UCN governing council says $4.63-million deficit arose from new collective agreement

The governing council of the University College of the North (UCN) approved a final 2024-25 budget April 25 that “will result in a deficit of $4,630,624 above total budgeted revenues, arising from the ratification of the new collective agreement, UCN said today.

UCN and the Manitoba Government and General Employees’ Union (MGEU) recently approved a four-year contract that calls for general wage increases and a special adjustment totaling 13.75 per cent over the four years. As of April 1, 8.25 per cent of the 13.75 increase is in effect. Signing bonuses ranged from $600 to $1,800 have been paid, and retroactive pay back to April 1, 2022 is to be paid out this month. The contract expires March 31, 2026. 

According to the 2024 funding letter from Renée Cable, NDP Minister of Advanced Education and Training, UCN will receive $41,027,765, including a two per increase from last year’s amount of $37,385,087.  “This year’s budgeted expenditures will result in a deficit of $4,630,624 above total budgeted revenues, arising from the ratification of the new collective agreement.  However, the provincial government has provided additional funds to address similar circumstances in other Post-Secondary institutions.  UCN is also anticipating slippage from unfilled positions to help offset the projected deficit.”

UCN has 2,026 students, with 716 in The Pas, 560 in Thompson, and 749 at regional centres.

UCN is the successor of Keewatin Community College as the main post-secondary education institution in Northern Manitoba. Keewatin Community College was established in 1966. Its Thompson campus was created in the early 1980s.

The University College of the North came into existence on June 10, 2004 when the University College of the North Act received royal assent. Keewatin Community College, as established by Section 2 of the Colleges Establishment Regulation, Manitoba Regulation 39/93, was continued as the university college.

From the outset, UCN was set up to provide “post-secondary education in a culturally sensitive and collaborative manner” that “is fundamental to the social and economic development of Northern Manitoba.”

UCN has the power to grant degrees, honourary degrees, certificates and diplomas.

The act also stipulates “post-secondary education in Northern Manitoba should be learner and community centered and characterized by a culture of openness, inclusiveness and tolerance and respectful of aboriginal and Northern values and beliefs.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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Workplace skills development and certificate programs outpace degree and diploma options in record UCN enrolment

University College of the North (UCN) said March 26 that it reached a record enrolment of 2,699 registered students at the end of February, mainly do to the “incredible” growth of workplace skills development training and certificate programs. Growth was particularly strong at UCN’s 12 regional post-secondary access centres, and other off-site locations, but less so at the two main campuses in The Pas and Thompson, and less so also in the areas of degree and diploma post-secondary education, which often take longer to complete than workplace skills development and certificate training. The school said it plans to focus on “increases in degree and diploma program enrolment” next academic year.

Workplace skills development, which supports industry needs, saw enrolment increase by 344 per cent, growing from 168 students as of Feb. 28, 2018 to 746 students at the end of February.

Overall enrolment between Feb. 28, 2018 and Feb. 28, 2019 increased by 20.4 per cent on The Pas campus and by 39.7 per cent at the Thompson campus, UCN says, although it did not provide the most recent actual raw numbers for the two campuses. However, last September the school said there were 190 full-time students registered on its Thompson campus and 298 full-time students registered on The Pas campus. Six months ago, another 127 UCN students were registered part-time on the Thompson campus, bringing the total number of students here to 317 then. In The Pas, there were 151 additional part-time students, bringing their total to 449.

The two campuses are almost 400 kilometres by road and four hours apart.

An additional 258 students as of last September were registered at UCN’s 12 regional post-secondary access centres operated through community partnerships in Flin Flon, Churchill, Swan River, Pimicikamak Cree Nation (Cross Lake), Tataskweyak Cree Nation (Split Lake), Chemawawin Cree Nation (Easterville), Nisichawayasihk Cree Nation (Nelson House), Mathias Colomb Cree Nation (Pukatawagan), Norway House Cree Nation, Misipawistik Cree Nation (Grand Rapids), Bunibonibee Cree Nation (Oxford House), and St. Theresa Point First Nation. There were 205 full-time students registered at the dozen regional centres and 53 part-time students registered as of last September.

Workplace skills development accounted for 578 additional students at the end of February, with the balance of enrolment increases occurring in certificate programs. Enrolment in all of UCN’s certificate programs grew by 39.2 per cent, led by a 95.6 per cent increase in students enrolled in the health care aid certificate program, and a 115.2 per cent increase in enrolment in the educational assistant certificate program.

“Our enrolment growth reflects UCN’s commitment to increase engagement with industry and with northern communities,” said Dan Smith, vice-president academic and research at UCN.

“Our efforts have paid off with exceptional growth in industry-related and community-delivered programming, and next year we add a focus on increases in degree and diploma program enrolment,” Smith added.

Final enrolment numbers for the 2018/19 academic year will be available after June, UCN said.

