

Christine HINZMANN Citizen staff
chinzmann@pgcitizen.ca
Caitlin Blewett, a second-year student in the university’s Northern Medical Program, is the recipient of the Rising Star of Health Service award which recognizes outstanding contributions made to health care in the north.
Blewett, who grew up in Vancouver, moved to Haida Gwaii to take a three-month post graduate course and knew almost immediately it was the place she wanted to call home.
As a public health masters graduate, Blewett stayed on the remote island for seven years developing programs focusing on child/youth mental health and substance use, wellness forums, and working with elders to improve quality of life for Indigenous communities while serving on the Haida Gwaii Islands Wellness Society.
“We talked specifically a lot around mental health services and what that could look like and also a lot about elder care – about aging in place and elder healthcare services and social services relevant and local to save families and the sick people from all of the hassle, which is not a strong enough word – of accessing health services off-island and that work was specifically for Haida Gwaii,” Blewett said, who has done extensive work in mainland rural communities as well.
Blewett feels a strong connection to Haida Gwaii.
“The people I met just threw open arms out to anything you wanted to do and anything you were interested in being a part of,” she said.
“Within the first month, I had joined the fire department. They’re just so excited to have people with energy and excitement who want to live in the community and who want to make it work. I think this kind of attitude is a large part of what keeps me in Northern B.C., and what makes me want to live and work here for the rest of my life.
“I definitely applied to medicine in hopes of
pursuing rural family practice.”
With five years of schooling left to go, Blewett said she specifically asked to be part of the Northern Medical Program at UNBC when given the choice of campuses from the program that is an extension of the University of B.C. medical program.
“When I graduate, I will be 40 and I would love to go home and get to practice there,” she said about Haida Gwaii.
Blewett said it was a nice surprise when she heard she had been designated as Rising Star, which includes a $5,000 award.
“The money made a short pit stop in my account,” Blewett laughed.
And then it went straight to tuition.
The award is provided through the Northern Medical Programs Trust, established in 2002 to help support a healthcare student’s education
and recruitment initiatives in the North.
“I have become very passionate about rural health services,” Blewett said.
It’s about what kind of services a rural community needs and how to get those services in town rather than having to fly to Vancouver or take an eight-hour ferry to Prince Rupert, Blewett gave as an example.
She said time spent at the BC Rural Health Conference held in the spring just confirmed her continued interest in rural medicine and healthcare improvement.
“Connecting with rural family doctors at the conference who have been doing this for so long and just getting to see how much they can change the work that they are doing, both to suit their communities and to suit what they and their families need, it’s really heartening,” Blewett said.
Citizen staff
Canfor announced 75 million board feet in additional production curtailments on Tuesday.
Production at the forestry company’s Prince George, Polar, Houston and Fort St. John sawmills will be curtailed during the week after Labour Day, the company announced at the end of the business day on Tuesday. In addition, Canfor’s Plateau sawmill in Vanderhoof and the Houston mill will transition to a fourday work week in September. The reduced work week will remain in effect at those mills until market and economic conditions “support a return to the full operating schedule of five days per week,” a statement by the company said.
“The curtailments are due to the ongoing low price of lumber and the high cost of fibre, which are making the operating conditions in B.C. uneconomic,” the statement said. The new curtailments are in addition to previous curtailments announced earlier this year. In July, Canfor announced an “indefinite curtailment” at its Mackenzie sawmill and permanently eliminating a shift at its Isle Pierre sawmill. The shutdown in Mackenzie took place in July, while the shift reduction at Isle Pierre doesn’t come into effect until Sept. 20.
A photo of 1920s-era George Street will grace the cans of CrossRoads Brewing & Distillings’ George Street Brown Ale, which will be available at local liquor stores.
On Tuesday the local craft brewer announced it will be canning its popular George Street Brown Ale as part of a press conference touting the revitalization of the city’s former main street.
“Council has a priority to enhance the vitality of downtown, and we are seeing the incredible local and out-of-town private investment in the downtown,” Mayor Lyn Hall said in a press release. “City investment in the area, like the new Wood Innovation Square, Park House, a new pool, and a pedestrian-friendly connection to George Street from Seventh Avenue is strengthened by nearby businesses such as CrossRoads, Birch & Boar, The Keg, Butterfly Boutique, and others – these entrepreneurs are bringing George Street back to life.”
CrossRoads founders Daryl Leiski and Bjorn Butow said the beer is one of their bestsellers.
“The dark, yet mild, easy-drinking English-style brown ale features subtle flavours of caramel malt, biscuit and chocolate,” Leiski and Butow said in a press release.
“English brown ales were a favourite of northern coal miners, their preferred beverage after a long day’s work. We’re excited to launch this packaged version of one of our top-selling draught beers, featuring this
iconic photo.”
Some of the projects contributing to the redevelopment downtown include the four-building Park House condo complex under construction across from city hall and a five-storey multi-use building under construction. The multi-use building at 547
and Chris
The project will include a mix of residential, office and retail space.
“We’re very excited to invest in downtown Prince George,” Chris Leboe said in a press release. “We see nothing but long-term
sustainable growth and opportunity for entrepreneurs and people wanting to live in an affordable urban setting. We’re excited to showcase our new project. We believe it will add another piece to transforming George Street, along with the other private investments.”
Citizen staff
On Tuesday, B.C. Parks implemented a new policy to limit the use of electric bikes (e-bikes) in provincial parks.
The growing popularity of e-bikes is putting pressure on sensitive ecosystems, wildlife and other values in the province’s parks, according to a statement by the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy.
“Cycling in parks can have an impact on trails and wildlife,” the ministry statement said.
“Electric bikes allow more riders to use trails and reach areas that were previously limited to a few visitors, leading to increased pressure on sensitive wildlife and ecosystems.”
The regulations for e-bikes is based on a three-class system used by industry and other government bodies.
Class 1 e-bikes are not considered motor vehicles under provincial regulations, and are can be used anywhere cycling or mountain biking is already permitted – unless signs specifically indicate the trail is closed to all e-bike access.
Class 1 e-bikes have motors which only provide assistance if the rider is pedaling, with a continuous maximum output of 500 W and a top speed for pedal assist of 32 km/h.
Class 2 and Class 3 e-bikes are
considered motor vehicles under provincial regulations, and can only be used in park areas where motor vehicle use is permitted –on roads and designated off-road vehicle trails. Class 2 and Class 3 e-bikes have electric motors capable of driving the bike while the rider is not pedaling, to a top speed of 32 km/h for Class 2 bikes and 45 km/h for Class 3.
Adaptive mountain bikes for people with disabilities are allowed in the same places Class e-bikes are allowed, as long as they meet the following criteria: three or four wheels, hand or foot crank to propel the bike without electric power and a motor with a maximum output of 800 W. In the Prince George region, the change in rules means Class 2 and Class 3 e-bikes are no longer allowed on the trails at Eskers Provincial Park, Pine Le Moray Provincial Park, or the designated cycling trails at Mount Robson Provincial Park and Crooked River Provincial Park. Cycling is prohibited in many other provincial parks in the region, or restricted to roadways only.
More information about the province’s e-bike policy can be found online at www.env.gov. bc.ca/bcparks/recreation/biking/ Information about what is allowed at specific parks can be found online at www.env.gov.bc.ca/ bcparks/explore/parks/.
organization like the Mafia, operating in more than 20 countries.
Citizen staff
Art in the Park at the Ancient Forest takes place Saturday where musicians and artisans will showcase their talents from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.
The event is part of the three-day Fraser Heritage Festival hosted by the Robson Valley Arts and Culture Council and sees Art in the Park events in McBride on Sunday and at Mt. Robson’s Kinney Lake on Monday as well.
The festival is in its 13th year and focused on Art in the Park last year to highlight the grand opening of the Ancient Forest, said Sheilagh Foster, chair of the council.
“That’s how it started,” Foster said. “McBride is in the centre of the Robson Valley with parks at each end, with the Ancient Forest at one end and the Mt. Robson at the other, so we thought it was the perfect opportunity to try to have a festival that celebrated the arts as well as the parks.”
The event at the Ancient Forest, Chun T’oh Whudujut, begins with a special welcome for all to the territory of the Lheidli T’enneh First Nations and Kym Gouchie will offer a special dedication in honour of Mary Gouchie’s memory.
Other musicians include the Robson Valley’s Fiddlesticks and String Ensemble who will perform classical music during the celebration at the Ancient Forest, which proved to be very popular last year and promises to add an unexpected treat for the ear to the event this year, too, Foster added.
Art in the Park will see a variety of artists including dancers and singers, quilters and knitters, painters and sculptors, basket weavers and wood turners showcasing their talents and their wares throughout the forest. Lunch, which is available by donation, will be provided by Dome Creek Community Association. Complimentary accessible return transportation thanks in large part to Diversified Transportation to the event is offered by bus at two times from Prince George and once from McBride.
Bus 1 leaves from CN Centre parking lot at 9:30 and leaves the forest at 1 p.m.
