The power outage on Wednesday night was the reason behind the extra-large flare coming out of the Husky Energy refinery’s stacks.
In an email response to the Citizen, company spokesperson Kim Guttormson said
the outage caused all of the refinery’s units to shut down and when that happens, the equipment needs to be depressurized.
As part of the process, light hydrocarbons are released into a system which safely handles them through flaring.
“When a shutdown happens suddenly (compared to a planned shutdown), a
Sawmill closures put drag on otherwise strong economy
Nelson BENNETT Glacier Media
As of May this year, an estimated 4,385 workers were employed on the $8.8 billion Site C dam construction project near Fort St. John. Kitimat and Terrace are humming with activity, thanks to the $40 billion LNG Canada-Coastal GasLink pipeline project. Port expansion in Prince Rupert has created an additional 1,000 jobs since 2016. Employment is strong in the Dawson Creek-Tumbler RidgeChetwynd triangle, thanks in part to Conuma Coal Resources reopening a third mine – Willow Creek – last year. And in the Golden Triangle of northwest B.C., mining exploration spending was up by about
$165 million in 2018, according to EY.
Economic growth in B.C.’s north is reflected in housing starts and construction permits.
Residential building permits in northern B.C. were up 30 per cent in 2018 compared with the total in 2017. In addition, industrial permits were up 427 per cent and institutional and government building permits were up 42 per cent, according to the annual State of the North report.
Overall, indicators show northern B.C.’s economy growing in 2018. But in small, forestry-dependent communities like Mackenzie and Fort St. James, it’s a very different story.
Both have been hit hard recently with sawmill closures and curtailments.
greater amount of light hydrocarbons are released, which leads to a larger flare,” Guttormson said. “In these cases there is often a smokier flare as steam, which is normally applied to the flare, isn’t available.”
Especially amidst the darkness that enveloped the city, the plume made for a spectacular sight while also prompting concerns
“You go to Kitimat and Terrace right now, things are hopping,” said Joel McKay, CEO of the Northern Development Initiative Trust, which publishes the State of the North report.
“In Prince Rupert, where you’ve got the Port of Prince Rupert – you know, hundreds of new jobs created in a couple of years with their expansion – lots of activity there. So no question about it, some of those major industrial projects are really helping to keep some communities afloat,” McKay said.
“If you pop up north to Mackenzie, Fort St. James, Vanderhoof, Fraser Lake and then down Highway 97 into the Cariboo, that’s where you start to see the impacts of the downturn in forestry. And that is a different story.”
— see ‘WHAT HAPPENED, page 3
that the refinery was on fire. It was not, nor was the refinery the cause of the outage. Instead, B.C. Hydro says it suspects a lightning strike led to a transmission failure that left most of the city without power for about 20 minutes, and affected more than 120,000 customers across northern B.C. — with files from The Canadian Press
Suspected home invader in custody
Citizen staff
A 37-year-old Prince George man is in custody and faces charges after allegedly breaking into a home and assaulting an elderly woman.
Phillip Christopher Roy Wood was arrested early Thursday morning after Prince George RCMP were called to a report of a home invasion.
Police were told a lone male had gained entry into a unit in a downtown-area apartment building and attacked the woman who as asleep in her bed at the time before taking off with a small quantity of cash. Wood was arrested a short distance away after officers, including a dog and handler,
converged on the scene at about 3 a.m. The woman was taken to hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.
Charges of break and enter to commit a robbery, robbery, assault causing bodily harm and failing to comply with an undertaking have been approved against Wood.
“This is an especially despicable crime” said Cpl. Craig Douglass. “To forcibly invade the privacy of someone’s home is absolutely horrible. To assault the 74-year-old resident is a whole other level of disgusting.” Although Wood currently lives in Prince George, RCMP said he has spent a significant amount of time in Fort St. John and Terrace and is well known to police.
Foodie Fridays extended to next week
Citizen staff
The Foodie Fridays run has been extended by two events.
The midday combination of local food trucks, street vendors, and live music will be held this Friday and next at Wood Innovation Square downtown.
The White Goose Bistro, Smokey J’s, North City Donair and Spicy
Greens are confirmed for both days and the Frozen Paddle will be serving ice cream at the park on Sept. 20. As it stands, the event has been more popular than ever, according to city hall.
Average daily attendance has been 563 people compared with 486 in 2018, and 425 in 2017.
“The extension of Foodie Fridays was driven by the participating
food vendors simply not wanting the event to end for the season, and the numbers indicate that neither does the public,” said civic events coordinator Jen Rubadeau. Food truck operators, restaurant operators, or licensed food vendors interested in participating can contact Rubadeau at 250-6147880 or jen.rubadeau@princegeorge.ca.
NEWS IN BRIEF
Driver sentenced for hit and run
A 40-year-old Prince George man was prohibited from driving for one year for a hit and run.
Kevin William Fowler was also sentenced to a six-month conditional sentence order and ordered to provide a DNA sample for the May 5, 2018 incident in which a cyclist was taken to hospital following a collision on University Way near the University of Northern British Columbia.
Fowler turned himself into police two days later after Prince George RCMP issued a call for help from the public in their search for a suspect. They had been looking for a half-ton pickup truck. The sentence was issued Wednesday in provincial court. — Citizen staff
Rollover kills passenger
North District RCMP say speed and alcohol may have played roles in a single-vehicle rollover that killed a 21-year-old Valemount woman on Wednesday evening.
The woman was ejected from the vehicle when it went off the road on Highway 16 by the Penny Access Road east of Purden Lake, Cpl. Madonna Saunderson said.
She said the vehicle was seen proceeding in an erratic manner prior to the crash and when police arrived they found it in a ditch on its roof. The woman was airlifted to hospital where she later died.
The driver, a 41-year-old man also from Valemount, suffered minor injuries. Names of the two were not provided.
RCMP were called to the scene just after 5 p.m. and the stretch remained closed for about six hours in both directions to allow investigators to gather evidence.
The investigation continues, Saunderson said.
— Citizen staff
Sentence issued for drunk driving
A Prince George man was prohibited from driving for one year for driving a pickup truck into a light standard.
Wade Kerr was also fined $2,000 under the terms issued Wednesday in provincial court for driving with a blood-alcohol level over .08 in relation to the Dec. 18, 2018 incident.
At the time, RCMP said they were called at about 3 a.m. to the scene of a crash on Highway 16 East at Boundary Road. The truck was extensively damaged and its lone occupant was taken to hospital with serious injuries.
— Citizen staff
Paving work slated for airport
A paving project is scheduled for Prince George Airport.
On Sunday, the main road to the terminal will be milled to prepare for resurfacing and, weather permitting, the actual paving will begin next Wednesday.
Traffic will be restricted to a single lane and drivers can expect a rough surface. Altimeter Road and Beacon Road, as well as the extension to the airport’s long-term parking lot will also be paved. “Motorists should drive slowly and watch for signage and workers,” airport officials advised. Also, the dates and times for firefighter training at the airport have been set for this month. They are today from 1:30-3 p.m., Monday from 7-9 a.m. and 1:303 p.m., Sept. 23 from 1:30-3 p.m., Sept. 26, from 1:30-3 p.m. and Sept. 27 from 1:30-3 p.m. “At times, smoke may be seen coming from the airport grounds. Fires are lit and quickly extinguished in a controlled, self-contained environment, and the public is not at risk,” officials said. “Live fire training is a mandatory component of airport operations training.”
— Citizen staff
Jail’n’Bail today
High-profile Prince George residents will be finding themselves behind bars today when the annual Cops for Cancer Jail’n’Bail fundraiser in the name of the Canadian Cancer Society will be held. For anything from violating good fashion sense to spending too much time at work, RCMP will be bringing arrestees to a makeshift jail at Northland Dodge where they will be given a phone and asked to call their friends and families to raise “bail.”
All the money collected will go pediatric cancer research and Camp Goodtimes for children with cancer and their families
The event comes in advance of the annual Cops for Cancer Tour de North cycle from Fort St. John to Williams Lake, which starts on Tuesday.
— Citizen staff
Stolen
items found on rural acreage
Dozens of allegedly-stolen items have been seized from a rural property north of Nukko Lake, Prince George RCMP said Thursday.
They include seven vehicles, five all-terrain vehicles, one dirt bike, one snow blade, eight generators, two compressors, a propane heater, a portable fuel storage tank, five loaded guns, ammunition, a crossbow, several power tools and a number of chainsaws.
The action came after a pickup truck was reported stolen on Monday morning. A subsequent investigation led RCMP to obtain a search warrant for a property on Moldowan Cutoff Road.
“All of these items are confirmed or believed to have been stolen,” said RCMP, who added that one of the vehicles had been stolen from Vanderhoof and another from Quesnel and that two of the ATVs were confirmed as stolen.
Six people were arrested but have not yet been charged and their names were not released.
“The investigation is in the early stages,” RCMP added. “More details may be released as the investigation continues.”
Efforts to identify the items’ owners is underway, RCMP said.
— Citizen staff
CITIZEN PHOTO BY BRENT BRAATEN
Grace Hoksbergen, 14, sings and plays guitar at Foodie Friday at Canada Games Plaza in July. Foodie Fridays will return today and next week.
The keys you forgot to customer
Unfortunately, really great customer service is hard to find. Yet as North American consumers we say we want a wonderful customer service experience but have come to expect something much less than wonderful. Sometimes we get exceedingly bad customer service; we rant and we rage. We believe that when we are doing business with a company, that company should have our interests in mind not the bottom line. Keeping our customers thrilled so that they want to do business with us again and even more than that they want to tell their friends about how great the experience was is an elusive goal.
Customer service is that awkward thing that few companies really do right. Next week I will be on the road giving a seminar on customer service. Its true as businesses, we train our staff on customers service… about once a year. We tell our employees that the customers are always right… but we act as if they are never right. We say that we want to focus on the customer but we are always glaring at the numbers.
One day we have great customer service because Happy, one of our employees, is really good. But the next time our customer comes back they get our other staff member, Grumpy, who really doesn’t like people.
Business has been pretty good in general for most industries over the last decade or so. Stock prices are at an all-time high and many companies are making good profit. It seems that in many markets its hard to fill jobs with qualified people. However, with changes in technology, competition, and expectations, many businesses are having to re-look at their customers service in order to ensure that
they are viable in the future. Let’s face it, if we aren’t creating value for our customers, if we are treating them badly, or if our competition is giving them something over and above what we are doing, they are going to walk. So much for profits then. So what are the keys to customer service that many businesses have forgotten while the good times were rolling?
1. Customers want to be served by people that like people and do their job. Author Scott McKain says that 68 per cent of customers leave a business because they were put off by an employee’s bad attitude. Only four per cent of customers will ever report it, the rest just leave. We need to hire people with the right attitude and train them appropriately. Our employees need to be consistent and congruent. They need to keep their word and give the same great level of service to our customers, each and every time. This cannot be done without systemizing the steps to ensure that our customers or clients go away raving not raging about the service they received.
2. Grow a backbone and keep your employees accountable. Unfortunately, many of our businesses overlook the crappy attitude of some employees. We say things like “oh that’s just Mrs. Jones complaining… she always complains, James isn’t really as bad as she says.” We get tired of hearing the complaints from customers about James and we block them out. We don’t want to do anything about James and how he is treating the customers because we don’t want
Plane pain
Members of the media inspect the wing from Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau’s campaign plane after being struck by the media bus in Victoria on Wednesday.
service
to rock the boat. We are scared of having a conflict with James which is, according to Patrick Lencioni, one of the 5 Dysfunctions of a Team.
Unfortunately, because we don’t keep our employees accountable Mrs. Jones, and her friends and their friends, will just have to take their business elsewhere. About James, well, it’s really hard to find employees so we just leave James doing what he is doing: running our business into the ground.
3. Figure out how to exceed your customers’ expectations. You and your team know your business better than anybody else. You know what your customers expect from past experience, or at least you should. So, go and figure out how you can exceed your customers’ expectations. Do they want simplicity, speed, value, experience or something else? If you don’t know, just ask them. What can you do that your competition doesn’t, that will really make your customers say “Wow! That was really great customers service. I think I will tell my friends.”
Customer service is not rocket science, but it takes the same commitment it took to put a man on the moon. It needs a serious consistent approach that is firm in its resolve to give our customers reasons to keep doing business with us. When we forget the key reasons why we are in business… which is to serve our customers and create value for them, all will be lost in a short period of time, and we will be looking for something else to do.
Dave Fuller, MBA, is an awardwinning business coach and the author of the book Profit Yourself Healthy. If you would like a complementary experience of business coaching that you are unlikely to forget, email dave@profityourselfhealthy.com.
‘What happened this year was it all kind of came at once’
— from page 1
“Those communities are concerned about the residents they’re going to lose, their future tax base in order to deliver services.”