The 2018 Manitoba Colleges Review found that UCN needed to do more to meet the needs of employers in contributing to labour force development in the North and do more to meet the needs of Indigenous and Northern communities.

Higher Education Strategies Associates’ mandate was to undertake a review of the five post-secondary institutions in Manitoba that offer college-level programs: Assiniboine Community College, the Manitoba Institute of Trades and Technology, Red River College, Université de Saint-Boniface and University College of the North, or UCN as its just as often abbreviated to and known as.

The Toronto-based consultant said in its Government of Manitoba: Manitoba College Review System-Wide Report that UCN was projecting a $1.8 million deficit in 2018-2019. “Based on its current projections and without the increase in revenues, UCN projects a deficit in the next three academic years, of: $1.2 million in 2017-2018; $1.8 million in 2018-2019; and $2.3 million in 2019-2020,” Usher and Pelletier wrote. “As UCN recognizes that it is not able to run a deficit, management decisions may be needed to reduce expenditures.”

Last fall, UCN reorganized its senior administration by reducing its four vice-presidents, who reported to president Doug Lauvstad, to one vice-president of academic and research and a chief administrative officer. None of the incumbents in the positions eliminated were laid off or otherwise lost their jobs, and most are still working for UCN in some capacity.

The provincial government asked for the review, co-authored by Alex Usher and Yves Y. Pelletier,  in 2016 and it was undertaken between November 2016 and November 2017. At the end of last May, Pelletier, at the invitation of UCN,  returned to lead an initiative to ensure the alignment of administrative structures in order for the senior executive to be able to achieve their goals and objectives.

The report also said the current role of the Council of Elders extends beyond the legislative advisory intention of the June 10, 2004 University College of the North Act and that UCN is “perceived as having a tri-cameral governing structure,” including the Governing Council and Learning Council also, which is “unique and problematic within a modern university context.” It recommends the Governing Council govern and that it ensure the role of the Council of Elders is advisory, as per the original legislative intent, it says, of almost 14 years ago.

In launching the review, the Progressive Conservative government of Premier Brian Pallister, elected in April 2016,  set out five objectives: to develop forward looking system-wide strategic directions and a proactive, co-ordinated, systemic approach to college education; to enable the college system to improve outcomes for students, including indigenous students, with improved completion and employment rates; to strengthen labour market alignment and responsiveness to labour market need; to improve governance and sustainability of the college system with lean, efficient and effective administration and operations; and to further promote innovation, collaboration and partnership opportunities within the college system and with industry partners.

UCN has more than 330 employees, including full-time, part-time and contract employees.

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University College of the North has 190 full-time students registered on Thompson campus

University College of the North has 190 full-time students registered on its Thompson campus, Dan Smith, vice-president of academic and research, reported Sept. 19. There are 298 full-time students registered on The Pas campus.

Another 127 UCN students are registered part-time on the Thompson campus, bringing the total number of students here to 317. In The Pas, there are 151 additional part-time students, bringing their total to 449. The two campuses are almost 400 kilometres by road and four hours apart.  An additional 258 students are registered at 12 UCN regional facilities operated through community partnerships in Flin Flon, Churchill, Swan River, Pimicikamak Cree Nation (Cross Lake), Tataskweyak Cree Nation (Split Lake), Chemawawin Cree Nation (Easterville), Nisichawayasihk Cree Nation (Nelson House), Mathias Colomb Cree Nation (Pukatawagan), Norway House Cree Nation, Misipawistik Cree Nation (Grand Rapids), Bunibonibee Cree Nation (Oxford House), and St. Theresa Point First Nation. There are 205 full-time students registered at the dozen regional centres and 53 part-time students registered.

Total University College of the North enrolment at the two main campuses and regional centres stood at 1,024 students, 693 full time and 331 part time as of Monday.

By way of a fairly recent comparison, in the 2015-16 academic year, UCN had a full-time equivalent enrolment of 604 university and 564 college students for a total of 1,168. University program enrolment has grown 47 per cent since the 2011-12 academic year, while college student enrolment grew 17 per cent over the same period and overall enrolment by 31 per cent.

Last March 19, Higher Education Strategy Associates of Toronto said in its Government of Manitoba: Manitoba College Review System-Wide Report that UCN was projecting a $1.8 million deficit in 2018-2019. The provincial government asked for the review, co-authored by Alex Usher and Yves Y. Pelletier,  in 2016 and it was undertaken between November 2016 and November 2017. At the end of last May, Pelletier, at the invitation of UCN,  returned to lead an initiative to ensure the alignment of administrative structures in order for the senior executive to be able to achieve their goals and objectives.

Pelletier also benchmarked UCN’s allocation of human resources by functional areas with those at two or three similar institutions offering a broad suite of post-secondary programs and serving vast geographical areas through networks of campuses and regional delivery sites.