Bus 2 leaves from CN Centre parking lot at 11 a.m. and leaves the forest at 2:30 p.m.
Bus 3 leaves at 9:30 a.m. from the McBride Train Station and leaves the Ancient Forest at 1 p.m. The service is available by preregistration on a first come, first served basis.
To reserve a spot on the bus through Engage Sport North visit: https:// events.eventzilla.net/e/art-in-the-parkdiscovering-chun-toh-whudujut--august31-2019-2138765868?resp=on&date id=2138461461.
There is parking at the Ancient Forest. It is suggested to carpool with family and friends as there’s limited space.
Be sure to bring a water bottle and snacks and dress for the weather.
Ancient Forest, Chun T’oh Whudujut, is located on Highway 16, 113 km east of Prince George.
VANCOUVER — Police officer Keiron McConnell had been on the job four months when a call crackled over the radio about a stolen vehicle.
The driver was arrested after a short chase, but when McConnell was told the young man was a gang member, it shattered his understanding of what that meant.
“Everything I thought about gangs up to this point had kind of come from the movies ‘Colors,’ ‘Boyz n the Hood,’ that kind of stuff,” McConnell said.
“This young fellow lived on the west side of Vancouver, mom and dad still lived in the house, they were wealthy by 1990s standards, his siblings were successful in school. So it was like, what is it about this kid that got him involved?”
The question plagued McConnell as he watched the pattern of seemingly privileged, middle-class young men choosing a life of crime repeat itself.
About 15 years after that arrest, he explored the question of what makes British Columbia’s landscape so unlike any other through a PhD.
Established wisdom, he found, aligned with the stereotypes he’d carried into the job. Traditional gang members in cities like Chicago are young men born into poor neighbourhoods without any options – a rational response to irrational circumstances.
That’s not always the case in British Columbia.
“In B.C., gangs are, generally speaking, an irrational response to rational circumstances,” he said.
An evolving gang landscape Gangs in B.C. are not a new phenomenon. The outlaw McLean gang was executed in a group hanging in 1881 after terrorizing the Kamloops community and killing a police officer. Newspapers in the 1940s documented clashes in Vancouver between military personnel and flamboyantly dressed zoot suitors on Granville Street. And the aptly-named “park gangs” staked territorial claims to the city’s parks in the 1960s and 1970s.
The notorious Hells Angels opened their first B.C. chapter in 1983 and would come to dominate organized crime across Canada by around 2000. Police consider the outlaw motorcycle gang a “top-echelon” criminal
Others like the United Nations, Red Scorpions and Brothers Keepers have emerged at the mid-level and the province’s antigang agency says much of that structure remains in place today.
“The main conflicts are still there, however, you see now the gangs are more loosely tied,” said Sgt. Brenda Winpenny, spokeswoman for the Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit, the provincial anti-gang agency.
Also distinctive today is how quickly allegiances shift and the number of lower-level “cells” or unnamed subgroups emerging, she said.
It makes defining and quantifying the number of gangs difficult. The number of gangs controlling criminal markets listed by the anti-gang agency grew from a handful in 1980 to 188 by 2011, but there’s no available estimate today.
The Criminal Code defines a gang as a group of three or more people with the main purpose of committing or facilitating serious offences for financial benefit. But many so-called “gangsters” don’t identify with the word.
“A lot of these kids, they’re not seeing themselves joining the gang,” McConnell said.
If you’re selling illicit drugs though, you’re associated, he said.
“You’re not independent, or if you are, you’re not independent for very long. You have to get the drugs from somebody and the drugs are coming in from organized crime and filtering down to mid-level and low-level street gangs.”
In contrast to the military-like hierarchy of the Hells Angels, McConnell likened the structure of many gangs today to a “bag of marbles.”
They are not tied to particular geographic areas but move location and shift loyalty according to business opportunity. And with that has come more public violence.
When Canada’s homicide rate reached 660 in 2017 – the highest in almost a decade – Statistics Canada attributed part of the spike to gang-related violence and shootings, singling out British Columbia as a hot spot. The province saw the homicide rate rise by 32 per cent that year.
The homicide rate in B.C. levelled off again in 2018 but gang-related violence continues to represent 37 per cent of all killings in the province.
— see ‘THERE IS NO ROCK, page 4
Long weekend requires caution on the roads
During the last long weekend of the summer, ICBC is cautioning drivers to drive smart.
Every Labour Day weekend sees about five people die and 610 people hurt in 2,200 crashes in the province, according to five-year averages for 2014 to 2018.
RVs, motorcycles, cars and trucks will take to the highways this weekend and ICBC asks everyone to stay focused and avoid distractions.
Drive smart tips include:
• You can only see motorcycles when you really look for them so make a game of it. Ask every passenger to guess how many motorcycles you’ll see during the drive and then count them as you travel. Leave plenty of space when passing a motorcycle and allow at least three seconds of following distance.
• Crashes with trucks and RVs are usually much more serious due to their sheer size
and weight. Keep clear of their blind spots – when following, you should be able to see both mirrors of the RV or truck in front of you. If you’re behind a slow moving RV or truck climbing up a hill, leave extra space and be patient as they’re probably trying their best to keep up with the flow of traffic.
• Most crashes with cyclists and pedestrians happen at intersections so always look for them – especially before turning. Make eye contact if you can, so they can anticipate your next move.
• Check road conditions at drivebc.ca before you leave. Be realistic about travel times and accept delays that may arise. Don’t rush to make up time – slow down to reduce your risk of crashing and arrive at your destination safely. You also save fuel by driving at a safe and steady speed. Statistics state that during the Labour Day weekend in the North Central region, on average, 19 people are injured in 120 crashes happen every year.
Hina ALAM The Canadian Press
VANCOUVER — The Crown suggested
Tuesday that a Vancouver Island father accused of killing his daughters on Christmas Day in 2017 hesitated before stabbing himself in the throat.
Crown attorney Patrick Weir showed the court a photo of Andrew Berry in the hospital and pointed to several nicks on his throat.
“One stab would have been an attempt to kill you,” Weir asked Berry.
“Yes,” Berry replied.
The nicks are “hesitation marks,” which were caused by Berry building up “courage” to kill himself, Weir said.
Berry denied the allegation.
He is charged with second-degree murder in the stabbing deaths of six-yearold Chloe Berry and four-year-old Aubrey Berry in his home in Oak Bay.
The Crown’s theory is that Berry killed the girls and then tried to kill himself, but Berry says he owed thousands of dollars to a loan shark named Paul and was attacked in his apartment.
Berry has told the trial that Paul was in his 30s when he first got to know him about 20 years ago, but he didn’t know the man’s last name. Weir showed the court evidence that Berry had 16 stab wounds in the upper left side of his chest.
The wounds were about two-and-ahalf centimetres in depth, close together, oriented in the same direction and none of them were life-threatening, the court heard.
The father said he was stabbed in the chest once but he doesn’t remember how he got multiple chest wounds.
Weir asked Berry to describe how he was attacked on Christmas Day.
He was tackled, pushed on the bed and stabbed in the throat, Berry said.
The attacker was a dark-skinned, dark-haired man who was not one of two henchmen who had previously visited Berry’s house or Paul the loan shark, he said.
“Did you make an effort to alert the girls?” Weir asked.
“I don’t know,” Berry said. He said he put a hand to his throat and it sounded like a “fart.”
He choked up as he described getting up, going to Chloe’s room, falling unconscious in the hallway, coming around and crawling over to his daughter’s bed.
“How do you know she’s dead?” Weir asked.
“She’s a bloody mess,” Berry replied, adding that he tried to push her but “nothing happened.”
At that time he thought of Aubrey and went into the kitchen where he was attacked again, he said.
He regained consciousness in the bathroom where he heard yells of “police, police,” he said.
A flashlight and a gun were also pointed at him, and someone was saying “this is the guy who killed his kids,” he told the court.
Berry said earlier he wanted to shout when he heard the comment. Weir asked him what he felt like shouting.
“Just ‘aaah,’” Berry replied.
Earlier in the day the prosecutor focused on two little girls’ notes to Santa, unopened gifts and the last full day they spent with their father on Christmas Eve.
“It must have been a very memorable day... you must have relived that day,” Weir said.
Berry said he didn’t have a vivid memory of what happened that day.
Weir asked for details of their outing to a recreational centre and what the father and daughters did that morning.
“You’re trying to parse this out in a level of detail that I just cannot remember,” Berry said.
Weir asked Berry about a note written to Santa by Chloe that read: “Dear Santa, Enjoy the bunny crackers from Chloe, Aubrey and Andy.”
Another note from the girls told Santa there was an unopened toothbrush for him to use after he ate the crackers.
Crime scene photos presented at the jury trial showed a bowl with cracker crumbs and an unopened toothbrush.
“I’m going to suggest those stockings were empty. I’m going to suggest there were no gifts at all from you to the girls that morning,” Weir said.
“No,” Berry said. Berry’s testimony is expected to continue on Wednesday.
