Prince George Citizen August 14, 2019

Sentencing options presented in Mackenzie manslaughter case

Mark NIELSEN Citizen staff

mnielsen@pgcitizen.ca

What to do with a son who beat his father to death and hid the body in the backyard shed of a Mackenzie home was the focus of a sentencing hearing on Tuesday. He has pleaded guilty to manslaughter and causing indignity to a body from the August 2014 incident. Because he committed the offence when he was 17 years old, he is being sentenced under the Youth Criminal Justice Act and his name is protected by a publication ban. According to an agreed statement of facts based largely on statements the son provided, in May 2014 he showed up unannounced at the door of his father’s home in a trailer court in the community of about 3,800 people north of Prince George, after traveling from his mother’s home in Alberta. However, his father had fallen on hard times. His trailer was dilapidated, there was little food in the home and his power was eventually cut off because he had not paid his hydro bill. As well, both were consuming marijuana and crack cocaine, the court was told. As the days followed, they began to bicker, get into yelling matches and into physical fights.

Matters reached the boiling when, on the day of the incident, the two once again got into an argument and the son told the father he was going to kill him.

While the father armed himself with a machete that had been mounted on a wall and the son got hold of a wooden club that had been sitting on top of a freezer in

the same room.

When the father moved towards the son in what the latter thought was a threatening gesture, he took a swing at the older man. Still perceiving his father to be advancing, he continued to hit his father with the club.

Suffering from blows to his head, the father fell to his knees and dropped the machete. Seeing his father bleeding heavily from his head and appearing unconscious and not breathing, the son tried to administer some first aid including mouth-to-mouth resuscitation for what he thought was about a half hour. However, at no time did he seek help from anyone else.

When his father did not revive, the son dragged him into the bedroom, put him on the bed and used zap straps to bind his hands and ankles out of fear he would be attacked again. He went to sleep on the living room sofa and when he went to check on his father the next morning, found that he had died.

In a state of panic, he wrapped the body, secured it with more zap straps and then, under the cover of nightfall, stood him up in the backyard shed, surrounded him with other objects and screwed the shed door shut.

In the days that followed, he spent some of his time smoking marijuana and drinking alcohol while also cleaning the house of evidence and telling the neighbours his father had gone to work. He also bought a tent, stole some food from a local gas station and went camping at a nearby reservoir for about three days.

When police showed up at the door looking for his father, he provided a photo album. But the

RCMP returned and while the son waited at a neighbour’s home, they conducted a search. When they found the body, police went to the neighbour to make an arrest, but the son slipped away and ran for about 10 kilometres to a lake where he hid.

The next day, however, he was back in town where one of the officers recognized him and made the arrest.

Although he was not in a state of psychosis at the time of the incident, he has been diagnosed with a mental health issue that requires medication. As a consequence, both Crown and defence counsels agree he qualifies for a “therapeutic sentencing option” available under the Youth Criminal Justice Act.

Called an Intensive Rehabilitative Custody and Supervision order, it is for those suffering from a mental illness, psychological disorder or an emotional disturbance and have been convicted of murder, attempted murder, manslaughter or aggravated sexual assault.

Crown is seeking an order lasting three years with two of them served in jail and one under close supervision.

In contrast, defence counsel Jason LeBlond argued the entire term should served in the community. For more than five years, his client has been living in a group home where he has been receiving the supports he did not get previously and has posed no trouble, he noted.

Putting him in a jail would only “disrupt a long pattern of success,” LeBlond contended.

B.C. Supreme Court Justice Ron Tindale will issue a decision at a later date.

B.C. Corrections looks at how to prevent contraband drops by drones

Jennifer SALTMAN Vancouver Sun

Smugglers are taking to the air and using drones to get past walls and fences to deliver drugs, cellphones and other contraband to inmates at correctional centres.

That is why B.C. Corrections is gathering information about ways it can use technology to protect its 10 provincial institutions from drones.

While drones are not yet “a significant concern,” as they are in other jurisdictions, the agency says it is always looking for ways to respond to potential new threats.

“To this end, B.C. Corrections is currently consulting with security advisors on drone detection options,” the service said in an email.

B.C. Corrections would not provide data about drone-related incidents at its facilities “due to security.”

In a request for information that closed on Monday, Corrections B.C. noted that the drone industry has grown over the years, and there is potential for the devices to be used for surveillance and smuggling contraband.

For that reason, it is interested in technology that can detect drones in use, within and around one kilometre from its jails. The agency is looking to find out the level of market interest, get information about new technologies and ap-

B.C. Corrections is not the first agency to look at drone detection, which is common in the U.S., where contraband smuggling by drones is a bigger problem.

proaches to drone detection, and get cost estimates. The type of detection equipment it hopes to use has not been determined, however some common ways to detect drones include cameras and sensors that detect the sound of a drone or pick up its radio frequency.

B.C. Corrections is not the first agency to look at drone detection, which is common in the U.S., where contraband smuggling by drones is a bigger problem. The Correctional Service of Canada, which oversees 43 federal institutions across the country, including nine in B.C., will spend $6-million over the next three years on a pilot of its drone detection program at six institutions.

“Several incidents within the last few years have revealed that there is an emerging potential vector for introducing contraband to an institution created by small commercially available drones,” said CSC spokesperson Véronique Vallée.

— see RECKLESS, page 3

Northern farmers get help to deal with changing climate

Citizen staff

The federal and provincial governments announced $300,000 in funding Tuesday to help northern B.C. farmers adapt to climate change.

The funding will support projects identified in the Bulkley-Nechako and Fraser-Fort George Regional Adaptation Strategies plan to help farmers respond to increasing wildfire risks; warmer, drier summer conditions; changing crop growing conditions; and potential new pest species.

“Our government is proud to stand behind our farmers and ranchers as they respond to changing climate conditions in their regions,” federal Agriculture Minister Marie-Claude Bibeau said in a press release. “This investment will help producers keep their farming operations strong and ensure Canadians can continue to put good, locally grown food on their tables for years to come.”

Development of the plan began in 2018 and involved a 14-member working group from both regions, working with local, provincial and federal agencies.

“It’s great that government is supporting farmers and ranchers in the Bulkley-Nechako and FraserFort George regional districts in dealing with

challenges due to climate change, because it is our new reality,” said Megan D’Arcy, a local farmer and member of the advisory committee, in a press release. “Information exchange, increased collaboration and the development of new systems and best management practices will be key to ensuring that the agriculture sector in these two areas remains resilient.”

Up to six projects are expected to be complete in the region by 2023. The Bulkley-Nechako and Fraser-Fort George plan is the eighth regional plan developed as part of the B.C. Agriculture and Food Climate Action Initiative.

“B.C. farmers are resilient and used to tackling challenges,” B.C. Agriculture Minister Lana Popham said in a press release.

“Floods, wildfires and shifting weather patterns are too big for one person to handle. I’m proud to support strategies tailored to different regions of the province so that farmers can thrive and British Columbians can continue to enjoy access to fresh, local food. By supporting farmers working to adapt, we are strengthening our economy so that all British Columbians can prosper.”

In 2016, agriculture employed more than 2,600 people in the regions.

a concert and workshop with harp school instructor Sharlene Wallace.

Harpist offers workshop, concert to Prince George

Christine HINZMANN Citizen staff chinzmann@pgcitizen.ca

Years ago, Canadian harpist and composer Sharlene Wallace was firmly ensconced in her classically trained musicality when she realized she needed a shakeup.

The burnt-out Ontario performer searched – and found – the creative avenue she needed to start a more adventurous musical journey.

She read about a folk harp retreat in the mountains of British Columbia almost 30 years ago.

That’s when she visited Wells and the artistic community she found there set her on a new path of creating her own music.

On Saturday, Wallace will be presenting a Journey of Shadows workshop at the Prince George Conservatory of Music with a concert at Trinity United Church. The events are hosted by the Prince George Conservatory of Music and Island Mountain Arts.

The workshop is set for 1 to 4 p.m., with the concert taking place at 7:30 p.m.

“I’m catering the workshop to the harp community who is already in Prince George,” Wallace said.

“And it’s so awesome there is a harp community in Prince George.”

The workshop is suitable for beginner and intermediate levels.

“I’m going to go in with a little bit of improvisation, knowledge about technique and one of the things about harp is called lefthand patterns so in the folk-harp world there’s this lovely tradition of improvising and arranging and composing but I’m going to be able to give them some ideas about arranging which includes these left-hand patterns. That way they’ll know what to do with their left hand if, say, they’re met with a fiddle tune – or just a tune that they really love – Celtic or classical – whatever it is.”

There is so little harp music out there, she said, and the workshop offers the opportunity for the players to actually arrange whatever music they want. It will give the musicians a chance to explore

their creativity.

“That’s kind of what learning the folk harp gave me – this wide open world where whatever music you want you can adapt it for your harp,” Wallace said. “So I’m going to give them ideas about that and I’m going to leave them with one of my pieces that they can learn if they wish.”

Wallace will prepare the piece so it’s suitable for two different levels so both the beginners and intermediates can use it, with emphasis on left-hand patterns that are within the piece.

She will also showcase a bit of Latin music to offer a unique flavour to the workshop.

“I’m really looking forward to working with the harp community – I know a few people in the Prince George harp gaggle but I’m looking forward to meeting the whole group.”

Wallace is the winner of two international harp competitions, performs, records and teaches on both Celtic and classical harps, tours with bass player George Koller, the Christmas ensemble Harp & Holly and the Soaring Harp Trio. Wallace has seven CDs that explore rhythm, spaciousness, the Canadian landscape, classical, Celtic, South American and original music. Wallace teaches both Celtic and classical harps privately and at York, Guelph and Wilfred Laurier Universities. Her own harp performance degree is from the University of Toronto where she studied with the eminent Judy Loman. Wallace is principal harpist with Kingston, Guelph and Oakville Symphonies.

During the concert, she will showcase mostly her own compositions, along with a few pieces from Alfredo Rolando Ortiz, a world-reknown harpist. There will also be a couple of Celtic tunes, Wallace added.

“I’m looking forward to meeting more members of the Prince George music community,” she said.

For details and registration for the workshop contact Shoshanna Godber at 250-640-8615 or sdgodber@gmail.com

Tickets for the concert are $20 at the door of Trinity United Church, 3555 Fifth Ave.

Cooling off

Children cool off in the Roteract water

Liberals gear up to take on Wilson-Raybould

OTTAWA — The Liberals now have a candidate in the British Columbia riding of Vancouver Granville, where their biggest rival will be someone they once called their own.