Enrolment on the two main campuses in The Pas and Thompson, as of Sept. 17, had increased by almost 5.7 per cent – from 725 students at this time last year to 766, as of Monday. Comparable information from the 12 regional centres  from this time last year is not available, Smith said.

“Institutional Research and the Office of the Registrar will both tell us that these numbers are preliminary and are subject to change – and they are correct,” Smith said. “The official numbers will become available in about six weeks after the voluntary withdrawal date. At that time, we’ll have a more solid sense of how enrolment is evolving this year. ”

UCN has more than 300 full-time employees, along with additional part-time and contract employees.

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Wa Ni Ska Tan meeting in Thompson May 15-17: Heart of Northern Manitoba mega-project hydro-electric country

Wa Ni Ska Tan, the Cree word for “wake up” or to “rise up”, an alliance of hydro-impacted communities, which is a Winnipeg-based cross-regional research alliance on the implications of hydro development for environments and indigenous communities in Northern Canada, and funded largely by a seven-year $2.5-million Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) partnership grant in 2015, meets in Thompson, the heart of Northern Manitoba mega-project hydro-electric country, this coming week from May 15-17 for their annual spring research gathering.

University College of the North (UCN) has donated free-of-charge space for some of the meetings, sessions and workshops from Tuesday to Thursday on the Thompson campus, while other meetings will be held at Ma-Mow-We-Tak Friendship Centre at 4 Nelson Rd.

Sylvia McAdam, co-founder of the Idle No More movement, is scheduled to provide the keynote address.

The Idle No More campaign originated first on social media in 2012, first on Facebook and later with Twitter, when McAdam, Nina Wilson, Sheelah Mclean and Jessica Gordon expressed concern about provisions of Bill C-45, which went onto receive royal assent on Dec. 14, 2012. Idle No More began nationally on Nov. 10, 2012 at Station 20 West, a community enterprise centre serving Riversdale, King George and Pleasant Hill on the west side of Saskatoon. The early stages of the movement consisted of five rallies before a National Day of Action on Dec. 10, 2012. It was Gordon who is credited by Wilson with coming up with the name one evening in the fall of 2012 when the four women were talking and Gordon said, “We need to get off our asses and quit being idle. We can’t be idle no more.”

McAdam will also facilitate a screening at 4:30 p.m. May 16 of Dakota filmmaker Sheldon Wolfchild’s 2104 documentary, The Doctrine of Discovery: Unmasking the Domination Code, as well as a discussion and workshop.

SSHRC is the federal research funding agency that promotes and supports post-secondary–based research and research training in the humanities and social sciences. SSHRC spends more than $350 million annually, supporting more than 8,000 graduate students and nearly 14,000 researchers.  The funding was awarded through SSHRC’s Partnership Grants, Partnership Development Grants, Insight Grants and Insight Development Grants programs November 2015 competition awards and publicly announced 10 months later on Sept. 9, 2016, when on Sept. 9, 2016, when SSHRC announced support for new research projects, including “Wa Ni Ska Tan: cross-regional research alliance on the implications of hydro development for environments and indigenous communities in Northern Canada” and other projects intended to “build knowledge and foster collaboration in a wide range of disciplines.”

Wa Ni Ska Tan emerged out of several meetings in Thompson in December 2014, and at Opaskwayak Cree Nation, adjacent to The Pas, in in June 2015, as well as two tours of hydro-affected communities in Northern Manitoba.  Wa Ni Ska Tan is comprised of representatives from 24 Cree (Ininew/Inniniwak), Anishinaabe, and Métis communities and First Nations; 22 researchers from nine universities in Canada and the United States, as well as a number of government entities and 14 social justice and environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

Ramona Neckoway, an assistant professor in Aboriginal and Northern Studies at UCN, and an active member of Wa Ni Ska Tan from Nisichawayasihk Cree Nation at Nelson House, is a PhD Candidate at the University of Manitoba whose research focuses on perspectives, experiences and implications of energy production on Cree homelands in Northern Manitoba. The working title of her thesis  is “‘Where the Otters Play: ‘The Horseshoe’ to Footprint and Beyond: exploring the spatial and temporal realities of hydroelectric energy production in northern Manitoba” and focuses on a critical and lesser known voices, histories, and perspectives of hydro-affected Cree “UCN is a great venue for this year’s gathering; as a faculty member and as a person from a hydro-affected community, I am looking forward to having sessions at our new facility here in Thompson,” NationTalk, an indigenous newswire reported May 11.

A University of Manitoba-led project, “Wa Ni Ska Tan: cross-regional research alliance on the implications of hydro development for environments and indigenous communities in Northern Canada” is headed by Stéphane McLachlan, a professor in U of M’s Department of Environment and Geography. His teaching and research focus on the interface between the biological and social sciences, and his research group is particularly interested in community centred and action research with farmers, rural communities, and First Nations across western North America, Europe, and Asia.