Laura KANE The Canadian Press
VANCOUVER
— An Oklahoma court ruling that found Johnson & Johnson helped fuel the state’s opioid crisis and ordered the company to pay US$572 million could persuade drug manufacturers to settle a similar lawsuit in British Columbia, legal experts say.
The decision in the United States does not directly apply to B.C. because it found the company created a “public nuisance” under a specific state law, said Dr. Michael Curry, a clinical associate professor at the University of British Columbia who has a legal background. B.C., on the other hand, filed a proposed class-action lawsuit a year ago alleging a number of pharmaceutical companies falsely marketed opioids as less addictive than other pain drugs and helped trigger an overdose crisis that has killed thousands.
But Curry said the fact that Johnson & Johnson and its subsidiaries were ordered to pay Oklahoma more than twice the amount another drug maker agreed to pay in a settlement will add pressure to companies to settle the various claims they’re facing.
“I do think it emphasizes to the pharmaceutical companies that there is going to be some accounting for or responsibility for some of their actions during the opioid crisis. I think it creates pressure from a stock market basis and also a legal basis to settle these claims,” he said.
But Curry noted that Johnson & John-
son’s stock price rose after the ruling because many investors expected the fine to be higher.
Attorneys for the company have maintained that they were part of a lawful and heavily regulated industry subject to strict federal oversight.
The lawyers say the ruling was a misapplication of the public nuisance law and they will appeal to the Oklahoma Supreme Court.
The ruling in Oklahoma followed the first state opioid case to make it to trial and could help shape negotiations in about 1,500 similar lawsuits filed by state, local and tribal governments consolidated before a federal judge in Ohio.
Ontario and New Brunswick have announced they will participate in B.C.’s lawsuit, while Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and Quebec are participating in a national working group on the case, said B.C. Attorney General David Eby on Tuesday.
Eby said the B.C. case is different because it names dozens of manufacturers and distributors, while Oklahoma named only one company after settling with others. But he said they are based on very similar facts and Johnson & Johnson is a defendant in the province’s suit.
“To have a judge say, ‘Yes, we do see a serious problem here with how this company conducted itself and we do feel that it needs to be paying money out because of the way it marketed these very addictive and harmful drugs,’ is a very positive sign for our litigation here in Canada,” he said.
‘There’s no rock bottom anymore, it’s a grave’
— from page 3
“In the, quote, ‘good old days,’ when the Hells Angels were in control of the whole lot, those acts of violence were minimal because they would go and talk to people about behaviour and about expectations and about attitudes, and if you did not listen carefully there were consequences,” said Rob Gordon, a criminologist at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby.
“There’s no subtlety anymore. I’m being a sentimentalist.”
Joe Calendino was lying on a prison floor, emaciated and sick from drug withdrawal symptoms when he says he hit rock bottom.
He was a member of the Hells Angels’ infamous Nomads chapter when he was busted selling $10 worth of crack cocaine to an undercover cop.
It was the moment he began turning his life around, which he says was possible because the outlaw motorcycle club was ready to cut him loose.
But the gang landscape has shifted so dramatically in the 10 years since then that today’s youth won’t have the same second chance, Calendino said.
“There’s no rock bottom anymore, it’s a grave,” he said.
Calendino now works with youth in gang prevention and intervention through his non-profit Yo Bro Yo Girl Youth Initiative. The organization offers programming in classrooms, after school and during school breaks that aim to keep kids busy, active and empowered with support from positive role models to choose a healthier life path.
When he looks back on his early entry into criminal life, beginning with drugs in Grade 8 and high school fights with other kids, he said the stakes were different than those facing the kids today.
“We didn’t go around shooting each other. We got into fights, a man or boy got beat up and it was over, it was done. You may have fought someone 10 to 15 times but you never ever thought of picking up a gun and going to shoot him,” he said.
Vancouver Police Chief Adam Palmer told reporters in January 2018 that the region was experiencing a swell of gang-related violence unparalleled in the past 10 years after an innocent 15-year-old was killed by a stray bullet while his family was driving past a shootout.
Several groups are at odds over drugs and killing one another, Palmer said.
For McConnell, today’s middle-class gangsters aren’t too different from the young man from west Vancouver he arrested in the 1990s.
Two years ago, he was speaking with a “wealthy” father of two young men at risk of violence.
“I pleaded with him to use his wealth to get his kids out of the country and he didn’t. And his one son was shot and killed in Surrey and at the same time, his other son was shot five times.”
Officials say many of the middle-class
young men stepping off school and career paths to pursue criminal businesses see it as a legitimate career opportunity.
They begin working low level “dial-adope” lines, where users can order drugs by phone for delivery or meet up, with the promise of growth.
“It’s the pizza delivery service of drug dealing,” Winpenny said, adding that it’s also the riskiest position in the line because it means dealing directly with addicts and acting as an easy target for rival gangs.
“These young kids are being recruited into this promise of making some easy money,” she said.
“But the higher ups are sort of insulating themselves from that violence.”
It’s the entry point into a much more complex organizational structure.
A 2018 report by an anti-gang task force in the Vancouver suburb of Surrey found many gangsters are profit driven and operate enterprises similar to traditional businesses.
Gangs in B.C. are more sophisticated than in other parts of Canada and some even require new members to pay for training, it says. Their product, primarily, is drugs.
Historically, British Columbia’s “porous” ports, with no dedicated patrolling force, made it an attractive hub for the international trade, Gordon said. And its temperate climate allowed it to become a major producer of marijuana, for which a thriving black market persists despite legalization last October.
Newer products – the deadly opioid fentanyl and its analogues – now present an even more lucrative business opportunity. The extremely concentrated painkillers are cheap to produce in China and even easier to transport than other drugs, since they can be ordered on the dark web and sent by regular mail.
Chief Const. Mike Serr of the Abbotsford Police Department, who also chairs the drug advisory committee for the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, said in May that quantifying the profitability of opioids is difficult since they are typically cut with other drugs rather than sold “pure.”
For comparison, he said one kilogram of pure heroin typically costs $70,000 and would be added to a cutting agent to produce two kilograms worth of drugs for street sales.
One kilogram of fentanyl costs roughly $12,500 but can be mixed with 100 kilograms of a cutting agent for street sale because it’s so potent.
Estimating that profit is difficult because it may be sold under several different drug names with different concentrations, and in much smaller quantities than one kilogram at a time, but $1 million isn’t out of the ball park, he said.
When you consider analogues like carfentanil are significantly more concentrated than fentanyl, the profit margins are exponential.
“If someone said 10 years ago, can you make the perfect drug, carfentanil and fentanyl would be, unfortunately, the drug because it’s cheap, it’s much easier to import, it’s easier to source,” he said.
The Canadian Press VANCOUVER — Attorney General David Eby says an investigation by Canada Border Services Agency that resulted in the arrest of seven foreign workers at Vancouver’s horse racetrack last week was sparked because a whistleblower contacted his office. Eby told a news conference that a person reached out to his office last October with concerns that included the issue of people working without permits. He says he asked the province’s gaming and policy enforcement branch to investigate, which found the complaint
had merit, and it also identified concerns relating to at least one gaming worker. Eby says that inspector has been suspended with pay while the investigation continues, adding that he has no reason to believe the probe will be restricted to a single person’s conduct. He says the investigation was handed over to the CBSA after potential immigration issues were identified and the agency is also investigating criminal allegations. The CBSA says in a statement that seven people were arrested on Aug. 19 after border officials conducted on-site interviews and identified them as “inadmissible.”
Joanna SMITH The Canadian Press
OTTAWA — The owner of the billboards that featured ads promoting Maxime Bernier and his stance on immigration said they would have stayed up had the thirdparty group that paid for them not left his company twisting in the wind.
Randy Otto, the president of Pattison Outdoor Advertising, said his company agreed to run the ads on the condition that True North Strong & Free Advertising Corp. identify itself and let people viewing the billboards know how to get in touch.
Otto said his company felt the group, which is registered with Elections Canada as a third-party advertiser in the 2019 campaign, was entitled to promote the views on immigration held by Bernier and the People’s Party of Canada – as long as it was prepared to deal with any fallout.
The billboards, which feature pre-election advertising with Bernier’s face, the logo of his People’s Party of Canada and a slogan advocating against “mass immigration,” started appearing in different spots across the country late last week.
They quickly sparked criticism, including from Nova Scotia Premier Stephen McNeil, for promoting anti-immigrant rhetoric.
Otto said he did not like having been left alone to defend the ads or appreciate Bernier’s accusing him of caving to a “totalitarian leftist mob” when he decided to take the ads off Pattison billboards.
“I think probably for me, the biggest concern I have is people’s impression of the company and that we are trying to restrict free speech,” Otto said in an interview Tuesday.
“More than that, has been the very strong vocal, sometimes venomous, calls to my staff across the country, where people are expressing their opinions about the decision to either put the ads up or take them down,” he said.
“And so people who had nothing to do with this decision and are simply answering the phone are getting extremely vicious calls from members of the public and that’s very unfortunate.”
based mining company, has not responded to follow-up questions.