Whether it is fisheries, forestry, mining or oil and gas, resource industries are cyclical, so many northern communities will always be vulnerable to boomand-bust cycles.
But the recent downturn in forestry has been particularly severe.
In Mackenzie, some 600 sawmill workers, loggers and truck drivers are suddenly out of work, thanks to the permanent closure of a Canfor sawmill and extended curtailment at a Conifex Timber mill.
In Fort St. James, 170 sawmill workers were laid off when Conifex closed its sawmill there. Conifex hopes to sell the mill to Hampton Lumber.
B.C.’s timber supply is in a long-term decline, thanks to the mountain pine beetle infestation and forest fires, which have taken more than 50 per cent of the merchantable timber out of the annual allowable cut.
High lumber prices in the U.S. forestalled the inevitable mill closures. But when prices started to fall, the sawmill closures and curtailments came quickly and have left communities like Mackenzie and Fort St. James reeling.
“It comes as zero surprise to anybody who’s been watching forestry for a while that there was going to be a downturn and it was going to be big,” McKay said. “What happened this year was it all kind of came at once.”
In mid-August, close to 1,000 people staged a rally in Mackenzie to call public attention to the sweeping job losses. They are pressuring the provincial government to do something, which in turn is pressuring the federal government to do something.
Doug Donaldson, minister of forests, lands, natural resource operations and rural development, has written to the federal government asking for federal aid for workers.
In Mackenzie, about one-third of the laid-off workers are 55 years old or older, so the province is asking the federal government to provide early retirement incentives.
“Some of those workers are seeking early retirement, but they have some years to go before their pensions kick in,” Donaldson said.
“So that’s the bridging funding we’re seeking from the federal government.”
The government is also asking Ottawa to lower eligibility requirements for employment insurance. With thousands of workers needed for multibillion-
dollar projects like the Coastal GasLink pipeline, there may be opportunities for laid-off sawmill workers to get jobs elsewhere in northern B.C.
The Coastal GasLink pipeline alone, which will run from Dawson Creek to Kitimat, is expected to employ 2,000 to 2,500 workers over a four-year period.
“It’s absolutely true that between Site C, Trans Mountain, Coastal GasLink, LNG Canada and some of the other projects that might come along, those create employment opportunities for the workers who may be impacted by the closures or curtailments,” McKay said.
“But the challenge is, not in 100 per cent of cases are skill sets going to be transferable.”
And while some laid-off loggers and sawmill workers may get jobs elsewhere, those jobs may require them to move, which exacerbates the drain on small communities like Mackenzie, which loses both industrial and residential taxpayers.
Some northern communities – Quesnel, for example – have been anticipating the long-term decline in forestry and have been working to diversify their economies to insulate them from the swings that characterize resource sectors.
Tourism is one area Quesnel has focused on.
Lomak employees ratify contract
Citizen staff
Employees at Lomak Bulk Carriers Corp. voted 98 per cent in favour of a new five-year collective agreement, the Christian Labour Association of Canada said Thursday. The new contract provides employees with a 10-per-cent total increase in wages over the life of the agreement, with a $500 bonus for all employees in the second year.
Employees’ RSP contributions will be moved to CLAC’s plan, with the introduction of a one per cent matching pension contribution.
Employees will also receive an increase to employer-paid benefits coverage and each employee will also receive a new $300 per year healthcare spending account, with incremental increases over the life of the agreement.
Other gains include the introduction of a tool allowance for
shop employees, an increase to the work-wear allowance, improvements to vacation scheduling language and dispatch scheduling procedures, and additional coverage for medical examinations.
“A huge credit goes to our elected union bargaining committee,” said CLAC representative Arielle Ross.
“They worked tirelessly alongside their union representative team to secure significant and well-deserved increases to their contract. We’re thrilled with the success of the vote, and the positive impact these gains will have for our members and their families.”
The 156 truck drivers and shop personnel are represented by Transport, Marine, Warehousing, and Allied Workers Union, CLAC Local 66.
The union has represented the employees since 1987.
Lomak drivers haul wood fibre product all across northern B.C.
‘Alternative measures’ pursued in B.C. mayor’s sexual assault case: defence
The Canadian Press PORT MOODY — A sexual assault case involving the mayor of Port Moody will return to court on Nov. 13, but the politician’s lawyer says “alternative measures” are being pursued that could see it resolved outside court.
Rob Vagramov returned to his regular duties on Monday after taking a voluntary leave of absence in March when he was charged with sexual assault stemming from an alleged incident in Coquitlam in 2015. Vagramov, who was not in court on Thursday, has denied the allegation.
Outside court, defence lawyer Ian Donaldson said alternative measures include extra judicial or a dispute resolution process. He would not elaborate on
what negotiations are taking place.
Donaldson says if they are successful he expects the charge will ultimately be stayed or withdrawn, and hopes the matter will have been “completed” outside the court process by the next date.
British Columbia’s prosecution service said Monday that a special prosecutor assigned to the case indicated in June that the Crown would proceed summarily on the matter. Its website says summary offences are less serious and alternative measures can be used in those cases.
Vagramov regular duties include heading several committees, but another councillor continues to fill in for him as chair of the police board until the legal case is concluded.
King of the hill
A bulldozer pushes gravel up a pile behind Studio 2880 on Tuesday morning. The work is being done for the Prince
Studio 2880 on 15th Avenue.
Christian PAAS-LANG
The Canadian Press
Social media not to blame for polarization, study says Man killed in shooting was brother of ‘Surrey Six’ killer
OTTAWA — Social media might not be to blame for Canadians’ ideological polarization, a new report on digital democracy in Canada finds.
The latest findings are from an ongoing effort led by the Public Policy Forum and McGill University’s Max Bell School of Public Policy called the Digital Democracy Project.
“A lot of people don’t use social media very actively,” said Eric Merkley, a researcher on the project. “People on Twitter are not representative of the broader population.”
Instead, the study argues polarization in Canada arises partly from intense party loyalty and how far apart Canada’s political parties are, meaning party positions are an important factor.
Also, researchers found that people did not appear to make meaningful distinctions in their views between politicians from opposing parties and their supporters.
“This is troubling,” the study says, because it suggests “polarization does not just influence people’s opinions about the parties, but also how they view ordinary Canadians.”
Each other, in other words.
Researchers found evidence that Canadians are “affectively
polarized” – they feel negatively towards other people simply for being part of the opposing group.
That was based on three measures, including the levels of warmth participants in the study feel for their ideological comrades and opponents; how much they associate their allies and opponents with positive and negative traits; and how comfortable they feel with having someone from an opposing ideology as a neighbour, friend or relative.
“Partisans have substantially colder and more negative feelings about ideologically opposed parties, compared to those that are ideologically proximate,” and also see opposed parties as “more socially distant,” the study says.
The study goes on to note that though Canadians do seem to be polarized, it’s probably not our use of social media that is causing the divide.
Based on an analysis of the activity of about 50,000 Twitter accounts, the Digital Democracy Project researchers found evidence supporting the theory that users tend to create “filter bubbles” for themselves.
Very few partisans, it found, follow information sources from other parties.
But the study suggests the echo chambers do not extend far beyond Twitter.
By comparing the Twitter data to information gleaned from the
survey, researchers also found just 16 per cent of Canadians are exposed to strongly partisan news sources. A tiny fraction – fewer than one per cent – get more than half their news from “partisancongenial” outlets.
Most Canadians still engage broadly with mainstream news sources, the study suggests. If media consumption is not to blame for polarization, the answer the study offers instead is that “the biggest driver of polarization seems to be ideology and partisanship themselves.”
Strong partisans have much more intense feelings towards opposing parties than weak partisans, the study finds.
The study also notes parties in Canada have shifted ideologically over time, and in particular the Liberals have become ideologically closer to the NDP. The changing ideological distance might also play a role, the study notes.
“It seems to suggest Canadians are attentive to the positions of the parties, how extreme they are or how moderate they are relative to their own beliefs,” Merkley said.
Because of the role ideological distance plays, parties “have a role in increasing and dampening polarization,” Merkley said.
“If parties choose to stake out more extreme positions, we might see more affective polarization as a result.”
The Canadian Press LANGLEY — British Columbia’s anti-gang agency says a man who was gunned down in Langley on Tuesday was the brother of a man convicted in the province’s largest gang-related mass murder.
Sgt. Brenda Winpenny of the Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit says Justin Haevischer was the brother of Cody Haevischer, who was convicted in 2014 of six counts of first-degree murder in the slaying of six men in Surrey, B.C., that became known as the “Surrey Six” killings. Justin Haevischer was later charged with accessory after the fact to the 2007 murders, pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice and was sentenced to 10 months in jail.
Winpenny says Haevischer was an active member of the Red Scorpions gang and a prominent figure in the Lower Mainland gang landscape, where the United Nations and Brothers Keepers gangs are rivals of the Red Scorpions.
The 33-year-old man was shot to death outside a McDonald’s restaurant in Langley just after 8 p.m. Tuesday in what police described as a brazen and reckless shooting by those who were unconcerned about others in the vicinity.
The Integrated Homicide Investigation Team says in a news release that it is revealing Haevischer’s name to determine his activities and who he may have had contact with prior to his death.
Sgt. Frank Jang says Haevischer was known to police, had a criminal record and known gang ties, and he’s urging anyone with information to come forward.
“Our investigators continue to push ahead on this investigation
Winpenny says (Justin) Haevischer was an active member of the Red Scorpions gang and a prominent figure in the Lower Mainland gang landscape...
and urge any witnesses who have yet to come forward to call IHIT immediately,” he says, adding anyone who wishes to remain anonymous can call Crime Stoppers.
Court records show Haevischer previously faced charges for drug trafficking, assault and possession of an illegal firearm.
The reasons for judgment in the first-degree murder case against Cody Haevischer and his associate, Matthew Johnston, say that Cody Haevischer returned to his home after the killings and was writing things down on a white board for his brother Justin Haevischer.
“He wrote ‘People died,’” testified a witness, whose evidence was accepted as credible by B.C. Supreme Court Justice Catherine Wedge.
The witness also testified that phones, as well as a pair of shoes and the clothes Cody Haevischer had been wearing, were thrown into a laundry bag and Justin Haevischer drove to another location and burned the bag.
Cody Haevischer and Johnston were each convicted of six counts of first-degree murder and one count of conspiracy to commit murder and were sentenced to life in prison.
George Elizabeth Fry Society’s social housing complex next to
young moose smashed its way inside on Wednesday.
Young moose smashes way into B.C. school board office
The Canadian Press
FORT ST. JOHN — A moose that may have had a yearning for learning smashed its way into the Peace River North School District office in Fort St. John.
Jarrod Bell, a director of instruction in the district, says it was just before closing on Wednesday when he heard what sounded like an entire band of cymbal players falling down the stairs.
Instead, he came out of his office to see a young moose in the building’s foyer that had crashed through the glass front door. He says several employees called police and the Conservation Officer Service, and both services needed some convincing that they actually had a moose intruder in the office.
Bell says the district’s superintendent walked around the outside building to open a back door and the moose “made a dash for it.”
He says a conservation officer later told them that this is the time of year when
moose mothers tell their teenage offspring that it’s time to go earn their own living.
“It may be the case that the moose was upset that it was alone,” he says.
The moose had some minor cuts and Bell says while staff didn’t see where it went at the time, they were able to track its movements afterwards.
“So, there were drops of blood through the hallway in learning services into an open office,” he says. “It wandered up to one of the windows because you could see the blood and saliva on the desk where it had obviously gone up and looked through a window.”
A conservation officer came back to the office to say they’d tracked the moose to the back yard of a nearby home, Bell says.
“While we were saying goodbye to the (conservation officer) the moose came running from the north down through towards the south and just kept going,” he said.
Bell says he has since heard the officer spent much of the evening tracking the animal out of town.
Thanksgiving Food Drive Day coming
Salvation Army Major Neil Wilkinson, Coun. Murry Krause and Jon Duncan from Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints announced on Monday that Sept. 21 is B.C. Thanksgiving Food Drive Day. This will be the ninth year for the event that will see paper bags go out across the community to be filled with food items that will be picked up by volunteers. This years goal is to collect more than 13.5 to 16 tonnes ton of food locally.
B.C. motorist fined for driving with bowl in one hand, chopsticks in the other
The Canadian Press
KELOWNA — A provincial court judge has served up a searing decision to a driver in Kelowna, who was spotted eating with chopsticks in one hand and a bowl of spinach in the other.
Judicial justice Brian Burgess handed down the ruling in Kelowna traffic court in August, finding the “egregious” offence took place in the city last November as Corinne Jackson drove past a roadside vehicle enforcement operation.
The RCMP officer who flagged Jackson’s vehicle testified she was travelling at an estimated 60 km/h while “shovelling” food into her mouth with the chopsticks and not once did she place a hand on the wheel during the entire five to six seconds he observed.
