“Most of my life, I’ve lived up north,” Larocque, who is Métis, told the
Thompson Citizen in a May 11 interview. “My parents met in Churchill. I’ve lived in Wabowden, Leaf Rapids, Flin Flon, The Pas, Wanless, Thompson. The north is my home and it always has been. When I got married, I left the north and then when I came back I noticed that nothing had changed. It broke my heart to see the condition of the north when it used to be so prosperous.” In Larocque’s view, having an MP who is not part of the government is a disadvantage to the riding, which has been held by the NDP for all but two terms since 1979, with the Liberals capturing the seat in 2006 and 1993. Elijah Harper, who won the 1993 election, is the only MP for Churchill (which became Churchill-Keewatinook Aski in 2015) to have been a member of the governing party.
Additional conditions have been added to the licences in an effort to address concerns raised by affected Indigenous communities about the effect these hydroelectric megaprojects have had on the environment and their way of life. “The province has undertaken rigorous and decade-long consultations with the Indigenous communities affected,” said Conservation and Climate Minister Sarah Guillemard in a statement emailed to media. “Manitoba Hydro will be held to multiple licence and non-licence conditions in the operation of these water-power licences. Consultation will continue into the future, by the province and by Manitoba Hydro. Constructed in the early to mid-1970s to redirect water from the Churchill River system into the Nelson River system in order to power the Crown corporation’s hydroelectric dams that provide more than 70 per cent of Manitoba’s electricity, the Churchill River diversion has operated with an interim licence for 44 years and annual approvals of h
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All the permits filed so far are from the private sector, inlcuding one new business. “Last year was a challenging year for business in our community,” said Mayor Colleen Smook in a press release. “But construction in Thompson continues to hold strong as our residents and entrepreneurs continue to find new opportunities in Thompson. 120 permits with a total construction value of $11,486,226 were field in Thompson in 2020. Forty-eight of them were for residential alterations, 25 for strucutre removal or demolition, 21 for commercial alterations and 16 for garage and carport cosntruction. The total number of permits last year was 50 per cent higher than the 80 filed in 2019 but the construction value was about the same. In 2018, 87 permits were filed with a total value of more than $18 million.
“Now the whole world knows that if you wear a mask, if you stay some distance from each other and if you wash your hands not only will you not get COVID but you won t even get the flu,” said Northern Regional Health Authority (NRHA) CEO Helga Bryant in a March 12 interview with the
Thompson Citizen, referencing the fact that during the pandemic, there was essentially no flu season, which came as a relief to health care planners, who had been concerned early on that the pandemic and seasonal flu could combine to put even more strain on the province’s health care system than COVID-19 itself did. “Something as simple as those three things did so much to keep people safe.”