Taleeb Noormohamed, a 42-year-old tech entrepreneur, has been acclaimed as the Liberal vying to unseat Jody Wilson-Raybould, the former justice minister now seeking reelection as an Independent candidate. Wilson-Raybould, who won the seat for the Liberals as a star candidate with about 44 per cent of the vote in 2015, rocked the Trudeau government earlier this year with allegations that she had been improperly pressured to end a criminal prosecution of SNC-Lavalin. The controversy, which saw her resign from cabinet and ousted from the Liberal caucus, sent the party into a tailspin, from which its fortunes have not fully recovered.

Trudeau has maintained that no one did anything wrong in exploring a deferred prosecution agreement, as allowed by law, for the Montreal-based engineering firm.

Noormohamed says he wants to focus his campaign on local issues such as housing, transit and climate change, which he says he

Reckless drone use can result in lawsuit, fines, jail

— from page 1

Vallée said they do not keep data specific to drone deliveries.

The service issued a request for proposals for the detection system, which closed on July 31.

It’s expected that about $1 million will be spent this year on the project.

The project will take place at Mission, Collins Bay (Ontario), Cowansville (Quebec), Donnacona (Quebec), Dorchester (New Brunswick), and Stony Mountain (Manitoba) institutions over the next four years.

Vallée said that the institutions were selected based primarily on the number of reported drone sightings, as well as making sure each region of the province has at

closures scheduled for Highway 16

Citizen staff

Lane closures will be on the calendar for parts of Highway 16 East starting on Monday and lasting for 10 days to allow a contractor for Telus to perform maintenance work.

The eastbound lane from Third to First Avenues and from Victoria Street to River Road will be affected from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. with the closures staggered to minimize disruption, the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure said. The work is scheduled to end on Aug. 29.

The Citizen archives put more than 100 years of history at your

least one test site.

It’s expected that the first system will be installed by March 31, 2020, with the rest completed by March 31, 2022.

The service has not determined in which order the institutions will receive their detection systems.

The pilot ends in March 2023, at which time a report will be prepared providing recommendations on next steps.

“CSC regularly reviews the use of innovative security tools to enhance its capacity to limit security incidents and prevent security breaches,” Vallée said.

Restricted airspace covers federal prisons and there are no-fly zones over provincial detention centres, which also have signs on

is hearing about a lot more than SNC-Lavalin.

“I think that most people are focused on the future,” he says.

The New Democrats, who placed second with about 27 per cent of the vote in 2015, chose climate activist Yvonne Hanson as their candidate. Zach Segal, a former political staffer in Ottawa, is running for the Conservatives. The Green candidate is Louise Boutin, a realtor, and Naomi Chocyk, a one-time constituency staffer to Wilson-Raybould, is running for the People’s Party of Canada.

Noormohamed, who saw some of his campaign signs defaced when he ran unsuccessfully for the Liberals in North Vancouver in 2011, says he also wants to talk about the importance of guarding against racism.

“I think people here are very concerned that we make sure that we, all of us who are going to be engaging in the debate and the dialogue, do not turn our backs on the whole idea of pluralism and the incredible value that diversity brings to this country,” said Noormohamed, whose parents immigrated from East Africa in the 1970s.

their perimeter fences telling the public that drones are forbidden in the area.

Transport Canada spokesperson Annie Joannette said that under the Aeronautics Act, anyone who violates controlled or restricted airspace with any size drone used for any purpose could be subject to fines of up to $25,000 and/or prison time.

Drone operators are also subject to the Criminal Code and all provincial, territorial and municipal laws about privacy and trespassing.

“Using a drone in a reckless and negligent manner could cause property damage or bodily harm, resulting in lawsuits, fines, and jail time,” said Joannette.

Citizen staff

Prince George RCMP are warning the public after a string of commercial break-ins this month.

Between Aug. 4 and Aug. 12, 17 businesses in the city reported break and enters to police.

Four of the businesses were located on Quinn Street, three on Robertson Road, two on River Road, and the remaining businesses hit were located on Ogilvie Street, Spruce Street, First Avenue, Third Avenue, 15th Avenue, Ospika Boulevard, Queensway and Tabor Boulevard.

In many of the break-ins, thieves smashed glass doors to get inside and specifically targeted cash drawers at the businesses. All of the break-ins happened between midnight and 4 a.m., police said in a press release.

Some of the businesses hit were professional offices, including medical and veterinary clinics.

A Ford F-series pick-up truck and an F-series van were also stolen on Quinn Street around the time of the break-ins.

Thieves also attempted to steal three Ford Excursion SUVs from locations near some of the breakins.

While police can’t confirm all the incidents are related, the motives, methods and locations suggests many of the thefts were committed by the same person or people.

Prince George RCMP urge local businesses to secure or remove any cash from their premises before closing each day, and to install high-quality video surveillance systems.

Anyone with information about these break-ins is asked to contact the Prince George RCMP at 250561-3300.

Tips can also be made anonymously by calling Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-8477, online at www.pgcrimestoppers.bc.ca (English only) or by texting CRIMES (274637) using the keyword “pgtips.”

CITIZEN PHOTO BY BRENT BRAATEN

spray park in Lheidli T’enneh Memorial Park on Tuesday.

Joanna SMITH The Canadian Press

Gov’t looking to reduce plastic waste leaving country

Minister Catherine McKenna says she has asked her department to look at what else Canada can do to reduce the amount of Canadian garbage that is ending up overseas.

As recently as Aug. 1, McKenna’s officials dismissed the idea of banning plastic waste exports entirely, fearing such a move could be economically harmful to countries with recycling industries that rely on the material.

Canada pointed to Australia, New Zealand and Japan as countries with similar policies.

But last week, Australia’s federal and state governments came together to start planning for an eventual ban of plastic waste exports.

McKenna says Canada has already taken steps to cut down on plastic waste, including a planned ban on most single-use plastics like straws and take-out containers within the next two years, and requiring producers to take more responsibility for ensuring the material is recovered and either recycled or reused.

She says there is also room for Canada to show leadership on exports and is “pushing” her department to figure out how.

“We need to look at what more we could do,” she said.

Canada has very limited ability to recycle plastics and has for decades relied on foreign nations,

mostly China, to take its plastic waste. China, however, banned most plastic waste imports in 2018 because it was getting too much additional material that couldn’t be recycled.

As a result, much of the ensuing volume has been shifted away from wealthy nations to places like Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand, where governments – now facing a deluge of material both legal and illegal – are contemplating bans of their own.

Many waste experts and environment advocates want Canada to simply stop exporting plastic waste entirely.

In 2016, Canada did change its regulations to require permits whenever plastic garbage is exported to countries that see it as hazardous waste.

That move came after fruitless efforts to sanction a now-defunct Canadian company that shipped more than 100 containers full of garbage, falsely labelled as plastics for recycling, to the Philippines –a diplomatic dustup that ended only after Canada agreed to spend $1.14 million to ship what was left of the waste back to Vancouver.

That regulatory change hasn’t stopped unwanted Canadian plastic garbage from arriving in foreign nations, however. No permits have been requested or issued since 2016, but in the last few months both Malaysia and Cambodia have reported finding containers of Canadian plastic garbage in their ports.

Hundreds have

The Canadian Press

VICTORIA — A report by British Columbia’s auditor general has revealed several holes in the safety net that restricts access to provincial government systems with the discovery that some ministries weren’t following the rules.

Auditor general Carol Bellringer’s report released Tuesday looked at five ministries and how each allowed employees and contractors to access government systems with passwords and usernames. The report didn’t look for

Behavioural analysis can help answer ‘why’ in B.C. murders: expert

Amy SMART The Canadian Press

VANCOUVER — A criminal profiler says investigators should find clues about why two men might have killed three people in northern British Columbia and whether there was a leader and a follower.

Jim Van Allen, a former manager of the Ontario Provincial Police criminal profiling unit who has studied 835 homicides, said evidence can determine what happened in most cases. But it can be harder to determine motive, and that’s where behavioural analysts come in.

“The evidence is going to take them so far. It’s going to tell them who did what to whom, at what time and how,” Van Allen said.

“But it’s probably not going to answer the big question on everybody’s mind: ‘Why?”’

Environment Canada is investigating those claims.

Kathleen Ruff, founder of the online advocacy campaign RightonCanada.ca, wants Canada to agree to stop shipping plastic waste out of the country.

She has been critical of the federal Liberals for refusing to agree to amend the Basel Convention to stop plastic waste exports. The convention is an international agreement to prevent the world’s wealthiest nations from dumping hazardous waste on the developing world.

Ruff said she was happy to hear McKenna say there was room to do more – and suspects the Oct. 21 federal election may have something to do with it.

Indeed, the Philippines fiasco prompted a spike in public interest in plastic trash, prompting all the major parties to put it on the agenda: the Conservatives say they would ban any plastic waste exports unless the importing country can prove it will be recycled, while the NDP wants to ban exports entirely, as well as the production and use of disposable plastics by 2022.

The Green party, meanwhile, would phase out the use of landfills for unsorted waste, and impose a system to ensure all electronic waste is recycled.

Canadians are among the biggest producers of waste in the world, churning out as much as two kilograms per person every day.

“That’s one of those behavioural issues that has to be interpreted to some degree from people’s conduct, their behaviour during the crime, what was done to the victims” and other factors, he said.

The RCMP has said its behavioural analysis unit is assisting investigators in the case of Bryer Schmegelsky and Kam McLeod, who were found dead from selfinflicted gunshot wounds in the northern Manitoba wilderness last week.

The fugitives were suspects in the July killings of Leonard Dyck, a University of British Columbia botany lecturer, and Australian Lucas Fowler and his American girlfriend Chynna Deese.

Once Mounties have completed a review of the case over the next few weeks, they’ve said they will provide families with an update, then release it publicly.

Van Allen said analysts in the case are likely reviewing crime scene evidence, interviewing friends and family of the suspects and looking over other material, including online posts by the men before their deaths.

It’s not an exact science but behavioural analysis has been used to create profiles of unknown suspects, to develop strategies for interviewing witnesses and to determine the truthfulness of statements in trials, he said.

“A behavioural interpretation will never have the certainty of a fingerprint comparison or ballistics comparison. That’s the nature of human behaviour.”

A behavioural interpretation will never have the certainty of a fingerprint comparison or ballistics comparison. That’s the nature of human behaviour.

— Jim Van Allen

Van Allen, who now lives in B.C. and works for Investigative Solutions Network, has no knowledge about the McLeod and Schmegelsky case beyond what’s been made public. But in general, he said, police can learn many details about behaviour from a crime scene.

