A Year of COVID-19: Missing friends, missing the Hub and Strand Theatre in Thompson, Manitoba

Last night, I was wistful for a very long moment for the pre-pandemic, pre-COVID-19 world, as I spotted the Hub restaurant and the Strand Theatre straight ahead of me downtown on Churchill Drive here in Thompson, Manitoba. After almost a year of takeout cuisine, which I am indeed grateful for, the Hub’s dining room, and perhaps a very rare steak sandwich to enjoy in the company of friends, and/or a movie next-door at the Strand Theatre, reminded me of life before Code Red.

For the last year, I have like many, many other people around the world, focused primarily on the present and putting one foot in front of the other and moving forward, one day at a time. It can be exhausting. Last March, the calendar may have said 31 days, but in truth it was the month without end.

One of the most chilling things, 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.

On 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).

I’ve read, thought and written a fair bit about pandemics and the like over the last 30 years. More than a decade ago on Dec. 4, 2010, when I was editing the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News, I penned a story headlined, “Potential influenza pandemic on Garden Hill First Nation, MKO says: Surrounding Island Lake First Nations may also be under the flu gun.”

I wrote: “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 the North American 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.

“Influenza A viruses are classified into subtypes on the basis of two surface proteins: hemagglutinin (H) and neuraminidase (N).

“Three subtypes of hemagglutinin (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. It is not yet known if this pattern will be altered by the emergence of the 2009 pandemic virus [A/California/7/2009 (H1N1)]. Immunity to the H and N antigens reduces the likelihood of infection and lessens the severity of disease if infection occurs.”

“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.

“The antigenic characteristics of current and emerging influenza virus strains include A/California/7/2009 (H1N1)-like, A/Perth/16/2009 (H3N2)-like and B/Brisbane/60/2008 (Victoria lineage)-like antigens.”

On Nov. 1, 2019, just before a likely, but not yet conclusively proven, viral species jump to humans, in or around Wuhan, China, that likely sparked  the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, more commonly known as COVID-19, I posted on Facebook on 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 2018’s Influenza A (H3N2) flu virus that circulated in Canada.

While influenza isn’t a coronavirus, some of the arguments I made on Oct. 16, 2013 in a editorial for the Thompson Citizen, might sound somewhat  familiar today, “Even if the influenza vaccine only prevents infection 60 per cent to 70 per cent of the time, in the best of cases – meaning that of every 10 people who would have gotten the flu without the shot, three or four still will – flu shots have proven to be effective in slowing the virus down and helping to limit the spread of pandemics,” I wrote. “On the balance of probabilities, you hopefully are helping yourself in getting a flu shot, but you’re almost certainly in any event being altruistic in helping the rest of us in the general population by slowing the spread the virus down.”

I’ve also blogged in soundingsjohnbarker on such esoteric topics as blog posts on “Black Death: Not so bad?” in 2014, “What if the 22nd century means staying at home with long-distance travel a thing of the past?” in 2015, “A still bigger picture: Médecins Sans Frontières’ (MSF), Samaritan’s Purse, ZMapp and the 2014 Ebola Crisis” in 2018 and, more recently, “The fire this time? Pandemic prose, and waiting and watching for the ‘big one’” in 2020

Thirty years ago, I wrote a third-year history essay at Trent way back in 1991 about ergot poisoning, from a fungus that commonly forms in wheat, rye, and other grains, and is now known to cause such symptoms as convulsions, vomiting, and hallucinations, possibly triggering the events leading to the Salem witch trials in Massachusetts between February 1692 and May 1693. In 2006. I read Laurie Garrett’s landmark 1994 book, “The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance.”

In 2011, Megan O’Brien was able to tell me she could bring in on inter-library loan to the Thompson Public Library for me 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.

Four years later, I borrowed an audio book version from University College of the North’s Wellington & Madeleine Spence Memorial Library on the Thompson Campus of “Station Eleven”, New York City writer Emily St. John Mandel’s post-apocalyptic novel published in 2014, and centred around the fictional “Georgia Flu” pandemic, which is so lethal, and named after the former Soviet republic, that within weeks, most of the world’s population has been killed and “all countries and borders have vanished.”