Colin Bonnycastle, an associate professor and director of the Northern Social Work Program at the University of Manitoba at 3 Station Rd. here in Thompson, and Peter Kulchyski, from Bissett, a professor of Native Studies at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, who attended the government-run Frontier Collegiate residential high school in Cranberry Portage, are listed among the numerous co-applicants for McLachlan’s $2.5-million SSHRC grant.

A UCN co-applicant is Maureen Simpkins, an associate professor in Aboriginal and Northern Studies and Social Sciences.  She completed her PhD in adult education in 2000 at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto.  Simpkins’s PhD thesis is entitled, “After Delgamuukw:  Aboriginal Oral Tradition as Evidence in Aboriginal Rights and Title Litigation.”

Listed as “partners” on the “Wa Ni Ska Tan: cross-regional research alliance on the implications of hydro development for environments and indigenous communities in Northern Canada” SSHRC application are the Legislative Assembly of Manitoba; LUSH Fresh Handmade Cosmetics in British Columbia; Manitoba Alternative Food Research Alliance; Manitoba Eco-Network Inc.; the Public Interest Law Centre, Social Planning Council of Winnipeg; University of Winnipeg; Tides Canada; and Manitoba Wildlands, all based in Winnipeg; McGill University in Montreal; Norway House Cree Nation; Pimicikamak Okimawin (Cross Lake Band of Indians);  the Sagkeeng Alliance from Pine Falls; Swan Lake First Nation; the University of Saskatchewan at Saskatoon and St. Thomas University in Fredericton, New Brunswick; and the Tommy Thomas Memorial Health Complex in South Indian Lake.

Other partners listed on the SSHRC application include Black River First Nation Pine Falls; Boreal Action Inc. in Winnipeg; Brokenhead Ojibway Nation at Scanterbury, Manitoba; the Toronto-based Canadian Association for Food Studies; Canadian Mennonite University in Winnipeg, and the Centre for Indigenous Environmental Resources, also in Winnipeg; the Community Association of South Indian Lake; Concerned Fox Lake Grassroots Citizens in Gillam; Food Matters Manitoba, based in Winnipeg; Four Arrows Regional Health Authority Inc. in Winnipeg; along with the Green Action Centre, also in Winnipeg; Honor the Earth in Callaway, Minnesota; the Winnipeg-based Interchurch Council on Hydropower; Jerch Law in Winnipeg, where Green Party of Manitoba leader James Beddome practices law;
Justice Seekers of Nelson House; the Keewatin Public Interest Research Group in Winnipeg; the Winnipeg-based Lake Winnipeg Indigenous Collective; and Aki Energy Inc., a Winnipeg-based indigenous social enterprise.

The Interchurch Council on Hydropower is made up of official representatives of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada (Manitoba/Northwestern Ontario Synod), Mennonite Central Committee Manitoba, United Church of Canada (Conference of Manitoba and Northwestern Ontario) and All Native Circle Conference, and Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Winnipeg (but not the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Keewatin-Le Pas where many of the large hydroelectric projects are located).

A broad range of research approaches are used to achieve project outcomes, including vegetation and seed bank sampling, geomatics, mail-out questionnaires, individual and group interviews, participatory mapping, and research video. McLachlan and graduate students in his Environmental Conservation Lab actively collaborate with rural and indigenous communities and stakeholders across North America and researchers from Alberta,  Ontario, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba.  McLachlan’s Environmental Conservation Lab research focuses on risk analysis of genetically modified organism (GM) crops; nanotechnology, diseases such as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), commonly known as mad cow disease, bovine tuberculosis (TB); nanotechnology; environmental restoration; spatial and dispersal ecology; environmental justice and video.

Thompson is and has been a major Manitoba Hydro hydro-electric project staging area for more than 60 years, dating back to the Kelsey Generating Station being built on the upper arm of the Nelson River between 1957 and 1961 to supply the International Nickel Company’s (INCO) mining and smelting operations in the Moak Lake and Mystery Lake areas. Kelsey was also built to supply electricity to the City of Thompson. Six years after completion, the generating station was linked to the province’s electrical system.

Elsewhere along the Nelson River in Northern Manitoba, construction was completed on Kettle Generating Station in 1974; Long Spruce Generating Station in 1979; and Limestone Generating Station in 1990. Construction finished on the Wuskwatim Generating Station, located on the Burntwood River, in the Nelson House Resource Management Area, approximately 45 kilometres southwest of Thompson and 35 kilometres southeast of Nelson House, in 2012.

The Wuskwatim Generating Station journey began for the Nisichawayasihk Cree Nation when they ratified the March 1996 Comprehensive Implementation Agreement, flowing from the December 1977 Northern Flood Agreement (NFA) Implementation Agreement.