The Canadian Press
DELTA
— A police officer in Delta has been fired for sexual misconduct and providing false or misleading information.
The Office of the Police Complaint Commissioner says in a news release that an external probe by Saanich Police Chief Scott Green found that former inspector Varun Naidu engaged in inappropriate sexual communications with a woman who wanted to be a police officer.
The report says Naidu initially communicated with the woman about potential employment, then later engaged in communications of a sexual nature. The office says during the investigation, Naidu provided false or misleading evidence when investigators asked about the communications.
Green determined Naidu’s conduct was a “deliberate and calculating effort to establish safeguards that would enable him to engage in a covert and sexually explicit relationship with (the woman).”
He imposed a penalty of dismissal, although the office says Naidu retired before the discipline hearing – which Naidu did not attend – and his employment record will say he was dismissed from the Delta Police Department. In a statement on Tuesday, Chief Neil Dubord of Delta police said the department immediately contacted the police complaint commissioner’s office after receiving a complaint and Naidu was suspended in September 2018. He said the Delta Police Department supports the findings of the investigation by Saanich police and the discipline authority’s decision.
Otto said his company received the finished ad directly from True North Strong & Free Advertising Corp.
“This was not a large campaign,” Otto said. “For him to say that he had no idea of the message, I find quite surprising.” Smeenk, chief executive of a Toronto-
Otto said he was “overwhelmed” and “appalled” to see Frank Smeenk, the head of the third-party group, tell The Canadian Press he disavowed the ad and that he mistakenly did not get the chance to sign off on the controversial campaign.
Elections Canada requires all third-party partisan advertising to include a clearly visible tagline identifying the group behind it and indicating that the group has authorized the ad. Photos of the billboards show this tagline was included.
According to financial returns the group has filed with Elections Canada, True North Strong & Free Advertising spent $59,890 on
billboards to be mounted in “select cities in Canada.”
It also received $60,000 from Bassett & Walker International Inc., a company that specializes in the international trade of protein products.
Messages left at Bassett & Walker have not yet been returned.
The People’s Party of Canada did not place the ads, but Bernier has said he agreed with their message.
OTTAWA — The Conservatives’ former leader doesn’t agree with the current leader’s assertion that Canada got taken to the cleaners by Donald Trump on the renegotiated NAFTA.
Rona Ambrose, who was interim Conservative leader after the party’s 2015 election defeat, says Prime Minister Justin Trudeau did make some concessions to get a deal – particularly offering up some limited access to Canada’s supply-managed dairy sector – but also made some important gains.
“I think at the end of the day, we came out doing well,” she said in an interview Tuesday.
Andrew Scheer, who took over the Conservative helm from Ambrose in 2017, has called the new NAFTA a “historic humiliation” and has accused Trudeau of “capitulating” in the face of the mercurial U.S. president’s threats to scrap NAFTA altogether if he didn’t get a new continental trade deal favouring the United States.
Scheer raised the issue again Tuesday in a statement challenging Trudeau to take part in a leaders’ debate on foreign policy scheduled for Oct. 1, less than three weeks before the Oct. 21 federal election.
“(Trudeau) has been incredibly weak on the world stage – backing down to Donald Trump on NAFTA, humiliating Canada and severely damaging relations with India and failing to stand up for Canada’s interests in China,” he said.
Scheer’s assessment of the new NAFTA is not shared by Ambrose, who was a member of a panel Trudeau appointed to provide advice and help create a united multi-party front during the turbulent negotiations.
“I think even the most critical economic analysis shows that, in terms of any loss of GDP, it’s a wash between the U.S. and Canada and Mexico gets hardest hit,” she said.
One assessment by the C.D. Howe Institute found that all three countries will be worse off if the treaty is approved by their legislatures and comes into force: the U.S. economy will be 0.1 per cent smaller than it otherwise would have been, the Canadian economy 0.4 per cent smaller, and the Mexican economy 0.79 per cent smaller. The effects are primarily because of U.S. efforts to get more protections for its
manufacturing sector, the analysis found.
“Yes, we gave up some access (in the dairy sector) but we have to remember what we got in return, which was Chapter 19 ... That was a big one for us, for Canada,” Ambrose said.
Chapter 19 lays out the trade agreement’s dispute-resolution mechanism and is, in Ambrose’s view, “the heart of the deal for Canada.” Trump was determined to scrap it and allow American courts to judge trade disputes in future but the Trudeau government held firm that some kind of independent disputeresolution system must be part of the deal.
“It wasn’t an idle threat (from Trump),”
said Ambrose. “They were extremely critical of Chapter 19 and I think right up to the last minute it was their intent to scrap it.”
In addition, Ambrose said Canada scored success on having international labour standards and environmental principles entrenched in the deal.
Ambrose said Scheer’s criticism of the dairy concession is consistent with his strong support for supply management. Dairy farmers were instrumental in his leadership victory over Maxime Bernier, who advocated dismantling supply management and has now left the Tories to found his own party.
Scheer, who has dubbed the new trade pact NAFTA 0.5, has also criticized the deal for extending patent protection for pharmaceuticals, which could drive up the cost of prescription drugs. He’s also maintained the deal makes Canadian automakers less competitive and that it gives the U.S. “unprecedented” say over Canadian negotiations with future potential trade partners.
“The prime minister had a once-in-a-generation opportunity to negotiate a better deal and he failed,” Scheer told the House of Commons last May. “He gave Donald Trump everything the president wanted and more.”
But Ambrose said she doesn’t think Canada was outmanoeuvred by Trump.
“No. I think at the end of the day, there’s three parties, everyone gained a little and everyone gave up a little. That’s the nature of a negotiation.”
Former Conservative cabinet minister James Moore, who also served on Trudeau’s NAFTA advisory panel, refused to comment on Scheer’s contention that Trudeau caved in to Trump.
“It’s a fair question, it’s a reasonable story but I’m not going to get sucked into the election,” Moore said in an interview.
Taxpayers have a message for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
“Mr. Trudeau, tear down this house!”
The house in question is a century-and-a-half old, and hasn’t been renovated in decades. There’s still asbestos in the walls, cracks all over the place, water damage, ancient electrical wiring and dodgy plumbing. If it was put up for sale, you can bet the words “real fixer upper” and “sold as-is” would have to feature prominently in the listing.
Welcome to 24 Sussex Dr., the official residence of Canada’s prime minister.
Unsurprisingly, he doesn’t actually live there – instead, Trudeau and his young family live just down the street at Rideau Cottage, on the grounds of the Governor General’s residence, Rideau Hall.
The problem, though, is that while 24 Sussex sits empty, it still costs taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars a year just for basic upkeep – including heating it and clearing the snow in the driveway.
After years of successive governments kicking the can down the road, it’s time to finally do something – and that something is to raze the place altogether.
But isn’t it an important part of Canadian history? Not really. For starters, there’s a strong case that architecturally, it’s nothing special. In fact, a former resident of the house, Maureen McTeer – wife of former prime minister Joe Clark and an author of a book on official residences – has described the building as “completely lacking in architectural value.”
But where, you may ask, will the prime minister live? The Trudeau clan seems perfectly happy living at Rideau Cottage.
Perhaps it could become the permanent prime ministerial residence. Alternatively, both the opposition leader and speaker of the House of Commons currently get to live in official taxpayer-funded residences. Maybe one of them could give up their residence (in exchange for a housing stipend like other MPs) and one those homes could be used for the prime minister instead.
Or maybe – if the price is right – we could build something new at 24 Sussex instead.
After all, according to the latest estimate, fixing 24 Sussex would cost at least $34 million. Canada could build a lavish new home for the prime minister for a fifth of that cost, and even then, it would still be worth three times more than the grand prize for the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario Foundation home lottery.
Imagine setting a reasonable budget and holding a competition open to the archi-
I find it alarming, that Art Betke can write-off concerns with the Greenland ice-melt because of an anomaly in Africa; a higher than normal temperature that in his opinion won’t happen again.
The trouble with this shortsighted opinion is that we are experiencing a whole host of anomalies, each one defying normal climate patterns, at least in frequency and number.
We often see the Facebook posts, that show snowfall in July and August, here close to Prince George, and see some uninformed people gasp in hilarity, that such a thing as global warming exists.
How can there be global warming, when it is snowing in July?
The answer is simpler than one would think, but often ignored.
The anomalies that are happening, are happening in a closed atmosphere.
Water does not leave the confines of the atmosphere, and with the exception of a small amount of water taken into space by astronauts, the water amount on Earth is the same as it has always been.
The simple water cycle that sees water evaporate, and fall back to earth, has not changed, and when water disappears, it isn’t really gone, just in another state.
The hole in the ozone layer, deforestation and industry have started to change not just the weather but the climate as well.
Normal wind patterns and currents are now being changed, adjusted and, due to these changes, warmer temperatures are happening, ice is melting and we are slowly losing land mass.
The key point to understand is that we are inside a closed atmosphere and when something happens in one place, it effects change elsewhere, in fact, everywhere.