In 2017, also from the UCN library here, I borrowed “The Plague”, a novel by Albert Camus, published in 1947, that tells the story from the point of view of an unknown narrator of a plague sweeping the French Algerian city of Oran.

I spent Mondays between 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. in a comfortable orange chair on the third floor of UCN during the fall of 2019 reading John M. Barry’s book “The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History”, chronicling the 1918-19 Spanish Flu pandemic. Barry is an adjunct member of faculty at the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine in New Orleans.

So, yes, I had some idea of what a pandemic might look like when it arrived a year ago and it did turn out indeed to be the fire this time.

Knowing might be good preparation. But you can only know so much. Nowhere had I read in advance to get ready for a pandemic where perhaps one out of every three carriers might be showing no symptoms and feeling just fine while shedding the virus and transmitting a disease, with multiple variants now, and that varies so much in its effects from person to person. The Chimera, according to Greek mythology, was a monstrous fire-breathing hybrid creature. COVID-19 is its progeny.

And no matter how much you know, it’s not the same as the lived experience of a pandemic where “mask up” is the imperative public health-ordered emergency non-pharmaceutical intervention that taken to brain and heart, along with six-foot physical so-called “social distancing” and restricted travel, might just some day mean dinner at the Hub and a movie at the Strand Theatre again.

That might seem like a distant hope at the moment, and I suppose it is, but I am mindful that individual actions can collectively matter, and instead of the “twindemic” of influenza and COVID-19 public health epidemiologists feared last spring for this winter, the start of the annual flu season in the Northern Hemisphere has been very quiet to date, much like it was in the Southern Hemisphere during their winter season last year during our summer. Since September, the CDC “FluView” – its weekly report on influenza surveillance – has shown all 50 states in shades of green and chartreuse, indicating “minimal” or “low” flu activity. Normally by December, at least some states are painted in oranges and reds for “moderate” and “high.”

In the Southern Hemisphere, where winter stretches from June through August, widespread mask-wearing, rigorous lockdowns and other precautions against Covid-19 transmission drove the flu down to record-low levels. Southern Hemisphere countries help “reseed” influenza viruses in the Northern Hemisphere each year, so a good flu season here year “Down Under” often, not always, means we can reasonably hope for one in the Northern Hemisphere.

And some of it is just seasonal variability. Some flu seasons are worse than others. Flu viruses mutate far more than coronaviruses through antigenic drift, hence the need for a different combination flu vaccine every year.

Since last February, COVID-19 has killed more than 430,000 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.

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

A still bigger picture: Médecins Sans Frontières’ (MSF), Samaritan’s Purse, ZMapp and the 2014 Ebola Crisis

One of the first things I knew I wanted to write about almost four years ago when soundingsjohnbarker started was something about Samaritan’s Purse and the 2014 Ebola crisis, particularly in Liberia in West Africa. “A bigger picture” https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/03/a-bigger-picture/ became my third blog post here on Sept. 3, 2014.

It interested me because Samaritan’s Purse, a Christian international relief ministry run by Franklin Graham, son of the late North Carolina evangelist Billy Graham, and based in nearby Boone, North Carolina, was best known in recent years by many in North America for its Operation Christmas Child, which was started in 1990, and by 1993 it had grown to the point it was adopted by Samaritan’s Purse.

Samaritan’s Purse was founded by Dr. Bob Pierce in 1970 as a nondenominational evangelical Christian organization to provide spiritual and physical aid to hurting people around the world. Samaritan’s Purse Canada was established in 1973.

As of 2014, Operation Christmas Child had collected and distributed over 100 million shoebox gifts in more than 130 countries worldwide.  Each shoebox is filled with hygiene items, school supplies, toys, and candy. Operation Christmas Child then works with local churches to put on age-appropriate presentations of the gospel at the events where the shoeboxes are distributed. Here in Thompson, hundreds of shoeboxes are collected each Christmas season for Operation Christmas Child through efforts co-ordinated in recent years mainly by the First Baptist Church, and previously the Thompson Pentecostal Assembly, which have co-ordinated efforts on behalf of a number of local churches, including St. Lawrence Roman Catholic Church, and other places including University College of the North (UCN), Thompson Public Library, and individual donors.