However, Jackson testified she gave due care and attention to her driving because she was going “no more than 10 km/h over” and had three fingers of her left
hand on the steering wheel while holding the bowl with her thumb and index finger.
Burgess rejected Jackson’s testimony as contradictory and criticizes her for the common misconception that 10 km/h over the limit is not speeding, noting the law says even one kilometre an hour over the limit is considered speeding.
Jackson was found guilty of driving without due care and attention and the judge declined to reduce her fine of $2,000 and six penalty points, although the average ticket for the offence is $368.
“Holding a bowl in one hand and using chopsticks in the other hand to eat while driving, even if three fingers of the hand holding the bowl were in contact with the steering wheel, is not giving one’s full attention to driving,” Burgess said in the ruling posted online. “The minimum standard of a reasonable and prudent person, as implied by the Crown, would be to have at least one full hand on the steering wheel while the vehicle being driven is in motion.”
Broken glass covers the floor of a foyer at the Peace River North School District office in Fort St. John, after a
Empowering local leaders essential
In addition to my work as a city councillor for Prince George, I’m proud to serve as the first vice-president for the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM), the organization that unites more than 2,000 municipalities across the country to advocate for the issues that matter most to Canadians in their communities.
On Thursday, FCM released its Election 2019 recommendations to federal parties. The platform – titled Building Better Lives – is a call to improve Canadians’ quality of life by empowering our local governments. After all, local governments are the ones closest to people’s daily challenges. Simply put, we’re calling on all federal parties to commit to the recommendations in this platform.
FCM’s cornerstone recommendation is to permanently double the federal Gas Tax Fund (GTF) transfer. Municipalities are responsible for 60 per cent of Canada’s public infrastructure, but collect just 10 per cent of each Canadian tax dollar. The GTF helps by transferring predictable funds to municipalities to renew roads, bridges, water systems and other core infrastructure.
While the GTF model works, its current scale still leaves many vital repairs and upgrades unfunded every year. We know that the top priority in Prince George and for so many Canadians is the continual improvement of the local infrastructure we depend on. Road, bridges, water systems and community centres – these cornerstones of local life become stronger through a stable and predictable form of funding like GTF.
Permanently doubling the GTF is the most efficient and effective step the next government can take to build better lives, in communities of all sizes. FCM’s recommendations also reflect the central and growing role local governments play in everyday life.
Next, a permanent public transit funding mechanism would empower municipalities to continue easing gridlock and shortening commutes for workers and families.
FCM’s housing affordability proposals would continue growing the affordable housing supply while tackling the broader disconnect between rents, home prices and incomes.
New long-term funding for local climate adaptation would protect Canadians from more frequent, severe weather extremes, from wildfires to floods and storm surges.
Cold reality withers budget projections
Ah, the rose. A beautiful presence. A short-lived bloom.
But once done, just the thorns to see.
The message of our province’s finance minister Tuesday as she delivered a quarterly economic update was analogous to that passing of the vitality that comes when a fresh flower no longer holds true and firm.
A turning point in her government’s life has arrived.
The buoyant economic climate inherited by the NDP is now a much more sombre heirloom it must own and cultivate.
To stretch the metaphor, its actions on housing have dried the revenue stream so necessary to water the plant. The global downturn in forestry is starting to hit the books. And the spectre of reforms of the Insurance Corp. of British Columbia (ICBC) may lower the boom.
What were once salad days are now a grapefruit diet.
A projected surplus made confidently only in February of $274 million in the 2019-20 fiscal year is now forecast to be $179 million, but only thanks to dipping into a contingency fund for $300 million to stay in the black.
A projected GDP forecast of 2.4 per cent this year and 2.3 per cent in 2020 has been, in rose terms, severely pruned to 1.7 per cent this year and 1.9 per cent next year. All told, a few months have taken one full point off the plan.
TO THE POINT
KIRK LAPOINTE
Who can predict what a few more months might incite?
The toughest results are yet to come from a forestry sector whose suffering has taken months to affect government revenues, from a housing sector that is into the throes of so much new taxation that it not yielding the venerable property transfer tax revenue governments count upon, and from the very real possibility that the province’s proclaimed dumpster fire at ICBC is not imminently extinguishable.
There are, too, other matters well beyond Carole James’ control as minister. The Donald, Boris and Xi spring immediately to mind.
But there is one matter she can control: herself. In commenting on the housing market slump, James has been unapologetic for her government’s role. It is a conceit to believe that the taxation of housing will make it affordable for who her government is speaking to – the younger, lowermiddle-income cohort that wants into the market – unless there are much more dramatic measures in the wings. Certainly the supply of new housing, if that is any solution, will not materialize in this environment. But then again, much of what the government is
doing to the real estate sector is more of a political voucher than an economic remedy.
It is increasingly hard to see how the revenue and expense trend lines translate into anything other than a deficit in the near term, because the government’s commitments to an expansion of its role in the economy has locked itself into spending it cannot forestall.
We might be absorbed by the federal election campaign, but it’s not as if the next provincial vote is eons away. If the economy indeed goes sideways globally, British Columbia would find itself in a high-tax financial box without great maneuverability to adapt. The very real possibility is that the NDP faces the electorate in the fall of 2021 in a financial strait, in part due to its ambitious social agenda and in part due to a miscalculation of when to invest in an economic cycle. Not that it had a choice: its supporters were expecting spoils and it had little choice but to do so upon assuming power if it did not wish to disappointment them. But the country’s best-performing economy is not the resilient flower we might wish. It depends on resources in the main and real estate has become a 21st century commodity in that fold. The tax-and-spend chapter is closing and the real business of being a finance minister has hit James’ desk.
That next quarterly report should be quite the presentation.
LETTERS WELCOME: The Prince George Citizen welcomes letters to the editor from our readers. Submissions should be sent by email to: letters@pgcitizen.ca. No attachments, please. They can also be faxed to 250-960-2766, or mailed to 201-1777 Third Ave., Prince George, B.C. V2L 3G7. Maximum length is 750 words and writers are limited to one submission every week. We will edit letters only to ensure clarity, good taste, for legal reasons, and occasionally for length. Although we will not include your address and telephone number in the paper, we need both for verification purposes. Unsigned or handwritten letters will not be published. The Prince George Citizen is a member of the National Newsmedia Council, which is an independent organization established to deal with acceptable journalistic practices and ethical behaviour. If you have concerns about editorial content, please contact Neil Godbout (ngodbout@pgcitizen. ca or 250-960-2759). If you are not satisfied with the response and wish to file a formal complaint, visit the web site at mediacouncil.ca or call toll-free 1-844-877-1163 for additional information.
I’ve often talked before about FCM’s focus on rural issues. In this election, FCM is urging parties to champion rural and northern communities, by committing to universal Internet access and modernized, streamlined funding tools. Throughout this federal election, the candidates and leaders will speak frequently about their vision to improve the lives of Canadians. It’s important for us all in local governments to seize this moment to put your concerns front and center on the agenda. That is what we’re doing. I urge you to check out more information about the platform at BuildingBetterLives.ca — Garth Frizzell is a Prince George city councillor and the first vice-president of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities.
Most non-European residents have faced discrimination: poll
While immigration is not currently one of the three most important issues facing Canada for most would-be voters in this year’s federal election, it has been a practically inescapable topic over the past few weeks.
In B.C., we were exposed to a video where a woman uttered racial slurs at a driver in a Richmond shopping centre parking lot. A national controversy ensued after billboards favouring the People’s Party of Canada’s rejection of “mass immigration” appeared in some areas. There was also a social media outcry over convicted criminal Jon Venables relocating to Canada from the United Kingdom – an allegation carelessly pushed by people bestowed with an immaculate ignorance of Canada’s immigration procedures.
In spite of this recent grotesqueness, there have also been developments of a different kind. Kasari Govender became the new provincial human rights commissioner, overseeing an office with the aim of examining and addressing systemic discrimination in British Columbia. MLA Ravi Kahlon finished a cross-province tour, during which he sought to quantify reported and unreported instances of racism and hate – a task that began during his tenure as parliamentary secretary for sport and multiculturalism.
Most British Columbians find out about incidents of racism and discrimination through media reports, which are, as evidenced by the case of the Richmond parking lot slurs, easier to assess when footage is available. With this in mind, Research Co. wanted to find out just how prevalent discrimination on the basis of ethnicity is in British Columbia, as well as to review how often race is cited in an attempt to diminish others.
The survey captured the sentiments of adult British Columbians who described their ethnicity as non-European. The sample allowed for direct comparisons among four specific groups as defined by Statistics Canada: North American Aboriginal, East Asian, South Asian and Southeast Asian.
Only 22 per cent of respondents to this survey said they have never experienced discrimination on account of their ethnicity in British Columbia. One third (33 per cent) reported enduring “a significant amount” (11 per cent) or “a moderate amount” (22 per cent) of ethnic-based discrimination, and a similar proportion (36 per cent) described it as “a small amount.”
While respondents aged 55 and over are more likely to say that they have not experienced discrimination (36 per cent), the proportion is lower among those aged 18 to 34 (19 per cent) and those aged 35 to 54 (18 per cent).
However, when respondents
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were presented with 11 different personal experiences, 62 per cent were able to say: “Yes, that has happened to me.”
The most common forms of discrimination that non-European British Columbians experienced are poor customer service (24 per cent), verbal harassment (23 per cent) and being the subject of racist jokes (17 per cent). In addition, 16 per cent were mocked or ridiculed because of their ethnicity, experienced unfair treatment in the workplace or lost a potential employment opportunity.
The prevalence of these inherently negative personal experiences was decidedly higher among respondents aged 18 to 34 (73 per cent) and aged 35 to 54 (66 per cent) than among those aged 55 and over (35 per cent).
Verbal harassment was a significant issue among North American Aboriginals (46 per cent) and South Asians (32 per cent). Poor customer service was a bigger matter for East Asians (30 per cent).
In any case, the most menacing forms of racism are not encountered during a scuffle over a parking spot or on a billboard. My personal experience may be limited to two of the 11 incidents included in the survey, but they both left an indelible impression.
A contractor who was directly responsible for serious damages to my home claimed that, because I was not “from here,” I did not understand the complexities of a “worksite” in Canada. My direct supervisor told me that my nascent career as a pollster would be limited to a “behind-the-scenes role” because Canadians did not want to hear statistics from someone with my accent. Looking back, the intellectual limitations of these two individuals are massively evident, but their words – delivered to push me aside and advance their interests – still stung.
We need to look at discrimination in a holistic manner. Statements uttered “in the heat of the moment” – like the one in the Richmond parking lot – should not be tolerated. A billboard that argues against an nonexistent policy is false advertising and should have never been approved. Still, as a society, we need to be observant of a significantly graver form of discrimination that transpires when people in a position of influence or power gravitate to ethnicity in the absence of a coherent, rational argument. Most of these instances of bigotry are not caught on video or displayed prominently as a tactic to scare voters into submission. But, as the survey has outlined, they do exist.
Shawn Cornell, director of advertising: 250-960-2757 scornell@pgcitizen.ca Reader sales and services: 250-562-3301 rss@pgcitizen.ca Letters to the editor: letters@pgcitizen.ca Website: www.pgcitizen.ca
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BY THE NUMBERS
MARIO CANSECO
Food Books explore link between cooking and mental health
Charlotte DRUCKMAN
Special To The Washington Post
Ella Risbridger’s new cookbook opens predictably enough: “There are lots of ways to start a story, but this one begins with a chicken.” Here is the universal emblem of home cooking in the West – the poultry for every pot.
The second sentence is a little more ambiguous. “It was the first story I ever wrote about food, and it begins with a chicken in a cloth bag hanging on the back of a kitchen chair.”
And then the third. “It was dark outside, and I was lying on the hall floor, looking at the chicken through the door, and looking at the rust in the door hinges, and wondering if I was ever going to get up.”
Spoiler alert: As the British writer promises, “this is a hopeful story... a story about wanting to be alive.” But before she wanted to be alive, she didn’t. What she thought about, in the hospital, after attempting to step in front of a London bus, was baking pie. “I remember the pie, and I remember the way I worked through each ingredient, step by step, and how, when the duty psychiatrist asked me why, I could only think of short crust and soften the leeks in Irish butter until translucent and rub the butter into the flour and bind with milk,” she writes. It’s one of the only things she remembers about that hospital. And it was all she could think about until she went home and, with some assistance, made that pie. It was a small triumph that helped her begin to see that she had survived, that maybe she’d “stop crying all the time” and, perhaps, “carry on cooking.” She did.
