ELECTION 2017 11
NEWS 3
A special report on the Burnaby North riding
Pipeline route ‘extensive, destructive’
Christy Clark and her BC Liberals bought and paid for John Horgan and the BC NDP working for you FRIDAY APRIL 28, 2017
LOCAL NEWS – LOCAL MATTERS
There’s more at Burnabynow.com
Authorized by Amber Hockin, Authorized by Amber Hockin, Financial 604-430-8600 FinancialAgent, Agent, 604-430-8600 CUPE3787 CUPE3787
ELECTION 2017
Horgan makes a house call in Burnaby By Lauren Boothby
editorial@burnabynow.com
OUT OF REACH: During a campaign stop in Burnaby Wednesday, B.C. NDP leader John Horgan talks to North Burnaby resident Tiffany Ottahal, holding her two-year-old son, while Janet Routledge, NDP candidate for Burnaby-North looks on. Horgan made a campaign stop at a single-family home on Oxford Street to talk about housing affordability. PHOTO CORNELIA NAYLOR
It had all the right political props for a campaign stop to highlight the NDP’s housing platform. A home with a $1.2-million price tag on it, young families having to move to another province because they can’t afford to buy a home in B.C., and a class of local kids eager to question the NDP leader, John Horgan. Horgan spoke with residents Wednesday in front of a house on Oxford Street while the media ate it up. He outlined the party’s housing platform, including a promise to build 114,000 units over the next 10 years in co-op, rent-purpose, notfor-profit and market-priced housing. Horgan suggested Premier Christy Clark’s positions and responses to housing in the province are influenced by her campaign donors. “Over the last two years, the benchmark price for housing in the Lower Mainland has gone up over $600,000,” he said. “Whose interest is it to see housing prices go up? Not the families that I’m with today, not the communities they want to live in. It’s in the interest of wealthy developers, and those are the ones who have been bankrolling the B.C. Continued on page 3
IN THE COURTS
Burnaby bookkeeper going to prison for fraud By Cornelia Naylor
cnaylor@burnabynow.com
A former Burnaby school bookkeeper found guilty of stealing a total of more than $62,000 from two former employers was led from
Janet Routledge Burnaby North
a courtroom in handcuffs Thursday and will spend the next 18 months in jail. Jodi Fingarsen, a bookkeeper at Alpha Secondary School between 2007 and 2010, was convicted of two counts of fraud over $5,000
Raj Chouhan Burnaby-Edmonds
on Dec. 8, 2016. Her case centred around numerous cheques, including bogus Alpha Secondary cheques made out to her directly, third-party cheques made out to businesses and individuals owed mon-
Anne Kang Burnaby-Deer Lake
Katrina Chen Burnaby-Lougheed
ey by Alpha, and third-party cheques made out to the Altus Group in Vancouver from clients for services rendered. Crown prosecutor Jennifer Horneland had called for a jail term of two years
less a day and a period of probation, while Fingarsen’s lawyer called for a conditional sentence or a jail term of 90 or less to be served intermittently. In sentencing Fingarsen to 18 months of jail and
two years of probation, Provincial Court Judge Joseph Galati said there were “essentially no mitigating factors” in her case and a number of aggravating ones, including her breach of two Continued on page 9
Authorized by Amber Hockin, Financial Agent, 604-430-8600 | CUPE 3787