Particularly brutal killings suggest explosive anger and offer direction to investigators in cases with no suspects.

“If you see an angry crime, then we’re looking for an angry offender,” Van Allen said.

“Who has been mistreated in the last few weeks? Who’s been evicted from their home? Terminated from their job?” Crime scenes can also show that more than one killer is involved, he said.

“I’ve looked at crime scenes where you see two distinct styles of conduct,” he said.

“You’ll see one (victim) is treated more brutally or unempathetically than the other. You might have a minor act of consideration for one victim. And those are two different thinking perspectives – they come from two different personalities.”

If a killer’s online history reveals a search for similar crimes, that can indicate that it was planned, he added.

Analysts will pay attention to whether a killer and victim had any relationship before an attack. If someone kills multiple people with whom he or she had no prior connection, especially if there’s evidence of intended suffering, it suggests a “thrill killing spree,” Van Allen said.

Thrill killings are rare and are especially difficult to process because the offender operates with a completely different set of moral rules, he said.

“In these crimes, the offenders get a high level of satisfaction out of just committing the murder.”

unauthorized access to B.C. gov’t systems, auditor says

inappropriate use of accounts, although it found more than 500 accounts that had been used after the employee had either left or was fired and more than 700 accounts still active that hadn’t been used in a decade.

Bellringer’s report says the number of active user accounts surpassed the number of employees and has grown over the years and that some government organizations weren’t following the protocols for restricting unauthorized access.

The report makes seven recommendations, including that there

be a central record of access rights granted to each user and that proper training be given to those who allow access to the government’s internal directory system.

The report notes that the office of the chief information officer began cleaning up dormant accounts last year and the auditor is recommending that be expanded to include accounts that have nonexpiring passwords.

Her report says the government’s internal directory system is the first line of defence against unauthorized access.

“Because all it takes is one

poorly managed user account to potentially compromise government systems,” Bellringer told reporters Tuesday during a conference call.

The report also recommends the office of the chief information officer and the public service agency compare lists of current government employees and open accounts to ensure the accounts are legitimate.

The audit covered the ministries of Finance, Health, Attorney General, Citizen Services and Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development.

Citizens’ Services Minister Jinny Sims says in a statement that the office of the chief information officer has already addressed more than 90 per cent of the accounts identified though the audit and those accounts have been suspended.

“Protection of government systems and the information they contain remains a top priority for the Ministry of Citizens’ Services and the (office of the chief information officer) especially concerning the personal information belonging to people living throughout the province.”

Amusement park ride breaks down, sprays people with oil

The Canadian Press

VANCOUVER — Visitors to a popular Vancouver amusement park were showered with oil but no one was seriously hurt when a ride known as The Beast broke down on Monday.

Patrons who were aboard the spinning, pendulum-style ride at Playland say it began to shake and make a noise like metal grinding on metal.

Operators safely brought the ride to a stop and helped people off, but McKenna Henderson says the whole event was nerve-wracking.

She says “every second felt like an hour” as she and a friend waited for their turn, and even after the pendulum had stopped, some sort of oil continued to spew and spattered onlookers.

Playland spokeswoman Laura Ballance says it appears a part malfunctioned and an investigation is underway. She says all rides are inspected daily

by the operator as well as annually by Technical Safety BC and third-party safety consultants, and engineers will assess The Beast again once it is repaired to ensure it is safe.

Henderson says the oil seemed to come from the top of the steeple supporting the swinging arm.

“It was like a shower. It was spraying everywhere – clothing, hair, bags. It got me on my clothing and hair. It was really warm. It appeared green.”

Ballance says all aspects of the malfunction will be examined and the details will be included in a report.

“With the oil, it’s not ideal, but we will deal with those guests on a case-by-case basis,” she said.

The two-week-long Pacific National Exhibition, which includes the Playland amusement park, opens this weekend. Ballance said there is no timeline for repairing, inspecting or reopening The Beast.

Mia RABSON The Canadian Press

OTTAWA — Environment

Plastics are gathered for recycling at a depot in North Vancouver in June.

Vavenby makes plans to recover from mill closure

Nick EAGLAND Vancouver Sun

CLEARWATER — Simone and Christian Volk moved to B.C. from Switzerland in 2015, drawn by their love of Canada and desire to do sustainable logging in its vast wilderness.

With their son, Gion, they moved into a house nestled in the woods up Clearwater Valley Road, where they own and operate VOLKtrans Canada. Canfor Corp., which had a mill in nearby Vavenby, was keen to contract them for highly specialized, steep-slope logging. They had the cutting-edge equipment and skills to do selective harvesting.

The Volks soon learned the pace of logging in B.C. was nothing like they expected.

Nobody wanted us to do selective harvesting, said Simone, 41.

“It was, ‘Why did you leave these trees? Cut it all down.’”

They adapted their equipment and trained their staff to meet the industry’s demand for high output. But in January, the Volks’ contracts started slowing down amid a dwindling allowable annual cut and poor market conditions. They had a sense worse news was coming.

By the time that Canfor announced on June 3 that it was closing the Vavenby mill permanently, and intended to sell the associated cutting rights to Interfor for $60 million, the Volks had sold off five main pieces of equipment. They now count themselves among North Thompson Valley contractors struggling with uncertainty as they await the completion of the tenure’s sale.

They are worried about what will happen to Gion’s school (it will be their 11-month-old daughter Leeza’s someday, too) if everyone has to leave town. Will the Dr. Helmcken Memorial Hospital lose doctors and nurses? Will there be enough children left to field a Clearwater Rapids soccer team?

“In my mind, when it happens – the transfer – it will be good for the loggers short-term,” said Christian, 43. “But for the longterm, for the town and the valley, it’s the worst thing that could happen. Then these opportunities are forever gone.”

The Volks hope the B.C. government will find a way to prevent Clearwater and Vavenby from further suffering, following the sudden slashing of more than 170 mill jobs and loss of work for contractors. The government says it is doing everything it can.

Delays in decision on tenure sale causing stress

The forestry sector faces a dwindling timber supply, record wildfire seasons and lower prices for spruce, fir and pine lumber.

According to B.C. government data, the B.C. Interior timber supply is forecast to drop as much as 40 per cent in the region to 40 million cubic metres from its peak during the beetle epidemic, when harvesting was increased to salvage dead trees before they were no longer economically useful.

In response, firms are rationalizing operations – closing three mills, and implementing curtailments and shift reductions at 19 others this year – leaving many workers and contractors out of work and facing uncertainty. The Ministry of Forests said an estimated 3,984 workers have been directly affected by active mill closures and curtailments this year.

Canfor, Interfor, the District of Clearwater, Simpcw First Nation and B.C. government are hammering out the details of the Vavenby tenure’s sale.

Bill 22, which passed in May, requires forest companies to obtain approval from the forestry minister before transferring tenure agreements to another party.

Minister Doug Donaldson has the power to refuse the new arrangement or put conditions on it, if it is not in the public interest.

The Vavenby tenure sale proposal is the first application of the new legislation. The process is expected to take 90 days, meaning a decision should come Sept. 1. However, because the legislation is new, most expect the announcement to come weeks or up to a month later.

Meantime, Interfor and Canfor are both working to support the North Thompson Valley communi-

ty while it awaits news of the sale.

Canfor has a transition team for the mill workers and has been working with government agencies and service organizations to support them and the community, said Michelle Ward, director of corporate communications. The firm co-ordinated a job fair in June and some employees are transferring to its other facilities, she said.

The firm is doing work to clean up and shut down the mill site in Vavenby, but hopes it can still be used to benefit the community.

“We believe the site could be suitable for other industrial activities given the existing infrastructure and its access to transportation and the local skilled workforce,” she said.

“In the meantime, we are interested in exploring short-term uses for the site that may generate or support local employment and economic benefits.”

Ric Slaco, vice-president and chief forester at Interfor, said it is important his firm secures the tenure to support workers at its Adams Lake mill and the surrounding community, about 120 kilometres to the southeast of Vavenby.

Interfor has hired two Vavenby mill workers and is working with Canfor to find jobs for more, Slaco said. They hosted a job fair in June.

Slaco said Interfor has been in touch with all of Canfor contractors in Clearwater and Vavenby. Those with replaceable licenses will automatically be transferred to Interfor when the tenure is transferred.

“Interfor’s going to need all the logging, road-building and trucking services on those timber tenures and we plan to maintain a hub of contractors in the North Thompson area to do that,” he said.

But Slaco said the delay in the Bill 22 process is creating uncertainty, and Interfor recognizes that is causing hardship for contractors. “We’ve got a plan in place, we’d like to get going. But until the tenure gets transferred we’re in limbo,” he said.

Some people in the community have found hope in the potential for hundreds of jobs during the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion and when a mine opens near Vavenby. Ali Hounsell, a spokeswoman for Trans Mountain, said a temporary construction yard, work camp and pipe stockpile site will be built in the District of Clearwater. Work would start this fall with site clearing and preparation before pipeline construction in 2020 and 2021.

Hounsell said they intend to hire as many local, regional and Indigenous workers as possible. The firm has already awarded general contracts but is still determining scheduling and how many work-

is still here, it’s still viable. It just needs to be managed.”

Instead, she is watching with concern as super mills continue to process millions of board feet and buy up fibre from other mills’ tenures when they run low.

“They gobble up a lot of wood really quickly,” she said.

“The thing is, it would be sustainable if they slowed down a little bit. But because the companies are so large and are running a business, they don’t want to slow down. They don’t want to reduce how much we produce.”

Government seeks public input on protecting forestry sector

Forests Minister Doug Donaldson said he and his deputy minister are regularly meeting and speaking with representatives from Clearwater, the Simpcw First Nation and mill workers’ union to discuss what government can do to support the North Thompson Valley community following the closure.

“We’re very cognizant of the stress it puts on families, workers and the community,” he said.

“We’re doing what we said we’d do as a new government to recognize that the forests are a publiclyheld asset, and first and foremost they should benefit the people and communities they surround.”

Teams have been co-ordinating supports and services for the workers. The province has sent representatives to information sessions and job fairs, and more job fairs are scheduled this fall.

ers it will need.

Taseko Minerals acquired Yellowhead Mining on Feb. 15, 2019, which is sole owner of a coppergold-silver development project 24 kilometres from Vavenby by forest service roads.

In a document filed in March, Taseko said it “intends to conduct further technical review and optimization work and to consider potential revisions to the project before providing any further disclosure.”