Midnight Chicken (& Other Recipes Worth Living For) is the record of Risbridger’s learning to cope: “a kind of guidebook for falling back in love with the world, a how-to of weathering storms and finding your pattern and living, really living.” She might have written a memoir with recipes, the format followed by Nora Ephron, Madhur Jaffrey, Nigel Slater and Ruth Reichl, to name a few. But Risbridger has instead given us a cookbook she hopes we get full of crumbs and sticky with sauce and syrup. She didn’t intend to write a cookbook at age 21, when she set out on what would be a five-year project. But cooking saved her life, and she hoped to pass that along in an actionable way. “I wanted the book to be useful. Actually, I think that’s probably why it’s a cookbook, not a memoir,” she said in an interview. “There’s things in there that are helpful.”
Because of this, Midnight Chicken turns out to be a double departure; Risbridger dares to share her experience with depression while also offering recipes as prescriptions for happiness. In addition to roasting chicken, preparing Uplifting Chilli & Lemon Spaghetti, Stuck In A Bookshop Salmon & Sticky Rice, or Life Affirming Mussels can be a path to a better state of mind.
It is cooking as self-help and, as the book’s introduction presents it, “a kind of framework of joy on which you could hang your day.” Cooking is also, she emphasized in an interview, a “broad church” with “room for everybody,” and this is especially important because, for her, it is “always bound up with mental health and self care, but in a very basic sense,” which, she distinguishes, is not the same as “bubble baths and shopping.”
Discussions of maintaining physical and psychic equilibrium that revolve around food have tended to adhere to one of two tropes: those endorsing the health benefits and balancing properties of particular ingredients or types of dishes, and those justifying indulging in “comfort food.” The first is tinged with obligation and virtuousness, while the second often seems to bear the taint of guilt. Neither implies pure, unfettered enjoyment. Both are fixated on eating. Before Midnight Chicken, cooking itself had mostly been left out of the conversation, at least in cookbooks.
Beyond cookbooks, a number of writers have touched on the positive psychic effect preparing food has had on them. Ruby Tandoh’s recent book Eat Up! Food, Appetite and Eating What You Want wields pleasure as a weapon against the restrictions of the health food and diet industries. It’s aimed at eaters, but she doesn’t leave out cooking altogether. She says her own relationship to cooking corroborates the results of a 2016 study that found young people who participated in quotidian creative hobbies – such as cooking untried recipes – saw a more noticeable upward spiral in their wellbeing, inventiveness and positive energy than those who hadn’t.
“Just taking a half an hour out of the day to be in the kitchen cooking, experimenting, tasting and feeling can be enough to drag me out of the slump of my depression,” Tandoh writes.
Like Tandoh, David Leite, founder of the blog Leite’s Culinaria, has been open about his struggles with mental health. In Notes on a Banana: A Memoir of Food, Love, and Manic Depression, he recalls his first professional culinary job, as the family cook for a college professor. He found that arranging his ingredients in the right order (what the pros refer to as mise en place, or “put in place”) provided a “kind of pleasure,” in that it allowed him “to impose control and order on something” even when he couldn’t do the same for himself. “At times, rare and unexpected, I’d feel small, almost imperceptible shivers of happiness,” he writes. Ann Yang, co-founder of Misfit Foods,
is the author of Midnight Chicken.
sees her relationship to cooking as “not about control at all.” In July, she penned an essay for Bon Appétit in which she disclosed she’d been diagnosed with depression and, at age 25, decided to step away from the successful business she built to take care of her mental health. Making meals for friends is one of the activities she’s identified as a productive way of managing stress and a sense of alienation.
Distinct from baking, she said in an interview, cooking involves “being very comfortable with ambiguity” and “the idea that things might not turn out as you expected them.” The feeling of achievement that comes with the completion of a task - and one she can execute in a set amount of time - helps her. “It has the same sort of creative satisfaction of painting, but on top of that there’s this additional gratification, sense of accomplishment and peace around taking care of people you love,” she said. “Being able to really feel like you can express to someone that you care about them in a different way that’s not verbal, or like physical touch, is also really powerful and therapeutic.”
Leite agrees. When he’s “cooking for family and friends, it is still a source of joy,” he said via email. “I feel a sense of self-care by caring for others.” And he still reaps the centering rewards of preparation. “Any repetitive task seems to help me. Chopping vegetables, stirring risotto, whipping cream. I kind of flip into kitchen hypnosis, if you will. It keeps me very much in the momentmindful,” he added.
Cooking can also serve as a powerful and restorative way to handle loss. In July, former criminal barrister Olivia Potts released A Half Baked Idea, her memoir about baking her way out of grief and lawyering after her mother died. Along the way, the British author discovered that cooking could be “meditative” (setting marmalade to simmer), “enlivening” (toasting spices in a dry pan), “exhilarating” (flambéing crepes Suzette) and “pure joy” (“the moment that honeycomb billows”). “There was something calming about recipes – a set of instructions that, if followed properly, would result in a predictable outcome,” she writes. “Everything around me was dissolving into uncertainty, but here, consequences followed neatly, from actions.” Nigella Lawson has posited that cooking can be a form of keeping the deceased present and said that writing her first book, How to Eat, allowed her to continue her relationship with her mother, who died when Lawson was 25.
That same book helped fellow British cookbook author Diana Henry through her postnatal depression. Similarly, in her second cookbook, Cravings: Hungry for More, Chrissy Teigen opened up about her postpartum depression and acknowledged the role cooking played in getting her back into her normal routine. In Henry’s case, it was less about the actual cooking and more about the anticipation of it. “I contemplated the lunches I would make when I felt more up to it. Things were going to be all right,” she wrote in an essay for the Telegraph last year. “Many – mostly women – have used How to Eat not just as a cookbook but as a balm during periods of depression, divorce or illness.”
Midnight Chicken seems poised to emerge as a balm for a new generation of cooks. And it might be the first of many.
Next month, The Art of Escapism Cooking by Taiwanese-born, Hong Kong-based food blogger Mandy Lee will be published in the United States. Lee records her agonizing displacement – and the cooking that helped her endure it – when she moved from New York to Beijing for her husband’s job.
For Risbridger, the key to encouraging a restorative approach to cooking is not to enforce it as another avenue for achieving perfection. That makes Midnight Chicken an antidote to so much current recipe-driven food content.
She assures readers that her recipes can be executed while tipsy, left on the stove too long and made with ingredients you can be careless in measuring.
GAVIN DAY PHOTO
Ella Risbridger
Raised by many mothers
What we can learn about parenthood from an indigenous group in Brazil
Sofia PERPETUA
Special To The Washington Post
When filmmaker Renee Nader Messora and her husband, João Salaviza, moved from their home in Sao Paulo to an indigenous Kraho village in Brazil, the couple did not expect to become parents.
But Messora, 40, became pregnant with a girl while directing the movie The Dead and the Others.
When their daughter was born, one of the indigenous actresses picked the baby up and began to breast-feed her.
“Maybe that could have been weird and confusing to me if she wasn’t a Kraho, but she is a Kraho and I already knew how family dynamics work in the village,” Messora said.
Messora discovered what it takes to raise a child during her time at Pedra Branca, a Kraho village in north-central Brazil, she says.
There, she says, the village is the key.
And if that means another woman breast-feeds your baby?
There’s a beautiful reason for that.
The Kraho people believe a child should have more than one mother. It’s so ingrained in the culture that the Kraho children use the word “inxe” for both their biological mother and their mother’s sisters or the women their mother considers as sisters, even if they’re not related by blood. In fact, there is no word for aunt. To the children, they are all mothers.
In indigenous cultures, women have a central role when raising children, even though indigenous motherhood is a broad concept, as one ethnic group can be very distinct from another. In Brazil, there are 305 ethnic groups that speak 274 languages, according to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics.
Messora first visited Pedra Branca in 2009. She has been here so often that the Kraho have given her and her husband their own Kraho names. She always stays at the house of what became her Kraho family, although the concept of house is different from the one she is used to.
“It’s the complete opposite of what we learn in a Western civilization. At the village there is an expansion of the core family, it’s not just about the mother, the father and the children. There are between 15 to 20 people in a house. Each house has more than one mother, the children are raised by everyone, the fouryear-olds take care of the threeyear-olds who take care of the two-year-olds,” she explained.
“When a couple marries, the man moves into the woman’s house. All mothers stay together, there is a network of daughters, they breast-feed the children of their close relatives, my daughter Mira is breast-fed by other women in our house.”
Bruna Franchetto, a professor at the Department of Linguistics and the Department of Anthropology at the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro, says she believes her time studying and working in indigenous villages in Brazil might have influenced the way she raised her own son.
“I learned how to share my son
with other women figures,” said Franchetto. “The big difference between raising a child in the city and raising a child in an indigenous village is that the children (in the village) go through this intensive process of socialization, but at the same time they have a scary amount of freedom. In the city, we are surrounded by walls, cars, traffic. The child has a small social circle and has to overcome a lot of barriers to be able to enjoy an open space.”
Regardless of culture, there are different approaches to parenting. And there are as many ways to be a mother as there are mothers.
French toddlers are expected to eat the same meals as their parents, Spanish kids stay up as late as they wish, Icelandic babies nap outside in subzero temperatures.
Indigenous children are raised to develop high autonomy from a young age, a valuable skill in adulthood. That allows them to be surprisingly agile and strong, and to be familiar with their surroundings.
“When I get back to the village, I feel a big difference,” Messora said. “Mira has a more autonomous life, she is not always holding onto her father and I.”
Ana Gabriela Morim Lima, a post-doctorate in anthropology at the University of Sao Paulo, points out that all children learn by playing and imitating their siblings and parents. The Kraho are no different.
“They believe that for someone to learn something, they need to ‘know how to see’ and ‘know how to listen,’ ‘to open their ears and their eyes.’ Only then you can learn the songs, how to move in the forest, how to identify the sounds of the birds and other animals, or how to follow their tracks,” said Lima. “To the Kraho
and other indigenous people, learning depends on a corporal and sensorial engagement with the world.”
This close relationship to nature from an early age can make it hard for the Kraho to leave their village. Messora and her husband were at Cannes, where their film was awarded the jury special prize, with indigenous actors from the movie. Then last February, the movie was presented at Lincoln Center in New York, but the actors didn’t come. They don’t like to stay away from their village for long periods of time.
The actress who once breast-fed their baby, Raene Kôtô Krahô, “thought everything in the big cities was very weird. She thought our apartment was always very empty, that people are away from each other and that there are a lot of people around but everyone is alone,” said Messora. “In the big city, we’re all alone in closed spaces.”
The indigenous actors were also disturbed to see homeless people sleeping in the streets.
“The Kraho share what they own with others, they believe things have to circulate. Detachment when it comes to things you own is a hard concept for us Westerners to grasp, as we’ve been through centuries and centuries of private property,” said Franchetto.
Messora told the story of a friend who lives in Pedra Branca who took his family to the city to see his parents outside of the village.
There, his son got presents from his grandparents.
As the family returned to the Kraho village, his son happily gave all his presents away to his friends.
Kraho tradition dictates that childbirth should be at home, where women in the family take
part in each others’ delivery.
That creates a connection between the ancestors and the newborn, and the baby is welcomed by everyone the mother trusts.
One of the most common positions to deliver a baby is to have the woman crouching on the legs of another woman who is holding her.
Children are born as they fall right into their grandmother’s hands.
Even though indigenous mothers are advised to give birth at a hospital, some Kraho women still hold on to tradition.
The nearest hospital is about 320 km away from this village.
If women chose to go, they pick someone to go with them who can help deliver the baby.
Messora and her husband want to go back to the village and raise their daughter there while they work on the production of an upcoming movie, also with the Kraho.
There are other mothers raising children in between cultures.
Maira Pedroso, a 33-year-old mother of two from Sao Paulo, has been living with the Kraho for eight years.
Once, her Kraho friend came to visit and brought along her twoyear-old daughter. The friend had come to do traditional body painting on Pedroso’s six-month-old son. Everything was going well until the visitor’s little girl started screaming.
“That’s when my Kraho friend taught me a beautiful lesson. . . . She calmly directed her daughter to paint just her arm and her daughter got quiet and allowed her mother to finish the work,” said Pedroso. “For us non-indigenous mothers, to offer a sense of freedom and a nonviolent education is a challenge that a lot of
times requires us to go through a reeducation.”
Messora has observed the same trait.
“I have never seen a Kraho mother yell at a child. They do tell them they’re wrong, but they never yell. Education is a collective endeavor the whole village takes part of,” said Messora. There are also Kraho mothers living in the city who try to preserve their culture.
Márcia Krahô, 21, has been living in Carolina, in the state of Maranhao in Brazil, for 10 years. Since she became a mother, she wants to spend more time in her village because of her son.
“I want my son to live between the village and the city, I want him to grow close to nature and to our family. In the city we feel a bit isolated,” said Márcia, whose son is eight months old. “I want to teach my son what I’ve been taught when I was a little girl. My friends and I used to have so much fun, we would bathe in the river, climb trees, run in the forest, we had a lot of freedom.”
For now, Messora and Salaviza are considering their options for where and how to raise their daughter.