Rev. Leslie-Elizabeth King, who pastored the Lutheran-United Church of Thompson, and was in active ministerial service here for 19 years, until she retired in June 2014, touched a nerve in her “Spiritual Thoughts” column in the Nickel Belt News Oct. 26, 2012 when she mentioned using the Canada Revenue Agency website to look at how the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association of Canada’s Calgary-based Samaritan’s Purse Canada operates.

In a nutshell, while King had no problem with the charity’s six per cent management and administration budget expense, while 90 per cent went directly to the charity, which, she said, was “very good,” she didn’t much like the concept of sending shoeboxes stuffed with a pillowcase, toothbrush and a few pencils to a poor child on the other side of the world. “Wouldn’t it be better, if we truly want to be of use to others, to send our money to a church, agency or Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) in the destination country so local people could decide what is needed and where? That way, it would be more likely that our gift would build the economy in a community that needs it?” she asked.

Frank King, no relation, communications manager for the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association of Canada’s Samaritan’s Purse Canada, pointed out “our work in developing nations, including distributing Operation Christmas Child shoe box gifts, is always done through local partners. This is a priority for us because we want to build up local churches and we want to rely on local expertise to do (or financially support) the work that best benefits those communities.”

The Ebola story and Samaritan’s Purse was to me the international back story to the local Operation Christmas Child story. “Wouldn’t it be better, if we truly want to be of use to others, to send our money to a church, agency or Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) in the destination country so local people could decide what is needed and where?” Leslie King asked in 2012. Well, speaking of NGOs, in 2014 it would be Médecins Sans Frontières, also known in English as Doctors Without Borders, the highly respected international humanitarian medical non-governmental organization, founded in Paris in 1971, but stretched beyond their limits in Guinea and Sierra Leone in the midst of the deadliest Ebola viral hemorrhagic fever outbreak recorded in West Africa since the disease was discovered in 1976, that would ask Samaritan’s Purse on July 8, 2014 to take over the management of ELWA (Eternal Love Winning Africa) Hospital — the main facility, founded in 1965 by the medical mission group Serving in Mission (SIM) USA, caring for all Ebola patients in Monrovia, Liberia. The West African Ebola crisis — the world’s first urban outbreak as opposed to primarily rural previous ones — began in December 2013 in Meliandou, a small, isolated village in Guinea with only 31 households. It wasn’t until March 21, 2014, that the disease was identified as Ebola. The outbreak peaked in October 2014 and ended in June 2016.

Writing back in September 2014, what I knew then was that Dr. Kent Brantly, 33, medical director at Samaritan’s Purse Ebola Consolidated Case Management Center in Monrovia, contracted Ebola and was the first patient ever medically evacuated to the United States with a confirmed case of Ebola, to be treated at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta. Brantly originally moved to Liberia with his wife and children in October 2013 to be a general practitioner.  Immediately after Samaritan’s Purse took over Ebola treatment operations in Liberia, he traded his hospital scrubs for a full-body hazmat suit.

I also knew that Brantly was the first Ebola patient ever treated with ZMapp, a highly experimental three-mouse monoclonal antibody drug serum treatment produced by U.S.-based Mapp Biopharmaceutical, based in San Diego. ZMapp was produced for Mapp Biopharmaceutical in the Reynolds American tobacco plant Kentucky Bioprocessing facility in Owensboro, Kentucky inside the leaves of tobacco plants. Two of the drug’s three components were originally developed at the Public Health Agency of Canada’s containment level 4 National Microbiology Laboratory (NML) in Winnipeg.

But what I didn’t know until I recently saw Samaritan Purse’s compelling 2017 documentary Facing Darkness on Netflix was that at the time Brantly was given ZMapp there were only four courses of ZMapp treatment in existence anywhere in the world. A specially-equipped isolation chamber Phoenix Air modified Gulfstream III air ambulance, the only one of its kind at the time in the world, chartered by Samaritan’s Purse to medically evacuate and repatriate Brantly, and en route from the United States to Liberia, had turned back half way across the Atlantic Ocean with a mechanical problem. Phoenix Air is headquartered in Cartersville, Georgia.

