The thinning of the “Veil Between the Worlds” – All Souls’ Day marks the end of the Allhallowtide triduum

I’m a fan of The Gap in the Curtain, a 1932 novel by the Scottish author John Buchan, the 1st Baron Tweedsmuir, who served as Governor General of Canada between 1935 and 1940. It is a novel about the thinning of the veil at certain times between the worlds of the living and the dead. As an aside, my favourite G.K. Chesterton quote, taken from his 1908 book Orthodoxy, which he described as a “spiritual autobiography,” is “Tradition is the democracy of the dead. It means giving a vote to the most obscure of all classes: our ancestors.”  

My supernatural story of the thinning of the veil involves the late Rhonda Payne; a story involving an obscure fridge magnet, of all things, and stretching from Halifax to Yellowknife. Rhonda, author of the play Stars in the Sky Morning, a tale of the hardships of women on the Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland – a playwright the National Post described as a “national treasure” in 1999 – was a fiery actor, writer, director, producer and activist from Curling, Newfoundland, who would go onto co-found Ground Zero Productions with Don Bouzek in Toronto, and after that Riverbank Productions in Peterborough on Parkhill Road East (the studio office was quite literally on the banks of the Otonabee River.) She died in Halifax in June 2002. No saints or miracles in my story, but an experience 20 years ago that sent a chill up my spine like I’ve never felt before.

In late June 2002, I was living in Yellowknife. Rhonda had died in early June at the tragically young age of 52 in Halifax, where she had been living since 2000. She had been ill only a short time.

I had known Rhonda since November 1997 when she lived on Parkhill Road East in Peterborough and she was running Riverbank Productions, her theatre company. I had arrived back in Peterborough seven months earlier to begin a second tour of duty at the Peterborough Examiner. I met Rhonda at a dinner party and found her to be one of the most vivacious guests I have ever met under such circumstances. That’s still true today.

Rhonda was a big, and at times, tumultuous, presence in my life for the next several years. I learned of her illness in late May 2002 when I was vacationing in Iowa. Instead of returning to Yellowknife as planned, I re-booked and caught perhaps the most convoluted flight plan ever that saw me backtrack through Minneapolis, Calgary and Edmonton before finally catching flights east to Moncton, and then driving to Halifax from my mother’s place in Amherst, Nova Scotia, to visit Rhonda at the Queen Elizabeth II Health Sciences Centre. She was well enough that day to talk and go for a short walk down the hospital corridor, but she died six days later, and three days after I had returned to Yellowknife.

Several weeks later, near the end of June, a young reporter, Christine Kay, who was from Ontario, I believe, but had just graduated from the journalism program at University of King’s College in Halifax, arrived in Yellowknife to start her first reporting job in the newsroom of Northern News Services Limited (NNSL). We gave her a desk that had been cleaned out and empty for some time.

What happened next, I still recall almost in slow motion. Near the end of her first day, Christine walked over to my desk (which was across the newsroom from hers, with numerous editors and reporters between our two desks, and I was not her direct supervisor as a news editor, and she knew none of us anyway) and held out her hand to me, and said, “I found this in my desk and didn’t know what to do with it.”

What she handed me from her desk drawer, from a supposedly cleaned out and empty desk, was the only thing she had discovered when she was unpacking her stuff into her new desk: a small fridge magnet. Although hard to describe precisely in a visual sense after 18 years, it was symbolically at least, no ordinary or common fridge magnet. It was identical to a fridge magnet I had only seen once before – in Rhonda’s kitchen on her fridge door on Parkhill – and have never seen again since that day in the newsroom Yellowknife in late June 2002, about three weeks after she died: The fridge magnet resembled a Celtic priestess perhaps performing a Beltane Day dance.

My immediate and involuntary reaction was to blanche, as if I had seen a ghost, which shocked poor Christine Kay, who had simply handed me a fridge magnet of unknown provenance she had discovered in a drawer in her new desk.

At that moment, I came to a profound understanding of the concept of the thinning of the “Veil Between the Worlds,” so rooted in the history and tradition of the the Allhallowtide triduum, and recalling for me All Souls’ Days from almost a decade earlier, from 1993 to 1995, when I studied graduate history in the master’s program at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and would reflect and pray on what was often this time of year a gray fall day in the Limestone City at St. James Chapel, adjacent to St. Mary of the Immaculate Conception Cathedral of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Kingston on Johnson Street.

It stands to this day as a unique episode in my life experience. My hunch is the answer to this rogue coincidence, if indeed there is an answer, might be discovered somewhere on the western shore of the Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland and Labrador, between Cow Head and Daniel’s Harbour, the ground of Rhonda’s being. There is much beyond the material world, far beyond my ken.

Halloween has roots in an ancient Irish festival called Samhain.

It is often associated with Los Dias de Muertos or “Days of the Dead” in Latin America. Almost 19 years ago, I wrote a story on Nov. 10, 2004 for The Independent, a weekly newspaper in Brighton, Ont., noting monarch butterflies in the fall of 2004 had started “arriving in central Mexico last week, on the first of November, at the same time as the national festival of Los Dias de Muertos or Days of the Dead (https://web.archive.org/web/20041208020154/http://www.eastnorthumberland.com/news/news2004/November/041110monarch.html).

For the local people, monarch butterflies are ‘old souls’ returning to the sacred mountains,” I wrote.

All Souls’ Day is a day to honour and pray for the dead who are believed to be in purgatory – the place in Roman Catholic belief in which those who have died make an elevator stop midway of varying lengths, as it were, to atone for their sins before going on the rest of the way up to heaven on the top floor. Roman Catholic belief suggests that the prayers of the faithful living on Earth – known as the Church Militant on Earth (one of my favourite descriptors for the Church, bar none) – help cleanse these souls of venial sins and help them reach heaven. Temporal punishment for sin is a punishment which will have a definite end, when the soul is purified and is permitted into heaven. Thus temporary. Temporal punishment for sin is that which is experienced in purgatory.

The day is primarily celebrated in the Catholic Church, but it is also celebrated in the Eastern Orthodox Church and a few other denominations of Christianity. The Anglican church is the largest Protestant church to recognize All Souls’ Day on Nov. 2. While considered a holy day, All Souls Day is not a holy day of obligation in the Catholic Church, where the faithful are required to attend mass.

The custom of setting apart a special day for intercession for certain of the faithful on Nov. 2 was first established by St. Odilo of Cluny at his abbey of Cluny in 998. From Cluny the custom spread to the other houses of the Cluniac order, which became the largest and most extensive network of monasteries in Europe. The celebration was soon adopted in several dioceses in France, and spread throughout the Western Church. Legend has it that a pilgrim returning from the Holy Land was cast by a storm on a desolate island. A hermit living there told him that amid the rocks was a chasm communicating with purgatory, from which perpetually rose the groans of tortured souls. The hermit also claimed he had heard the demons complaining of the efficacy of the prayers of the faithful, and especially the monks of Cluny, in rescuing their victims. Upon returning home, the pilgrim hastened to inform Odilo, the fifth Benedictine Abbot of Cluny, who set Nov. 2 as a day of intercession on the part of his community for all the souls in Purgatory.

C.S. Lewis, the noted mid-20th century Anglican Christian apologist and author, viewed purgatory primarily as a state in which the redeemed are purged of their sins before entering heaven rather than an intermediate place of retributive punishment for people with unconfessed sins, noted Jerry L. Walls, a scholar-in-residence and a philosophy professor at Houston Baptist University, in a December 2017 interview with the Plano, Texas-based Baptist Standard. “Viewed in that sense, some type of purgatory – a process that allows sanctification to be completed before an individual enters God’s presence – can be embraced ecumenically” (https://www.baptiststandard.com/news/faith-culture/c-s-lewis-believed-purgatory-heavens-sake/) said Walls, a Methodist who now attends an Episcopal church, wrote Ken Camp, managing editor of the Baptist Standard.

According to Catholic belief, the soul of a person who dies can go to one of three places. The first is heaven, where a person who dies in a state of perfect grace and communion with God goes. The second is hell, where those who die in a state of mortal sin are naturally condemned by their choice. The intermediate option is purgatory, which is thought to be where most people, free of mortal sin, but still in a state of lesser (venial) sin, must go. The primary scriptural basis for the belief is found in 2 Maccabees, 12:26 and 12:32. “Turning to supplication, they prayed that the sinful deed might be fully blotted out … Thus made atonement for the dead that they might be free from sin.” Additional references are found in Zechariah, Sirach, and the Gospel of Matthew. The first two books of Maccabees only are part of canonical scripture in the Septuagint and the Vulgate (and hence are deuterocanonical to Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy) and are included in the Protestant Apocrypha (https://www.gotquestions.org/first-second-Maccabees.html).

Most Protestant denominations, however, do not recognize purgatory, or All Souls’ Day, and disagree with the theology behind both.

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Bus to the Stars: Reading sci-fi in the 1970s down the highway

While I don’t read as much science fiction today as I once did, recalling what I did read more than 40 years ago reminded me today how much of it at the time was read on intercity buses.

As a kid, while I enjoyed reading some science fiction, I was also fond of other genres, including Greek mythology (I remember taking a mighty tome home on the subject from my school library and reading it from start to finish one Sunday in Oshawa, where I learned a bit about the Hippoi Athanatoi).