The snow here in July, is
because climate is changing and drought, heat, and lower humidity are occurring elsewhere.
Understanding the difference between climate and weather is essential, understanding that the biosphere is undergoing significant change, is necessary.
Understanding that the Arctic in addition to Greenland, is also melting, and to ignore it borders on irresponsible stupidity.
Earth’s climate is definitely cyclic and I will not argue that some of what is happening is natural.
There is however a massive human element to this, one never before experienced.
I would suggest that anyone questioning this pay a visit to UNBC, where some of the world’s leading research in climate change is being done. It is easy to Wikipedia information and spread rhetoric.
Understand the science first.
Mike Maslen Prince George
It is timely that Sean Ollech (letter, Aug. 21) highlights the lack of student support at CNC.
The faculty association agrees, but our solution is not to hire more tutors; rather it is to ensure that underprepared students are given every opportunity to succeed.
The college reports that just under 50 per cent of students are now international.
These students need increased student services, particularly for those students who lack fundamental skills in speaking, listening, reading, and writing in English.
But the college has chosen to eliminate, downsize or threaten the jobs of its faculty who work in student counselling, disability support, and in its learning assistance centres.
The beauty of community colleges is that they were designed
to serve students’ needs; we used to say, “Start here, go anywhere!” Class sizes are small compared to universities where students seldom see more than a tutor or teaching assistant.
College faculty keep regular office hours and help students with their studies. We believe that we now have a college board of governors that may take seriously the concerns about student services and other issues we have raised with consecutive administrations and college boards since 2001.
We now have an opportunity to convince the college board that CNC has to return to its mandate as the comprehensive community college for north central B.C.
Our members’ only interest is in teaching students and we look forward to the day when students’ access to education and student success are once again priorities for the administration at CNC.
Bill Deutch, President Faculty Association of CNC Prince George
The lead story on the local news yesterday detailed the admittance of a small dog in life threatening condition to the SPCA.
As a long term member of the organization and specifically the host of the Pet Parade program on Shaw Cable for over 25 years, I have seen and heard my share of animal neglect and cruelty. What was described was nothing short of debauchery. My thanks to those generous souls who have contributed $15,000 for the vet care so far.
I hope that the SPCA will urge the RCMP to investigate and press charges. I also hope that there is successful rehabilitation and a long life – for the dog, not the owner.
Doug Strachan Prince George
tects from around the world, giving them a rare opportunity to present a vision for a residence befitting the leader of our great country. Canadians could even participate in the process by giving feedback, or maybe even voting for the winner from a group of shortlisted finalists. We would be seizing the opportunity to put an unloved, unremarkable and moneydraining building out of its misery and replacing it with something iconic and uniquely Canadian – a unifying project in a country that could probably use a few more unifying symbols.
The bottom line is that doing nothing for decades has cost taxpayers a bundle for nothing. It’s time to bite the bullet, tear 24 Sussex down, and move on – one way or another.
— Aaron Wudrick is federal director for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.
It’s been some time since I waded into the issues surrounding both primary and secondary education. Of course that is probably for the best, as my ideological leanings do not align with the preaching from the pulpits of pedagogy popular today in the public and unionized system. But I come from a long line of beloved teachers and last year I began to substitute in the profession myself. Thus, I have some observations to put forth –take them or leave them.
Let’s begin with the student, in case we’ve forgotten why we bother building a school and filling it with staff.
The purpose of schooling is to increase a child’s knowledge and skills in math, reading, writing, history and science. “Socialization” and “self-regulation” are certainly important, but they are incidental to curricula: the object is not to create perfectly obedient citizens – the object is to create well-informed humans who can survive something as taxing as a classroom.
Speaking of those four walls teacher and student must endure, I have seen its invasion by smart boards and tablets. It has not yet been proven to me that these beat slate and chalk, paper and pen, or marker and whiteboard.
For higher math and science, as well as the few internet resources that actually instruct rather than inculcate a biased view, I can concede the usefulness. But digital malfunctions and distractions seem to waste teaching time far too often.
To prove I am not just a luddite hoping to reintroduce rote learning and dunce caps, I will mention here that computer classes are absolutely vital to the formation of students as our world continues to digitize everything. The best learning I’ve seen in this subject has been in the area of programming, with simplified lines of code needing to be properly sequenced in order for a fun task on screen to be completed. This is the stuff that will get us to Mars and I am in full support.
Of band, sports teams, and extracurricular activities, I can only say that we still seem to be stuck between the draw of private lessons or non-school leagues, and the conviction that all children must have a chance to experience
these things, a tension that has existed since before I was born. There is no solution that fits all these issues, except perhaps revisiting the question of vouchers or tax credits that will make such activities accessible to all of our schools’ families.
However, I ardently believe that the elimination of standardized testing and its ongoing denigration by particular members of the pedagogical class is perhaps the greatest scandal of our time. From uniforms to provincial exams, standards allow for the marginalized to rise to an objective and respected threshold which aids their success down the road. It is paramount that a committee of stakeholders be struck to create rubrics that test academics, arts and sports. It’s swell to dream of how to make education great again but the single biggest stumbling block to maintaining the system, let alone improving it, is the teacher shortage.
This has many causes, not least of which were the shenanigans of the previous provincial government. But as I have applied to “teachers’ school,” I can tell you the entrance requirements aren’t helping: even with my substituting experience, my lack of a university math course will now cost me a year.
Thankfully, I will be able to use these months to gain more experience in the classroom. But unless I take a 15-month program down south, there is no way to gain back the lost annum: substituting every other day until June won’t shorten UNBC’s twoyear program. And at the end, despite similar effort and time, the degree doesn’t say “Master of Arts” – it’s just another BA.
Thus, our inflation of higher education is actually inhibiting our ability to teach the next generation, all while primary and secondary curricula are being made less rigorous and more therapeutic. Until these problems are addressed, teachers and students will continue to suffer.
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The Canadian Press
Darlene Stonechild is preparing to bring a piece of her family’s history home to her southeastern Saskatchewan First Nation.
Her brother, Dale Stonechild, a prolific artist known primarily for his paintings, is one of the carvers behind a totem pole that has stood for almost 45 years on a bank of the North Saskatchewan River in Prince Albert.
The pole was created and gifted to the city by a group of inmates from Saskatchewan Penitentiary in 1975, but has to be removed because the base is rotting and it’s no longer safe.
Judy MacLeod Campbell, the city’s arts and cultural director, said that cultural protocols were followed to decide what to do with the damaged pole.
Having been told that the lead carver, James Sutherland, had likely died, and without contact information for his family, the city next consulted with elders and knowledge keepers from the Indigenous community.
It was ultimately decided the pole would be laid to rest near the penitentiary.
When Darlene Stonechild learned of that plan, she reached out to McLeod Campbell and told her she’d like to bring the artifact back to the Okanese First Nation on behalf of her brother.
“So we worked together and we worked it out,” Stonechild said. “We can display it in Okanese where his home is. This is his homeland, where his relatives are, and his grandchildren can be proud of something.”
Stonechild talks to her brother, who is in prison in Abbotsford, B.C., regularly over the phone and said he approved the plan. His sister learned about the history of the landmark from him. During the 1970s, when her brother and Sutherland were incarcerated at Saskatchewan Penitentiary, there was no recreational programming.
“So what the people of (Prince Albert) would do, they would come into the
a safety concern. Inmates work on crafting a totem pole at the Saskatchewan Penitentiary in a 1975 handout photo. Dale Stonechild sits carving at right while James Sutherland sits on the far left, also carving.
penitentiary and they’d have picnics and barbecues and play football, and soccer and play cards with the inmates,” she said.
The activities were hugely important to the prisoners, she said.
“I think they kept them sane at a time when nobody was there. Their families weren’t there.”
As a symbol of their appreciation, some of the inmates - led by Sutherland with Stonechild as his main assistant - carved the totem pole as a gift to the city.
Stonechild is responsible for much of the painting, including the wings of the thunderbird that crowns the pole.
Darlene Stonechild said her brother was always interested in art, but wasn’t able to use his gifts to their full potential early in
life. He and his siblings spent much of their childhood and adolescence attending the Gordon Indian Residential School in Punnichy, Sask.
Stonechild said her brother has struggled with the life-long effects of the physical, sexual and emotional abuse he endured there.
In 2013, he was convicted of manslaughter in the death of a Regina man during an argument when both men had been drinking.
Stonechild, 65, has six years left in his 15-year sentence. Even if he were to be released on parole, it’s unlikely the conditions would allow him to leave B.C., said his sister, so it’s unclear if and when he’ll be able to see the totem pole displayed in his
The Washington Post
When Eddie Murphy first appeared on Saturday Night Live in November 1980, the show was on the brink of extinction.
Creator Lorne Michaels had departed prior to the sixth season, most of the high-profile cast was gone and critics labeled the sketch show as “Saturday Night Dead.”
But Murphy, who will host SNL on Dec. 21 – the first time he has performed comedy on the NBC show since 1984 – became a breakout star who would later be credited with keeping the show afloat.