Those agreements were aimed at mitigating and compensating the indigenous Cree and Métis of Northern Manitoba, including the Nisichawayasihk Cree Nation, for the impacts of the 1977 Churchill River Diversion Project and Nelson River Diversion Project.

The project diverted water flows through a series of channels and control structures into the Nelson River. The effects of this diversion on pre-existing water levels included increased flows in the Burntwood River, a three-metre rise in the level of Southern Indian Lake and the flooding of some 809 hectares of reserve land in Nelson House, requiring remedial works and other mitigation.

The Nisichawayasihk Cree Nation used their settlement with Manitoba Hydro as a stepping-stone toward greater self-sufficiency. Wuskwatim marked the first time a First Nation and Manitoba Hydro entered into a formal partnership to develop and operate a hydro-electric project.

Manitoba Hydro provides ongoing management and operations services to the Wuskwatim Power Limited Partnership in accordance with the project development agreement signed in June 2006. Nisichawayasihk Cree Nation has the option to own up to 33 percent of the project, through the Wuskwatim Power Limited Partnership, while Manitoba Hydro owns the balance.

The Keeyask Hydropower Limited Partnership (KHLP) began construction in July 2014 on the 695-MW Keeyask Generating Station, located on the Nelson River about 30 kilometres west of Gillam and downstream from Split Lake, within the Split Lake Resource Management Area about 180 kilometres northeast of Thompson.

Manitoba Hydro and representatives from the Tataskweyak Cree Nation, War Lake First Nation, Fox Lake Cree Nation, and York Factory First Nation signed the Joint Keeyask Development Agreement at Split Lake for the Keeyask Generating Station in 2009. Under the agreement Manitoba Hydro provides administrative and management services for the project and will own at least 75 per cent of the equity. The four First Nations will collectively have the right to own up to 25 per cent of the partnership.

Construction delays have increased the cost to more than $8.7 billion and the project manager in January told provincial regulators that further delays could raise that to as much as $10.5 billion if there are additional delays until November 2022. Keeyask is officially still supposed to be completed by the summer of 2021 at a cost of $8.7 billion.

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UCN projects a deficit of $1.2 million in 2017-2018, according to college review

 

 

 

As both its 2017-2018 fiscal year and the current four-year collective agreement between the Governing Council of University College of the North (UCN) and the Manitoba Government and General Employees’ Union (MGEU) come to an end in five days on March 31, UCN is projecting a deficit of $1.2 million in 2017-2018, Higher Education Strategy Associates of Toronto said in its Government of Manitoba: Manitoba College Review System-Wide Report, released March 19. The provincial government asked for the review, co-authored by Alex Usher and Yves Y. Pelletier,  in 2016 and it was undertaken between November 2016 and November 2017.

UCN senior management and the Governing Council are currently working on the 2018-19 fiscal year budget.

The report also said the current role of the Council of Elders extends beyond the legislative advisory intention of the June 10, 2004 University College of the North Act and that UCN is “perceived as having a tri-cameral governing structure,” including the Governing Council and Learning Council also, which is “unique and problematic within a modern university context.” It recommends the Governing Council govern and that it ensure the role of the Council of Elders is advisory, as per the original legislative intent, it says, of almost 14 years ago.

Higher Education Strategies Associates’ mandate was to undertake a review of the five post-secondary institutions in Manitoba that offer college-level programs: Assiniboine Community College, the Manitoba Institute of Trades and Technology, Red River College, Université de Saint-Boniface and University College of the North, or UCN as its just as often abbreviated to and known as.

In launching the review, the Progressive Conservative government of Premier Brian Pallister, elected in April 2016,  set out five objectives: to develop forward looking system-wide strategic directions and a proactive, co-ordinated, systemic approach to college education; to enable the college system to improve outcomes for students, including indigenous students, with improved completion and employment rates; to strengthen labour market alignment and responsiveness to labour market need; to improve governance and sustainability of the college system with lean, efficient and effective administration and operations; and to further promote innovation, collaboration and partnership opportunities within the college system and with industry partners.

Usher, president of Higher Education Strategy Associates,  is a former director of Educational Policy Institute Canada (EPI Canada), where he managed the “Measuring the Effectiveness of Student Aid Project” for the Millennium Scholarship Foundation, a four-year $4 million research project to investigate the long-term effects of student aid, and is the author of the project’s final report, published in 2010.

Pelletier, a former assistant deputy minister for post-secondary education in New Brunswick, is a senior consultant with London-Ontario-based Academica.

“Based on its current projections and without the increase in revenues, UCN projects a deficit in the next three academic years, of: $1.2 million in 2017-2018; $1.8 million in 2018-2019; and $2.3 million in 2019-2020,” Usher and Pelletier write. “As UCN recognizes that it is not able to run a deficit, management decisions may be needed to reduce expenditures.”