And then, a miracle by many measures. One of Brantly’s colleagues, and one of the physicians treating  the critically-ill doctor, Dr. Lance Plyler, medical director of the Disaster Response Unit at Samaritan’s Purse, located one of those four courses of ZMapp in neighbouring Sierra Leone. A Styrofoam box containing three frozen vials of straw-colored fluid was flown to the border, canoed across a river and put on a plane to Monrovia, the Liberian capital. But there was enough to treat only one person, and meanwhile, Nancy Writebol, 59, with Serving in Mission, (SIM), had also contacted Ebola.

The day the ZMapp arrived in Monrovia, Brantly was actually having one of his better days since contracting the virus, and insisted that Writebol, who appeared sicker, be given the available ZMapp. But as the frozen vials were literally warming up under her arm, Brantly took a sudden and dramatic turn for the worse, and started to seize. Plyler made what must have required the Wisdom of Solomon-like Hippocratic Oath decision to retrieve the ZMapp vials from under Writebol’s arm, and administered the drug to Brantly instead. Brantly started to feel better almost immediately.

Both Brantly and Writebol would both wind up being treated with ZMapp and be medically evacuated by Phoenix Air within days, Brantly first, to Emory.  Both made full recoveries.

Facing Darkness also provides insights into the character of Franklin Graham, as head of Samaritan’s Purse, that I had never seen before. While it may not be charitable to say so, in truth I have wondered more than once if Franklin Graham is up to being his father’s son. He’s a bit too of-this-world political and too cozy with President Donald Trump and his band of cronies for my taste. But recalling how he learned about Brantly contracting Ebola while he was in Alaska, Graham was almost ashen-face still as he recalled the moment. Speaking in the same measured tones Billy Graham often did, doesn’t take away from Franklin Graham’s sense of being overwhelmed by shock and grief. Initially, “I didn’t even know how to pray,” he says. But Graham would soon enough pray. And Samaritan’s Purse with Franklin Graham at the helm, would, in the best tradition of the United States Army Rangers nemo resideo, and “leave no one behind,” move heaven and earth to medically evacuate Brantly and Writebol from Liberia back to the United States.

A true-life page-tuner worthy of the best of the late Michael Crichton’s medical thrillers.

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

Soundingsjohnbarker: ‘You can write that?’ You bet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tolko Industries said they were going to pull the plug Dec. 2 on their heavy-duty kraft paper and lumber mill in The Pas after 19 years, leaving all 332 employees unemployed. The mill in The Pas has been a money-loser for years. It was conceived by the Progressive Conservative provincial government of premier Duff Roblin in 1966.

Less than a month before Tolko pulled the plug on its mill in The Pas, OmniTRAX, the Denver-based short line railroad, which owns the Port of Churchill, announced on July 25 it would be laying off or not re-hiring about 90 port workers, as it was cancelling the 2016 grain shipping season. OmniTRAX bought most of Northern Manitoba’s rail track from The Pas to Churchill in 1997 from CN for $11 million. OmniTRAX took over the related Port of Churchill, which opened in 1929, when it acquired it from Canada Ports Corporation, for a token $10 soon after buying the rail line. The Port of Churchill has the largest fuel terminal in the Arctic and is North America’s only deep water Arctic seaport that offers a gateway between North America and Mexico, South America, Europe and the Middle East. OmniTRAX created Hudson Bay Railway in 1997, the same year it took over operation of the Port of Churchill. It operates 820 kilometres of track in Manitoba between The Pas and Churchill.

At the time the cancellation was announced, OmniTRAX did not have a single committed grain shipping contract. Normally, the Port of Churchill has a 14-week shipping season from July 15 to Oct. 31. When the Canadian Wheat Board lost its grain monopoly, creating a new grain market several years ago, and was renamed G3 Canada Ltd. by its new owners, the newly-minted G3 Canada Ltd. began building a network of grain elevators, terminals and vessels that bypasses Churchill and uses the Great Lakes, St. Lawrence River and West Coast to move grain to foreign markets. Surprise.

While OmniTRAX accepted a letter of intent last December from Mathias Colomb First Nation, Tataskweyak Cree Nation and the War Lake First Nation to buy its rail assets in Manitoba, along with the Port of Churchill, the deal has not been completed to date, and its future looks murky to non-existent. Rail freight shipments measured by frequency along the Bayline have been cut in half by OmniTRAX this summer.

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

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

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

Kool-Aid anyone?

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

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