“We think about our lives, we think about how we want to spend our time, where do we want to be,” Messora says. “I want my daughter to be happy and I’ve never seen anyone as happy as a Kraho child. In a city, I don’t see that this kind of freedom and this connection to nature, can be possible... I want Mira to learn from them. I want her to know there are other things in the world apart from cellphones and tablets, many children are wasting their childhood with those devices and I don’t want that to happen to my daughter.”
An indigenous mother and her child cool themselves in a lake.
Spruce Kings hosting Grizzlies tonight
Ted CLARKE Citizen staff tclarke@pgcitizen.ca
Still looking for his first win as a B.C. Hockey League head coach, Alex Evin isn’t pushing any panic buttons.
The new season is just entering its second week and Evin has no doubts his Prince George Spruce Kings – still smarting from a regulation loss and an overtime loss last weekend to the visiting Surrey Eagles – will soon find the win column.
When he stepped up from his assistant’s role this summer to replace Adam Maglio, Evin inherited a younger, much less experienced Kings squad than the one that steamrolled its way to the national championship final last season.
Growing pains are expected.
“It’s going to take some time to get to where we need to get to,” said Evin, 32, who turned five years of experience as a BCHL goalie with Powell River, Williams Lake and Penticton into a full-ride scholarship and a four-year stint stopping pucks at Colgate University.
“As long as we’re learning every game and getting better I think we’re going to
like the result longterm,” he said. “We’ve had a good couple days of practice and we should be ready for Friday against Victoria, it should be a good game.
“We’ve obviously got a bit of a target on our backs. Being league champs we’re probably going to get everyone’s best effort.”
That only adds to the difficulty of the task they have on their hands, first having to face the speedy Victoria Grizzlies tonight (7 p.m.) at Rolling Mix Concrete Arena, then on Saturday hosting the Penticton Vees, the early-season favourites to win the Interior Division.
Like the Spruce Kings, who graduated 15 players, the Griz have lost their mainstays from last year.
Alex Newhook, Alex Campbell, Riley Hughes and Carter Berger are among 11 Grizzlies from the team that got swept by the Spruce Kings in the conference final now playing for NCAA schools.
The offensive-minded Grizzlies (0-1) ran into a hot goalie Saturday in Duncan and lost 8-2 to the Cowichan Valley Capitals. BCHL player of the week Zach Borgiel stopped 32 of 34 Victoria shots.
The Kings lost 4-2 to Surrey on Friday and fell 4-3 in overtime to the Eagles in Satur-
day’s rematch at RMCA.
In both games Evin was happy with his team’s special teams. On Friday they went 2-for-4 on the power play and held the Eagles to one PP goal on six chances. The Kings went 1-for-6 with the extra skater Saturday and successfully killed off their one shorthanded situation.
“Our 5-on-5 game has been OK as well, looking at some of the goals we’ve given up its just young errors and inexperience in the league,” said Evin.
“Hopefully we can start learning from some of that stuff. We have to understand it’s not easy to score in this league and not easy to win in this league and we can’t be giving up easy goals. Hopefully we can make some adjustments in that area.”
Twenty-year-old Jett Alexander, who came over in a trade from the North York Rangers, was made to look ordinary in the Surrey series (3.49 goals-against average, .881 save percentage) and more is expected of him this weekend.
“Average, not his best,” was Evin’s assessment.
“He’s going to need some time to adapt to the league. He’s been working hard in practice and had some good video sessions
PGSS, College Heights Cougars kick off football season with Spirit Bowl
School’s out early this afternoon at Prince George Secondary School and the College Heights Cougars football team and their fans will surely get a sense they won’t be the home team when they show up at Masich Place Stadium.
Classes will be dismissed for all 1,200 students at PGSS so they can attend the game and cheer on the Polars when they play the Cougars in the inaugural PGSS Spirit Bowl – the first exhibition game of the season for either team.
“It’s not just a football game, it’s to develop school spirit and it’s also a giveback to the (Prince George) Humane Society,” said Polars head coach Pat Bonnett.
“They’re going to take loonie and toonie donations from students who are having competition in the classrooms to see which class can donate the most.” It’s an easy walk for most PGSS students considering the stadium is right next door to the school fields. Not so for College Heights Secondary, which is located in the south end of the city. The school decided it was too much of a hurdle to bus nearly 1,000 students to and from the game.
Seating capacity under the covered grandstand at Masich is about 1,700.
“Hopefully it will be a good turnout for them, our school’s not going,” said Cougars head coach Grant Erickson. “It’s not like CN Centre where you can separate the kids. It’s probably not big enough for both schools.”
Erickson figures the big crowd cheering for the Polars and against the Cougars will give his players a taste of fan adversity which might help them in years to come if they ever advance beyond high school football.
“We’re just going to go in there and try to execute,” he said. “Our guys are not used to crowds that big and it will be good experience for them. If they go on to junior or university ball and they have to play an away game, that’s what it’s like.”
Because of the short notice, plans to get cheerleaders and a pep band involved in the game did not materialize and that might happen next year when it becomes College Heights’ turn to host the game. Still, Bonnett says players on both teams are going
to love the spotlight.
“If you have a 1,000 people in a place that seats 1,700 it’s going to look pretty full, it’s going to be cool,” he said. “We’re going to dress the seniors and the juniors so we’ll have about 40 players on the field and they’ll have about 40.
“We’ll primarily play seniors but there will be some juniors that get to play as well. We have probably a dozen kids from Grade 8 and if you put them against Grade 12 kids it would be unfair and dangerous. But they’re excited to dress (in their uniforms) and get the recognition of being part of the team.”
Last year the Cougars senior squad was predominantly made up of players in Grade 10. Those 20 players have stuck with football and most have three or four years of experience.
“The team that went to the (Northern Conference) semifinals last year were pretty much all Grade 10s and they’ve moved up to Grade 11 now,” said Erickson. “We only have five Grade 12. This year we’ve expanded our playbook exponentially and I’m challenging them to learn this new offence. This year is kind of learning-curve year and next year we’re hoping when these guys are all in Grade 12 we’re going to make a run at it.”
The Polars have size working for them but lack the experience which led them to the P.G. Bowl Northern Conference title in 2018. PGSS has 21 players on the senior team and 24 who will play on the junior varsity team.
“We were decimated by graduation last year, 11 of 15 seniors graduated so we’re rebuilding a little bit,” said Bonnett. “I think of the 21 seniors, probably five or six have never played football and their first practice was (Tuesday). Two or three of the seniors are Grade 12s and the rest are Grade 11. They’re good athletes, they’ve played other sports and it’s just a matter of learning football.”
The Polars and Cougars compete in the five-team Northern Conference, part of the B.C. Secondary School Football Association, with the Kelly Road Roadrunners and Nechako Valley Vikings of Vanderhoof. Each team will play three exhibition games in September and three regular season games before playoffs begin.
Admission to today’s game ( 1 p.m. start) is by donation with all proceeds gong to the Humane Society.
I think he knows what he needs to do to be successful. He’s going to improve, just like everybody else.”
Earlier this week the Kings acquired defenceman Evan Orr, an 18-year-old native of Detroit, Mich., who collected five goals 16 points and 105 penalty minutes in 48 games last season for the Wilkes-Barre/ Scranton (Pa.) Knights of the North American Hockey League. With the exception of BCHL sophomore Nick Bochen, all the other defencemen are new to the league this year, including Orr, Brendan Hill, Nolan Barrett, Colton Cameron, Amran Bhabra, Cole Leal and Sol Seibel. Leal suffered a lower-body injury Friday and won’t be ready for a couple weeks. The Spruce Kings had the best crop of defencemen in the league last season and the newcomers are trying to fill the gaps left now that Layton Ahac, Dylan Anhorn, Jay Keranen, Max Coyle and Liam WatsonBrawn have joined NCAA teams.
“It’s definitely tough having just one returning guy, losing some really good players from last year,” said Kings captain Nolan Welsh. “The guys coming in might struggle at the start but I think we can get there again.”
Cougars add Griffin to the
Ted CLARKE Citizen staff
The Prince George Cougars struggled to score goals last season, a contributing factor which led to them missing the WHL playoffs for a second consecutive season.
On Thursday they made a move to address that need, acquiring 17-year-old forward Davin Griffin in a trade from the Prince Albert Raiders for a conditional bantam draft pick.
“Davin is an offensive player that has a track record of scoring at the bantam and midget levels,” said Mark Lamb, the Cougars’ general manager and head coach. “We needed to add to our 2002-born age group, and he is that piece we were looking for.”
Griffin, a five-foot-seven, 150-pound native of Regina, was a fifth-round pick of the Raiders,
fold
110th overall, in the 2017 WHL bantam draft. He spent the past two seasons in the Saskatchewan Midget Triple-A Hockey League with the Saskatoon Contacts. In 43 games last season he collected 26 goals and 20 assists for 46 points, third in team scoring, and was the Contacts’ top goalscorer. That came on the heels of a 17-goal, 35-point rookie season with the Contacts in which he was their top point-getter. In 2016-17 he led the Saskatchewan bantam double-A league with 50 goals in 30 games. The Cougars are in Dawson Creek for exhibition games tonight and Saturday against the Edmonton Oil Kings.
The Cats start their 26th season in Prince George next weekend when they host the Vancouver Giants Friday and Saturday nights at CN Centre.
Northern Capitals playing with Fire
Citizen staff
After posting a pair of preseason wins over the Fraser Valley Rush, the Northern Capitals are in Calgary this week to try to douse their tournament opponents in the Calgary Firestarter Showcase.
The Capitals, who play in the B.C. Female Triple-A Midget Hockey League share a pool in the 16-team tournament with Calgary Fire, Prince Albert Northern Bears and Notre Dame Hounds. The Capitals open against the Fire Thursday night. On Friday, the Capitals face Notre Dame, then on Saturday
will play Prince Albert.
The Capitals began their exhibition season last weekend with a 3-2 win over the Rush in Williams Lake. Hailey Armstrong netted the winner in that one with just 29 seconds left. Destiny Bautista and Brette Kerley also scored for the Caps. Cadence Petitclerc-Crosby went the distance on goal for the Prince George-based Capitals.
On Sunday in 100 Mile House they defeated the Rush 3-1, with goals from Bautista, Brooke Norkus and Pyper Alexander. The 30-game BCFMHL season starts with the league showcase on Oct. 4 in the Lower Mainland.
Prince George Spruce Kings pose for a photo outside their dressing room prior to taking on the Surrey Eagles on Friday night at Rolling Mix Concrete Arena.
Ted CLARKE Citizen staff
Crossley, Cats visit Peace Country
Ted CLARKE Citizen staff
tclarke@pgcitizen.ca
Six years had gone by since the last time Prince George Cougars defenceman Austin Crossley played a game of hockey close to home in Fort St. John.
So you could understand why the 20-year-old was so excited about the Cougars setting up shop an hour’s drive to the southeast in Dawson Creek for a pair of WHL preseason games against the Edmonton Oil Kings Thursday and Saturday.
Crossley and Cougars forward Connor Bowie, also a Fort St. John native, arrived in their Peace Country stomping grounds early Thursday and will be there for two more days to show off their talent on the ice in the games, visit some school kids and share their hockey knowledge in skills clinics.
“It’s going to be a good time,” said Crossley.
“Dr. Kearney Middle School (in Fort St. John) has a hockey academy there and I actually went there. My brother’s going there now so it will be cool to see him.
“I haven’t played a game up there since my second year of bantam, way back in minor hockey. I’ve got a lot of cousins, aunties, uncles and parents and the rink (Encana Events Centre in Dawson Creek) will be packed, lots of friends.”
The hard-hitting Crossley played as a left winger in the last three games of the 2018-19 season and scored a goal, and has also been used as a forward again this preseason. Now in his fourth junior season, after starting his WHL career with the Prince Albert Raiders, he doesn’t mind switching back and forth.
“It’s just day-by-day right now, wherever (head coach and general manager Mark Lamb) thinks I’ll play best that day,” said the six-foot-one, 210-pound Crossley. “In minor hockey I was an offensive defenceman but I switched my role quite a bit going into junior.”
The Cougars, who open the season next weekend at home against the Vancouver Giants, won’t play any of their preseason games in Prince George. After facing off Thursday night against each other, the Cougars and Oil Kings will be working together today visiting schools and putting on minor hockey clinics in Dawson Creek and Fort St. John, followed by a banquet tonight.
“It’s great for the team to get a lot of exposure in that area,” said Lamb.
“There’s a lot of hockey players there, younger kids who will see ourselves and Edmonton, and there’s going to be some point where we’ll have a kid from Dawson Creek on our team. It’s good for our players to go to the schools and it’s good for us to meet some minor hockey people. It will be a fun couple days up there for us.”
