the country.

“But such characteristics –  no matter how appealing – aren’t the point of this exercise,” says Brown. “This isn’t the best places to visit, it’s the best places to live. If you’re going to plant roots somewhere we think there should be good access to medical care, low crime, good public transportation and, yes, nice weather. Above all, the best places in Canada have to be affordable. That’s why measures like housing prices, employment and wealth are particularly important, and are given the greatest weighting in our methodology.”

In fact, New Glasgow was dead last in 209th place this year. New Glasgow finished in 198th spot out of 201 places last year, after finishing 196th in 2013 out of 200 spots. It also finished last at 190 of 190 in 2012 and 180 out of 180 in 2011. In 2010, it managed to creep out of the cellar to rank 177th out of 179 after finishing dead last also in 2009 at 154th out of 154 places. In 2008, New Glasgow was 151 out of 154. The Census Agglomerate for New Glasgow includes New Glasgow, Stellarton, Trenton, Westville, Merigomish Harbour, Fisher’s Grant, Pictou Sub Division C and Pictou Subdivision. B.

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