Taseko hasn’t yet made an application to the Environmental Assessment Office, the Ministry of Environment said.

The pipeline jobs are only temporary and the mine will come too late, lamented Madeleine deVooght, a planer tech who worked at the Vavenby mill for 30 years. She wants the B.C. government to show it cares about forestry workers by slowing the rapid consolidation of mills and continuing job losses. She wants the province to consider how the transfer of tenures punishes the communities attached to affected mills.

“We don’t want to live in the past,” deVooght said. “But forestry

To address the broader issues facing the sector, the Interior Forest Sector Renewal process is being ramped up in the coming months, Donaldson said. It provides an online portal where the public can submit suggestions for revising policies and legislation related to the forest sector in the region. Donaldson wants to use Bill 22 to ensure a diversity of tenure holders in order to have more producers, including communities and First Nations, and to ensure that the public interest is factored into any sale, he said.

“I would say that we’ve been making changes at the legal, regulator and policy level, and that these changes take some time to turn things around after 16 years of the previous government taking a certain direction,” he said.

“I believe the direction they felt was best was if it’s in the best interests of the corporations, then eventually the communities and workers will benefit. We think that needs to be tweaked (to ensure) more of an equal footing between industry, communities, First Nations and workers.”

In June, the Simpcw First Nation said it had been in talks with

Canfor about acquiring some of its cutting rights and was disappointed to learn the firm had been “making a deal in another room” with Interfor.

Now, talks are underway with the province and Interfor regarding the tenure, said Kukpi7 (Chief) Shelly Loring, who declined to make further comment.

Clearwater Mayor Merlin Blackwell doesn’t want the tenure to leave Vavenby but said he recognizes that a municipal government has limited power to stop it. As far as he’s concerned, the sale is already a done deal.

“Any delays in that process or any shift under Bill 22 that the B.C. government wants to do on that, we’re more than willing to talk about that, about holding back some of that tenure for local production, local cutters and our community forest,” he said.

“If it all gets shifted to Interfor at Adams Lake – Interfor pitches that as a local mill – it’s not local. It’s a long way away.”

Blackwell had meetings in late July with Donaldson, his deputy minister John Allan and Interfor, and was able to express the community’s concerns about the tenure transfer. He felt good about the meetings but recognizes that there’s a tremendous amount of work ahead to ensure Bill 22 benefits the community, he said. Blackwell believes the Interior Forest Sector Renewal process will do more than Bill 22 to bring about change that will benefit forestry-dependent communities, he said.

“We have a little bit more hope for that one,” Blackwell said. “We could be looking at a different world, next summer, as far as how the forests are managed.”

Meantime, Blackwell is working on immediate job creation. The district is seeking provincial funding to hire more people to do wildfire fuel mitigation, including at Wells Gray Provincial Park, he said.

He is talking with Telus about improving cellular and broadband service in the region. It would help attract more workers who teleconference from their homes and benefit tourism, too. Telus could cash in on the roaming fees of 450,000 tourists who visit Wells Grey Park each year and upload videos of waterfalls and bears to their social media networks, Blackwell said. “We’ve been about economic diversity here, growing tourism and other smaller businesses, getting those people who want the lifestyle to come and live here,” Blackwell said.

— With files from Vaughn Palmer, Gordon Hoekstra and Financial Post

VANCOUVER SUN PHOTO BY NICK EAGLAND

Simone and Christian Volk with their son Gion, 9, and daughter Leeza, 11 months. The couple owns VOLKtrans, which specializes in steep-slope logging, and is a contractor for Canfor.

Legal pot a health fiasco

It’s becoming increasingly obvious that legalizing marijuana consumption was a colossal public-health blunder.

A good part of the evidence comes from south of the border, where several states legalized pot much earlier than Canada.

This has allowed time for robust scientific follow-up – follow-up that is beginning to reveal a frightening picture.

Colorado legalized medical marijuana in 2012, and recreational use in 2014. One result is that emergency hospital visits by adolescents with marijuana-related symptoms have jumped from 84 a year in the pre-legal era, to 500 in 2018.

More troubling still, many of these teens exhibited signs of mental illness, including psychosis, depression and early-onset schizophrenia. There were also numerous cases of repeat vomiting.

Now the minimum age for purchasing the drug in Colorado is 21, or 18 if the patient has a medical certificate. Yet most of the kids being admitted to hospital are younger. The obvious conclusion, and hardly a

surprise, is that governments can set the age of consumption wherever they wish and youngsters will still get their hands on the stuff.

Moving on, the cost of legal marijuana in Canada is now almost 50 per cent higher than the illicit version. According to Statistics Canada, the average price of a legal gram last year was $9.70, versus the blackmarket price of $6.51.

Now supposedly, one of the benefits of legalization was that it would drive drug traffickers out of business. But how is that going to happen, when the illicit stuff is much cheaper?

Answer: It isn’t. That same StatCan report found consumers are still buying more than twice as much of their stash from street vendors than from government-approved suppliers.

To be fair, there is a possible rejoinder here. It has taken longer than anticipated to get the necessary regulations in place. It might be argued that once a public-sector regime is fully implemented, prices could come down.

Yet from the beginning, various studies have found that regular users say they will continue to buy from black-market vendors they trust, even if a legal product were available.

In short, one of the most frequently claimed benefits for legalization – that it would de-fund drug gangs – hasn’t materialized so far, and might never occur.

That raises a third problem. In its 2018 budget, the B.C. government projected marijuana revenues of $200 million over three years.

That figure has now been reduced to $68 million.

Other provinces, along with the federal government, have also revised their estimates downward.

But that should concern us.

If you’re a cash-strapped administration, and sales aren’t where you’d like them to be, will you still play honest broker?

Or will you ease up on the regulations and turn a blind eye to dubious behaviour so the revenues increase?

Now that the realities have begun to

Harm reduction support growing

Next month will mark the 16th anniversary of the start of operations at Insite, the first legal supervised drug injection facility to operate in North America. Since 2003, 48 similar sites have opened across Canada, more than half of which are located in Ontario.

The ongoing opioid crisis has hit British Columbia especially hard.

The numbers are staggering.

From January 2016 to September 2018, the deaths of more than 10,300 Canadians have been linked to opioid-related causes.

More than 3,500 of these fatalities occurred in British Columbia.

Our views on drugs have gone through drastic changes over the past two decades. In October 2018, 64 per cent of British Columbians told Research Co. that the use of prescription and nonprescription opioid drugs in their community is a “major problem.” Across Canada, drug use is no longer confined to “some” urban areas.

As more supervised injection facilities are authorized, there is no doubt about the growth of this crisis. With this in mind, Research Co. asked Canadians to review five measures that could be implemented to deal with drug use in the country.

The results outline a population that is looking at the issue holistically.

BY THE NUMBERS

MARIO CANSECO

The most popular idea, with the backing of 83 per cent of Canadians, is to support “education and prevention campaigns.”

The federal government has advertised extensively in various platforms, focusing efforts primarily on awareness and ending stigma.

Almost three in five Canadians are in favour of “supervised injection sites” (59 per cent) and “needle-exchange programs” (58 per cent). These projects are no longer regarded as “radical” by many politicians, like they were at the beginning of this century.

As expected, the views on supervised injection sites fluctuate on a regional basis.

While-two thirds of Quebecers (68 per cent) approve of this measure, acceptance drops to 63 per cent in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, 59 per cent in Atlantic Canada, 52 per cent in both Ontario and British Columbia and 49 per cent in Alberta.

The physical location of supervised injection sites plays a role in the way respondents react. While most Canadians (52 per cent) would approve of having one of these facilities “anywhere in their municipality,” the proportion drops to 38 per cent for one located “anywhere in their neigh-

bourhood” and 32 per cent for one placed “a block away from their home.”

In Alberta, where eight supervised injection sites have been approved and two more are “awaiting key information before a decision can be taken,” public views are more negative than anywhere else in the country.

Fewer than half of Albertans would consent to a supervised injection site “anywhere in their municipality” (46 per cent, six points lower than the Canadian average), about three in 10 would welcome one “anywhere in their neighbourhood” (29 per cent, nine points lower than the Canadian average) and fewer than one in four would approve of one “a block away from home” (22 per cent, 10 points lower than the Canadian average).

We also sought to learn about the perceptions of Canadians on different varieties of addiction treatment.

Across the country, more than half of Canadians (57 per cent) express support for “treatment that does not rely on opioid replacement therapy and aims for abstinence.”

Approval for “treatment that does not aim for abstinence and relies on opioid replacement therapy” is significantly lower at 48 per cent.

An addiction treatment program that aims for abstinence is particularly important for Albertans (65 per cent), Atlantic Canadians (62 per cent) and British Columbians (60 per cent).

emerge, every one of the pro-legalization arguments is in doubt. Except, that is, the medical case, where the evidence of harm is overwhelming. Government won’t back down without a fight. The lure of a new cash source is just too appealing. So here is a proposal. Let the B.C. Health Ministry contract with a research outfit – say, the Michael Smith Foundation in Vancouver – to examine the downstream health effects of marijuana legalization.

Run a five-year study at several of the province’s hospitals, looking for an increase in ER visits by teens with symptoms of psychosis once legal marijuana becomes readily available. And if a meaningful increase is found?

Then shut down the entire legalization project or 10 years from now we’ll be spending millions encouraging British Columbians to keep off the grass, just like we do with tobacco.

Except it will, of course, be too late by then.

— Victoria Times-Colonist

After murders, questions linger

The remains of Kam Mcleod, 19, and Bryer Schmegelsky, 18, were discovered near York Landing, Manitoba. After a two-week manhunt, covering all four western provinces and involving dozens of volunteers, RCMP, and CAF members, the suspects were tracked down in the Canadian Shield. Due to their apparent suicides by gunshot at point blank range, we may never know why they allegedly murdered Chynna Deese, Lucas Fowler, and Prof. Leonard Dyck.

The grisly details of the case are internationally known. Deese and Fowler were road tripping across Canada in an older vehicle, which broke down near Liard, in northern B.C. Their bodies were discovered on July 16 in the ditch next to their vehicle, despite reports the couple was happy and healthy 24 hours before.

Then the suspects’ burned out Dodge truck was found south of Dease Lake, with Prof. Dyck’s body laying close by and his Rav4 missing.

The torched vehicle and stolen SUV suggested that the three deaths were linked.

The connection to the suspects was made after the destroyed truck was traced, leading to a call for any information regarding the location of Mcleod and Schmegelsky.