The Cougars were outscored 19-4 in their first three exhibition games last weekend, losing 7-1 to Kamloops and 5-3 to Vancouver in Langley, before traveling to Kelowna where they suffered a 7-0 loss to the Rockets.
CITIZEN SPORTS
“It was tough, we’re so young, but I expected that,” said Lamb. “It’s all evaluation and it’s all good. We started pretty good in that (Kelowna) game. We got down, but we outchanced them in that first period and played alright.”
That game was goalie Tyler Brennan’s first taste of preseason action. The 16-year-old rookie was injured for the first two games and with Taylor Gauthier still at the Boston Bruins’ rookie camp at the time, midget goalie Colton Phillips-Watts sat on the bench while Isaiah DiLaura faced the Blazers and Giants. Trailing the Rockets 7-0 after two periods, Brennan wiped the slate clean and made 10 saves, shutting them out the rest of the game despite his team being shorthanded five times in the final period.
“That was good for Brennan to battle back in third with all those penalties,” said Lamb. “He was rattled in there, he hadn’t played because he had an injury.”
F Ilijah Colina got hurt in the Vancouver game and will be out four to six weeks with a shoulder injury. F Ethan Browne is also nursing an upper-body injury and hasn’t skated even in training camp. D Cole Beamin (upper body) was close to being ready for games in the Dawson Creek.
“It would be nice to get healthy,” Lamb said.
The Cougars now have their NHL campers back, including Gauthier, D Cole Moberg (Chicago Blackhawks) and LW Josh Maser (New York Rangers).
Aside from their injured players they’ll have a full roster available for the two games this week. They released defenceman Cam MacPhee, their only other 20-year-old, during training camp, which leaves Crossley, Maser, and defenceman Ryan Schoettler as their three overage players.
On Thursday night, the Edmonton Oil Kings beat the Cougars 6-1 in Dawson Creek.
Red Sox beat Blue Jays
Gregory STRONG The Canadian Press
TORONTO — Blue Jays starter Clay Buchholz looked like he had his former team figured out at the start of Thursday’s game against Boston.
The Red Sox soon woke up from a series-long slumber for a 7-4 victory over Toronto that ended a five-game losing streak.
“I did a little bit of my job today, I didn’t do it all,” Buchholz said. “It’s tough to navigate lineups like that.”
Mookie Betts had three hits and scored twice as the Red Sox prevented a three-game sweep at Rogers Centre. Boston (77-70) had 12 hits and took advantage of some sloppy defence by the home side in front of 17,420 fans on a pleasant late-summer evening. Andrew Benintendi (0 for 4) was the only starter in the Boston batting order without a hit. The Blue Jays (57-90) have dropped eight of their last 10 games.
Buchholz (1-5), who won 81 games for the Red Sox over 10 seasons, was facing his former club for the first time. He breezed through the opening frame, retiring the side on just seven pitches.
Boston got to him an inning later after J.D. Martinez walked and Mitch Moreland singled. Marco Hernandez drove them in with a sinking liner that a sliding Billy McKinney couldn’t squeeze in right field. The Red Sox made it 3-0 in the third when Martinez drove in Xander Bogaerts with a double. Buchholz gave up three more hits in the fourth, with Jackie Bradley Jr. scoring on a single by Juan Centeno.
“Overall it could have been a lot worse in certain situations out there,” Buchholz said. “But our team battles. They battled back and made it a game. That’s really all you want.”
The veteran right-hander allowed four earned runs and seven hits over four innings. He issued one walk and had four strikeouts.
The youngsters at the top of
Toronto’s batting order helped cut into the lead in the fifth. Bo Bichette drew a two-out walk and scored on a Cavan Biggio double.
Biggio, who had three hits, came across on a single by Vladimir Guerrero Jr., whose 113 hits is tops among American League rookies this season.
A pair of defensive blunders hurt Toronto in Boston’s two-run seventh. Right-fielder Anthony Alford’s fielding error allowed Betts to score and Brock Holt to take second base.
Reese McGuire tried to pick off Holt from behind the plate but his throw sailed into centre field. Holt scored on a single by Bogaerts.
Toronto loaded the bases in the eighth after two walks and an infield single. Matt Barnes walked Derek Fisher on four pitches to make it a 6-3 game. Red Sox manager Alex Cora turned to Brandon Workmanthe ninth Boston pitcher of the night – to get Bichette to fly out to end the threat. Fisher made Toronto’s third error of the game in the ninth as he misjudged the hop from a Betts single. Betts took two extra bases as the ball rolled to the wall and he came home on a Holt single. “The effort is still there, they’re still working,” Cora said.
“The at-bats were a lot better today. We controlled the strike zone a little bit more.”
Biggio scored in the bottom of the ninth on a sacrifice fly before Workman finished things off for his 12th save.
Notes: Boston starter Jhoulys Chacin worked 2 2/3 innings. Josh Taylor (2-2) pitched a clean fourth inning for the win. ... Before the game, the Blue Jays reinstated right-hander Elvis Luciano from the 60-day injured list and released left-hander Clayton Richard. ... Toronto had seven hits and used six pitchers. ... The game took three hours 32 minutes to play. ... The Blue Jays welcome the AL East-leading Yankees for a three-game series starting Friday night. Left-hander Anthony Kay (0-0, 3.18) is scheduled to start against New York.
CROSSLEY
A dozen new fall TV shows to watch
Hank STUEVER
The Washington Post
It’s not going to be a particularly tranquil fall for TV connoisseurs, as the major players march further into a streaming war. As if you had the time or additional money, both Disney and Apple are set to unleash their streaming services; the plus signs in their logos will appear as minus signs in your bank account.
Disney+ tempts us with a Star Wars series called The Mandalorian. Apple TV+ has got Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon and Steve Carell acting out backstage network drama in The Morning Show. Your mentally exhausted TV critic has yet to see an episode of either – he’s still puzzling out HBO’s Watchmen.
The biggest surprise I noticed this season is a comparatively strong lineup from the broadcast networks (remember them?) and good ol’ PBS. I can’t remember the last time that one-third of my list of fall TV picks could be watched on the traditional networks.
Unbelievable
Netflix
This gripping eight-episode series, from Susannah Grant (Party of Five) and novelists
Ayelet Waldman and Michael Chabon, is based on investigative reporting from ProPublica and the Marshall Project. It’s about a string of serial rapes (triggers galore), yet the writing and execution are refreshingly empathetic toward victims, procedure and justice.
Merritt Wever (Nurse Jackie) stars as Detective Karen Duvall, who learns that a rape she’s investigating has similarities to a case one town over, handled by Detective Grace Rasmussen, played by Toni Collette (United States of Tara).
Working together leads them to an older, closed case, in which the victim (Kaitlyn Dever) was pressured into recanting her statement about being attacked.
Emergence
ABC Remember all those copycat network dramas in the Lost years, which would take a spooky occurrence and string it along with unlimited twists and conspiracies until abrupt cancellation? Emergence’s producers swear they’re not doing that, and a better-than-usual pilot seems promising: Fargo’s Allison Tolman stars as small-town Long Island police chief Jo Evans, who finds a frightened child (Alexa Skye Swinton) at what appears to be a plane crash on the beach. When a shifty couple claims to be the girl’s parents, something feels wrong. Tolman’s performance is the best reason to keep watching – I hope her character can solve it soon. Network TV watchers are a lot more impatient than they used to be.
Stumptown
ABC Set in Portland, Oregon, and based on a graphic novel, this crime drama is one of the more raucous and edgier network pilots I’ve seen in years. Cobie Smulders (How I Met Your Mother) stars as ex-Marine Dex Parios, a free spirit struggling to find steady work while caring for her intellectually disabled brother, Ansel (Cole Sibus), and coping with psychological grief (she lost her one true love in combat) and symptoms of PTSD. Turns out she finds her purpose in brutal work as a private investigator, where she takes on
Fall
thugs and clients alike with sharpwitted skill. Stumptown’s intro plays like fast-and-furious popcorn cinema; if it can keep up that pace, it’s worth a longer ride.
Evil
CBS Who makes better, more relevant TV than Robert and Michelle King? Their dramas include The Good Wife, The Good Fight and the prescient 2016 political/horror satire BrainDead. Now they turn to the demonic with Evil, a satisfyingly scary drama about a seminarian (Luke Cage’s Mike Colter) and his techie assistant (Aasif Mandvi) who investigate possession cases for the Vatican. They persuade a highly skeptical criminal psychologist (Katja Herbers) to help them sort the possessed from the merely insane. Evil isn’t afraid to get gruesome, but the Kings are always mindful of the topical twist, namely that true evil thrives in online chat rooms. As one character observes, the worst of us are now connected to each other.
The Politician
Netflix
Ryan Murphy (along with cocreators Brad Falchuk and Ian Brennan) makes his Netflix debut with this Wes Anderson-like, onepercenter dramedy about Payton Hobart (Dear Evan Hansen’s Ben Platt), a teenager obsessed with becoming U.S. president. His ambitions currently rest on two hurdles: getting into Harvard, which he insists on doing without his parents (Bob Balaban and Gwyneth Paltrow) buying his way in; and winning the student council presidency at his fancy private school, where his campaign advisers calculate his every move, including his choice of a cancer-stricken running mate, Infinity Jackson (Zoey Deutch), who lives with her controlling, greedy grandmother (Jessica Lange). It’s a hoot, but just know that Murphy’s biggest adversaries – tone control and plot discipline – have
premiere dates
The Washington Post
9-1-1(Fox) Monday, Sept. 23
20/20 (ABC) Friday, Sept. 27
60 Minutes (CBS) Sunday, Sept. 29
American Horror Story: 1984 (FX) Wednesday, Sept. 18
American Housewife (ABC) Friday, Sept. 27 America’s Funniest Home Videos (ABC) Sunday, Sept. 29
Bering Sea Gold (Discovery) Tuesday, Sept. 17
Big Mouth (Netflix) Friday, Oct. 4
Black-ish (ABC) Tuesday, Sept. 24
The Blacklist (NBC) Friday, Oct. 4
Bless This Mess (ABC) Tuesday, Sept. 24
Blue Bloods (CBS) Friday, Sept. 27
Bob’s Burgers (Fox) Sunday, Sept. 29
Bull (CBS) Monday, Sept. 23
The Chef Show (Netflix) Friday, Sept. 13
Chicago Fire (NBC) Wednesday, Sept. 25
Chicago Med (NBC) Wednesday, Sept. 25
Chicago P.D. (NBC) Wednesday, Sept. 25
The Conners (ABC) Tuesday, Sept. 24
The Crown (Netflix) Sunday, Nov. 17
come along for the ride.
Modern Love
Amazon Prime
Each episode takes a different Modern Love column from the New York Times archive and turning it into an even more facile story of the many ways it is possible to find love, so long as you believe (and live) in New York. Gross. (But also, great?) The first few episodes feature Cristin Milioti as a single woman with an overprotective doorman; Catherine Keener as a magazine writer who teaches a young tech-bro (Dev Patel) about romantic fate; and Anne Hathaway as a singing and dancing manic-depressive. Is this a recommendation or a warning? Yes!
Watchmen
HBO Not like the classic 1980s comic series and definitely not like the limp 2009 movie adaptation, this thematic workover from Damon Lindelof (Lost and The Leftovers) is a puzzling yet mesmerizing alternate reality tale, set in Oklahoma, USA, where Robert Redford is the president and police officers wear masks for their own protection against a terrorist threat from a rising group of masked white supremacists. Quite dramatically, the whole thing opens with the 1921 massacre of black citizens in Tulsa. In other words, even the first episode is a lot to sort out. At a pilot screening for critics this summer, it was no surprise that the standout performance came from Emmy and Oscar winner Regina King. I’ll follow her just about anywhere, even here.
Mrs. Fletcher
HBO Tom Perrotta has mastered the spot-on modern suburban novel, providing plenty of material for other film and TV adaptations. This time Perrotta is in charge of this engagingly wry and perfectly detailed seven-episode series
based on his 2017 novel about a single mother, Eve Fletcher (Kathryn Hahn of Transparent and I Love Dick), who tries new things after dropping off her deplorably selfish son, Brendan (Jackson White), for his first semester of college. While Brendan discovers that he’s not as popular or cool as he used to be as a high school jock, Eve takes advantage of her empty nest to watch online porn, enroll in a writing class and discover a new side of herself. Good for her!
The Mandalorian
Disney+ Critics haven’t actually seen it yet, but you have to hand it to Disney for launching its subscription service by putting Netflix and everyone else on notice with the equivalent of a warning shot from the Death Star. Trailers promise something along the lines of a souped-up Star Wars Western, set after the fall of the Galactic Empire and in such a remote part of the galaxy that we’ll never have to hear the word Skywalker. Pedro Pascal (Narcos, Game of Thrones) stars in the title role as a lone bounty hunter; the rest of the cast includes Nick Nolte, Giancarlo Esposito, Gina Carano and, yes, Werner Herzog. If you have a lifelong Star Wars jones, you’ve already cleared your calendar. If not, well, may some other force be with you.