The Manitoba Colleges Review, the shorthand name for the Higher Education Strategies Associates’ report, makes 11 specific recommendations “designed to help strengthen UCN,” the school said in a March 19 news release reacting to the report, “and more than a dozen recommendations regarding Manitoba’s overall college system. ”

The eleventh and final recommendation is that “UCN should clarify the role and responsibility of the Council of Elders, established in Section 16 of the University College of the North Act. The legislation currently notes in Section 16 (2) that: ‘The Council of Elders is to promote an environment at the university college that respects and embraces Aboriginal and northern cultures and values. The Council of Elders is also to promote an understanding of the role of elders within the university college.’

“While their mandate is clear, the Council of Elders has been operating as a third decision-making body of equal standing to the Governing Council and the Learning Council. The role and responsibilities of the Elders Council should be clarified by the Governing Council, who set the duties of the Council of Elders, as per by-law 16 (3). The Governing Council should ensure that the Council of Elders advise on community needs and student supports.”

In their concluding  chapter on the section of the 206-page report devoted to UCN, Usher and Pelletier write: “Through our various qualitative and quantitative measures, we have heard many stories regarding UCN, with many being less encouraging than at other institutions. Over the past decade, since it was given the power to develop and deliver university programming, the number of college programs offered has declined, while enrolments at the college level have been modest. This occurred during a period when the North was undergoing significant economic expansion due to high commodity prices which in turn led to labour shortages in areas where college-level training is required. This was a badly missed opportunity.”

Elsewhere in the report, Usher and Pelletier write: “Administrative decisions have led to a decrease in the number of college-level programs during this 10-year period, from 44 programs offered in 2006-2007 compared to 28 programs in 2015-2016, despite a doubling of its operating budget and a 17 per cent increase in college-level FLE enrolments.”

The transformation of the “former Keewatin Community College into the University College of the North did not have to entail a drop in college-level programming and seems set by management direction. There appears to be consensus, both from industry and community leaders, that UCN suffered from a lack of public engagement, that it was unresponsive in dealing with stakeholders and in some cases stumbled when trying to meet community needs … the current economic condition of the province’s North suggests that many of the trades and colleges skills which were in shortage for much of the past decade are no longer in shortage. UCN should not spend time re-litigating what should have happened in the last decade: it needs to be focused on future needs and it is by no means self-evident that the demand for college-level skills will be higher than that for university-level skills in the next decade.”

Tom Goodman, chair of UCN’s Governing Council, is quoted in the school’s March 19 news release responding to the report as saying, “UCN is committed to working with the Government of Manitoba and other colleges to address the review’s recommendations. UCN will make changes to strengthen our responsiveness to communities and to industry and will make the changes necessary to ensure that we continue to provide the highest quality education to Northerners. We will be taking immediate steps to begin to implement these recommendations.”

Goodman, who lives in the Flin Flon area, is a former senior vice-president and chief operating officer with Hudbay Minerals. He was appointed chair of the Governing Council by the province by order-in-council last April 12, with the appointment announced by Education and Training Minister Ian Wishart.

“This report makes clear that UCN has much work to do,” said Doug Lauvstad, president and vice-chancellor of University College of the North, in the same news release. “UCN is a young institution that has grown quickly since it was first established in 2004. We need to consider the findings of the review, and take the necessary steps to ensure that we can continue to support social and economic development in the North.”

UCN announced last June 23 that Lauvstad, of The Pas, would  take over last Aug. 1 as president and vice-chancellor, succeeding Konrad Jonasson, appointed president and vice-chancellor in June 2012, who retired.

Lauvstad had been serving as the executive director of the Northern Manitoba Sector Council, an association of the region’s largest industrial sectors of mining, forestry and energy. He had worked previously in a senior administration role with UCN and its predecessor, Keewatin Community College, from 1988 to 2007, and holds a Master’s of Business Administration (MBA) graduate degree.

UCN operates two main campuses in The Pas and Thompson and 12 regional facilities operated through community partnerships in Flin Flon, Churchill, Swan River, Pimicikamak Cree Nation (Cross Lake), Tataskweyak Cree Nation (Split Lake), Chemawawin Cree Nation (Easterville), Nisichawayasihk Cree Nation (Nelson House), Mathias Colomb Cree Nation (Pukatawagan), Norway House Cree Nation, Misipawistik Cree Nation (Grand Rapids), Bunibonibee Cree Nation (Oxford House), and St. Theresa Point First Nation.

The number of full-time equivalent (FTE) university and college students at UCN grew from 894 FTEs in 2011-2012 to 1,168 students in2015-2016, the report said. The percentage of Indigenous students in base-funded university programs continued to increase, from 67 per cent in 2011-2012 to 74 per cent in 2015-16. The number of Indigenous students in base-funded college programs has fallen from 79 per cent to 68 per cent over the same period “The average age of the college student at UCN is 27, a consistent age throughout the last five years,” the report notes.

UCN has about 394 full-time employees, along with additional part-time and contract employees.