Tips began to pour into local detachments and the national office of the RCMP, a clear pattern slowly emerging: the two desperate fugitives had made a hard turn east, fleeing along northern roads towards Manitoba.

Sleepy and obscure towns were suddenly flooded with strangers.

On the west coast, media began asking probing questions about the suspects’ history in their hometown of Port Alberni, and in the Shield, York Landing and Gillam were canvassed by uniforms and citizens.

This case drew global attention, as Deese was an American and Fowler an Australian, as well as the son of a police chief.

Our age of social media has also had an international impact, as the P.G. Citizen made clear on Aug. 11, with a piece from the Canadian Press: “Homicide victim’s sister accuses fugitive’s dad of refusing to take responsibility” via Facebook.

Alan Schmegelsky, Bryer’s father, has stated that a broken system and past altercations with authority shaped his son’s dark path, concluding, “he’s on a suicide mission. He wants the pain to end.”

There isn’t space here to test this premise, but it exemplifies the chasm between Canadian and American Gestalts, as the discussions in both traditional and social media have centred on questions of resignation to forces beyond our control versus individual culpability.

Indeed, when the life-rights to this gruesome tale are finally purchased, the novel and film will hinge on the ironic interplay between the fatalistic concept CanLit has coined “survival” and the wider, Western ideal of protagonists/antagonists’ choices leading to their pursuit and death.

Politicizing victims or suspects is unforgivable – the mourning that is ongoing requires reverence from even we in the chattering classes. However, when the investigation has ended and the full report is made available, questions must be asked about the vulnerability of the victims to their attackers.

Clearly Canada is not the friendly, safe place we project to the world; our parks prescribe methods of self-defence against four legged predators but what about two-legged ones?

Lastly, while all involved in tracking down the suspects acquitted themselves admirably, it begs the question why resources are so lacking on the Highway of Tears?

These murderers turned their violence on themselves as justice was closing in so might not overwhelming forces of pursuit also discourage monsters on Highway 16?

If we refuse to alleviate the conditions leading to the missing and murdered, can’t we at least hunt down and capture the perpetrators swiftly?

It is cold comfort to the victims’ families that Mcleod and Schmegelsky will never hurt anyone again.

We would do well to heed the lesson that Canada is still a wild, dangerous land.

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Member of the

SHAWN CORNELL DIRECTOR

RIGHT OF CENTRE

NATHAN GIEDE

Portland braces for violent clashes

The Associated Press

Portland police are mobilizing to prevent clashes between outof-state far-right groups planning a rally and the homegrown anti-fascists who oppose them as America’s culture wars seep into this progressive haven.

Saturday’s rally – and the violence it may bring – are a relatively new reality here, as an informal coalition of white nationalists, white supremacists and extremeright militias hones its focus on Oregon’s largest city as a stand-in for everything it feels is wrong with the U.S. At the top of that list are the masked and black-clad antifascists who turn out to violently oppose right-wing demonstrators as soon as they set foot in town.

“It’s Portlandia, and in the public mind it represents everything these (far-right) groups are against,” said Heidi Beirich, director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups.

“It’s progressive, and even more offensive to them, it’s progressive white people who should be on these guys’ side.”

The groups know they will get a headline-grabbing reaction from Portland’s so-called “antifa,” whose members have issued an online call to their followers to turn out to “defend Portland from a far-Right attack.” Portland’s Rose City Antifa, the nation’s oldest active anti-fascist group, says violence against right-wing demonstrators is “exactly what should happen when the far-right attempts to invade our town.”

Portland leaders are planning a major law enforcement presence on the heels of similar rallies in June and last summer that turned violent, and the recent hate-driven shooting in El Paso, Texas. None of the city’s nearly 1,000 police officers will have the day off, and Portland will get help from the Oregon State Police and the FBI. Mayor Ted Wheeler has said he may ask Gov. Kate Brown, a Democrat, to call up the Oregon National Guard.

“There’s no winning for the cops in a situation like this. There just isn’t,” Beirich said. “This is hardcore stuff, and I don’t think you can be too cautious.”

Experts who track right-wing militias and hate groups warn that the mix of people heading to Portland also came together for a Unite the Right rally in 2017 in Charlottesville, Va., which ended when a participant rammed his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing one person and injuring 19.

The rally is being organized by a member of the Proud Boys, who have been designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group.

Others expected include members of the American Guard, the Three Percenters, the Oathkeepers and the Daily Stormers. American Guard is a white nationalist group, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, while the Three Percenters and the Oathkeepers are extremist anti-government

militias. The Daily Stormers are neo-Nazis, according to the centre.

Portland’s fraught history with hate groups adds to the complex dynamic.

Many of today’s anti-fascists trace their activist heritage to a group that battled with neo-Nazis in Portland’s streets decades ago, and they feel this is the same struggle in a new era, said Randy Blazak, the leading expert on the history of hate groups in Oregon.

White supremacists murdered an Ethiopian man, Mulugeta Seraw, in Portland in 1988. And by the 1990s, Portland was known as Skinhead City because it was the home base of Volksfront, at the time one of the most active neoNazi groups in the U.S. As recently as 2007, neo-Nazis attempted to gather in Portland for a three-day skinhead festival.

“When I’m looking at what’s happening right now, for me it’s a direct line back to the 1980s: the battles between the racist skinheads and the anti-racist skinheads,” Blazak said. “It’s the latest version of this thing that’s been

going on for 30 years in this city.” Police, meanwhile, have seemed overwhelmed by the cultural forces at war in their streets.

At the June rally, masked antifa members beat up a conservative blogger named Andy Ngo. Video of the 30-second attack grabbed national attention and further turned the focus on Portland as a new battleground in a divisive America.

Republican Sens. Ted Cruz, of Texas, and Bill Cassidy, of Louisiana, introduced a congressional resolution calling for anti-fascists to be declared domestic terrorists, and President Donald Trump echoed that theme in a tweet last month.

Portland’s City Hall has been evacuated twice due to bomb threats after the June 29 skirmishes, and Wheeler, the mayor, has been pilloried by critics who incorrectly said he told police to stand down while anti-fascists went after right-wing demonstrators.

“I don’t want for one minute anyone to think that because we’re being thrust into this political

show, that I or the public have lost confidence in (police officers’) ability to do what we do,” said Police Chief Danielle Outlaw, who is regularly heckled as she leaves City Hall by those who feel the police target counterprotesters for arrest over far-right demonstrators.

Police have noted the violence in June was limited to a small area of downtown Portland despite three different demonstrations that lasted more than five hours, with hundreds of people constantly on the move. They also made two arrests last week in a May Day assault on an antifa member that became a rallying cry for the city’s far-left.

“We’ll be ready for the 17th here in little Portland, Oregon,” Wheeler, the mayor, told The Associated Press. “But at the end of the day, the bigger question is about our nation’s moral compass and which direction it’s pointing.”

Blazak, the Oregon hate groups expert, said he worries the extreme response from a small group of counterprotesters is starting to

backfire. Many in the city oppose the right-wing rallies but also dislike the violent response of antifa, which provides social media fodder for the far-right.

“The opposition is playing right into the alt-right’s hands by engaging with them this way,” he said. Joe Biggs, organizer of Saturday’s rally, said the attack on Ngo made him decide to hold the event with the goal of getting antifa declared a domestic terrorist organization. Biggs said those coming to Portland have been told not to bring weapons or start fights, but they will defend themselves if attacked.

Biggs toned down his online rhetoric after the El Paso shootings and urged followers coming to Portland to keep a cool head. He says he is not racist – he has a toddler daughter with his Guyanese wife – but wants to show the world antifa’s violent tactics.

“That group of antifa there in Portland needs to be exposed for who they are,” Biggs said in a phone interview. “And guess what? They should be scared.”

AP PHOTOS

Above, counter-protesters prepare to clash with Patriot Prayer protesters during a rally in August 2018 in Portland, Ore. Below left, a protester participates in a rally in Portland last August. Below right, Portland Police Chief Danielle Outlaw says her officers are ready to deal with any violence that may occur betweeen out-of-state hate groups planning a rally Saturday and homegrown anti-fascists who say they’ll come out to oppose them.

The case of the missing dentures

Washington Post

The 72-year-old man could not figure out what was wrong with his throat.

Following a minor operation on his abdomen, he had been in pain, coughing up blood and unable to swallow solid food for almost a week.

But when emergency room doctors examined the back of the man’s throat, they found nothing unusual.

After ordering a chest X-ray and blood tests, they told the man he had a lower respiratory tract infection and he was sent home with medication.

The pain, doctors said, was likely a lingering side effect from having a tube inserted in his throat during the surgery.

It wasn’t until the man’s condition worsened, prompting a second trip to the emergency room, that doctors finally discovered the real source of his symptoms.

His dentures, which he thought were lost during an operation eight days earlier, had actually been lodged in his throat the entire time, according to an article published Monday in the peer-reviewed journal BMJ Case Reports.

The article did not identify the man or the hospital.

The man’s case brings attention to the risks of leaving dentures in the mouths of patients undergoing surgeries that require general anesthesia, wrote the article’s author, Harriet A. Cunniffe, an otolaryngologist at James Paget University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust in the U.K.

“There are no set national guidelines on how dentures should be managed during anaesthesia,” Cunniffe wrote, adding that many hospitals allow false teeth to be left in place until right before a patient is intubated.

It is unclear why the man’s dentures were not taken out during the surgery to remove a benign lump from the wall of his abdomen, but by the time he awoke, the teeth were nowhere to be found, the report said.

Believing the dentures had been misplaced somewhere at the hospital, the retired electrician

went home and likely didn’t give it another thought, according to the report.

Six days later, he was in the emergency room.

But the medicine from the initial visit appeared to have little impact, the article said.

In two days, he was back at the hospital again – this time with even more symptoms.

Now, as he told doctors that he couldn’t swallow the medication and was still coughing blood, he spoke in a “hoarse breathy voice,” according to the report.

He was also having a hard time breathing, especially when he laid down, which forced him to start sleeping sitting upright on his couch.

Doctors were concerned that he had developed pneumonia from inhaling something and admitted him to the hospital.

Further examinations of his neck found nothing amiss, until a thin flexible tube with a camera on the end was inserted through his nose and into his throat.

A “metallic semicircular object” was covering his vocal cords, “completely obstructing their view,” the report said.

It was wedged against the man’s epiglottis, a flap in the throat that keeps food from entering the windpipe and lungs, and had caused irritation and swelling.

When the man was told about the unidentified object, he remembered his missing dentures – a metallic plate with three front teeth affixed to it.