Dollface
Hulu
Jordan Weiss’s dramedy stars Kat Dennings (2 Broke Girls) as Jules, who, after being dumped by her longtime boyfriend, finds herself on a metaphorical bus driven by a cat lady, destined for a depot where recently dumped women are supposed to reunite with their BFFs. It’s here Jules realizes she lost all her girlfriends and must start over with those who wrote her off long ago, including Madison (Brenda Song) and Stella (Shay Mitchell). Dollface is best when it cleverly snarks between the real and the hallucinatory,
commenting on gender tropes and other observed behaviors, such as shrieking hello at brunches or enduring the bizarre story conferences at the Goop-like website (Woom) where Jules works as a designer. It’s not a slam so much as an enjoyably cynical social study.
College Behind Bars
PBS
This four-part documentary from Lynn Novick (The Vietnam War) closely portrays the inmates in New York’s state prison system who are lucky enough to be accepted to the Bard Prison Initiative, an intensive curriculum sponsored by the private college. Despite evidence that higher education access greatly reduces recidivism, many such programs vanished because of the 1994 crime bill. Bard quietly and impressively immerses these students in the classics, higher math and foreign languages. Conservatives tend to squirm at the process (comparing it to “free college” for the undeserving), but as one of BPI’s students points out: It’s called the Department of Corrections. What could be more corrective – redemptive, even – than the broadening of one’s intellect?
Work in Progress
Showtime
I fell immediately for Abby McEnany, the dyspeptic, Fran Lebowitz-esque star of this dark comedy (which McEnany cocreated with Tim Mason) about a self-loathing, 45-year-old lesbian in Chicago who gives her life 180 days to improve or else she will end it. The first episode includes an encounter worth catching, as Abby spies former Saturday Night Live cast member Julia Sweeney in a restaurant and is compelled to tell Sweeney how her life was ruined by people cruelly comparing her to Sweeney’s gender ambiguous Pat sketches in the 1990s. Sweeney’s reaction is priceless, and McEnany is a newly discovered treasure.
for some of your favourites
Dancing With the Stars (ABC) Monday, Sept. 16
Dateline (NBC) Friday, Sept. 27
Disenchantment (Netflix) Friday, Sept. 20
The Deuce (HBO) returned Sept. 9
The Durrells in Corfu (PBS) Sunday, Sept. 29
Empire (Fox) Tuesday, Sept. 24
Family Guy (Fox) Sunday, Sept. 29
FBI (CBS) Tuesday, Sept. 24
Finding Your Roots With Henry Louis Gates Jr. (PBS) Tuesday, Oct. 8
Fresh Off the Boat (ABC) Friday, Sept. 27
God Friended Me (CBS) Sunday, Sept. 29
The Goldbergs (ABC) Wednesday, Sept.
25
The Good Doctor (ABC) Monday, Sept. 23
The Good Place (NBC) Thursday, Sept. 26
Grey’s Anatomy (ABC) Thursday, Sept. 26
Hawaii 5-0 (CBS) Friday, Sept. 27
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (FXX) Wednesday, Sept. 25
The Kominsky Method (Netflix) Friday, Oct. 25
Law & Order: SVU (NBC) Thursday, Sept. 26
Life Below Zero, (Nat Geo) Tuesday, Sept.
24
Live PD (A&E) Friday, Sept. 20
Live Rescue (A&E) Monday, Sept. 16
Madam Secretary (CBS) Sunday, Oct. 6
Magnum P.I. (CBS) Friday, Sept. 27
The Masked Singer (Fox) Wednesday, Sept. 25
Mayans M.C. (FX) returned Sept. 3
A Million Little Things (ABC) Thursday, Sept. 26
“Modern Family (ABC) Wednesday, Sept.
25
Mom (CBS) Thursday, Sept. 26
Mr Inbetween (FX) returned Sept. 12
NCIS (CBS) Tuesday, Sept. 24
NCIS: Los Angeles (CBS) Sunday, Sept.
29
24
NCIS: New Orleans (CBS) Tuesday, Sept.
The Neighborhood (CBS) Monday, Sept.
23 New Amsterdam (NBC) Tuesday, Sept. 24
Peaky Blinders (Netflix) Friday, Oct. 4
Poldark on Masterpiece (PBS) Sunday, Sept. 29
The Ranch (Netflix) returned Sept. 13
Ray Donovan (Showtime) Sunday, Nov. 17
The Resident (Fox) Tuesday, Sept. 24
The Rookie (ABC) Sunday, Sept. 29
Room 104 (HBO) returned Sept. 13
Running Wild With Bear Grylls, (Nat Geo)
Tuesday, Nov. 5
Saturday Night Live (NBC) Saturday, Sept. 28
Schooled (ABC) Wednesday, Sept. 25
SEAL Team (CBS) Wednesday, Oct. 2
Shark Tank (ABC) Sunday, Sept. 29
The Simpsons (Fox) Sunday, Sept. 29
Single Parents (ABC) Wednesday, Sept.
25
Superstore (NBC) Thursday, Sept. 26
Survivor (CBS) Wednesday, Sept. 25
S.W.A.T. (CBS) Wednesday, Oct. 2
This Is Us (NBC) Tuesday, Sept. 24
Top Boy (Netflix) returned Sept. 13
The Voice (NBC) Monday, Sept. 23
The Walking Dead (AMC) Sunday, Oct. 6
WWE Smackdown Live (Fox) Friday, Oct.
4
Young Sheldon (CBS) Thursday, Sept. 26
Clockwise from top left: Watchmen, Unbelievable, The Politician and College Behind Bars.
Vape industry fights back on flavour bans
The Associated Press
Efforts to ban flavoured ecigarettes and reduce their appeal to youngsters have sputtered under industry pressure in over a half-dozen states this year even as one state, Michigan, moves ahead with its own restrictions and U.S. President Donald Trump promises federal ones.
In many cases, the fight by the industry and its lobbyists has focused on leaving the most popular flavours – mint and its close cousin, menthol – alone. But public health experts say that all flavours should be banned, and that menthol can still hook kids on vaping.
The proposal Trump outlined on Wednesday, which would supersede any state inaction, includes a ban on mint and menthol, and an industry giant quickly indicated it would capitulate.
“We strongly agree with the need for aggressive category-wide action on flavoured products,” read a statement released by Juul Labs Inc. “We will fully comply with the final FDA policy when effective.”
But the fight in state legislatures has been fierce. Lobbyists for the vaping and tobacco industry fought bans on flavours in Hawaii, California, New Mexico, Massachusetts, New York, Maine and Connecticut.
Such bans failed or stalled, even as Michigan’s governor this month ordered emergency rules prohibiting flavoured e-cigarettes. New York Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo expressed a desire Monday to ban flavoured e-cigarettes.
Trump’s federal proposal, as it stands, would require no congressional approval, meaning lobbying efforts to defeat it could be less effective than in state legislatures. Juul spent $1.9 million in the first half of the year to try and sway the White House, Congress and the Food and Drug Administration.
The Vapor Technology Association has reported spending $78,000 this year in its lobbying fight against California’s proposed
flavoured e-cigarettes ban, while one of the world’s largest tobacco producers, Altria, reported spending over $100,000 last fall solely to lobby such legislation. The bills have since stalled.
Reynolds American, which sells Vuse Alto e-cigarettes, reported spending $240,000 on paid lobbyists in New York this year.
At least $23,000 alone went to fund their lobbying push against a flavoured tobacco ban that failed to pass this year.
Altria – which is also Juul’s biggest investor – also spent over $70,000 in Maine alone this spring on an online social media and email campaign in its efforts to defeat a ban on flavoured e-cigarettes and all tobacco products, according to lobbying reports filed with state ethics officials. Maine still has no flavour ban.
The global e-cigarette and vape market was valued at as much as $11 billion in 2018. The rise in teen vaping has been driven mainly by flavoured cartridge-based products such as Juul, which controls roughly three-quarters of the U.S. e-cigarettes market.
The proposals and the lobbying fight come as health authorities investigate hundreds of breathing illnesses reported in people who have used e-cigarettes and other vaping devices.
No single device, ingredient or additive has been identified, though many cases involve marijuana vaping. Supporters of flavours argue that adult cigarette users say flavours helped them quit, and that legislators should instead focus on companies that are trying to hook young nonsmokers with clearly kid-friendly market-
ing and packaging.
“One of the things that we are finding is that state legislatures are reflexively reacting to media stories and without a scientific basis making determinations that flavours are the problem so we need to get rid of all the flavours,” said Tony Abboud, president of the Vapor Technology Association.
There had been concern that the tobacco and vaping industries were winning their fight to keep at least the most popular flavours – mint and menthol – in play. That concern has now been tempered by Trump’s announcement Wednesday that his ban would include menthol and mint.
Last November, the FDA announced plans for a crackdown that could lead to federal regulators pulling all e-cigarette flavours besides menthol and mint
– thought to be useful to adult smokers – from shelves. The FDA also said it would also seek to ban menthol cigarettes.
The FDA’s announcement came just two days after Juul announced the halting of in-store sales of mango, fruit, creme and cucumber flavours in retail stores.
The company’s CEO has said that Juul never intended for young people to use their products but that they are “sensitive” to concerns raised by the FDA. And a spokesman for Juul, Ted Kwong, said before Wednesday’s announcement by Trump that the company would support an outright ban on flavours that mimic kid candies, foods and drinks.
Still, in line with the FDA’s proposed policy, Juul Labs still distributes mint, menthol and tobacco flavours in retail stores.
Teen on life support linked to vaping sickness
The Washington Post
She had decided that day to put down the vaping device, but it was already too late. After vaping for two years as an alternative to smoking cigarettes, 17-year-old Whitney Livingston came down with a fever that landed her on life support, her mother told Fox4News.com.
“She could have almost died,” Jennifer Audas told Fox4News about her daughter. “And her oxygen had already dropped all the way. There was pneumonia in both lungs. The doctor said that it looked like no pneumonia he’d ever seen.”
Livingston’s illness comes as health officials scramble to understand a wave of serious lung diseases afflicting more than 450 otherwise healthy people who use ecigarettes, which mimic smoking by heating liquids with substances such as nicotine
or marijuana. Six deaths have been attributed to vaping, and U.S. President Donald Trump said Wednesday he would move to ban most flavored e-cigarettes.
Livingston, a high school senior who works as a restaurant hostess, is being treated at a hospital in Dallas after she became sick about two weeks ago, Fox4News reported. At first, the report says, her symptoms resembled those of a stomach virus: a fever, a cough and rapid breathing. She immediately knew what was happening. Livingston had read about a spate of vaping-related illnesses and deaths across the country, Fox4News reported, and she understood the risks of using the e-cigarettes.
Doctors, however, are not sure that vaping caused Livingston’s illness, CBS Dallas/ Fort Worth reported. Audas told Fox4News that when her
daughter revealed she had been smoking cigarettes, Audas had thought vaping would be a better alternative.
“You think: cigarettes, you’re going to get cancer, so this is much healthier,” Audas told Fox4News. “Because that’s the way it’s portrayed.” Livingston’s health is improving, the news station reported, but the family is unsure of what lies ahead for her.
Although e-cigarettes have been on the market for more than a decade, reports of illnesses accelerated this year after patients reported coughing, chest pain or shortness of breath. Many people have been diagnosed with acute respiratory distress syndrome, a life-threatening condition in which fluid builds up in the lungs.
As The Washington Post’s Hannah Knowles previously reported: “Officials are still trying to figure out what, exactly, is
causing people to fall ill. They think chemicals are to blame.
“The focus of our investigation is narrowing, and that is great news, but we are still faced with complex questions in this outbreak that will take time to answer,’ said Ileana Arias, CDC acting deputy director for noninfectious diseases.
“The nationwide investigation has found no particular vaping devices or products linked to all cases and is looking into potential contamination or counterfeit, as many victims report buying marijuana on the street rather than from a store,” the report continued.
The popularity of vaping has soared in recent years as young people in particular take to the practice.
More than half of users are younger than 35 years old, according to a study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
Vape pods are displayed for sale on Sept. 3 at Good Guys Vape Shop in Biddeford, Maine.
MONEY IN BRIEF
Currencies
OTTAWA (CP) — These are indicative wholesale rates for foreign currency provided by the Bank of Canada on Thursday. Quotations in Canadian funds.
HBC announces nearly $1B loss
David PADDON The Canadian Press TORONTO — Hudson’s Bay Co. reported a $984-million loss in its latest quarter as its bottom line was eroded by a number of one-time charges and its flagship Canadian retail banner experienced weaker sales compared with last year.