“Out of nowhere, Eddie saved Saturday Night Live,” comedian Chris Rock said during the NBC show’s 40th anniversary special.
“If Saturday Night Live hadn’t hired Eddie Murphy, this show wouldn’t have lasted half as long as Baywatch.” Murphy has a long history with the show that helped propel him to fame, including a long stretch when he stayed away.
A stand-up comic, Murphy was just 19 when he joined SNL. One of his first characters was Raheem Abdul Muhammed, a high school basketball player who complained about an Ohio judge’s ruling that teams had to have at least two white players. Indeed, much of the material Murphy performed tackled race in edgy and direct ways.
Sketches such as White Like Me and Mister Robinson’s Neighborhood have since become classics.
When Murphy joined, many of the show’s biggest stars from its first few years – Dan Aykroyd, Jim Belushi, Gilda Radner – had left. Much of the new cast was “cowed by the fact they were following in the footsteps of these luminaries,” former SNL writer David Sheffield told The Washington Post’s Geoff Edgers. “I remember watching Eddie and he was completely relaxed. He looked like if the set fell down on top of him, he would not give a damn.”
Soon Murphy became indispensable.
“Eddie’s the single most important performer in the history of the show,” Dick Ebersol, who returned as executive producer during Murphy’s run, previously told Edgers. Ebersol instituted a rule that Murphy had to be on-screen at least three times during the first part of the night.
“He literally saved the show.” During his four-year run on SNL, which included popular performances as Gumby, Buckwheat and
Eddie Murphy appears in 2016 at the 20th annual Hollywood Film Awards in Beverly Hills, Calif.
James Brown, Murphy was turning into a movie star.
He released box-office hits such as 48 Hours and Trading Places, and the stand-up special Delirious.
As he approached his final season in 1984, he told Rolling Stone, “I can’t wait to leave.”
He said he didn’t find the show funny anymore, and was ready to focus on his acting and music career. In the years that followed, a mythology built up that Murphy had ill will toward SNL. He declined to be interviewed for Live From New York: An Uncensored History Of Saturday Night Live, and his absence on the show’s 25th anniversary was glaring.
“Everybody had their own theory,” the book’s co-author, James Miller, told ThinkProgress in 2015. “But it wasn’t like there was a huge fistfight. I really, to tell you the truth, I think there’s many explanations out there, probably a dozen, about why it all happened.”
One of the most persistent theories had to do with a joke David Spade told during a Hollywood Minute sketch in 1995, during a career downturn for Murphy.
“Look, children,” Spade said as a photo of Murphy appeared, “it’s a falling star. Make a wish.”
According to Spade, Murphy called him up angrily to complain.
“I made a stink about it, it became part of the folklore,” Murphy told Rolling Stone. “What really irritated me about it at the time was that it was a career shot. It was like, ‘Hey, come on, man, it’s one thing for you guys to do a joke about some movie of mine, but my career? I’m one of you guys.’ “ Murphy and Spade have since reconciled, and Murphy has also spoken publicly about how much SNL meant to him.
In a highly anticipated return, Murphy appeared during the 40th anniversary episode.
He expressed gratitude that people valued “the stuff I did 35 years ago on the show” and said “I will always love this show.” But then he ended his appearance without telling a single joke. Later, it was revealed that the show had wanted him to impersonate Bill Cosby.
“I totally understood,” Murphy said. “It was the biggest thing in the news at the time. I can see why they thought it would be funny, and the sketch that Norm (Macdonald) wrote was hysterical.”
But, he added, the Cosby story was “horrible. There’s nothing funny about it. If you get up there and you crack jokes about him, you’re just hurting people. You’re hurting him. You’re hurting his accusers. I was like, ‘Hey, I’m coming back to SNL for the anniversary, I’m not turning my moment on the show into this other thing.’”
Now, Murphy is prepping for another return to the spotlight, with rumors that a Netflix standup special is in the works.
He recently appeared in the latest season of Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee on Netflix and will be in next month’s Netflix movie Dolemite is My Name. He’ll also reprised his role as Prince Akeem in the hotly anticipated Coming To America sequel, due out in 2020.
Given the resurgence, it makes sense that Murphy has chosen now as the time to return to SNL.
“This show is such a big part of who I am,” Murphy said during his 40th anniversary appearance. And being at Studio 8H, he said, “feels like going back to my old high school.”
home community.
She is planning to come to Prince Albert to get the pole in September. There is to be a ceremony as it is taken down and it will then be transported by flatbed truck to the Okanese First Nation near Balcarres, about 85 kilometres northeast of Regina.
The Stonechild family and the First Nation will cover the cost of the move.
Stonechild said she wants to emphasize the gratitude she feels towards the city of Prince Albert for letting her take the totem pole and looks forward to displaying it in her yard.
“For myself and my relatives – Dale’s relatives – it’s a lot of pride. It’s his art that’s coming home, a piece of history, his history is coming home.”
The Canadian Press
Reka Rossignol remembers feeling a mix of frustration and fear while trying to get an incoherent friend back to their dorm after a night of drinking during their first year in university.
Campus security at the school in northern Ontario had just informed them that a bear had been spotted nearby and ordered everyone inside.
Rossignol asked for help getting home but was told all security could do was call an ambulance for the young woman who was having trouble staying upright – something neither of the two students wanted.
The pair somehow struggled to their beds but, four years later, the memory of the night has stayed with Rossignol.
Binge drinking at the off-campus party like the one they were at was rampant, pressure to get drunk in the first place was high, and support for those who had too much was hard to come by, said the 23-year-old, who uses gender neutral pronouns.
“Everyone was partying on the weekends and everyone was binge drinking,” they said. “There’s a lot of this toxic kind of culture of having to prove yourself. People want you to prove yourself as being a partier or being a big drinker and the more booze you can take the cooler you are.”
Research suggests binge drinking among youth, and women in particular, may be on the rise, with a recent study indicating a spike in emergency room visits related to alcohol issues by those groups.
Several universities are tackling the issue by reconsidering how they run their orientation week activities, placing harm reduction and an emphasis on students educating students about the risks of binge drinking at the centre of their initiatives.
At Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont., the school has a dry orientation – or frosh – week, as well as campus security and a first aid team available around the clock.
Beth Blackett, health promotion co-ordinator at Queen’s, said educational awareness happens at a peer-to-peer level during the week, with upper-year volunteers teaching new students everything
from how to maintain a low blood alcohol concentration to pointers on how to safely pour a standard drink.
“Students, especially, think that others are drinking way more or way more often than they actually are,” said Blackett, who added that students showing other students how to have fun without alcohol can have a positive effect.
All orientation facilitators and leaders sign contracts promising to remain sober throughout the week and undergo harm-reduction training, she said.
Since 1990, the school has also had an onsite non-medical detox facility called the “campus observation room,” which provides a safe place for students under the influence where they can be monitored by staff.
The University of Toronto’s campus in Mississauga, Ont., has dry
orientation programs as well. The school works with student clubs to support them for their events and even pub nights during frosh week are “completely dry,” said Jessica Silver, the director of student engagement on campus.
Carleton University in Ottawa is also hosting a dry frosh, led by roughly 500 facilitators and 100 frosh leaders.
Douglas Cochrane, president of university’s student-run Rideau River Residence Association, said the orientation will try to correct perceived notions of how much university students drink.
“There’s no hiding it, binge drinking does happen on university and college campuses,” said Cochrane. “It’s important for both the university administration and also student organizations such as ourselves to be proactive instead of reactive to these situations.”
Research certainly backs up the anecdotal evidence that binge drinking is an issue among youth.
In July, a study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal looked at patterns in alcohol-related ER visits in Ontario between 2003 and 2016.
The rate of alcohol-related ER visits spiked by 175 per cent among individuals aged 25 to 29.
The change was even more pronounced among young women, who saw an increase of 240 per cent, the study showed.
Ann Johnston, who authored the book Drink: The Intimate Relationship Between Women and Alcohol, pointed to a shift in cultural norms as an explanation. It’s more acceptable for women to drink than in the past, she said, with the alcohol industry aiming marketing specifically towards women.
A “pinking” of the market since the mid-1990s has seen the invention of “alcopop” drinks like Mike’s Hard Lemonade, Skinnygirl Cocktails and Smirnoff Ice that are typically aimed at young women, she noted.
“In our culture we drink to celebrate, relax, reward and we are completely sold on the notion that alcohol is a great way to unwind,” she said.
Johnston, who also co-founded the advocacy group the National Roundtable on Girls, Women and Alcohol, said the way to combat the issue is to increase awareness around low-risk drinking guidelines and scale back access to alcohol.
“There are three leaders that you can push on: marketing, accessibility, and pricing,” she said. “That changes the way a population drinks.”
The Canadian Press Isaac Kohtakangas realized something was wrong as he was playing a round of golf in 2011. The business intelligence analyst from Calgary had been having some difficulty with his balance, but it was a sudden loss of vision that gave him cause for alarm. “I just noticed when I hit the ball it was gone and I couldn’t track it at all,” he said. Kohtakangas was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, an autoimmune disease of the central nervous system which attacks myelin, the protective covering of the nerves, causing inflammation and often damage
and disruption of nerve impulses.