Time travel was just one topic within one genre of my reading interests back then. I have become a fan in more recent years of perhaps more post-apocalyptic dystopian sci-fi, such as New York City writer Emily St. John Mandel’s 2014 post-apocalyptic Station Eleven, centered around the fictional but not so implausible in the-world-after-SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) in 2003 and the H1N1 influenza pandemic of 2009 “Georgia Flu,” a flu pandemic so lethal and named after the former Soviet republic that, within weeks, most of the world’s population has been killed. Station Eleven, which was a finalist for a National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, won the 2015 Arthur C. Clarke Award for best science fiction novel of the year for the British Columbia-born writer. It all begins when the character of 51-year-old Arthur Leander has a fatal heart attack while on stage performing the role of King Lear at Toronto’s Elgin Theatre.

As the novel picks up some 20 years later, “there is no more Toronto,” Sigrid Nunezsept noted in the Sept. 12, 2104 New York Times book review “Shakespeare for Survivors.” In fact, “There is no Canada, no United States. All countries and borders have vanished. There remain only scattered small towns.”

Airplanes are permanently grounded and used as cold storage facilities. There are no hospitals or clinics.

But there is the “Travelling Symphony” made up of “20 or so musicians and actors in horse-drawn wagons who roam from town to town in an area around the shores of Lakes Huron and Michigan,” Nunezsept writes. “At each stop the Symphony entertains the public with concerts and theatrical performances – mostly Shakespeare because, as the troupe has learned, this is what audiences prefer.”

There are limits, however, to my fandom for post-apocalyptic dystopian science fiction in popular culture, whether it is in a visual or written context. When Black Mirror was first aired on Netflix, I found it dark but cleverly well written. Now, I find virtually everything on Netflix dystopian, and not all of it well written. For that matter, I find much of CNN and even The Guardian real-life dystopian. Thanks for that Donald John Trump and the global COVID-19 pandemic rapidly closing in on the three-year mark.

I read Lucifer’s Hammer by Jerry Pournrelle and Larry Niven in a paperback edition much like the one shown here is shortly after it was published in 1977, while I was a student at Trent University on a late fall three-hour one-way trip on an old Voyageur Colonial Bus down Highway 7 and back from Peterborough to Ottawa and back to Peterborough weekend trip. It was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1978.

Wikipedia summarizes the plot this way:

“When wealthy amateur astronomer Tim Hamner co-discovers a new comet, named Hamner-Brown for its discoverers, documentary producer Harvey Randall persuades Hamner to have his soap company sponsor a television documentary series on the comet. Political lobbying by California Senator Arthur Jellison eventually gets a joint Apollo-Soyuz (docking with Skylab B) mission approved to study the comet, dubbed “The Hammer” by the media, which is expected to pass close to the Earth.

‘The scientific community assures the public that a collision with Earth is extremely unlikely, but the comet’s nucleus breaks apart and the pieces strike parts of Europe, Africa, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. These result in volcano eruptions, earthquakes and tsunamis, destroying major coastal cities around the world, killing billions and initiating a new ice because of the massive quantities of water and debris flung into the atmosphere.

‘Immediately after the strike, China, anticipating that the Soviet Union become too cold for its people and must therefore invade its neighbor, launches a preemptive nuclear attack on its neighbor. The Soviets retaliate with their own nuclear missiles, reassuring the United States that it is not the target.”

So, a 1977 plot, not so far from today’s real-life headlines.

After 10 months flying in space, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) – the world’s first planetary defense technology demonstration – successfully impacted its asteroid target less than a month ago on Sept. 26, the agency’s first attempt to move an asteroid in space.

Mission control at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, announced the successful impact at 7:14 p.m. EDT.

“As a part of NASA’s overall planetary defense strategy, DART’s impact with the asteroid Dimorphos demonstrates a viable mitigation technique for protecting the planet from an Earth-bound asteroid or comet, if one were discovered,” the agency said.

Pournelle, who died in 2017, was born in Shreveport in Caddo Parish, Louisiana. He was a polymath: a scientist in the area of operations research and human factors research, science fiction writer, essayist, journalist, and one of the first bloggers. While Pournelle was great at writing or co-writing page-turners like Lucifer’s Hammer, he is also known as the first writer to sit and compose at a typewriter connected to a television screen, forerunner of today’s desktop computer, to compose, edit, and revise there, and then to send copy to his publisher. Jerry was an early adopter.

Sometimes science and science fiction mingle easily enough in my mind.

Looking at images from the James Webb Space Telescope capturing highly detailed snapshots of the iconic Pillars of Creation within the Eagle Nebula, about 6,500 light-years from Earth, which show a vista of three looming towers made of interstellar dust and gas that’s speckled with newly formed stars, is remarkable, but the name Pillars of Creation immediately took me back in my mind to a another intercity bus ride; this one a Greyhound bus ride out of Blaine, Washington in the United States’ Pacific Northwest in the Summer of 1979, where I was reading Arthur C. Clarke’s brilliant 1953 science fiction novel Childhood’s End where Rashaverak, an Overlord, refers to “Sideneus 4 and the Pillars of the Dawn.”

Aside from reading Childhood’s End on that bus trip, I remember having to changes buses in Spokane, Washington and being awoke in the middle of the night, with my body draped rather uncomfortably across several very hard plastic seats on the second floor of the bus terminal, as Washington State troopers made a gunpoint arrest of a man opening a rental locker on the mezzanine below.

While I’m not sure how much of Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1971 science fiction novel The Lathe of Heaven was read on a bus (perhaps some of it was on the old Trent Express run from downtown Peterborough to Trent’s Nassau Campus), the book left a big impression on me in the late 1970s.

I still remember reading, “Dr. William Haber’s office did not have a view of Mount Hood. It was an interior Efficiency Suite on the sixty-third floor of Willamette East Tower in Portland, Oregon and didn’t have a view of anything. But on one of the windowless walls was a big photographic mural of Mount Hood, and at this Dr. Haber gazed while intercommunicating with his receptionist.

“That doesn’t last long. Mount Hood is the very first thing that we see transformed by George’s power: it gets changed into a horse. And that’s just the first of its transformations.

“Later, when he’s become more powerful and famous, Haber gets a beautiful view of Mount Hood through a fancy window instead of just a picture. When the alien invasion begins, Mt. Hood wakes up and spouts fire that burns the surrounding forest. It’s not until George stops Dr. Haber’s dream that the mountain goes to sleep again.”

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We haven’t had that spirit here since 1984: The zeitgeist of self improvement and The Learning Annex

The Learning Annex is an American education company based in New York City. It was founded in 1980 by Bill Zanker in his New York City studio apartment with a $5,000 investment.

It is hard to exactly recapture the zeitgeist of that era, but in 1984, I moved to The Bain Apartments Co-operative Inc., the oldest housing co-op in Toronto, located at 100 Bain Ave. in the Riverdale area of Toronto, where it provides affordable housing to mixed income people.  Our neighbourhood was a rectangle formed, give or take a few blocks, by Broadview Avenue in the west, Danforth Avenue in the north, Withrow Park in the east, and Gerrard Street in the south.  My good friend, Ron Graham, from university days a few years earlier at Trent University, who has lived in Vancouver for more than three decades now, lived around the corner on Logan Avenue near Withrow Park at the time.

It is easy to poke fun at Toronto’s sense of self-importance; we did it more than 40 years ago. But truth be told, the Riverdale, Broadview/Danforth area was one of the most beautiful areas I’ve lived in anywhere, including lots of small cities and towns in Canada and the United States, as well as larger cities such as Ottawa, Halifax, Boston, and Durham, North Carolina.

In 1984, I was writing for Ontario Lawyers Weekly, and perhaps as close as I’d ever come to being a “young urban professional,” albeit minus the money and upward-mobility, as this was still journalism after all.

A big part of the mid-1980s’ zeitgeist was self improvement: mind, body and soul. The Learning Annex, with its ubiquitous street boxes, filled an important niche, providing continuing adult education for all kinds of general interest and hobby courses and workshops, often in the evening or over a two-day weekend. If you wanted to learn about tax planning strategies or how to deal with stress, for instance, The Learning Annex likely had a seminar on the subject. While I took several offerings in the autumn of 1984, the one I recall best was a bicycle repair workshop weekend at a bike shop, the name of which I’ve long forgotten, on King Street. I think I still recall it best because I was a pretty unlikely participant. I have been an avid cyclist for most of my life; avid bike repair guy, not so much. From 2007 to 2014, Ian Graham, then sports editor of the Thompson Citizen (now editor), was my go-to-bike repair guy. I’d grab a few Allen keys at home, and deliver my bicycle to the newspaper’s abandoned pressroom at the back of the building on Commercial Place for Ian to work his magic in about 30 seconds on my latest handlebar fiasco. These days, my bike gets dropped off at Doug’s Source for Sports as needed.

Zeitgeists change, of course. While The Learning Annex still exists as a shell of its former self in some larger American cities, it decamped from Toronto some 15 years ago in 2007.

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2020 vision: Look back and lean forward as we revisit COVID-19 and early scenes of a biological Armageddon

It was a time before social distancing, face masks and coronavirus vaccines. 

March 11, 2020 was a Wednesday. It was also the day the world changed.

On that day, a year ago today, the World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared COVID-19 a pandemic, after the novel coronavirus was detected in more than 100 countries.

That same day, the Dow Jones plummeted into bear market territory, the National Basketball Association (NBA)  abruptly halted its season, then-U.S. President Donald Trump announced a European travel ban in a national address and Tom Hanks and his wife Rita Wilson announced they had contracted the virus while filming in Australia. That was one day: March 11, 2020.

March 2020 was simply the March that never ended. Last March, the calendar may have said 31 days, but in truth it was the month without end. Never mind notions of March coming in like a lamb and going out like a lion, or vice-versa, or beware the Ides of March, that sort of thing. A year ago this month was far more terrifying, yet simultaneously, surreal than anything so pedestrian as lambs, lions and ides.