A trip to the X-ray provided confirmation and the man was whisked off to the operating room, where the dentures were plucked out with a pair of forceps.

The man’s recovery, however, wasn’t quite as simple.

Over the course of several weeks after the denture removal, the man returned to the hospital multiple times still coughing up blood, the article said.

During one visit, doctors estimated he had lost 1.5 litres of blood. The average adult has between 4.5 and six litres of blood

circulating inside their body, according to Live Science.

The source of the bleeding was eventually discovered to be “a spurting arterial vessel” in the man’s throat that had been obscured by tissue that formed over it during the healing process, according to the report.

The man was rushed into another emergency surgery to repair the artery and appeared to recover well from the procedure, the report said.

Cunniffe, the report’s author, wrote that the man’s case “highlights a number of key learning points for anaesthetists, theatre staff, emergency physicians and ear, nose and throat (ENT) surgeons alike,” but noted that it is not the first of its kind.

A 15-year review of more than 80 cases worldwide in which dentures ended up in airways found six instances that occurred when people were under general anesthesia, according to research published in 2016 in the Journal of Oral & Maxillofacial Research.

In 1976, a 49-year-old woman died after a fragment of her dentures was inhaled when a breathing tube was placed in her throat. More recently, a case report published in May detailed an incident of a 50-year-old man swallowing his dentures during sedation. He later passed the false teeth through his digestive system, the article said.

The British man’s experience also emphasizes another important lesson for doctors: “Always listen to your patient,” Cunniffe wrote.

While the chest X-ray and bloodwork indicated a respiratory infection, the tests “acted as a distraction,” she wrote. Looking back at the symptoms the man presented during his emergency room trips, Cunniffe wrote that it was clear he had come in because of a sore throat and difficulty swallowing. “Listen to the story the patient is telling you and do not be distracted by positive findings on investigations,” she wrote.

Charity helping infertile Canadians may close

The Canadian Press

Kaeleigh MacDonald found the best way to cope with her infertility was to share her experience with others going through the same thing.

About five years ago, the 33-year-old from Edmonton was diagnosed with diminished ovarian reserve, a condition that causes ovaries to lose normal reproductive levels.

“My husband and I had been dating for a really long time – since I was 19 – and we didn’t want a family right away,” she says.

“So we travelled the world. We got our affairs in order. But by the time I was 26, I wanted to start trying for a family. We assumed since we were still so young that we should have no problem.”

After her diagnosis, MacDonald sought support online and got in touch with Fertility Matters Canada, one of the only national charities that helps people with infertility issues.

“People don’t always talk about their reproductive health,” MacDonald says. “It’s not something you bring up at the dinner table, so you end up feeling kind of isolated.”

She now has a three-year-old son and a one-year-old daughter after undergoing several IVF treatments. She also volunteers for the organization by running online support groups and writing informational material.

But the group is struggling to stay open.

“We are in dire straights,” says executive director Darlene Tozer.

“We need to find new revenue streams. We need to find other opportunities beyond our memberships and donations, which are incredibly grateful for, but we recognize it’s not quite enough if we want to continue.”

The organization is unique, MacDonald says, because it helps people in more remote parts of the country get support and information on infertility.

“If you live in the Yukon and have no access to a support group, we have online support groups,” she says. “If you live in Toronto, we can tell you the different kinds of clinics that are in the area.”

Tozer, who is based in Moncton, N.B., says the charity also helps people seeking egg donors and sperm donors, as well as members of the LGBTQ community looking to adopt or find surrogates.

To do the work, she says, Fertility Matters Canada not only relies on donations, but memberships from clinics, professionals such as lawyers who specialize in fertility law and sponsorships from pharmaceutical companies.

“Unfortunately, over the last couple of years, we recognized that a couple of fertility clinics have not renewed their memberships and it’s getting tougher to get sponsorship money from pharmaceuticals,” says Tozer.

The organization gave up its office last year and its executives started working from home. An administrative position has also been eliminated.

Tozer says she recently had a meeting with the office of the federal health minister, but was told there was no money to assist the organization.

“They are going to do a bit a research for us to see if there are government grants that might be available to us, but they essentially told me there is no funding,” she says.

“And that’s unfortunate, because you are looking at close to six million people in Canada who struggle with fertility – that’s a big chunk of Canadians.”

The number has also doubled since the 1980s.

The office of the health minister says in a statement that it sympathizes with the difficult situation faced by Fertility Matters Canada, but infertility is a medical matter and under provincial jurisdiction.

Canada does not have universal coverage for assisted fertility treatments such as invitro fertilization and people can spend up to $15,000 a cycle, depending the province they live in. Only Ontario covers the first IVF cycle, while Manitoba, New Brunswick and Quebec offer grants or tax credits to help cover some cost.

Dr. Anthony Cheung, a Vancouver-based fertility specialist, says fertility needs to be more integrated in the public health system, adding that treatments are covered in Australia and many European countries. Cheung, also a professor at the University of British Columbia, says infertility is not considered an acute illness, so it isn’t always a funding priority.

But he says it can cause severe emotional distress and affect someone’s long-term well-being.

“Some people perceive suffering from infertility as like having cancer,” he says, adding it’s important to have networks of support.

An American study of almost 500 women found those with infertility felt as anxious or depressed as patients diagnosed with cancer, hypertension or recovering from a heart attack.

Cheung says the system in Ontario can help remove the financial barrier to fertility treatments and hopes to see it become more universal.

In this Aug. 26, 2014 photo, Gail Turner holds a partial set of dentures in Panama City, Fla. Turner’s nephew found them on a camp chair owhile cleaning the street following a downtown festival. Sometimes, missing dentures aren’t so easy to find.

Chairman of the board

Mal Paterson of Cascadia Sport Systems Inc. works to install new rinkboards at CN Centre last week. The new NHL-licensed acrylic rinkboard systems are part of WHL league-wide improvements meant to address player safety and improve the fan experience.

Matvichuk heading to Burnaby

Ted CLARKE Citizen staff

Richard Matvichuk spent nearly three years in the city as head coach of the Prince George Cougars and now he’s moving to Burnaby, but he won’t be forgetting the friendships he and his family have made in the local sporting community.

That’s especially good news for the Prince George Spruce Kings.

Matvichuk has replaced Maco Balkovec as the hockey director of the Burnaby Winter Club. Balkovec was hired this summer as an assistant coach for Bowling Green University in Wisconsin. He and former Prince George Spruce Kings head coach Adam Maglio had a close relationship which helped open up a pipeline of junior player talent crucial in the Spruce Kings’ development as a B.C. Hockey League powerhouse.

Matvichuk got to know Kings general manager Mike Hawes during his time behind the Cougars’ bench and he intends to keep those Winter Club hockey academy ties with Spruce Kings intact.

“Mike and I worked together a lot and I have a good rapport with Mike and I hope to send as many players as I can to him,” said Matvichuk.

“That’s our ultimate goal is to develop these young athletes, not just into hockey players, but into people in the community and the culture, and schooling is obviously a big part of what we do. The chance for them to be able to go to the B.C. league and obviously our relationship with the Spruce Kings has been fantastic. Some of our players have moved on (to college hockey) from there. That team, with what it’s done the last two years, kind of speaks for itself.”

Former Kings stars Ethan de Jong, Kyle Johnson, Liam WatsonBrawn, Ben Brar and Ben Poisson, as well as current team members Nick Poisson, Nick Bochen, Fin Williams and Nolan Welsh all played bantam and midget hockey at BWC before they came to the Spruce Kings.

a new post as the hockey director of the Burnaby Winter Club.

The BWC alumni wall of fame includes NHL players Dante Fabbro (Nashville Predators), Matthew Barzal (New York Islanders), Ryan Nugent Hopkins (Edmonton Oilers), Karl Alzner (Montreal Canadiens) and retired pros Glenn Anderson, Curtis Joseph, Paul Kariya and Cliff Ronning.

“We’ve had some great success in the past, which helps us recruit families and the name recognition kind of sells itself,” said Matvichuk. “When you say Burnaby Winter Club, people know what you’re talking about.”

Matvichuk’s teams will play in the Canadian School Sports Hock-

ey League against St. George’s School, a Vancouver-based hockey academy. The head of the hockey program at St. Georges is now Todd Harkins, who served four years as general manager of the Prince George Cougars and was there for two of the seasons Mavichuk coached the WHL team.

Harkins, whose contract with the Cougars ended in 2018, served last season as hockey director at West Van Academy in North Vancouver.

“Todd is doing a similar role and he’s having fun doing it, he’s back where his house is (in North Vancouver) and where his family’s

been,” said Matvichuk.

BWC is hosting the annual Pat Quinn Tournament in December, which will bring teams from Canada and the United States. Several teams from Dallas, where Matvichuk won the Stanley Cup with the Stars in 1999, are on the entry list.

Matvichuk was fired as Cougars coach Feb,. 6, after the team lost its 11th straight game, a streak that went on for a club-record 17 games. He compiled an 85-89-1210 record in nearly three seasons and was at the helm when the Cats suffered a first-round playoff loss to Portland after winning the B.C.

Shapovalov overcomes bad first set

The Canadian Press

Canada’s Denis Shapovalov roared back from a bad first set to post a 2-6, 6-3, 6-2 win over Joao Sousa of Portugal in firstround action Tuesday at the Western & Southern Masters 1000 tennis tournament. Shapovalov, from Richmond Hill, Ont., won on his first match point when his forehand was sent into the net by Sousa. It was the second tournament in a row that Shapovalov, ranked 34th in the world, won his first match. He had five-match losing streak – part of a 2-9 run dating back to March – heading into last week’s Rogers Cup men’s tournament in Montreal. He beat France’s Pierre-Hugues Herbert in the first round in Montreal to end his run of futility before falling to world No. 4 Dominic Thiem.It looked like Shapovalov’s struggles might continue against world No. 43 Sousa, who beat the Canadian in the only other meeting between the players – a 6-4, 4-6, 6-4 win in Auckland,

Division, the first regular-season title in the team’s 25-year Prince George history. The Cougars have since missed the playoffs in each of the last two seasons.

“You can only coach with the cards that were handed to you and looking back now after several months we feel as a coaching staff we did exactly what we could have done,” Matvichuk said. “We made the decision three years ago to go all in (making trades for older players) and the Cougars are kind of paying the price for it. It’s probably going to take a couple years with draft picks and trades and rebuilding to get them back to where they were a couple years ago.