The full report can be found at: http://www.edu.gov.mb.ca/docs/manitoba_college_review.pdf

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Real News: Manitoba Tories to stop subsidizing air travel for medical escorts, but some on Facebook wonder if that’s ‘fake news’

Way back aeons ago, say around August 2014, when I last wrote in print, the phrase “fake news” hadn’t yet entered the popular lexicon. It’s not that fake news, especially in the form of state-sponsored propaganda, didn’t exist. It did and it had a long history. Octavian famously used a campaign of disinformation to aid his victory over Marc Antony in the final war of the Roman Republic,” noted James Carson, head of search engine optimization and social media at the Telegraph Media Group in London, in a March 16 piece headlined “What is fake news? Its origins and how it grew in 2016,” which appears in the Telegraph online at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/0/fake-news-origins-grew-2016/

Carson also notes that in the aftermath of Octavian’s final war of the Roman Republic, from 31 BC to 29 BC, also known as Antony’s civil war, Octavian “changed his name to Augustus, and dispatched a flattering and youthful image of himself throughout the Empire, maintaining its use in his old age.”

The British, in particular among the Allies, made good use of propaganda against the Germans during the First World War from 1914 to 1918, demonizing the “Hun” with unsubstantiated false reports of atrocities. Twenty years later in the lead-up to the Second World War, the Nazi party in Germany “used the growing mass media to build a power base and then consolidate power in Germany during the 1930s, using racial stereotyping to encourage discrimination against Jews.” That’s why the name Joseph Goebbels, who served as Reich minister of propaganda, still sends chills down our spine.

It wasn’t until Donald Trump’s first press conference as president-elect on Jan. 11, when he pointed at CNN reporter Jim Acosta, while refusing to listen to his question, saying, “You are fake news!” that the phrase entered the popular lexicon.  Two days after Trump became president, Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, added to the lexicon, telling Chuck Todd, host of NBC’s Meet the Press, that White House press secretary Sean Spicer had used ‘alternative facts’ in his first statement to the press corps Jan. 21,  when making false claims about the inaugural crowd size. Spicer had baldly told the pants-on-fire lie that Trump drew the “largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period.”

Lo-and-behold, on Friday, I posted on Facebook links to two media stories, one from May 2, written by Jonathon Naylor, a hometown Flin Flon boy, whom I have known for 10 years, and who has edited the local newspaper, The Reminder even longer, headlined “Patient escort subsidy for airfare to be eliminated” (http://www.thereminder.ca/news/local-news/patient-escort-subsidy-for-airfare-to-be-eliminated-1.17447605), and a similar May 4 story from CBC News Manitoba, headlined “‘Who’s going to help them now?’: Manitoba cutting airfare subsidy for escorts of northern patients” http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/northern-patient-escort-subsidy-1.4100111

Naylor wrote: “The provincial government plans to cancel a subsidy that offers affordable airfare to the escorts of northern Manitoba patients who fly to Winnipeg for medical appointments.

“The Northern Patient Transportation Program (NPTP) currently allows patients and their escorts to purchase commercial flight tickets for $75 each, far below the standard price.

“While eligible patients will continue to have this option, the province plans to remove the subsidy for escorts at a date yet to be announced.

“Manitoba Health spokeswoman Amy McGuinness said the move is important for financial reasons.

“‘This ensures that costs are being managed for medically necessary trips,’ she said, adding the change is estimated to save about $1 million a year.

“Escorts, she said, ‘will need to travel by land, or to purchase a regular ticket with the air carrier.’ A one-way plane ticket from Flin Flon to Winnipeg costs up to $859 without the subsidy.

“McGuinness could not confirm when the change will be implemented, saying the health department will work with the Northern Health Region to confirm timelines.”

Amy McGuinness is press secretary to cabinet for the Pallister Progressive Conservative government.

While I may not much like some of the news delivered by her and her Tory bosses, including this news of the cancellation of a subsidy under the Northern Patient Transportation Program (NPTP) that offers affordable airfare to the medical escorts of Northern Manitoba patients flying to Winnipeg and back  to Winnipeg for medical appointments, I would never have dreamed McGuinness was offering up “fake news” or “alternative facts” here.

Just because I find something in the news I definitely don’t like and find most unpalatable, such as the cancellation of the medical escort subsidy, doesn’t make it “fake news,” whether I post it on Facebook or elsewhere on social media, or not.

Back in the day, when I edited the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News here for seven or so years, I was never accused, even by another name, of faking the news or linking to fake news stories online.

What I was accused of sometimes was running too many real but inconvenient “bad news” stories, especially actual crime and crime-related statistical stories on how Thompson finds itself for crime, along with some OmniTRAX rail stories on freight train delays, derailments and plans (now scrapped) to ship oil-by-rail across Northern Manitoba from The Pas in the southwest to Churchill and Hudson Bay in the northeast.