The National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI) at Fort Detrick, Maryland warned as far back as November 2019 that a contagion was sweeping through China’s Wuhan region, changing the patterns of life and business and posing a threat to the population. The report was the result of analysis of wire and computer intercepts, coupled with satellite images. The medical intelligence (MEDINT) cell within Canadian Forces Intelligence Command (CFINTCOM) gave a similar warning in January 2020.

As early as Jan. 23, 2020, I had written here: 

Novel Coronavirus 2019-nCoV [as it was then provisionally known], which “shows signs of being far worse than SARS-CoV, has resulted in lockdowns today in two Chinese cities, Wuhan and Huanggang. The Coronavirus Study Group (CSG) of the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses, which is the entity within the International Union of Microbiological Societies, founded in 1927 as the International Society for Microbiology, and responsible for developing the official classification of viruses and taxa naming (taxonomy) of the Coronaviridae family, proposed the naming convention SARS-CoV-2 for COVID-19. The World Health Organization, perhaps finding the recommended name a tad too resonant politically to SARS from the not-so-distant past, opted instead for the official name COVID-19.

“Yi Guan, a Chinese virologist, who played an important role in tracing the development of SARS-CoV, said, ‘I’ve experienced so much and I’ve never felt scared before. But this time I’m scared,’ Nathan Vanderklippe, Asia correspondent for the Globe and Mail, and Alexandra Li, in Beijing, reported today.”

A few paragraphs later, I wrote “2019-nCoV was first detected last month in Wuhan City, Hubei Province, China, and the virus did not match any other known virus. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention describes it as ‘an emerging, rapidly evolving situation.'”

Yet that same day – Jan. 23, 2020 – the Geneva-based WHO said that “now is not the time” to call a global health emergency related to a new coronavirus that has left 17 dead and more than 500 others infected in China, according to reports from the Associated Press, CTV News Channel, and other media. A “Public Health Emergency of International Concern” (PHEIC) must be an “extraordinary event” that poses a global risk and requires co-ordinated international action, according to the WHO. Global emergencies had been declared before, including for the Zika virus outbreak in the Americas, the swine flu and polio.

That decision would be revisited just a week later on Jan. 30, 2020, when, following the recommendations of its emergency committee, WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared that the novel coronavirus outbreak constituted a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC).

Less than six weeks later, the WHO said a Public Health Emergency of International Concern was now a global pandemic.

The day before COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic, the New York State National Guard were  deployed to the New York City suburb of New Rochelle in Westchester County to enforce a COVID-19 containment area comprising a circle with a radius of about one mile.

In Italy, scenes from the new contagion were apocalyptic by mid-March of last year. “Unfortunately we can’t contain the situation in Lombardy,” said Daniela Confalonieri, a nurse at a hospital in Milan “There’s a high level of contagion and we’re not even counting the dead any more,” she said.

Underscoring the scale of the drama, soldiers transported bodies overnight March 18 and 19, 2020 from the northern town of Bergamo, northeast of Milan, whose cemetery has been overwhelmed.

An army spokesman said 15 trucks and 50 soldiers had been deployed to move coffins to neighbouring provinces. Earlier local authorities had appealed for help with cremations as their own crematorium could not cope with the huge workload.

One of the most chilling things on this side of the Atlantic, and there have been many, that I’ve heard to date during the COVID-19 pandemic, was this audio clip posted on Twitter last March 21. I heard this brief 30-second clip on Twitter March 24, 2020, the day after the “surge” hit New York City. Tim Mak is National Public Radio (NPR’s) Washington investigative correspondent – and an emergency medical technician (EMT), which is how he got the message. Aside from the subject matter, there is something eerie about that electronically-generated voice on the automated message that went out, with this message:

“This an emergency message. This is a priority request for D.C. MRC volunteers (District of Columbia (DC) Medical Reserve Corps (DC MRC)…” (https://twitter.com/i/status/1241471610395267084)

The District of Columbia (DC) Medical Reserve Corps (DC MRC) supports the DC Department of Health (DC Health) in its role as lead for public health and medical emergency preparedness, response and recovery by recruiting, training, and deploying medical and non-medical volunteers to assist with planned events and emergencies.

Last March 30, I wrote on Facebook: “Consider this. Ordered earlier this month to “lean forward,” a military term familiar to those who serve in the United States Navy, meaning the willingness to be aggressive, to take risks, the U.S.Navy hospital ship USNS Comfort (T-AH-20), homeported at Naval Station Norfolk, Virginia, sailed from port up the Atlantic seaboard Saturday and arrived in New York Harbor this morning.

“The Comfort will provide relief for New York hospitals by taking on non-COVID-19 cases and allowing the hospitals to focus on the most critical patients suffering from the virus.

“Picture this.

“What those sailors, military doctors and nurses, officers, enlisted personnel and civilians aboard the USNS Comfort (T-AH-20) must have been thinking as they answered the call of duty and sailed north into a Biological Armageddon.”

The following day, on March 31, 2020, I posted again on Facebook, “Waking up every morning in March 2020: ‘Red alert. All hands stand to battle stations’” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wV30YwXaKJg).

Since Feb. 6, 2020, COVID-19 has killed more than 530,000 people in the United States, more than influenza has in the last five years, notes the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.in Baltimore. COVID-19 has a higher severe disease and mortality rate than influenza in all age groups, except perhaps children under the age of 12. “Influenza is a significant burden on the population, but COVID-19 has had a vastly larger effect,” Johns Hopkins says.


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Remembering Sister Andrea

Sister Andrea Dumont, the longest-serving religious in Thompson by far when she retired back to Ontario in mid-June to live with other members of her order in a residence in Toronto, at the insistence of her general superior, has died at the age of 86.

Originally from St. Catharines, Ontario. and a member of the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Toronto, Sister Andrea arrived in Thompson in 1991 and spent 29 years working here.

Her parents, William Dumont and Orienne Gauthier, were from Quebec.

Sister Andrea graduated as a registered nurse from St. Joseph’s Hospital School of Nursing in Toronto in 1955. She worked as a nurse in Windsor and then at the emergency department and in the nursing service office at St. Joseph’s Hospital before seeing a notice from the sisters seeking volunteers for some missionary work, Thompson Citizen editor Ian Graham wrote May 28 in a nice piece on her impending retirement (https://www.thompsoncitizen.net/news/thompson/after-29-years-in-thompson-sister-andrea-dumont-returning-to-toronto-1.24143006).

Sister Andrea entered the Sisters of St. Joseph of Toronto in February 1956, and received the habit in August 1956. She made her final profession in August 1961 and celebrated her diamond jubilee in June 2016.

Sister Andrea spent 14 years in Guatemala until the mission closed and after returning to Canada lived in Grand Rapids, Easterville and Thompson, where the main focus of her work was in adult education, which included training lay presiders for times when there is no priest available, organizing and instructing in the various ministries, sacramental preparation and RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults). There are no parochial Catholic schools in the area. As well as Guatemala, the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Toronto at one time also had foreign missions in Hong Kong, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Nicaragua, Honduras and Haiti. They continue to serve in Honduras and Haiti.

In April 2015, she received the St. Joseph Award, the highest honour Catholic Missions in Canada bestows for outstanding missionary work. The Catholic Missions in Canada was founded in 1908 as The Catholic Church Extension Society of Canada. The organization comes to the aid of isolated missions across the country where a lack of resources makes it impossible to maintain a Catholic presence without outside financial help.

Sister Andrea’s order also included some of the same sisters – a fact I only learned here in Thompson years later – that taught some of my high school classes from September 1971 to June 1976, when Sister Conrad Lauber was principal, and Sister Dorothy Schweitzer taught me several English and math classes  at Oshawa Catholic High School (now Monsignor Paul Dwyer Catholic High School). Both Sister Conrad and Sister Dorothy, so it turned out, happened to be good friends of Sister Andrea.

About 10 years ago, I asked Father Eugene Whyte, then pastor of St. Lawrence Church here in Thompson, and a member of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, about the prospects of a particular sister soon retiring. Without missing a beat, Father Eugene’s deadpan reply was, “Nuns don’t really retire, John. Ever.”

I wasn’t quite sure then that was quite literally true, but pretty darn close, I thought as I caught Father Eugene’s drift.

For my Catholic friends, it will come as no surprise for me to say there are at least two other truths in addition to non-retirement about Catholic nuns, always worth remembering: you don’t want to incur their wrath and you can never say “no” to a request from a sister, which usually is stated more in the form of a direction assuming compliance, than an actual question. Such, of course, was the case in my relationship with Sister Andrea.

In November 2010, I had Ryan Flanagan, a new reporter at the Thompson Citizen, which I was editing at the time, write a story on charitable organizations who sold homemade goodies at community events as fundraisers for their many good works. One of his stops that crisp fall Saturday morning was the St. Lawrence Pastoral Centre, where Sister Andrea and other volunteers were making their famous perogies for the upcoming Catholic Women’s League (CWL) Annual Christmas craft sale and raffle, scheduled to be held a few short weeks at St.. Lawrence Parish Hall, and the premier fundraising event of the year for the CWL.