“My time in Prince George was fantastic and that first year we had we were successful in more ways than just on the ice. We got kids drafted and signed and moved kids on to (U Sports Canadian university hockey) and I felt we did a great job and I’m proud to be part of it. It’s obviously easier to replace one guy than 20 and as coaches we know we’re kind of hired to be fired and you turn a page and move on to another chapter.”

Matvichuk was born in Edmonton and grew up in Fort Saskatchewan, Alta., playing baseball as well as hockey and he’s been utilizing his coaching talents on the ball diamond working with head coach Brad Feniuk this summer on the LTN Contracting Knights midget single-A team which played its provincial tournament over the weekend in Mission. Matvichuk’s 15-year-old son, Dylan, was part of that team which went 3-2 in the tournament but did not advance to the playoff round.

“We worked all summer to get to this point and we have a great bunch of kids and the good thing, just like hockey, is we’ve gotten better every day,” he said.

Matvichuk and his wife Tracy have a 12-year-old son, Dalton, who took the year off playing all-star baseball. Both are hockey players and they’ll be trying out for the Winter Club’s academy teams.

Richard Matvichuk coaches the Prince George Cougars during training camp in September 2016. The team fired Matvichuk in February but now the retired NHL defenceman has

T-wolves add bite to offense

Citizen staff

If you need to lay siege to an opposing team’s net, it helps to have a Trojan horse.

The UNBC Timberwolves picked up striker/forward Sage Meyers in a transfer from the SAIT Trojans on Monday. Meyers, who scored seven goals in nine starts for the Trojans during her freshman year, might just be the secret weapon the T-wolves need as they head out on a preseason roadtrip to Victoria this week.

“Sage has been great for the group already,” Timberwolves coach Neil Sedgwick said in a

press release. “She has been really good around the goal, which is where she excelled at SAIT... I am excited to have her as part of this program.”

Sedgwick recruited the five-footfour, 19-year-old environmental engineering student from St. Timothy High School in Cochrane, Alta. but Meyers thought she could use a year playing in the Alberta Colleges Athletic Conference before joining UNBC. During her year with the Trojans, SAIT went 12-0 and advanced to the final. She joins fellow 2018-19 SAIT teammate Sarah Lepine on the Timberwolves roster.

Where

did

“Soccer at SAIT was a really good experience. I definitely have a lot more confidence playing,” Meyers said in a press release. “It would be a way difference experience if I came up alone. (I am) coming with with someone (I) have played with. I has been great. I am so excited to be here.”

The T-wolves open their regular season at noon on Sept. 5 with a home game against Thompson Rivers University at Masich Place Stadium.

SAIT Trojans.

the lefties go?

NFL set to start second straight year with no left-handed quarterbacks

The Washington Post

At the three youth football camps Michael Vick has attended this year, he’s seen hundreds of kids. Of all the young quarterbacks he’s come across, maybe three were left-handed.

Vick is one of the most productive left-handed quarterbacks in NFL history, but like most lefty passers, Vick doesn’t like being viewed as different; he simply wants to be judged by gaining yards and scoring points. Yet he understands he might only feel this way because, unlike other lefties, his rare combination of foot speed and arm strength allowed him to transcend handedness.

“It’s not the same way for everyone else,” Vick said. “If you’re not a prototypical quarterback who can do some exceptional things, and you’re left-handed, then you’re probably going to get overlooked.”

Left-handers make up roughly 12 per cent of the United States population, and the NFL has had a defining lefty quarterback in each modern era. Ken Stabler, Boomer Esiason, Steve Young, Vick. Almost every year, left-handers have contributed roughly five to 10 per cent of the league’s passing yards. Yet, after Kellen Moore retired to coach for the Dallas Cowboys following the 2017 season, the percentage of left-handed quarterbacks dropped to zero. None of the roughly 90 signal-callers to crack an NFL active roster last season were left-handed, and this season looks like it’ll be the same.

“We’re an extinct species,” said Matt Leinart, a former lefty QB.

So where have all the left-handed quarterbacks gone? The most popular theory is that baseball steals away strong-armed lefties to pitch, but there are other factors at work. While handedness might not matter to the quarterbacks themselves, it does to many others. Front offices hesitate to accommodate them by changing schematics unless they’re special. Receivers must adjust, too.

Youth coaches specialized in training quarterbacks struggle to adapt.

The implicit bias against left-

handers shrinks the margins, leaves no room for the average left-handed quarterback and stretches as far back as the origin of the word “left” itself: Old English’s “lyft,” meaning “weak, useless.”

In the last half-century or so, the once-pervasive left-handed stigma has largely dissipated from Western society.

Four of the last eight U.S. presidents were left-handed.

There are examples of elite athletes, like tennis star Rafael Nadal and baseball hitting savant Ichiro Suzuki, who were pushed by relatives to play left-handed to gain a competitive advantage. But at the most important position in America’s favorite game, lefthanders become liabilities.

The search to understand why left-handed quarterbacks have disappeared delves into the brain

differences between the left and right hand, and reveals the position on the football field at which handedness might matter mostand it’s not quarterback.

For Leinart, football was a happy accident. Before he won the Heisman Trophy at Southern California and became a firstround pick of the Arizona Cardinals, he focused on baseball. The 36-year old now maintains that he would have “100 per cent” played baseball were it not for a major shoulder injury before his sophomore year of high school. It caused him too much pain to pitch, but for whatever reason, he could still throw a football.

“Weird,” Leinart says now.

Had Leinart chosen baseball over football, he would hardly have been the first hard-throwing lefty to do so. Coaches from Little League

to Major League Baseball prize southpaws because an opponent’s unfamiliarity against them offers a tactical advantage. Last season, of the 795 pitchers to appear in an MLB game, 26 per cent were lefthanded – more than double the population.

But while lefty arms are rewarded in baseball, football treats them like a burden.

The tail which once gave Leinart’s fastball nasty bite made his passes more difficult to catch, as left-handed throws look and spin differently out of the hand. (Kicks, too: for years, one of football’s most well-respected tacticians, New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick, has employed a leftfooted punter to trouble unfamiliar opponents.)

Brian Xanders, a senior personnel executive with the Los Angeles Rams, became a left-handed quar-

terback expert with the Atlanta Falcons during Vick’s tenure, and later drafted southpaw Tim Tebow as the Denver Broncos’ general manager. In both situations, Xanders understood the implications: teams must prioritize right tackles because they, rather than the left tackle, protect a lefty’s “blind side.” Coaches must alter formations and flip plays, because lefties drop back and run play-action fakes differently. Leinart was deemed to be worth the extra effort. The same was true for Vick and Tebow. Alabama’s lefty-throwing quarterback Tua Tagovailoa, considered a likely top pick in the 2020 draft, also fits the mold.

The NFL’s drought of left-handed quarterbacks could end as early as next season, when Tagovailoa becomes eligible to enter the draft.

Aaron Ness, D, 2 yrs, $1.4 million; Ivan Prosvetov, G, 3 yrs, $2.472 million. BOSTON - Connor Clifton, D, 3 yrs, $3 million; Ryan Fitzgerald, C, 1 yr, $700,000; Brendan Gauce, LW, 1 yr, $700,000; Danton Heinen, RW, 2 yrs, $5.6 million; Maxime Legace, G, 1 yr, $700,000; Par Lindholm, LW, 2 yrs, $1.7 million; Brett Richie, RW, 1 yr, $1 million. BUFFALO - Jean-Sebastien Dea, C, 2 yrs, $1.4 million; John Gilmour, D, 1 yr, $700,000; Zemgus Girgensons, C, 1 yr, $1.6 million; Andrew Hammond, G, 1 yr, $700,000; Marcus Johansson, C, 2 yrs, $9 million; Johan Larsson, C, 1 yr, $1.55 million; Jake McCabe, D, 2 yrs, $5.7 million; Chris Lazar, C, 1 yr, $700,000; Evan Rodrigues, LW, 1 yr, $2 million; Linus Ullmark, G, 1 yr, $1.325 million. CALGARY - Sam Bennett, C, 2 yrs, $5.1 million; Ryan Lomberg, LW, 1 yr, $700,000; David Rittich, G, 2 yrs, $5.5 million; Cam Talbot, G, 1 yr, $2.75 million; Rinat Valiev, D, 1 yr, $700,000. CAROLINA - Sebastien Aho, C, 5 yrs, $42.27 million; Ryan Dzingel, C, 2 yrs, $6.75 million; Haydn Fleury, D, 1 yr, $850,000; Anton Forsberg, G, 1 yr, $775,000; Ryan Graves, D, 1 yr; Alex Lintuniemi, 1 yr, $700,000; Brock McGinn, LW, 2 yrs, $4.2 million; Petr Mrazek, G, 2

MONTREAL - Joel Armia, RW, 2 yrs, $5.2 million; Riley Barber, RW, 1 yr, $700,000; Ben Chiarot, D, 3 yrs, $10.5 million; Nick Cousins, C, 1 yr, $1 million; Charles Hudon, LW, 1 yr, $800,000; Keith Kinkaid, G, 1 yr, $1.75 million; Artturi Lehkonen, LW, 2 yrs, $4.8 million; Michael McCarron, RW, 1 yr, $700,000; Phil Varone, C, 1 yr, $700,000. NASHVILLE - Daniel Carr, RW, 1 yr, $700,000; Matt Duchene, C, 7 yrs, $56 million; Colton Sissons, C, 7 yrs, $20 million NEW JERSEY - Will Butcher, D, 3 yrs, $11.2 million; Connor Carrick, D, 2 yrs, $3 million; Kurtis Gabriel, RW, 1 yr, $700,000; Nikita Gusev, LW, 2 yrs, $9 million; Mirco Mueller, D, 1 yr, $1.4 million; Wayne Simmons, RW, 1 yr, $5 million. N.Y. ISLANDERS - Anders Lee, LW, 7 yrs, $49 million; Semyon Varlamov, G, 4 yrs, $20 million. N.Y. RANGERS - Antemi Panarin, LW, 7 yrs, $81.5 million; Pavel Buchnevich, RW, 2 yrs, $6.5 million; Jacob Trouba, D, 7 yrs, $56 million. OTTAWA - Tyler Ennis, LW, 1 yr, $800,000; Ron Hainsey, D, 1 yr, $3.5 million; Jordan Szwarz, RW, 1 yr, $800,000; Christian Wolanin, D, 2 yrs, $1.8 million. PHILADELPHIA - Andy Adreoff,

$1 million; Alex Chaisson, RW, 2 yrs, $4.3 million; Tomas Jurco, LW, 1 yr, $750,000; Jujhar Khaira, LW, 2 yrs, $2.4 million; Mike Smith, G, 1 yr, $2 million. FLORIDA - Noel Acciari, RW, 3 yrs, $5 million; Brett Connolly, RW, 4 yrs, $13 million; Sergei Babrovsky, G, 7 yrs, $70 million; Sam Montembeault, G, 1 yr, $708,750; Kevin Roy, RW, 1 yr; Anton Stralman, D, 3 yrs, $16.5 million; Mackenzie Weegar, D, 1 yr, $1.6 million. LOS ANGELES - Alex Iafallo, LW, 2 yrs, $4.85 million; Joakim Ryan, D, 1 yr, $725,000. MINNESOTA - Ryan Donato, C, 2 yrs, $3.8 million; Gabriel Dumont, C, 2 yrs, $1.4 million; Ryan Hartman, RW, 2 yrs, $3.8 million; Luke Johnson, C, 2 yrs, $1.4 million; Mats Zuccarello, RW, 5 yrs, $30 million.

