Ottawa finds one word for CFB Wainwright fire, and it's 'incident'
The federal Office of Preliminary Vocabulary says the noun stays in service until something stronger clears review, as Defence Minister David McGuinty confirms fatalities at the Alberta base.
After the deadly fire at CFB Wainwright, a small Ottawa office approves the word 'incident' for its twenty-sixth consecutive national emergency. Its director defends the noun as a traffic cone in front of a hole. Magnus Worldweary has read this script before, in several countries.
A filing clerk in Ottawa moved one rubber stamp from the second drawer to the first on Friday afternoon. Nobody filmed it. It was, by some distance, the most decisive act of the day.
The stamp reads "INCIDENT". It belongs to the Office of Preliminary Vocabulary, the small federal body that approves which nouns a minister may use before anyone knows what happened. On Friday it was approved for a twenty-sixth consecutive national emergency.
The facts, such as they are, run as follows. A fire broke out at Canadian Forces Base Wainwright in Alberta, one of the busiest bases in the country. People died and people were hurt, and Defence Minister David McGuinty confirmed as much. This correspondent has nothing to add to that part, and will not try.
What happened next is the part I have read before. In Windscale, in 1957, a reactor fire was a "release". In Pennsylvania, in 1979, a partial meltdown was an "event". The nouns change their coats every few decades. The tailor is always the same.
The noun that never retires
Dr Helena Oduya runs the Office of Preliminary Vocabulary from a converted meeting room two floors beneath the Department of National Defence. She has a 26-page style guide and a kettle. She is very proud of both.
"The word 'incident' is not a dodge," she told me. "It is a placeholder with a pension. We put it in front of the public the way you put a traffic cone in front of a hole. Nobody loves the cone. Everybody would miss it."
Her office received the request at 4:12 on Friday afternoon. A minister's aide needed something to say that was true, short, and could survive a week of follow-up questions. Dr Oduya says she did not even open the drawer herself.
"We have a lad for that," she said.
"The word 'incident' is a placeholder with a pension. We put it in front of the public the way you put a traffic cone in front of a hole."
Her rivals in government want the stamp retired. A working group inside the Privy Council Office has spent two years developing a replacement, which it describes as "a situation-adjacent occurrence". Dr Oduya calls that "four words doing the job of one, badly".
I have heard this argument before too. In 1986 the first Soviet bulletin from a certain power station managed to be both longer and emptier than the Canadian one. Length is not candour. It is usually the opposite.
The queue behind the fire
By Friday evening the stamp had company. Standing behind it, in the office's own logbook, were the words "ongoing", "active" and "fluid". Each is cleared for use on the first day. None may be used on the fourth.
"'Fluid' is for when you are still hoping," said Dennis Praskey, a retired military press officer who now speaks for the Canadian Association of Former Spokespeople. "'Ongoing' is for when you have stopped hoping but the cameras are still there. 'Incident' is for all weather."
Praskey spent thirty years saying the word in front of flags. He says he never once said it without meaning it.
"People think it's cold," he said. "It isn't. It's the only word that doesn't promise anything we can't deliver by Tuesday. You'd be amazed how rare that is in this building."
The opposition disagrees, as the opposition does. A shadow critic has asked why the government cannot call a fire a fire. The government's answer, as of Friday night, is that it has, and that the fire is not the question. The question is what caused it, and that word is not on any shelf yet.
Which is, grudgingly, fair. I have stood outside enough gates in enough countries to know that the first honest sentence after a disaster is usually the dullest one. The dishonest sentences are far more exciting. They come later, and they come from people who have had time to think.
A sequel, reviewed
So here is the review. The Wainwright statement is a faithful remake of a script Ottawa has staged twenty-five times before. The performances are competent. The dialogue is familiar to the point of comfort. Nothing in it is wrong, exactly, and nothing in it tells you anything, exactly, and both of those were the point.
Dr Oduya does not mind the notices. She has heard them twenty-five times.
"Everyone wants a better word on the first day," she said, rinsing her mug. "Then the better word arrives, and it turns out to be a number, or a name, or a cause. Nobody ever thanks us for the cone. They just drive round the hole."
The stamp went back in the second drawer at six. It will not stay there long. It never does.