Sure enough, Ryan, would wind up writing, “Among the guidelines are that the event must be registered with Public Health at least 14 working days before it begins, that the event operator must maintain a list of all vendors including contact information, and that any food qualifying as ‘potentially hazardous’ must be prepared and packaged in an approved establishment. Foods qualifying as ‘potentially hazardous’ include antipasto, cabbage rolls, chocolate (unless it has been heated as an ingredient in, for example, chocolate chip cookies), coleslaw, pastries filled with cream or custard, dairy products, fish, garlic spreads, homemade soups, meat or meat products, perogies, pickled eggs, pumpkin pie or any pie with meringue, salsa, ungraded eggs, and whipped butter. None of these foods can be sold unless they were prepared in a facility that has been approved by the province as a food handling establishment” (https://www.thompsoncitizen.net/news/thompson/strict-public-health-rules-in-place-for-volunteer-groups-food-and-bake-sales-1.1368718).

I found myself in Sister Andrea’s “if-looks-could-kill” deep freeze for several months. The gradual thaw came a few months later, as Father Eugene made a point of being extra nice to me (no small feat perhaps, as Father Eugene’s opinion of the media wasn’t so very removed from Sister Andrea’s in general, as I recall, from our many conversations) when Sister Andrea and I were sharing the same space, such as reaching extra far to shake my hand when he was processing at the beginning of mass and I was standing near the end of a pew, perhaps suggesting to Sister Andrea that despite apparent evidence to the contrary, I might not be quite beyond redemption.

Sister Andrea, of course, forgave me in time, which is what sisters do. Within a couple of years she was swapping movie lists with Jeanette and I.

She may have also had the last laugh, as it were, a few years later, although she was also may have just been being practical and solving a problem on the fly on short notice. Or a little of both maybe.

In May 2013, The Christophers, a non-profit organization founded in 1945 by Maryknoll Father James Keller, were in Thompson to offer a Christopher leadership course. The ancient Chinese proverb – “it’s better to light one candle than to curse the darkness” – guides the organization’s programs. The name of the group is derived from the Greek word “christophoros,” which means “Christ-bearer.”

The Christopher leadership courses teaches participants speaking skills to organize ideas an think on their feet; conquer shyness or fear of public-speaking; speak with conviction and “captivate” their audience; and effectively express themselves in business, socially, in the community and in the larger world.

The New York City-based Christophers emerged in the wake of the Second World War, with the rapid dawn soon after of the Cold War, as periodic historical suspicions of Roman Catholic loyalties in the United States re-emerged in the public conspicuousness. In response, a number of Roman Catholics began to find new ways of commending the Church to the public, including the new medium of television. The most popular and influential television presentation was The Christophers, a weekly half-hour program aired on ABC beginning in 1945. The Christophers, as Keller, from Oakland, California envisioned it, would have no formal organization, no memberships, and no dues. “The reason for this somewhat unusual formula,” he explained, “was to focus attention on personal responsibility.”

The wrap-up to the Thompson Christopher leadership course seven years ago was to be held on Saturday, May 4, and was to feature a keynote speech from Archbishop Sylvain Lavoie, who had just recently become the most recent archbishop emeritus of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Keewatin-Le Pas.  However, plans changed at the last minute, and His Grace was unable to keep the speaking engagement.

Sister Andrea telephoned me around mid-afternoon on Friday, May 3 in my office at the paper. And that was how I came to fill in with less than 24 hours notice for the archbishop – a sad disappointment I’m sure to unsuspecting participants – as the keynote speaker for the wrap-up session.

I’m not sure, but I could swear I saw a grin on Sister Andrea’s face, as I mercifully finished up, and heard from somewhere above me a good-natured celestial “got you.”

The last time I wrote about Sister Andrea until today was in an email I sent to Thompson Mayor Colleen Smook May 30:

“I was thinking about the departure of Sister Andrea next month back to Toronto, after being recalled at the age of 86, after 29 years in Thompson  by her religious order, the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Toronto, and it occurred to me that I could think of no one any worthier to receive a Key to the City of Thompson than Sister Andrea. I also know it is an infrequently bestowed honour, but having known several of the previous recipients over the last decade – Dr. Alan Rich, when he departed for Swan River in 2014, and provincial court Judge Murray Thompson, and his wife, Linda Webstob, when they moved to Winnipeg the same year – left me thinking  Sister Andrea would be in good company with those keyholders of high character and purpose, and vice versa.”

I don’t know if the City of Thompson has ever awarded a Key to the City posthumously, but I think, if not, Sister Andrea would still be a good candidate for one, after touching so many lives, Catholic and non-Catholic, during her 29 years of service in Thompson, Manitoba.

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From the Missiguash River to the Mackenzie Delta, breathtaking, raw beauty

This is a land bigger than the imagination – for all of us. In the Northwest Territories, the Akaitcho say, “‘Denech’anie,’ meaning ‘the path the people walk’ and that ‘we will live on the land as long as the sun shines, the river flows, and the grass grows.”

I’ve driven across the Western Arctic’s Mackenzie Delta; summer at 68 degrees latitude and the vast, open land at the top of the world, listening to Robin Mark’s “Revival In Belfast (Hope In The City)” and Susan Aglukark’s powerfully haunting song, “E186,” about what it meant to be an “Eskimo” with a number and no name, cranked up to full volume. With its raw power, it served as a defining moment in helping me to understand, if imperfectly and incompletely, the difference in what it meant to be Inuit rather than qallunaat (which, loosely translated from Inuktitut, is not terribly flattering, as it translates a bit closer to honky than white) North of 60 in the 1940s and 1950s.

Inuvik lives for me as a kaleidoscope of snapshots. One of the most vivid standing on the shore of the mighty Mackenzie River watching a flotilla of small boats head out in miserable weather for Aklavik.

The Gwich’in and Inuvialuit were gathering to bury three of their own: Doug Irish, Larry Semmler and Charlie Meyook. Northerners, aboriginal and non-aboriginal, look after their own.

Hundreds of Gwich’in, Inuvialuit and white men travelled by river and by air from Inuvik, from McPherson, from Tsiigehtchic, from the Yukon, from Alaska and from the South for the funerals at All Saints Anglican Church in Aklavik, on the site of the original Anglican Cathedral of the Arctic. The women volunteered to cook the community feast; the men hunted caribou and dug graves, all giving aid and comfort to their brothers and sister in Aklavik.

The Northwest Territories is a vast and open land, where two of the highest virtues practiced are tolerance and respect. I’d come home from work that first October in 2001 to my apartment on the shores of Great Slave Lake, and read more and more of Bern Will Brown’s Arctic Journal and  Arctic Journal II (a colleague had wisely recommended Brown’s writing as a good introduction to the Northwest Territories).

One dark December day, l got a sense of how imaginatively the lives of the peoples of the Circumpolar North are weaved together, between glances out my balcony window before 3 p.m. darkness fell and watching Smilla’s Sense of Snow, the delightful 1997 Danish thriller starring Julia Ormond, Gabriel Byrne, and Richard Harris, based on the 1992 novel Frøken Smillas fornemmelse by Danish author Peter Høeg, with both the book and the film telling the story of a transplanted Greenlander, Smilla Jasperson, who investigates the mysterious death of a small Inuit boy who lived in her housing complex in Copenhagen. Clues send her not just around Copenhagen, including the Hotel d’Angleterre, but also to Kiruna, the northernmost town in Sweden in Lapland, and Ilulissat in western Greenland.

I remember the first time I heard Stan Rogers’ “Northwest Passage” performed in the Northwest Territories in Yellowknife, with seemingly everyone in the audience in a school auditorium raising their voices in unison to join in. One of those moments that still send chills up your spine years later. I’ve long forgotten who performed it that night some 20 years ago almost now, but I haven’t forgotten it was a Stan Rogers song, and thinking the Bard of Guysborough County was truly one of Canada’s poets, a coast-to-coast-to-coast national treasure.

We are a country blessed with national treasures. Rhonda Payne, author of the play “Stars in the Sky Morning,” a tale of the hardships of women on the Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland – was a playwright the National Post described as a “national treasure” in 1999. Rhonda was a fiery actor, writer, director, producer and activist from Curling, who would go onto co-found Ground Zero Productions with Don Bouzek in Toronto, and after that Riverbank Productions in Peterborough, Ontario on Parkhill Road East (the studio office was quite literally on the banks of the Otonabee River).

From Churchill, Manitoba, I’ve had the chance to sail a beluga-populated Hudson Bay, across the invisible maritime boundary that divides Manitoba from Nunavut, and share the Seal River with polar bears. Churchill Airport was built by the United States military in 1942 and owned and operated by Transport Canada as a remote airport since 1964. Churchill Rocket Research Range, also built by the United States Army, under the aegis of Canada’s Defence Research Board in 1956, operated 23 kilometres east of town, where the Churchill Northern Studies Centre now is, until 1985.

I remember the haunting but not at all unwelcome sound of the train whistle when I would visit my mother, who lived near Amherst, Nova Scotia, 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 Missiguash 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.

I spent a balmy Maritime spring evening reporting from Middle Musquodoboit Harbour on the Eastern Shore’s Musquodoboit Harbour River, while I’ve travelled deep in the woods near Earltown in Colchester County, on the north slope of the Cobequid Mountains, searching for Willard Kitchener MacDonald, the so-called “Hermit of Gully Lake,” who had gone AWOL in 1945 after being conscripted and abandoning a troop train during the Second World War. Canada declared an amnesty for army deserters in 1950, but MacDonald, retained a lifelong suspicion of government and police. In the same area, I later returned to Sugar Moon Farm, also near Earltown, in search of maple syrup stories, while travelling the back roads of Folly Lake-Folly Gap-Folly Mountain, and through the Cobequid Mountains and Wentworth Valley to Londonderry, formerly known as Acadia Mines, in Colchester County, where time appeared to have stood still.

