More lakes named after fallen soldiers

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This article was published 05/10/2010 (5758 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Wanda Watkins won’t be on hand early next month when the province honours her son, Lane, and four other Manitoba soldiers killed in Afghanistan.

“I will not be there,” she said Monday of the ceremony tentatively planned for Nov. 4 at 11 a.m. at the Legislative Building, where the government will officially name a lake after each of the fallen servicemen.

Watkins said her husband, Charles, and Lane’s twin brother, Leigh, will likely attend, but she cannot bring herself to go — she’s still smarting from the long wait to honour her son, especially in light of the Selinger government’s decision this summer to name a lake after hockey superstar Jonathan Toews. Her son Lane was killed in a roadside explosion near Kandahar on July 4, 2007.

“They’re only doing this now because of the mistake they made — and it (the controversy over Toews Lake) hit the fan. I’m not putting myself through that. I don’t care to meet the premier. I don’t care to have anybody pretend that they care about Lane now when they haven’t up till now,” she said from her home in Clearwater.

Besides Pte. Lane Watkins, Manitoba will also be naming lakes after Cpl. Michael Seggie, Trooper Corey Joseph Hayes, Sapper Sean Greenfield, and Cpl. James Hayward Arnal.

They won’t be the first Manitoba casualties of the Afghanistan war to be so honoured. Three years ago, at a ceremony just before Remembrance Day, the province named two northern lakes after Cpl. Keith Morley, who was born in Winnipeg and killed on Sept. 18, 2006, and Master Cpl. Timothy Wilson, who was born in Alberta and moved to Manitoba at an early age with his family. Wilson was killed earlier the same year.

Watkins said she has nothing against Toews, the Chicago Blackhawks superstar. But “if the premier starts handing these things out with a kind of flavour-of-the-day approach, that’s wrong,” she said. “It’s too important, too lasting of a legacy.”

She said the government could have soothed soldiers’ families’ feelings if it had warned them ahead of time or called them afterwards. But it didn’t. “You can fix a lot of things if you genuinely, sincerely acknowledge what you’ve done wrong and make amends,” Watkins said.

The government has explained that the naming of lakes or other geographic features after worthy Manitobans falls under a broad program that applies to more than armed forces personnel who have been killed in the line on duty.

Manitoba’s chief of protocol, Dwight Macaulay, said Monday that the province had planned to honour the soldiers last November, but its plans fell through with resignation of former premier Gary Doer, a leadership race and the installation of Greg Selinger as premier. He could not recall why no one was honoured in 2008.

“It’s not as though the government has been bullied into this at all,” he said of this year’s ceremony, showing a reporter a copy of a January internal memo discussing plans to honour the soldiers this fall around Remembrance Day.

Toews and his Team Canada teammates won Olympic gold at the end of February, while the Blackhawks ended their half-century Stanley Cup drought in June. Premier Greg Selinger announced that a lake would be named after Toews in July.

The mother of at least one other soldier to be honoured next month may not be able to attend the ceremony.

Arnal’s mom, Wendy Hayward-Miskiewicz, is in the midst of a six-month stint at the Tim Hortons restaurant at Kandahar air base. The Free Press was unable to reach her by email on Monday. Her son James died July 18, 2008. “I know it would have meant an awful lot to Wendy to be here for the (ceremony),” Watkins said.

Jim Seggie, father of Michael Seggie, who died Sept. 3, 2008, declined, in an email, to comment. Hayes’s family now lives in New Brunswick, and it’s believed that Greenfield’s is also now living out of the province. Greenfield hailed from Pinawa.

larry.kusch@freepress.mb.ca

 

Lots of room for names

 

How many lakes does Manitoba have? At least 100,000, says Des Kappel, the provincial toponymist and guardian of the Manitoba Geographical Names Program.

How many have been named so far? About 6,800.

What other geographic features can be used to honour members of the Canadian Forces or other worthy Manitobans? Roads, islands, bays, points, streams, bridges, parks, bends in rivers, eskers and isthmuses, etc. There may be a half million such geographic features or more that could still be named, Kappel estimates.

How many named features are there in the province’s database? About 24,000.

How many wartime casualties have a geographic feature named in their honour? About 4,200 Manitobans who died in the Second World War, 37 from the Korean conflict and 45 from the First World War (the number is so low mainly because the program lacks the resources to do the necessary research).

How many geographical features are named each year? It varies from year to year. Last year there were about 20.

Who makes the decision? Provincial officials will review suggestions from the public, but ultimately the government decides.