The 38-year-old is one of two patients undergoing a 14-week neurological treatment program at Calgary’s Synaptic Spinal Cord Injury and Neuro Rehabilitation Centre. Executive director Uyen Nguyen says.
A device called PoNS – short for portable neuromodulation stimulator – sits on the surface of the tongue and delivers mild, high-frequency electrical impulses while the patient undergoes an intense regimen of daily physiotherapy. The hope is the tiny tingles lead to neuroplasticity and encourage new neural connections. Clinics in Surrey and Montreal also offer the therapy.
Synaptic executive director Uyen Nguyen says Canada is the only country to have approved the therapy clinically.
Kohtakangas said he had done his own research on the device before deciding to try it. “It sounded like snake oil, like black-magic-type stuff. I was very interested at that point. I looked into it more and was really hopeful that I could actually do it because it sounded amazing.”
He said he’s optimistic it will “rewire” his brain. “I’m really hoping to just improve my mobility in any way and my balance. If I could walk without a cane that would be amazing. Right now, I can walk for about
15 or 20 minutes and then I need a break.” The device is part of an intense workout. After a half hour working on his balance, he gets on a treadmill before finishing up by strolling – with a somewhat unsteady gait –around the workout area.
Nguyen said there is no pain involved with the device, which she tried during training.
“For those of us old enough to remember ... it’s like Pop Rocks, maybe, with a can of Coke on top of it, so it can get pretty intense. That’s what it feels like – kind of a tingling and popping sensation in your mouth.”
Jackson Block of Kelowna has a narrow lead on Dallas Hall of Prince George as the pair race around the track at Rolling Mix Supertrak BMX Park on Saturday afternoon while competing in a moto race of the BMX Canada Northern Lights National No. 1.
Ted CLARKE Citizen staff tclarke@pgcitizen.ca
Keaton Dowhaniuk is getting to know the lay of the land.
As the third player picked in the 2019 WHL bantam draft he knows his hockey home will be in Prince George playing for the Cougars, once he’s old enough to play in the league.
For now, this is his time to show the Cougars what they can expect in future seasons from the 15-year-old from Sherwood Park, Alta., touted as the top defenceman available in the 2019 bantam crop.
The six-foot, 155-pound Dowhaniuk played in the Young Guns game Friday and will be wearing a blue the rest of training camp playing for Team Chara.
“It’s awesome, the rink’s really nice and lads are cool too,” he said. “I’ve talked to a few of them and they seem nice. It’s just one more step.”
During the season, under-agers are limited to just five games of
junior until their team is finished its season.
Dowhaniuk knows his time will come soon to play a regular season game with the Cougars and get his feet wet in the WHL.
“I want to be called up whenever they need me and know that they’ll get a reliable d-man,” he said. “Hopefully I’ll stay to the end of pre-season.”
His 17-year-old brother Logan plays in the league as a defenceman, about to begin his second season with the Edmonton Oil Kings. Keaton is hoping their paths will cross next month in Dawson Creek, where the Cougars and Oil Kings meet for exhibition games Sept. 12 and 14.
“We work out together and skate together and it’s pretty competitive,” said Keaton. “We throw bets on the line all the time, it’s pretty fun. If I make preseason, we’ll play him in Dawson Creek.”
In 25 games on the blueline last season in the Canadian Sport School Hockey League Dowhaniuk scored eight goals and had 27 as-
sists for 35 points, with 34 minutes on penalties.
“Keaton obviously brings a complete skillset package to the game, his skating is extremely strong, defensively he’s sound but he also activates into the play effectively and generates offence and he’s capable of quarterbacking the power play,” said Bob Simmonds, the Cougars’ director of scouting.
“He’s a very feisty player and we like everything he brings to the game.”
One of Dowhaniuk teammates last season with the Edmonton Okanagan Hockey Academy bantam prep team was centre Koehn Ziemmer, whose name was called by the Cougars right after his, picked fourth overall in the May draft. Dowhaniuk drew power-play duty with Ziemmer, a centre who lit it up with 37 goals and 39 assists for 76 points in just 29 games.
Ziemmer won’t reach his 15th birthday until Dec. 8, but already has a junior-sized body at fivefoot-11 and 175 pounds. For the
rest of camp he will be wearing black with Team Connolly.
“Ziemmer is a big solid boy and a powerful skater with a very strong shot, it’s deadly accurate,” said Simmonds. “He’s a scorer, he knows where he needs to go to put the puck in the net and he’s certainly physically strong enough to get there.”
Playing on line with Alex Ochitwa and Blake Eastman, Ziemmer drew a couple of assists for Team Hamhuis in the Young Guns game Friday, which ended in a 6-5 overtime loss to Dowhaniuk’s Team Brewer. “I thought I played pretty good in the first half but kind of slowed down in the second, tired out a little bit,” said Ziemmer. We had two practices the other day so it was my third time on the ice.
“The first couple days I just want to get the nerves out and set the speed for the games.”
Ziemmer went in to score twice Sunday afternoon against Team Bourke.
Heading into the draft the Cats had their own fourth-overall
A season that began with Tiger Woods celebrating a fifth Masters title ended with a fifth surgery on his left knee. This one wasn’t serious. Woods said Tuesday on Twitter he had arthroscopic surgery last week to repair what he described as minor cartilage damage. In a statement Woods released on social media, Dr. Vern Cooley said he looked at the rest of the knee and found no additional problems.
“I’m walking now and hope to resume practice in the next few weeks,” Woods said, adding that he looked forward to travelling to Japan in October for a planned Skins Game exhibition and the ZoZo Championship on Oct. 24-27. Mark Steinberg, his agent at Excel Sports, described the knee as little more than “irritating.”
“It was bothering him, but arthroscopic these days is different than we had years and years ago,” Steinberg said. “He’s up and walking now. This will have no effect on the fall or winter.”
Woods has a light schedule the rest of the year – Japan in late October, his Hero World Challenge in the Bahamas the first week of December and then the Presidents Cup at Royal Melbourne in Australia.
He is the U.S. captain and could play as a captain’s pick. He won’t have to make that decision until a week after the Japan event. Woods has dealt primarily with back
issues the last six years. He had the first of four back surgeries in the spring of 2014, and the last one in 2017 to fuse his lower spine when it reached a point he feared he might never compete again. He returned a year later and capped
off his comeback with a victory in the Tour Championship. The final piece was a major, and Woods delivered the most memorable week of the year in April at Augusta National when he won the Masters for his 15th major.
But that was his lone highlight. He missed the cut in the PGA Championship and the British Open and was never a factor in the Memorial or the U.S. Open.
He withdrew after the opening round of The Northern Trust to start the FedEx Cup playoffs, and he failed to reach the Tour Championship. He said about his health at the BMW Championship that “body-wise it’s the same. If it’s not one thing, it’s another. Things just pop up.”
“I’m making tweaks and changes trying to play around this back and trying to be explosive and have enough rest time and training time,” he said at Medinah. “That’s been the biggest challenge of it all.”
Woods first had surgery on his left knee as a freshman at Stanford in 1994 to remove two benign tumors and scar tissue. He had arthroscopic surgery to remove fluid and cysts after the 2002 season, and another after the 2008 Masters to repair cartilage damage.
Two months later, after winning the 2008 U.S. Open, he had reconstructive surgery to repair his ACL.
Steinberg described this surgery as “more cleanup maintenance.”
choice and also held Swift Current’s second-overall pick as the result of a trade they made two years ago which sent Josh Anderson to the Broncos. At the draft table they traded Swift Current’s pick to the Winnipeg Ice for the third-overall pick which they used to select Dowhaniuk and also picked up the Ice’s third rounder in 2020.
Ziemmer had already gone home to Mayerthorpe when the Cougars made their choices and Dowhaniuk was the first to text him the news. Ziemmer figures the Cougars were wise to latch on to him.
“He’s a really good two-way defenceman, he can score goals but he’s really good on the back end,” said Ziemmer. “He’s a really good teammate, nice with all the guys and a big leader.”
Dowhaniuk is going back to OHA to play for the midget prep team, while Ziemmer, a native of Mayerthorpe, Alta., plans to play this season for the triple-A midget squad in St. Albert.
Citizen staff
Russian president Vladimir Putin now knows how dangerous Prince George hockey player Jeremy Gervais is with a stick in his hands. Putin was in attendance Saturday at Junior Club World Cup opener in Sochi, Russia and watched Gervais and his Alberta Junior Hockey League selects play the opening game of the tournament against Loko Yaroslavl of Russia.
Gervais gave the AJHL a 2-0 lead when he took a cross-ice pass and scored a power-play goal 4:33 into the first period but Loko fired three unanswered goals for a 3-2 victory.
On Sunday, Carter Savoie of the Sherwood Park Crusaders scored a natural hat trick to complete the comeback in a 5-4 AJHL win over Modo of Sweden. Jordan Biro (Spruce Grove Saints) scored the first two goals for the AJHL, and they trailed 3-1 after one period.