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Sci-Fi time travel: Where the popular imagination meets theoretical science and pseudoscience

Applied research often has the clarifying effect of disabusing one of preconceived notions. Except perhaps for debates about religion where all bets are off for everyone on all sides at all times. But that’s another story.

Every now and then I will post an article or a link to one on social media from some at least marginally reputable science site on some new wrinkle in theoretical time travel. I have three friends, in particular, located in British Columbia, Nunavut and Manitoba, who are sci-fi fans, but also science rationalists, who can be quickly counted on to let me know two things: what a fun idea the new theory is; how completely implausible it is on the science. Thanks, guys.

As a kid, while I enjoyed reading some science fiction – Ursula K. Le Guin‘s Lathe of Heaven from 1971, and Arthur C. Clarke’s 1953 book Childhood’s End, come immediately to mind – I was also fond of other genres, including Greek mythology (I remember taking a mighty tome home on the subject from my school library and reading it from start to finish one Sunday in Oshawa, where I learned a bit about the Hippoi Athanatoi). Time travel was just one topic within one genre of my reading interests back then.

But aside from my reading interests, in terms of my later popular culture viewing, on both the big and small screens, as well as my own writing from time-to-time, time has never been too far from my remote view, if I think broadly about it.

Both The Time Tunnel on ABC and Star Trek on NBC television series originally debuted within a day of each other in September 1966. I was nine. The Time Tunnel (https://www.tvyesteryear.com/shows/the-time-tunnel/), largely forgotten today, was about Project Tic-Toc, a top-secret U.S. government effort to build an experimental time machine, known as “The Time Tunnel” due to its appearance as a cylindrical hallway. The base for Project Tic-Toc is a huge, hidden underground complex in Arizona, 800 floors deep and employing more than 12,000 specialized personnel. Star Trek made its debut on Sept. 8, 1966, one day earlier then The Time Tunnel, and is far from forgotten.

Manu Saadia, a contributor for The New Yorker, wrote back in 2016 in “The Enduring Lessons of ‘Star Trek,”‘ a 50th anniversary piece to mark the debut of the franchise, that “the original series was at its best when its cast engaged in good, old-fashioned time travel. ‘The City on the Edge of Forever,’ penned by Harlan Ellison, threw the dynamic trio of Kirk, Bones, and Spock into nineteen-thirties New York. They were familiar characters dropped into a familiar setting, tasked with a familiar, if daunting, mission: save the world. (By a series of unlucky coincidences, their arrival in New York had altered the future, leading to Nazi Germany winning the Second World War. This had to be corrected.)” Joseph Walter of Screen Rant in his piece today, “Star Trek: The 10 All Time Best (And 10 Worst) Episodes, Officially Ranked” rates “The City on the Edge of Forever” as the sixth-best Star Trek episode from the entire franchise, which includes all the series that followed the original, which aired on NBC from September 1966 to June 1969.

Star Trek, and its many successors, both television series and movies, not surprisingly have continued to explore the idea of time travel and alternate timelines in all kinds of manifestations. I like many of them, but have a particular fondness for Dr. Beverly Picard, who in a briefly existing alternate timeline in “All Good Things,” the aptly-named May 23, 1994 final episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, is the captain of the U.S.S. Pasteur (NCC-58925), as her ex-husband, Capt. Jean-Luc Picard, inexplicably finds his mind jumping between the present stardate 47988 and the past just prior to the U.S.S. Enterprise-D‘s first mission seven years earlier at Farpoint Station and then flash-forward 25 years into the future, where he has retired to the Picard family vineyard in Labarre, France.

In The Man in the High Castle, an alternate history novel by American writer Philip K. Dick, published and set in 1962, events takes place 15 years after a different end to the Second World War, and depict intrigues between the victorious Axis Powers – primarily, Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany – as they rule over the former United States, as well as daily life under totalitarian rule. A television series was loosely adapted from the book and ran for four seasons from January 2015 until last November.

In a similar vein, The Plot Against America is a novel by Philip Roth published in 2004. It is an alternate history in which Franklin D. Roosevelt is defeated in the presidential election of 1940 by Charles Lindbergh. Adapted for television as a six-part miniseries that aired in March and April, The Plot Against America imagined an alternate American history told through the eyes of a working-class Jewish family in Newark, New Jersey, as they watch the political rise of Lindbergh, an aviator-hero and xenophobic populist.

Wormholes and parallel universes are pretty much de rigueur for this genre, and Sliders, a television series which aired between 1995 and 2000, understood that, as it was premised on a group of travelers, led by Quinn Mallory, using a wormhole to “slide” between different parallel universes. Alternate timelines are altered versions of our timeline. Unlike parallel universes, alternate timelines do not seem to diverge from the universe, but instead rewrite history to the point of wiping out the original timeline.

For its first two seasons, Sliders was produced in Vancouver. It was filmed primarily in Los Angeles in the last three seasons.

In Quantum Leap, which aired on NBC for five seasons from March 1989 through May 1993, Scott Bakula stars as Dr. Sam Beckett, a physicist who leaps through spacetime during an experiment in time travel, by temporarily taking the place of other people to correct historical mistakes. Dean Stockwell co-stars as Admiral Al Calavicci, Sam’s womanizing, cigar-smoking companion and best friend, who appears to him as a hologram.

Time Changer is an independent science fiction Christian seriocomic film written and directed by Rich Christiano, and released by Five & Two Pictures in 2002. The screenplay concerns Dr. Norris Anderson (Gavin MacLeod), who uses his late father’s time machine to send his colleague, Bible professor Russell Carlisle (D. David Morin), from 1890 into the early 21st century.

The fascination with alternate timelines is not limited to science fiction writers. Historians have been known to wonder if the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, in ending Camelot, changed the course of history for the worse? It’s a popular, if not almost universal view, that it did. But historian David Hackett Fischer, in his 1970 book, Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought, warns of the dangers of counterfactual historiography, which extrapolates a timeline in which a key historical event did not happen or had an outcome which was different from that which did in fact occur. Had Kennedy lived would the United States have exited Vietnam closer to 1964 than 1975? Would Lyndon Johnson’s landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 have passed so soon under JFK? We can only wonder.

In 1983, Ohio State University historian Stephen Kern wrote The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918, a book which talked about the sweeping changes in technology and culture that reshaped life, including the theory of relativity and introduction of Sir Sandford Fleming’s worldwide Standard Time – and an onrush of technics, including telephone, electric lighting, steamships, skyscrapers, bicycles, cinema, airplanes, X-rays, machine guns, as well as cultural innovations that shattered older forms of art and thought, such as the stream-of-consciousness novel, psychoanalysis, Cubism, simultaneous poetry. All of these things created new ways of understanding and experiencing time and space during that almost 40-year period ending with the end of the First World War. Kern’s argument is that in the modern preoccupation with speed, especially with the fast and impersonal telegraph, international diplomacy broke down in July 1914, leading to the outbreak of the First World War the following month.

In physics, according to Albert Einstein’s 1905 theory of special relativity (SR), motion in space alters the flow of time, creating a time dilation, speeding up or slowing down time, because as you move through space, time itself is measured differently for the moving object than the unmoving object. This, in theory, would allow time travel within the known laws of physics into the future, not into the past (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2016/03/12/time-dilation-daylight-saving-time-and-other-mysteries-of-time/).

Standard Time, of course, with its standardized times zones, is a Canadian invention, courtesy of Sir Sandford Fleming, who conveniently divided time into hourly segments, dating back to October 1884 and the International Prime Meridian Conference attended by 25 nations in Washington, D.C. Before Fleming invented standard time, noon in Kingston, Ontario was 12 minutes later than noon in Montréal and 13 minutes before noon in Toronto. Noon local time was the time when the sun stood exactly overhead.

Most of Canada’s time experts work in a place called Building M-36 (which involuntarily conjures up for me visions of the X-Files and Area 51.) They work in the Frequency and Time program in the Measurement Science and Standards portfolio with the National Research Council of Canada on Montreal Road in Ottawa. Physicist Rob Douglas, the principal research officer, however, can be found on Saskatchewan Drive in Edmonton.

Fleming’s genius was to create 24 time zones and within each zone the clocks would indicate the same time, with a one-hour difference between adjoining zones. Usually, when one travels in an easterly direction, a different time zone is crossed every 15 degrees of longitude, which is equal to one hour in time (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2015/03/07/just-remember-you-are-about-to-pass-briefly-through-the-twilight-zone-nothing-can-happen-tomorrow-between-201-a-m-and-259-a-m-because-those-59-minutes-do-not-exist-on-march-8/). Like many things, there are, of course, exceptions. Samoa uses Coordinated Universal Time (UTC+13:00) as standard time and UTC+14:00 as daylight saving time, which it observes during summer in the southern hemisphere. The U.S. territory of American Samoa, as well as the Midway Islands and the uninhabited islands of Jarvis, Palmyra, and Kingman Reef, use the Samoa Time Zone, which observes standard time by subtracting eleven hours from Coordinated Universal Time (UTC-11). The zone is one hour behind the Hawaii-Aleutian Time Zone, one hour ahead of Howland and Baker islands, and 23 hours behind Wake Island Time Zone.

Samoa happens to sit in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, just 32 kilometres, or 20 miles, east of the International Date Line, an imaginary line at the 180º line of longitude that runs from the South Pole to the North Pole separating two consecutive calendar days. Immediately to the left of the International Date Line the date in the Eastern Hemisphere is always one day ahead of the date (or day) immediately to the right of the International Date Line in the Western Hemisphere (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/29/skip-a-day-why-not-samoa-did/).