The timing was bad, to say the least. 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, opposition fueled in part no doubt by the tragedy only 5½ weeks earlier at Lac-Mégantic in Quebec’s Eastern Townships 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 on July 6, 2013. Forty-seven people died as a result of the fiery explosion that followed the derailment.

While many of the comments were spot-on in reacting to the news of the province cancelling the subsidy under the Northern Patient Transportation Program (NPTP), several others wondered on my timeline if this had been confirmed by the government or was it just media speculation?

Either some of my well-meaning Facebook friends perhaps needs to read links a little more thoroughly before commenting, or Amy McGuinness, press secretary to cabinet for the Pallister government, needs to raise her profile a little more when quoted in news stories. Perhaps something like AMY MCGUINNESS, PRESS SECRETARY TO CABINET FOR THE PALLISTER GOVERNMENT, said today. I suspect, although I could be wrong, part of it is that some of my Facebook friends, especially ones with Tory leanings (yes, I do have friends like that) were a bit blindsided by the news of the province cancelling the subsidy under the Northern Patient Transportation Program (NPTP) that offers affordable airfare to the medical escorts of Northern Manitoba patients flying to Winnipeg and back for medical appointments, and couldn’t quite believe what they were reading at first. They didn’t want to believe it was true.

The topper, however, was the one Facebook friend from here in Thompson, who managed to post the comment “Fake news” with zero elaboration twice on a single thread (well done, Ron). But he also “liked” the story (I think), although it’s always hard to know exactly what that means on Facebook. Now Ron, speaking earlier of Huns, I consider to be somewhere just to the right of Attila the Hun. But here’s the thing about small Northern towns. You know people personally. And I like Ron in person. While we don’t run into each other in real life so much, we do on occasion and we have great chats about the State of Thompson, as it were.

But I must confess after readings Ron’s somewhat cryptic “fake news” allegation, I went for a little troll on his Facebook page, to see what he was reading, listening to and watching these days. A few days ago, on April 28, Ron shared on his Facebook timeline the Metaspoon story, “Ship Went Missing In The Bermuda Triangle. But Then It Shows Back Up 90 Years Later” http://www.metaspoon.com/ship-bermuda-triangle?so=pgshM&cat=shock&fb=17036M1mwr3565a0&utm_source=17036M1mwr3565a0

It’s a great story. And one that appeals to me having written soundingsjohnbarker posts such as “Invisible ships: Romulan Star Empire Birds-of-Prey and the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard’s USS Eldridge” on Nov. 25, 2015 (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2015/11/25/invisible-ships-romulan-star-empire-birds-of-prey-and-the-philadelphia-naval-shipyards-uss-eldridge/) and last Oct. 23, “Can meteorology use science to unmask the long-cloaked air and sea secrets of the Bermuda Triangle?” https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2016/10/23/can-meteorology-use-science-to-unmask-the-long-cloaked-air-and-sea-secrets-of-the-bermuda-triangle/

Ron’s Metaspoon story goes like this. The SS Cotopaxi, a tramp steamer that disappeared in December 1925, was discovered by the Cuban Coast Guard 90 years after it vanished in the Bermuda Triangle. The story originated in the World News Daily Report, which on May 18, 2015 published an article reporting that the Cuban Coast Guard had intercepted the SS Cotopaxi that disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle while en route to Havana in 1925. The story originated with the Weekly News Daily Report and has been widely picked up by “news” aggregators such as Metaspoon.

“The Cuban authorities spotted the ship for the first time on May 16, near a restricted military zone, west of Havana. They made many unsuccessful attempts to communicate with the crew, and finally mobilized three patrol boats to intercept it,” the Weekly News Daily Report says.

Problem is, Ron, while there was indeed a real SS Cotopaxi, which disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle in December 1925, it unfortunately did not reappear to the Cubans on May 16, 2015. Or at any other time. World News Daily Report is a news and political satire web publication, which may or may not use real names, often in semi-real or mostly fictitious ways. It routinely publishes clickbait hoax articles. All “news” articles contained within worldnewsdailyreport.com are fictitious. Any resemblance to the truth is purely coincidental, except for all references to politicians and/or celebrities, in which case they are based on real people, but still based almost entirely in fiction.

Fake news, Ron. Didn’t happen.

Another Facebook friend posted on my timeline: “Media is a tricky business to navigate . I’ve learned that the hard way when it comes to being misquoted or have had things taken out of context (not by you personally ). I’m grateful for journalists that look into all sides and facts before stating an opinion.”

Perhaps so. In the old days we used to talk about things like a story having a “ring of truth” or whether it passed the “smell test.”

Today, I might point to something like, Deception Detection for News: Three Types of Fakes by Victoria L. Rubin, Yimin Chen and Niall J. Conroy, which appeared last year in the Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology. The abstract can be found here: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pra2.2015.145052010083/pdf

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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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