Gervais, a 20-year-old defenceman, is about to begin his second season in the AJHL for the Bonnyville Pontiacs after beginning his junior career in the BCHL with the Nanaimo Clippers. His Pontiacs teammate, forward Daine Dubois of Williams Lake, is also in Russia playing for the AJHL team. Dubois, who turns 20 on Sept. 13, played two years of major midget hockey with Gervais in Prince George from 2015-17 with the Cariboo Cougars.
Gervais won the top defenceman award playing for Cariboo at the 2016 Telus Cup national midget championship. The eight-team tournament wraps up on Saturday.
The Washington Post
U.S. President Donald Trump has instructed Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue to exempt Alaska’s 16.7 million-acre Tongass National Forest from logging restrictions imposed nearly 20 years ago, according to three people briefed on the issue, after privately discussing the matter with the state’s governor.
The move would affect more than half of the world’s largest intact temperate rainforest, opening it up to potential logging, energy and mining projects. It would undercut a sweeping Clinton administration policy known as the “roadless rule” that has survived a decades-long legal assault.
Trump has taken a personal interest in “forest management,” a term he told a group of lawmakers last year he has “redefined” since taking office.
Politicians have tussled for years over the fate of the Tongass, a massive stretch of southeastern Alaska replete with old-growth spruce, hemlock and cedar, rivers running with salmon, and dramatic fjords. Bill Clinton put more than half of it off limits to logging just days before leaving office in 2001, when he barred the construction of roads in 58.5 million acres of undeveloped national forest across the country. George W. Bush sought to reverse that policy, holding a handful of timber sales in the Tongass before a federal judge reinstated the Clinton rule.
Trump’s decision to weigh in, at a time when Forest Service officials had planned much more modest changes to managing the agency’s single largest holding, revives a battle that the previous administration had aimed to settle.
In 2016, the agency finalized a plan to phase out old-growth logging in the Tongass within a decade. Congress has designated more than 5.7 million acres of the forest as wilderness, which must remain undeveloped under any circumstances.
Timber provides a small fraction of southeast Alaska’s jobs – just under one per cent, according to the regional development organization Southeast Conference, compared with seafood processing’s eight per cent and tourism’s 17 per cent.
But Alaskans, including Gov. Michael Dunleavy, R, and Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R, have pressed Trump to exempt their state from the roadless rule, which does not allow roads except when the Forest Service approves specific projects. It bars commercial logging.
In a statement, Murkowski said all of Alaska’s elected officials have sought to block the roadless rule.
“It should never have been applied to our state, and it is harming our ability to develop a sustainable, year-round economy for the Southeast region, where less than one percent of the land is privately held,” she said. “The timber industry has declined precipitously, and it is astonishing that the few remaining mills in our nation’s largest national forest have to constantly worry about running out of supply.”
Alaskans have found a powerful ally in the president. Speaking to reporters on June 26, after meeting with Trump during a refueling
stop at Elmendorf Air Force Base, Dunleavy said of the president, “He really believes in the opportunities here in Alaska, and he’s done everything he can to work with us on our mining concerns, timber concerns; we talked about tariffs as well. We’re working on a whole bunch of things together, but the president does care very much about the state of Alaska.”
Trump expressed support for exempting the Tongass from the roadless rule during that conversation with Dunleavy, according to three people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. Earlier this month, Trump told Perdue to issue a plan to that effect this fall, these individuals said.
It is unclear how much logging would take place in the Tongass if federal restrictions were lifted, since the Forest Service would have to amend its existing management plan to hold a new timber sale. The 2016 plan identified 962,000 acres as suitable for commercial timber and suggested no more than 568,000 acres of that should be logged.
John Schoen, a retired wildlife ecologist who worked in the Tongass for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, co-authored a 2013 research paper finding that roughly half of the forest’s large old-growth trees had been logged last century. The remaining big trees provide critical habitat for black bear, Sitka black-tailed deer, a bird of prey called the Northern Goshawk and other species, he added.
Trump has frequently talked with his advisers about how to manage the nation’s forests, and
signed an executive order last year aimed at increasing logging by streamlining federal environmental reviews of these projects. The president came under fire after suggesting during a visit to Paradise, the California community devastated by a 2018 wildfire, that the United States could curb such disasters by following Finland’s model since that nation spends “a lot of time on raking and cleaning and doing things, and they don’t have any problem.”
The president has peppered Perdue with questions about forest management and has indicated that he wants to weigh in on any major forestry decision, according to current and former aides. Trump wanted to deprive California of federal funds in retaliation for the way they managed the state’s forests, but he ultimately did not follow up on the plan.
White House and Agriculture Department officials referred questions to the Forest Service, which declined to comment. But the three people who spoke on the condition of anonymity said it was forging ahead with an exemption at Perdue’s instructions.
Chris Wood, president of Trout Unlimited, joined with local business owners, conservation and outdoors groups in urging federal officials to make more limited changes to the rule. He said the shift could jeopardize the region’s commercial, sport and subsistence salmon fishing industry.
About 40 per cent of wild salmon that make their way down the West Coast spawn in the Tongass: the Forest Service estimates that the salmon industry generates $986 million annually. Returning
salmon bring nutrients with them that sustain forest growth, while intact stands of trees keep streams cool and trap sediment.
Wood, who worked on the Clinton rule while at the Forest Service, said that in recent years agency officials have “realized the golden goose is the salmon, not the trees.”
“They need to keep the trees standing in order to keep the fish in the creeks,” Wood said.
The question over what sort of roads should be built in America’s remaining wild forests sparked intense battles in the 1990s, culminating in the 2001 rule affecting a third of the Forest Service’s holdings in a dozen states. Some Western governors, including in Idaho and Wyoming, challenged the restrictions.
In some cases, conservationists and developers have been able to forge a compromise. A decade ago, for example, Idaho officials opened up roughly 400,000 acres of roadless areas to ease operations for a phosphate mine while protecting 8.9 million acres in exchange. But in Alaska consensus has been more elusive, with many state officials arguing that the limits have hampered development.
The Forest Service has approved at least 55 projects in roadless areas, according to the agency, including 36 mining projects and 10 projects related to the power sector. Most projects win approval “within a month of submission,” according to an agency fact sheet.
But Robert Venables, executive director of Southeast Conference, said permitting for some projects has taken years and made them too costly to complete.
U.S. stock markets fell after taking their lead from the bond market, which responded to the deepest yield curve inversion since 2007.
Stocks fell as soon as the gap between the two- and 10-year curves further deepened into the red.
The S&P/TSX composite index closed up 84.80 points at 16,183.59. In New York, the Dow Jones industrial average was down 120.93 points at 25,777.90. The S&P 500 index was down 9.22 points at 2,869.16, while the Nasdaq composite was down 26.79 points at 7,826.95. Seven of the 11 major sectors on the TSX closed higher led by materials, which climbed 2.56 per cent, as more people sought safety in gold. Centerra Gold Inc. surged 7.7 per cent while shares of several other producers increased by more than three per cent.
The December gold contract was up US$14.60 at US$1,551.80 an ounce, the highest level since April 2013.
The September copper contract was up 0.4 of a cent at US$2.55 a pound.
Technology was pushed higher by Shopify Inc. shares gaining 3.27 per cent.
Health care lost 3.2 per cent with Canopy Growth Corp falling by nearly six per cent. Energy dipped even though crude oil prices increased, on worries about Tropical Storm Dorian approaching Puerto Rico at near-hurricane strength. The Canadian dollar traded for an average of 75.41 cents US, compared with 75.31 cents US on Monday.
Harvena Catherine Price
December 24, 1937 to August 21, 2019
Doris Price (nee Ter Haar) (born Stewart) is survived by daughters Lydia (Jack), Chris (Jim), Lisbeth (Norm), Wendy (Eddy) & Katina. She was known as Gram to her 14 grandchildren and 25 great grandchildren. She was predeceased by her son Jeffery Ter Haar. A celebration of Doris’s life is planned for Saturday August 31, 2019 at 1:00pm, at Elder Citizens’ Recreation Centre, 1692 10th Ave, Prince George. Please join us afterwards for refreshments and sandwiches. In lieu of flowers please give a donation to Hospice House.
Edith Heavysides
June 11, 1924August 14, 2019
The family of Edith is saddened to announce her passing Aug 14, 2019 at the age of 95. She lived a long and full life enjoying it all very independently. Edith was predeceased by both her parents, Bill and Mary, husband Stanley, son Stanley Jr. and daughter Darlene. She will be forever loved and remembered by daughters Linda (Dave), and Carol (Dale), grandchildren and great grandchildren. Edith is survived by her sister Lena and family, many friends and extended family. A special thanks to the medical staff at UHNBC and to friends who cared for her. No service by request. A celebration of life to be held on Aug 31st at the Pomeroy Hotel, room 1&2 from 1:00-3:00pm. Bring your memories and stories of Edith to share!
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