It is not a perfectly straight line, however, and has been moved slightly over the years to accommodate needs of varied countries in the Pacific Ocean. Kiribati, north of Samoa and near the equator, south of Hawaii, previously straddled the dateline. The eastern part of Kiribati was a whole day and two hours behind the western part of the country where its capital is located and a time difference of 23 hours between neighbouring islands. There were nine islands on the eastern side of the international date line, and 20 per cent of the population. On Jan. 1, 1995 it added an eastward extension to its section of the dateline so all 33 of its islands would have the same date and all of Kiribati would be in the Eastern Hemisphere.

Since 1892, when Samoa had two Monday, July 4ths, it had been east of the International Date Line until Dec. 29, 2011, after switching sides to coincide its days better with trading partners in the United States and Europe. Now, Samoa does a lot more business with New Zealand, Australia, China and Pacific Rim countries such as Singapore, so it switched back to the western side of the International Date Line.

China, which has just one time zone – Beijing Standard Time – making the time zone uncommonly wide. In Kashgar, in the extreme western part of China, the sun is at its highest point at 3 p.m. and in the extreme eastern part at 11 a.m.  In 1912, the year after the collapse of the Qing Dynasty, the Republic of China had created five time zones in the country, ranging from five and a half to eight and a half hours past Greenwich Mean Time. But in 1949, as the Communist Party consolidated control of the country, Chairman Mao Zedong ordered that all of China use Beijing time.

Historians aren’t the only academics to ponder these sort of things.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)  professor of philosophy Bradford Skow suggests a “box” universe theory, as describes “now” as an arbitrary place in time and states that the past, the future and the present all exist simultaneously, suggesting that if we “look down” on the universe, as if we were looking at a piece of paper, we would see time spanning all directions, exactly the same way that we see space at some point. I believe my three friends unanimously concluded this was rather bunk, but good fun.

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Manitoba mandate letter gives UCN and other post-secondary institutions marching orders on ‘stewardship of public funds’

Progressive Conservative Minister of Economic Development and Training Ralph Eichler has given the University College of the North (UCN), and the province’s other seven universities and four colleges – Booth University College, Brandon University, Canadian Mennonite University, Providence University College, Université de Saint-Boniface, University of Manitoba, and the University of Winnipeg, Assiniboine Community College, École Technique et Professionnelle, International College of Manitoba, Manitoba Institute of Trades and Technology, and Red River College – their marching orders in the form of a mandate letter that addresses “stewardship of public funds.” UCN offers both university and college-level programs.

In his letter earlier this month, sent to Cam Mateika, chair of UCN’s governing council, Eichler writes: “The Province of Manitoba expends over one billion dollars annually on our post-secondary system, through direct funding to institutions and indirectly through student financial supports, tax credits and research funding, among other supports. Manitobans expect that all public sector organizations operate with sound oversight, financial accountability and transparency as core principles. Manitoba is continuing its efforts to achieve fiscal and workforce sustainability and this requires all of our public sector entities, including post-secondary institutions, to be aligned with government policies and priorities with respect to compensation for executive employees and management staffing levels.”

Before entering politics, Eichler served for eight years as the administrator of the Stonewall-based Interlake School Division.

“The Province has made difficult decisions to help stabilize our finances while protecting our front line services. In the same way, we expect post-secondary institutions to ensure the financial sustainability of our post-secondary education system. Institutions must employ lean principles, reducing duplication, increasing efficiencies, and ensuring that expenditures consider value for taxpayer’s dollars. Specifically, opportunities to develop and implement a shared services model for ‘back office’ functions, such as procurement, centralized applications, and other related administrative activities should be explored. In addition, institutions should coordinate academic programming to reduce duplication of effort and achieve economies of scale.

“It is expected that institutions operate with balanced budgets, in a fiscally responsible manner. Institutions must seek approval from the provincial government on all institution-owned or controlled capital projects, including approval of related operating expenditures, regardless of the funding source. Each organization should develop five-year capital plans and submit those plans to the Province for review.”

Eichler copied his letter to Mateika to Doug Lauvstad, president and vice-chancellor of the University College of the North. The school released a copy of the minister’s letter Jan. 27.

“Over the next year,” Eichler goes on to say, “post-secondary institutions will work together, in partnership with the Province, to further define student successes and continue to build data capacity to enable measurement of outcomes over time. Going forward, leveraging this foundational data work, Manitoba will be developing a new model for post-secondary funding based on performance, and will be engaging institutions in the design.”

The minister also said, “Post-secondary institutions need to be closely connected to industry to ensure programs meet workforce needs and students gain the right skills and competencies to succeed. There are numerous examples of successful partnerships at all of our Manitoba institutions, however, more alignment and collaboration is needed in order to meet the demands of our ever-evolving world of work.”

More than ever, said Eichler, “it is critical that our colleges and universities be nimble and responsive, ceasing programs that lack responsiveness and value in a modern context and building programs that deliver the skills needed for today and tomorrow. It is expected that Manitoba’s post-secondary institutions will become more agile and continuously make changes to their systems in order to be more responsive to the pace of labour market changes.”

The minister’s letter also follows on work by Higher Education Strategy Associates, of Toronto, and its Government of Manitoba: Manitoba College Review System-Wide Report, released almost two years ago in March 2018. The provincial government asked for the review, co-authored by Alex Usher and Yves Y. Pelletier,  in 2016, shortly after it was first elected, and it was undertaken between November 2016 and November 2017.

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 government, first 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.

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The fire this time? Pandemic prose, and waiting and watching for the ‘big one’

The fire this time?

Next time?

Are we just waiting and watching for the “big one,” knowing it is just a matter of time, or as a headline on Laurie Garrett’s story in Foreign Policy put it so succinctly last September: “The World Knows an Apocalyptic Pandemic Is Coming.”

Garrett, a former senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, Pulitzer Prize winning science writer, and author of the landmark 1994 book, The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance, argued some 26 years ago now that human disruption of the global environment, coupled with behaviours that readily spread microbes between people and from animals to humans, guaranteed a global surge in epidemics, even an enormous pandemic.

How quickly we could we make a trip back to a modern-day equivalent to the Dark Ages of the 5^th to 11^th centuries?

Mathematician and complexity scientist John Casti’s 2012 book, X-Events: The Collapse of Everything looked at scientific modelling and prediction computer simulation as to how social “mood” can affect future trends and extreme events, sounds a clarion warning as to how easy it would be to slip suddenly into a new Dark Ages, and how the global food supply system could collapse (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2015/12/12/what-if-the-22nd-century-means-staying-at-home-with-long-distance-travel-a-thing-of-the-past/). Or the “digital darkness” that would come from a widespread and prolonged failure of the internet. Or what a continent-wide electromagnetic pulse (EMG) would do to electronics, and how we may have reached peak oil in 2000, and how any of those scenarios leave us vulnerable in overly complex technological societies to an “X-event” that would send us back to a pre-modern world – and again, a world without air or other long-distance travel – virtually overnight.

New York City writer Emily St. John Mandel’s post-apocalyptic Station Eleven, her fourth novel, published in 2014, is centred around the fictional but not so implausible in the-world-after-Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS-CoV) in 2003, and the novel influenza A (H1N1) pandemic of 2009. “Georgia Flu,” is a flu pandemic so lethal, named after the former Soviet republic, that within weeks, most of the world’s population has been killed.

Station Eleven, which was a finalist for a National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, won the 2015 Arthur C. Clarke Award for best science fiction novel of the year for the British Columbia-born writer. It all begins when the character of 51-year-old Arthur Leander has a fatal heart attack while on stage performing the role of King Lear at Toronto’s Elgin Theatre.

As the novel picks up some 20 years later, “there is no more Toronto,” Sigrid Nunezsept noted in the Sept. 12, 2104 New York Times book review “Shakespeare for Survivors.” In fact, “There is no Canada, no United States. All countries and borders have vanished. There remain only scattered small towns.”

Airplanes are permanently grounded and used as cold storage facilities. There are no hospitals or clinics.

But there is the “Travelling Symphony” made up of “20 or so musicians and actors in horse-drawn wagons who roam from town-to-town in an area around the shores of Lakes Huron and Michigan,” Nunezsept writes. “At each stop the Symphony entertains the public with concerts and theatrical performances – mostly Shakespeare because, as the troupe has learned, this is what audiences prefer.”

Sadly, novel influenzas, unidentified forms of pneumonia, and other respiratory illnesses, incubating in the reservoir of wet markets, live poultry markets and farms in cities in both mainland China and Hong Kong is not a new story, but rather one that dates back at least to May 1997. The relevant questions are always the same, including how bad is it and when will we know that truth?

The Huanan Seafood Market in  Wuhan is where Chinese officials believe the latest coronavirus outbreak may have originated in a wild animal sold at the food emporium, which sold live foxes, crocodiles, wolf puppies, giant salamanders, snakes, rats, peacocks, porcupines, koalas and game meats, the Daily Mail and South China Morning Post report. The market has since been closed and has been labelled ‘ground zero’ by local authorities.

We now also have time-lapse tracking of the transmission and evolution of Influenza A (H7N9), the most deadly flu on Earth, which has been circulating in China for the last five years or so. It has a mortality rate of 40 per cent, making it about 200 times more deadly than this season’s Influenza A (H3N2) flu virus circulating in Canada is expected to be. Nextstrain is an open-source project to harness the scientific and public health potential of pathogen genome data (https://nextstrain.org/flu/avian/h7n9/ha?dmax=2019-04-06&dmin=2012-03-23&fbclid=IwAR0uzebD_Fpv1UGNP3tybCf8txl3m1dpm8O7CqOkhhnXmfdQILbtQszb-bA&l=radial)

Not all pandemic news is necessarily bad news, at least in retrospect historically speaking, some academics have suggested in recent years.