- Pontus Aberg, LW, 1 yr, $700,000; Kenny Agostino, F, 2 yrs, $1.4 million; Cody Ceci, D, 1 yr, $4.5 million; Tyler Gaudet, C, 1 yr, $700,000; Kevin Gravel, D, 1 yr, $700,000; Kalle Kossila, C, 1 yr, $700,000; Alex Kerfoot, F, 4 yrs, $14 million; Nick Shore, F, 1 yr, $750,000; Jason Spezza, C, 1 yr, $700,000; Garrett Wilson, LW, 1 yr, $725,000. VANCOUVER - Jordie Benn, D, 2 yrs, $4 million; Micheal Ferland, LW, 4 yrs, $14 million; Tyler Graovac, C, 1 yr, $700,000; Oscar Fantenberg, D, 1 yr, $850,000; Josh Leivo, LW, 1 yr, $1.5 million; Zane McIntyre, G, 1 yr, $700,000; Tyler Myers, D, 5 yrs, $30 million. VEGAS - Patrick Brown, F, 2 yrs, $1.4 million; Deryk Engelland, D, 1 yr, $700,000; Tomas Nosek, F, 1 yr, $1 million; Brandon Pirri,

UNBC HANDOUT PHOTO Sage Myers joins the UNBC Timberwolves from the

Dallas Cowboys quarterback Kellen Moore passes during the 2016 training camp in Oxnard, Calif. There hasn’t been a left-handed passer on an NFL roster since Moore retired at the end of the 2017 season.

Obstacles block drug import plan

Bloomberg

U.S. President Donald Trump’s plan to import cheap Canadian drugs overlooks a crucial fact: it can’t happen without the cooperation of major drugmakers, the very industry he’s trying to undercut. Even as alarm grows in Canada over the prospect of Americans draining their supply of medicines, there’s little reason to believe the U.S. proposal would worsen the country’s drug shortages. But the fear plays into the hands of the powerful drug companies seeking to protect their U.S. profit margins.

“Instead of attacking the Trump administration for this proposal, it’s easier to make sure that this proposal does not come into existence in Canada,” said Marc-André Gagnon at Carleton University in Ottawa, who focuses on the political economy of the pharmaceutical sector. “But what we do have is a fear-mongering campaign as if it will be a catastrophe for Canadian supply.”

Canada’s supply chain is beholden to the drugmakers. Pharmaceutical companies sell most of their drugs through wholesalers and distributors who in turn supply the front-line hospitals and pharmacies under agreements that the products are intended for the domestic market only. Both groups stand to lose from diverting drugs south.

“We’re not in the business of exporting,” said Daniel Chiasson, president of the Canadian Association for Pharmacy Distribution Management representing distributors like Gamma Wholesale Drugs and McKesson Corp.’s Canadian unit. “There is no merit to doing so – in fact, there is a disincentive.”

Selling outside of Canada wouldn’t serve the wholesalers’ customers and could put them at risk of being cut off by the manufacturers, he said. Exporting in bulk requires a license from Health Canada – something that typically only happens during humanitarian aid efforts, he said.

“The ones that may do so, do it at a significant risk,” Chiasson said.

Pharmacies are supplied with the agreement they won’t intentionally sell to non-Canadians, said Sandra Hanna, vice president

of the Neighborhood Pharmacy Association of Canada, whose members include Loblaw Cos.’ Shoppers Drug Mart and Rexall Drug Stores.

If a pharmacy were to export in bulk, “they would endanger their relationship with those manufacturers and suppliers,” Hanna said.

It’s not an idle threat: in the early 2000s, amid a boom in online and mail-order Canadian pharmacies, GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer threatened to cut off supplies to those caught shipping drugs south of the border.

Manufacturers began limiting supply to wholesalers and pharmacies to only the exact amount needed for the domestic population, according to Dani Peters, a senior adviser at the Canadian branch of the Alliance for Safe Online Pharmacies, whose members are pharmacies, distributors and wholesalers.

“Canada cannot supply medicines and vaccines to a market ten times larger than its own population without jeopardizing Canadian supplies and causing shortages,” said Sarah Dion-Marquis, a spokeswoman for Innovative Medicines Canada, the pharmaceutical lobby representing some of the world’s biggest drugmakers including Pfizer, Sanofi, and Merck & Co.

Legally, patented and generic medicines can be exported from Canada, according to Health Canada. But the government “will not hesitate to take the steps needed to safeguard Canadians’ access to prescription drugs,” Health Canada said in an email.

It’s premature to speculate on the impact of the U.S. plan, which is still being drafted, Riley Althouse, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said in an email. Paul Grootendorst who researches the economics of the pharmaceutical industry at the University of Toronto, said the controversy is a non-issue. “It’s not like there’s a consumer-direct factory where a reseller can simply back up a semi-truck and load up full of drugs. It doesn’t work that way. The one place to get the drugs is the manufacturers – they control the supply and they can take measures to cut it off if they believe it’s being redirected.”

There’s a certain deja vu to the uproar.

In 2003, after the U.S. passed legislation enabling regulations that would allow the import of Canadian prescription drugs – the legal framework underpinning Trump’s proposal – there werewarnings of impending Canadian shortages. Around that time,

Pfizer, Eli Lilly, GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca were among those that began limiting supplies to Canada in an effort to slow the importation trend.

Underpinning the concern is the lack of transparency into what’s driving existing shortages in Canada. Of the roughly 7,000 prescription drugs available in Canada, there are shortfalls of more than 1,800 and “there is almost no transparency around the true causes,” Kelly Grindrod, an associate professor at the University of Waterloo’s School of Pharmacy, said in a newspaper commentary this week.

Pharmacists are told there’s a “disruption of manufacturing” or a “delay in shipping,” but there are no explanations of why there are disruptions or delays, she wrote.

With only 37 million people, Canada is a small market for the drugmakers and a finicky one requiring bilingual labels in French and English, and special sizes and colours just for Canada. Faced with uncertainty about U.S. importation, the drug companies may decide to just hold back supplies, said Peters at the Alliance for Safe Online Pharmacies.

“We’re not an important market enough and it might just be too risky so they might cut back,” she said.

Air Canada lawsuit gets green light

A Quebec Superior Court judge has authorized a class action lawsuit against Air Canada after the company allegedly used a surcharge to bill passengers for the cost of fuel and then some.

The lawsuit, approved to proceed as a class action Monday, argues the country’s largest airline “illegally overcharged its customers” by more than 200 per cent – and more than the fuel cost itself – on some flights.

Michael Vathilakis, the petitioners’ lawyer, said Air Canada misrepresented the stated purpose of the surcharge, which was to partially offset the fluctuating price of jet fuel.

“What Air Canada did was represented to passengers that they were collecting this amount in order to offset volatility, when in fact the allegations are that they were in many

cases actually reaping a real profit on it,”

Vathilakis said in a phone interview.

“In multiple cases, they charged an amount that was equal to or higher than the entire cost of fuel for the flight.”

The lawsuit cites one example in which Air Canada allegedly charged business and economy passengers 105 per cent of the total fuel cost on a flight to Paris in January 2014.

Each economy passenger on that flight allegedly paid $238 in fuel surcharges alone – $163 more than they should have, according to Air Canada’s definition of the charge. The airline took in $73,878 in fuel supplements on the flight, rather than the $23,164 it should have charged, according to the lawsuit.

The suit states Air Canada’s contract with consumers allows it to charge them up to onethird of the cost of fuel.

The class action concerns customers in

Quebec who bought international tickets to destinations outside the U.S., Mexico and the Caribbean between April 2012 and November 2014.

The plaintiffs, brothers George and David Itzkovitz, are requesting damages of $273 million for affected passengers.

Air Canada said Tuesday it disagrees with the allegations.

“We intend to vigorously defend our position through the courts,” spokeswoman Angela Mah said in an email.

The lawsuit is not the first time frustration over fuel charges has bubbled to the surface.

Last year, the Quebec Court of Appeal upheld a lower court authorization of a class action lawsuit for provincial residents who paid fuel surcharges when redeeming Aeroplan points to buy Air Canada flights within Canada or the U.S.

delay imposing 10 per cent tariffs on

toys and other items until Dec. 15, while tariffs would be removed entirely on some fish and baby seats. Markets have been volatile since U.S. President Donald Trump announced earlier this month that he would impose the tariffs on about US$300 billion of Chinese imports. That’s in addition to 25 per cent tariffs imposed on US$250-billion of imports. China responded by devaluing its currency and cutting agricultural imports. The S&P/TSX composite index closed up 113.07 points at 16,350.84. In New York, the Dow Jones industrial average was up 372.54 points at 26,279.91. The S&P 500 index was up 42.57 points at 2,926.32, while the Nasdaq composite was up 152.95 points at 8,016.36.

Ten of the 11 major sectors of the TSX climbed, led by health care, consumer discretionary, industrials and energy. Car seat maker Dorel Industries Inc. and toymaker Spin Master Corp. gained almost three per cent on the easing of tariffs. Canadian Pacific Railway helped the industrials sector by rising 2.6 per cent. The key energy sector was driven by gains from several producers including TC Energy Corp, Cenovus Energy Inc. and Crescent Point Energy Corp. as the price of crude rose. The September crude contract was up US$2.17 at US$57.10 per barrel and the September natural gas contract was up 4.2 cents at US$2.15 per mmBTU.

WASHINGTON POST PHOTO

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to reporters in this file photo.

The Canadian Press

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CREGO,Charles August7,1928-August7,2019

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