In May 2014, a study in PLOS ONE, an international peer-reviewed journal, located in Levi’s Plaza (as in Levi Strauss & Co. jeans) in San Francisco, and authored by University of South Carolina anthropologist Sharon DeWitte, 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 (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/03/black-death-not-so-bad/).

“The Black Death Actually Improved Public Health,” read the headline at the Smithsonian, the official journal published by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. When it comes to science, you don’t get much more prestigious than the Smithsonian. On the more populist end of the online spectrum, AOL Inc., based in nearby Dulles, Virginia, went with “Black Death may have improved European health” on its AOL.com website.

DeWitte’s study of the Black Death suggested it was not an indiscriminate killer, but instead targeted frail people of all ages and that survivors experienced improvements in health and longevity, with many people afterwards living to ages of 70 or 80 years old. While improvements in survival post-Black Death didn’t necessarily equate to good health over a lifespan, it did demonstrate a hardiness to endure disease, either directly or indirectly, powerfully shaped mortality patterns for generations after the epidemic ended, she argues.

The skeletal samples for DeWitte’s study came from medieval London cemeteries and are curated at the Museum of London Centre for Human Bioarchaeology.

The pre-Black Death samples came from St. Mary Spital, Guildhall Yard and St. Nicholas Shambles, dating to the 11th and 12th centuries, based on stratigraphic and documentary data and artifacts. The post-Black Death samples came from the cemetery associated with the Cistercian Abbey of St. Mary Graces, which was established in London in 1350, as the Black Death was about to end, and it was in use until the Protestant Reformation in 1538.

As it happens, I find the particular subject of La moria grandissima fascinating. Way back on July 14, 2008, I fired off an e-mail to Sheena Spear at the Thompson Public Library, trying to borrow a copy of John Hatcher’s The Black Death: An Intimate History of the Plague on inter-library loan. Alas, as it had just been published a month earlier in June 2008, that wasn’t happening.

But on Oct. 13, 2011, Megan O’Brien was able to tell me she could bring in on inter-library loan a copy of The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague Of All Time by John Kelly, published in 2005. Good enough.

The Black Death swept across Europe, killing a third of the population. As Kelly, and others have pointed out, it proved a major challenge to the Church, striking down both believers and non-believers alike, testing religious faith. If anything priests were at higher risk than most, as they were called onto minister to those gravely ill.

Infected rats aboard Genoese sailing ships piloted by Italian sailors, returning from the Far East and docking in Sicily, carried fleas that spread the disease when they bit humans. Think Ground Zero.

The plague is caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis. Pneumonic plague is characterized by lung infection and spitting blood and occurs when Y. pestis infects the lungs. This type of airborne plague can spread from person-to-person through the air. Transmission can take place if someone breathes in aerosolized bacteria.

Bubonic plague is characterized by swollen lymph glands, known as buboes, a type of boil, and is the most common form of plague. It occurs when an infected flea bites a person or when materials contaminated with Y. pestis enter through a break in a person’s skin. Patients develop swollen, tender lymph glands, called buboes, and fever, headache, chills, and weakness. Bubonic plague does not spread from person to person.

A third type of plague, septicemic plague occurs when plague bacteria multiply in the blood. It does not spread from person-to-person.

Novel influenza A(H1N1) hit parts of Northern Manitoba hard in 2009, especially south of Thompson, in places like the Island Lake First Nations of Wasagamack, St. Theresa Point, Red Sucker Lake and Garden Hill.

The novel H1N1 influenza pandemic, which started in Mexico in March 2009, albeit with relatively mild symptoms in most cases, was the first pandemic since the Hong Kong Flu of 1968. It originated in Guangdong Province in southeast China, but the first record of the outbreak was in Hong Kong on July 13, 1968.

By the end of July, extensive outbreaks were reported in Vietnam and Singapore. By September 1968, Hong Kong Flu reached India, Philippines, northern Australia and Europe. That same month, the virus entered California via returning Vietnam War troops but did not become widespread in North America until December 1968.

A vaccine became available in 1969 one month after the Hong Kong flu pandemic peaked in North America. About a million people died worldwide in what are described as “excess” death beyond what be expected in a normal flu season, but still only half the mortality rate of the Asian flu a decade earlier. H1N1 swine flu is the first worldwide influenza pandemic since the Hong Flu of 1968-69.

A decade earlier, the Asian Flu pandemic of 1957 was an outbreak of avian-origin H2N2 influenza that originated in China in early 1956 and lasted until 1958. It originated from mutation in wild ducks combining with a pre-existing human strain. The virus was first identified in Guizhou and spread to Singapore in February 1957, reaching Hong Kong by April and the United States and Canada by June 1957. Estimates of worldwide deaths caused by the Asian Flu pandemic vary, but the World Health Organization believes it is about two million.

The Asian Flu strain later mutated through antigenic drift into H3N2, resulting in the milder Hong Kong Flu pandemic of 1968 and 1969.

Three subtypes of haemagglutinin (H1, H2 and H3) and two subtypes of neuraminidase (N1 and N2) are recognized among influenza A viruses that have caused widespread human disease, says the Public Health Agency of Canada. “Since 1977 the human H3N2 and human H1N1 influenza A subtypes have contributed to influenza illness to varying degrees each year.”

Influenza B viruses have evolved into two antigenically distinct lineages since the mid-1980s, represented by B/Yamagata/16/88-like and B/Victoria/2/87-like viruses. Viruses of the B/Yamagata lineage accounted for the majority of isolates in most countries between 1990 and 2001. Viruses belonging to the B/Victoria lineage were not identified outside of Asia between 1991 and 2001, but in March 2001 they re-emerged for the first time in a decade in North America. Since then, viruses from both the B/Yamagata and B/Victoria lineages have variously contributed to influenza illness each year.

In Canada, the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) reports:

• Influenza A(H3N2), A(H1N1) and B continue to co-circulate;
• Influenza A remains the predominant circulating type and influenza B continues to circulate at higher levels than usual;
• A(H1N1) and A(H3N2) are circulating in almost equal proportions. For the season to date, there is a slight majority (53 per cent) of A(H1N1), due to an increase in detections in recent weeks;
• The highest cumulative hospitalization rates are among children under five years of age and adults 65 years of age and older.

Although influenza A remains the predominant laboratory-confirmed circulating type, influenza B continues to circulate at higher levels than usual. In addition, while A(H3N2) remains the predominant subtype for the season to date, the proportion of A(H1N1) appears to be increasing.

Differences in the predominant circulating type/subtype by age-group are observed. The majority (90 per cent) of sentinel site hospitalizations among adults are associated with influenza A, while pediatric sentinel hospitalizations are a mix of influenza A (46 per cent and B (54 per cent).

Influenza A viruses are classified into subtypes based on two surface proteins: haemagglutinin (HA) and neuraminidase (NA).

Of these, the influenza A viruses that have caused widespread human disease over the decades are:

Three subtypes of HA (H1, H2 and H3)

Two subtypes of NA (N1 and N2)

Influenza B has evolved into two lineages:

B/Yamagata/16/88-like viruses

B/Victoria/2/87-like viruses

Over time, antigenic variation (antigenic drift) of strains occurs within an influenza A subtype or B lineage. The ever-present possibility of antigenic drift requires seasonal influenza vaccines to be reformulated annually. Antigenic drift may occur in one or more influenza virus strains.

The global mortality rate from the 1918/1919 “Spanish Flu” pandemic is not known, but it is estimated that 10 to 20 per cent of those who were infected died.

2019-nCoV is a novel coronavirus, the first such outbreak in eight years.

Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS-CoV), was first reported in Saudi Arabia, but later retrospectively identified and traced to the first known index case of MERS-CoV having occurred on the Arabian Peninsula in Jordan in April 2012; most people infected developed severe respiratory illness, including fever, cough, and shortness of breath. About three or four of every 10 patients reported with MERS-CoV died, a 30 to 40 per cent mortality rate.

Almost 10 years earlier, in November 2002, the first known case of an atypical pneumonia, later identified as Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS–CoV) occurred in Foshan City, Guangdong Province, China. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), a total of 8,098 people worldwide became sick with SARS during the 2002-2003 outbreak. Of these, 774 died. Since 2004, there have not been any known cases of SARS reported anywhere in the world, but on Oct. 5, 2012, the Federal Select Agent Program, a national registry program jointly comprised of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention/Division of Select Agents and Toxins, and the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service/Agriculture Select Agent Services, published a final rule declaring SARS coronavirus a select agent. A select agent is a bacterium, virus or toxin that has the potential to pose a severe threat to public health and safety. The program oversees the possession, use and transfer of biological select agents and toxins, which have the potential to pose a severe threat to public, animal or plant health or to animal or plant products.

2019-nCoV, which shows signs of being far worse than SARS-CoV, has resulted in lockdowns today in two Chinese cities, Wuhan and Huanggang.

Yi Guan, a Chinese virologist, who played an important role in tracing the development of SARS-CoV, said, “I’ve experienced so much and I’ve never felt scared before. But this time I’m scared,” Nathan Vanderklippe, Asia correspondent for the Globe and Mail, and Alexandra Li, in Beijing, reported today.

“’Conservative estimates suggest that the scale of infection may eventually be 10 times higher than SARS,’ said Dr. Guan, director of the State Key Laboratory of Emerging Infectious Diseases at the University of Hong Kong, told China’s Caixin media group on Thursday,” the Toronto-based paper reported. Dr. Guan spent two days in Wuhan this week.

2019-nCoV was first detected last month in Wuhan City, Hubei Province, China, and the virus did not match any other known virus. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention describes it as “an emerging, rapidly evolving situation.” Elizabeth Cohen, CNN’s senior medical correspondent, reports that a single patient, what’s called a “super spreader” or “super shredder,” has infected 14 health care workers (https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/23/health/wuhan-virus-super-spreader/index.html?).

The Geneva-based World Health Organization said earlier today that “now is not the time” to call a global health emergency related to a new coronavirus that has left 17 dead and more than 500 others infected in China, according to reports from the Associated Press, CTV News Channel, and other media.

The World Health Organization made the announcement in Geneva at a press conference after the second meeting this week of a WHO emergency advisory committee on the new virus.

It was “a bit too early to consider that this event is a public health emergency of international concern,” said Didier Houssin, the chair of the emergency advisory committee, noting that there remained strong divisions during discussions.

“The emergency committee members were very divided, almost 50-50,” he said. Some felt the severity of the disease and increase in cases warranted a global health emergency, he added.

“Several others say that it is too early because of limited number of cases abroad and also considering the efforts which are presently made by Chinese authorities in order to try to contain the disease,” he continued. “Declaring a public health emergency of international concern is an important step in the history of an epidemic.”

A “public health emergency of international concern” (PHEIC) must be an “extraordinary event” that poses a global risk and requires co-ordinated international action, according to WHO. Global emergencies have been declared before, including for the Zika virus outbreak in the Americas, the swine flu and polio.

Key to the announcement were recent extraordinary precautions already in place around China. Beijing announced it would cancel public celebrations of Lunar New Year, which is typically one of the busiest travel seasons of the year.

“They’re making a very concerted effort in China to try and contain things. We’re making efforts worldwide. That’s the most important thing,” said Susy Hota, the medical director of Infection Prevention and Control at the University Health Network in Toronto, on CTV News Channel. The committee was likely attempting to strike a “balance” to avoid negative consequences, Hota added.

Global health emergencies often prompt foreign governments to restrict travel and trade to affected countries. In 2003, WHO issued travel warnings for Toronto during the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), which impacted the Greater Toronto Area economy at the time. Hotels in the area lost $39 million in revenue in one month, according to the Canadian Tourism Commission.

“It would be very similar for China,” said infectious disease physician Michael Gardam on CTV’s Your Morning. “People would definitely avoid the country.”

There are still a number of “unknowns” to be probed, the WHO said at the Thursday press conference, including the possible animal source of the virus, its mode of transmission and the quality of containment measures.

The WHO announcement was encouraging for Neil Rau, an infectious disease specialist and assistant professor at the University of Toronto.

“If they had said it was an emergency, it would mean they were more concerned,” he said, adding that the announcement underscored the fact that the committee still needs more information on two key things:

First, how deadly is the virus? “What percentage of people who get this infection actually die from it? Based on my calculations it looks like it’s only about two per cent.”

Second, how contagious is the virus? “It’s looking right now that there are no chains of transmission beyond what we call a secondary chain,” he said. “In other words, a person has it, then a person in close contact with them gets it, but it doesn’t keep transmitting person-to-person after that.”

The committee added Thursday that they would be prepared to convene again “as soon as necessary” as more information emerges.

A global health emergency likely would not have changed much in Canada, according to Gardam, much in thanks to 17 years of preparation for another outbreak after SARS.

“We learned a lot from SARS. We also went through the H1N1 pandemic in 2009. So there’s been a lot of preparation done quietly in the background,” he said.

In Canada, travellers from Wuhan are screened, others are put in isolation who have symptoms, and hospitals have stockpiled necessary equipment for an outbreak. Those procedures would continue, said Gardam. It’s possible that a broader screening process to include travellers from Beijing or China in general may be implemented, he added. But that is less about the declaration from WHO, and more about where the virus is linked to in China.

“We may start to broaden our screening criteria. As we do that, we’re going to start screening a lot more people,” he said.

On the ground, that process would have a major impact for health care workers. “That’s going to be quite disruptive for the running of our hospitals,” he said. “We’re already pretty full dealing with all the other respiratory viruses.”

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From the McLaughlin Motor Car Company of 1907 to GM in 2019: End of an era as Oshawa Assembly winds down to close

End of an era for my hometown.

On Nov. 26, 2018, General Motors announced plans to “unallocate production” by December 2019 to Oshawa Assembly, which made the Chevrolet Impala; Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly, where the Chevrolet Volt, Buick LaCrosse and Cadillac CT6 are produced; Lordstown Assembly in Lordstown, Ohio, which made the Chevrolet Cruze compact; Baltimore Operations in White Marsh, Maryland; and Warren Transmission Operations in Warren, Michigan.

And now, December has truly arrived.

Unifor Local 222 is set to lose roughly two thirds of its membership due to the end of 112 years of auto assembly in Oshawa sometime next week. The McLaughlin Motor Car Company, incorporated on Nov. 20, 1907, began automobile manufacturing the following month in December 1907 – 112 years ago this month – in Oshawa, producing 154 McLaughlin-Buick Model F cars – called McLaughlins – with Buick engines that first year.

The last truck will roll of the assembly line the week before Christmas, as GM stops production in Oshawa of the Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra full-size, light-duty trucks, the last of which were being shipped from Indiana for final assembly in Oshawa. The end of production will leave about 2,300 workers unemployed. Unifor Local 222 president Colin James says the local is re-evaluating its future and potentially downsizing from its union hall on Phillip Murray Avenue in Oshawa.

GM will continue to manufacture parts and employ about 300 workers people at its sprawling soon-to-be-very-underused Oshawa plant, stamping parts for GM and, potentially, suppliers. The automaker has made a 10-year commitment to build parts, such as quarter panels, trunks, doors and hoods at the plant. The company is also building a 55-acre (22-hectare) autonomous-and-connected-vehicle and smart technology test track on the Oshawa site.

I arrived to work at General Motors in Oshawa shortly before the halcyon days of the early 1980s when employment at GM in Oshawa would top out at more than 23,000 workers.

I spent the first of five summers, beginning in July 1976 as a Trent University-bound first year student, fresh out of Grade 13 at Oshawa Catholic High School, working in the very same GM Oshawa West Plant high-seniority Completely Knocked Down (CKD) department that my dad, Bill Barker, had retired from the year before. Some of his buddies were still there; some I had heard about for years and met for the first time.

My dad worked as an hourly-rated employee for 32½ years before retiring in 1975. He was a proud rank-and-file trade unionist, a member of Local 222 of the old United Autoworkers of America (UAW).

In the fall of 1970, he walked the picket line for 3½ months in the second-longest strike against his employer since the Dirty Thirties. I remember it because I was 13 and in Grade 8 at St. Christopher in Oshawa at the time. He also walked the picket line 15 years earlier in 1955 in the five-month UAW strike against General Motors of Canada, the longest strike against the company.

While he wasn’t much fond of politicians of any stripe collectively, he did have a bit of a liking individually for Mike Starr, Oshawa-Whitby riding Progressive Conservative MP, and a federal labour minister in the Diefenbaker government for a time in the 1960s, but was truly fond of the man who defeated Starr by 15 votes in the June 1968 federal election, future NDP leader Ed Broadbent, who in his youth had been my parent’s paperboy for a time, delivering the Oshawa Times to the south-side of their rented Church Street red Insulbrick duplex, my first home.

Truth be told, my dad liked Ed not so much because of his NDP affiliation, although as a trade unionist that carried weight, but mainly because he saw him as a hardworking, honest politician; a kindred spirit, although my dad would have put it more plainly than that.

I well remember my dad’s General Motors’ ring, presented to him in 1967 for 25 years of “Loyal Service.” In fact, I have it now. My dad and mom, along with his co-workers getting their rings, took a GM-provided train trip from Oshawa to Toronto to the Royal York Hotel for dinner and the presentation by the company. After another five years of seniority in 1972, GM added a diamond to it for 30 years of service.

My first hourly-rated job was hammering large wooden crates together. It was just an amazing cavernous building that old West Plant with great big windows and wooden floors. I remember once going across the tunnel (or bridge, I’m not sure now how it was referred to) connecting the West Plant and the North Plant over Division Street. Later that summer, I hung rads in the “Rad Room” of the old North Plant across the street. My last summer job at GM was many years later in the Summer of 1992, working on the acid side of the Battery Plant.

The Canadian Automotive Museum was created in Oshawa in 1961. The city at various times has been known by mottoes that include “The City that Motovates Canada” and “The City in Motion” and, most recently, the “Automotive Capital of Canada.”

While my hometown of Oshawa is a lot bigger (and for that matter older) than Thompson, Manitoba where I live now, it was in many ways, at least as I recall it from growing up there, a lot like Thompson in being a working-class blue-collar town.

The men in my Nipigon Street neighbourhood – guys like Earl Kirkpatrick, Snow Willson and my dad – were often working six days a weeks, with overtime on Saturdays when they were on day shift. If they were on nights, they’d be busy flooding the Nipigon Park outdoor rink at 2:30 a.m. – after their eight-hour night shift ended and they went to bed – so us kids could skate the next day. That’s how I remember my dad.

Instead of going to INCO or Vale, as the company is now, and down into a mine, the men (and they were invariably men back then) I knew in the 1960s carried their metal lunch pails into the factory at General Motors to build cars and trucks. When they were leaving at the end of their shift, they punched the same clock they had coming in.

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