The owner of the Hudson’s Bay chain of department stores, as well as the New York-based Saks Fifth Avenue luxury chain and Saks Off 5th outlets, said the loss amounted to $5.35 per share for the quarter ended Aug. 3. That compared with a year-earlier loss of $280 million or $1.45 per share.
HBC’s overall revenue totalled $1.9 billion, roughly the same as a year ago, while comparable sales fell 0.4 per cent.
Comparable sales at the Hudson’s Bay chain fell 3.4 per cent in the quarter.
Saks Fifth Avenue’s comparable sales grew 0.6 per cent, while Saks Off 5th comparable sales increased 3.4 per cent.
Hudson’s Bay officials said in a conference call that the second quarter was disappointing, but expressed confidence that they’re taking the steps necessary build to build its two core retail businesses and to find value from its real estate.
The markets today
TORONTO (CP) — Canada’s main stock index could be on the path to surpass 17,000 for the first time after investors put money into key sectors like financials and energy to lift the TSX to a record intraday high, says a market observer.
“The bulls and the bears have had a bit of a wrestling match here for the last six weeks and it’s resolving itself to the upside so I think there’s potential for this to continue to the extent that you don’t get more negative headlines out of the China situation,” says Mike Archibald, associate portfolio manager with AGF Investments Inc.
The TSX surged for most of the day in reaction to signs of thawing trade tensions between the U.S. and China, along with more stimulus coming from the European Central Bank.
The S&P/TSX composite index rose to 16,696.40, beating the previous high of 16,672.71 set in April. A pullback at the end of the day cut some of the gains as it closed up 32.14 points to 16,643.28, below the highest-ever close of 16,669.40.
In New York, the Dow Jones industrial average was up 45.41 points at 27,182.45. The S&P 500 index was up 8.64 points at 3,009.57, while the Nasdaq composite was up 24.79 points at 8,194.47. Archibald adds that it’s not unreasonable for the S&P 500 to reach 3,100 in six to eight weeks.
The Canadian dollar traded for an average of 75.73 cents US, compared with 75.87 cents US on Wednesday.
“At Saks Fifth Avenue, we feel strongly about our position in an increasingly competitive environment and remain committed to driving further upside to this business,” HBC chief executive Helena Foulkes said. “For Hudson’s Bay, we are continuing to fix the fundamentals within our merchandise strategy and service model.”
Foulkes said there is more to be done to re-invigorate The Bay’s product lineup to be more appealing to a slightly more upscale customer but repeatedly expressed confidence that it has a distinctive, valuable role to play for the long-term.
“Even so, on a two-year basis, Hudson’s Bay (comparable sales) declined four per cent – a clear signal that we have more work to do.”
Foulkes, who has been bluntly critical of The Bay’s attempt to woo former customers of Sears Canada with middleof-the-road merchandise and price discounting, said Thursday that HBC has cut out more than 300 unproductive brands.
The Hudson’s Bay stores that remain in its lineup are profitable so no closures are planned, she said, but HBC is looking at different uses for space within the locations – such as WeWork short-term office space in Toronto.
Merchandise brands are also inter-
ested in entering the Canadian market through the Bay stores, she said.
“For 50 per cent of Canadians, they live within 16 kilometres of our store. I think that speaks to the overall brand we have in the country.”
The results came as HBC’s independent directors evaluate an offer by a group of shareholders led by executive chairman Richard Baker, who want to take the company private at a price of $9.45 per share.
The deal is opposed by other investment firms including Catalyst Capital Group Inc., which revealed in a regulatory filing this week that it controlled about a 16 per cent stake in HBC, as well as Land & Buildings Investment Management.
HBC’s shares traded Thursday in a narrow range between $9.77 and $10.13 in Toronto, above the Baker group’s offer and closer to the $10.11 per share that Catalyst said it paid to buy 18.5 million shares last month.
Among the one-time items in HBC’s most recent quarter that added to its net loss was a $150-million non-cash writedown of the value of Canadian deferred income tax assets, which may
not be fully usable. Other unusual items were related to the closure of HBC’s Home Outfitters chain in Canada and some Saks Off 5th locations. There were also items related to a change in vendor relationships.
Excluding one-time items, HBC says its normalized net loss for the quarter was $171 million or 93 cents per share, compared with a normalized net loss of $85 million or 46 cents per share in the same quarter last year.
Analysts had estimated an adjusted loss of 73 cents per share with about $2.1 billion of revenue for the quarter, according to financial markets data firm Refinitiv.
In August, HBC announced it will sell its Lord & Taylor banner to Le Tote, a clothing rental company.
That follows HBC’s previously announced plan to sell its remaining German holdings for $1.5 billion to its joint venture partner, a deal that was announced almost simultaneously with the Baker group’s offer to take the company private. HBC executives said Thursday that the process for selling the German holdings has advanced but hasn’t yet closed.
Best, worst economic sectors swap spots
Divya BALJI Bloomberg
As momentum trades unravel in major stock markets across the world, investors in Canada have another rotation to watch.
Tech stocks, which had been the top performing sector on the S&P/TSX Composite Index until last month, are now among the worst. Taking the No. 1 spot in September is the health-care gauge.
Before you deem this a flight to safety, consider that volatile pot stocks make up more than half of the S&P/TSX Composite Health Care Index.
“Things got a little bit overextended in the realm of safety,” said Hans Albrecht, fund manager at Toronto-based Horizons ETFs Management Canada Inc. “Come early September that unwound a little bit.”
Part of it can be blamed on the move that investors are making from growth stocks to value as they sell out of tech
B.C. raked
The Canadian Press
and into sectors like energy and financials. But there’s also been a rebound in the shares of weed companies.
It may be a technical bounce after cannabis stocks underperformed since April. “They’ve been suffering all year,” Albrecht said. “Whether there’s some sort of underlying story that will give them a big push, I’m not sure.”
Pot stocks have had a rough year as leaders in the industry reported disappointing results, regulatory breaches and as acquisitions languished amid U.S. antitrust reviews. Canopy Growth Corp., up about 15 per cent this month, was in oversold territory in August. Aurora Cannabis Inc. was flirting with that technical level for most of last month.
Others point to a short squeeze.
“A lot of people were shorting the companies for fundamental reasons and also quantitative reasons,” said Greg Taylor, chief investment officer at Purpose Investments.
And that may be unwinding. Some U.S.-based companies have posted good earnings, like Curaleaf Holdings Inc., and that might be boosting sentiment, he said. Bank of Montreal is no longer allowing retail investors to short cannabis stocks, according to a media report. But the pot stock bounce does feel like a technical move, Taylor added.
Canada’s tech stocks have added $49 billion in value through the end of August. Since then, they have erased about $7 billion as investors reassessed expectations for global economic growth. On the flipside, among the top companies on the health-care gauge this month are weed stocks: Canopy Growth, Aurora Cannabis, Hexo Corp., Aphria Inc. and Cronos Group Inc.
“It almost feels like a change in sentiment,” Taylor said.
“A lot of people have been hiding in momentum names. Some people have reversed those trades.”
in $115 million in vacancy tax
VANCOUVER — British Columbia collected $115 million in the 2018-19 fiscal year from homeowners who paid the province’s speculation and vacancy tax. As of Sept. 3, it says almost 12,000 homeowners were paying the tax, which targets people who own vacant property in B.C. The province says more than 1.6 million tax declarations have been filed and its data shows 99.8 per cent of home owners are exempt from the levy. Of those paying the tax, the province says just over 4,500 were foreign owners, about 3,000 were classified as satellite families, some 1,500 were Canadians living outside the province, and about 2,400 were B.C. residents.
Finance Minister Carole James is scheduled to meet in Vancouver today with mayors from communities where the tax is applied to discuss potential changes this fall. The tax is applied in communities in and around Victoria and Vancouver, as well as other areas that have had hot housing markets including Kelowna and Nanaimo. Several communities have called on James to eliminate the tax or offer exemptions because they say it hurts development and punishes homeowners with second properties. The tax rate for 2018 was 0.5 per cent of the assessed value for all properties, rising to two per cent in 2019 for foreign owners and so-called satellite families,
while Canadian citizens or permanent residents continue to pay 0.5 per cent. Satellite families are defined as those that earn most of their income outside of Canada. The government says the average assessed home value of properties that are subject to the tax is $1.45 million. James said the money collected from the tax will be used to help fund affordable housing projects in the communities where it is applied.
“Our government inherited
Hudson’s Bay Co. reported a loss of $984 million in its latest quarter compared with a loss of $280 million in the same quarter last year.
Donald William McGregor
January 5, 1943August 31, 2019
With heavy hearts we announce the passing of Donald William McGregor, aged 76, on Saturday August 31st, 2019 at Rocky Mountain Care Home in Fernie, BC.
Donald was born in Thunder Bay Ontario and moved at a young age with his parents Deloss and Helen McGregor along with his twin brother Gary to Jasper, Alberta. Donald spent his formative years loving the outdoor life in the Rocky Mountains - most of Don’s time was spent alongside his twin brother, training and competing in all aspects of skiing.
Don spent a brief time at Montana State University where he thought of pursuing his love of photography fulltime - he decided to follow in his father’s footsteps and left post secondary to join the railway workforcespending his next 35 years working for BC Rail as a Conductor. Donald moved to Prince George with his former wife Carol; where they raised their three children. An avid outdoorsman - many fond memories of fishing and camping trips with friends and family punctuate this time.
Donald continued to work for BC Rail and moved on to the communities of Kamloops, Lillooet, Ashcroft and Barriere - when not working - he was always researching and planning his next outdoor adventure. Always the one to document his trips with his camera - his love of biking and photos was a constant throughout his life. After retiring, Donald turned his adventurous soul to travellingspending many winters in Mexico, Thailand and the Philippines and taking many pleasure train trips. Never slowing down - you would often see Don riding his “Fat Tire” bike on trails as late as 74 years of age - when he moved to Kimberley and then on to Fernie for his final adventure. Don’s passion for adventure and love of sports lives on in his kids and grandkids. He is survived by his children; Shawn (Lisa), Tisha (Bryce), Kyle (Heidi), his twin brother Gary (Toni) and his grandchildren Katie, Natalie, Logan, Cole and Hudson. A special thank you to the caregivers and nurses at Rocky Mountain View in Fernie BC - we are very grateful for their care and kindness. There will be a celebration of life in Jasper, Alberta to be announced at a later date. In lieu of flowers donations can be made to Alzheimer’s Society of Canada.
Ron Abernethy 1928 - 2019
It is with sadness we announce the passing of our father Ron Abernethy. Predeceased by his loving wife of 64 years, Joyce. Survived by sons Gordon (Jean), Gary (Kathy); daughters Cindy Norum (Royce), Susan Morash (Shawn); seven grandchildren, ten great grandchildren and numerous nieces and nephews. A Graveside service will be held at 11:30am on Saturday, September 14, 2019 in the Prince George Memorial Park Cemetery. Following the graveside service, please join the family for a Celebration of Life at the Columbus Community Centre at 12:00pm. In lieu of flowers donations to a charity of your choice would be greatly appreciated.
LiedI - Rosa
December 13, 1929August 28, 2019
It is with deep sadness that the family of Rosa Liedl announces her death at the age of 89. She was a devoted wife, mother and friend; unassuming to a fault, firmly grounded in basic decencies and selfless in all her dealings.
Born December 13, 1929 in Kiefersfelden, Germany to a family of eight children at a time when bad times were just ahead. At the age of ten the second world war started and children grew up very quickly having to help to provide for the family’s needs. In 1947 she married Rudi Liedl and had two sons - Rudi and Karl. In the cold month of November, 1959, she left her parents and all her brothers and sisters to cross the ocean to a new land and language to be with her husband. A year later they had a daughter, Trudy. In her 40’s, wanting to work and living out of town, she learned to drive and worked until 1984 when they packed up once more and moved to West Bank. Prior to his death in 2002, her husband urged her to move back to her children in Prince George thinking that she could never manage the property with all the fruit trees and garden. But, in her wisdom, she decided to wait a year. The years passed and she stayed in her home and managed very well until suffering a stroke. Left to mourn are her two sons Rudi (Shelli), Karl (Brenda), daughter Trudi (Bill) Engler, grandchildren Konrad (Chantelle), Kirk (Michelle), Karen (Jason), Sara (Troy), Michael (Lorena) and six great grandchildren. She was predeceased by husband Rudi and grandson Martin. We cherish the many memories of her hospitality, kindness and her incredible Apfelstrudel. A Memorial Service will be held at the St. Giles Presbyterian Church Saturday 14, 2019 at 1:00pm. Luncheon to follow.
Lorne Donald Jackson June 1, 1931September 3, 2019
It is with heavy hearts that the family announces the passing of Lorne Jackson on September 3, 2019 at the age of 88, in Kamloops with his family at his side. He is survived by his loving wife Doris whom he spent 66 years with, his children Brian (Ann), Karen (Daryl) Shelley and Keith, grandchildren Theresa, Shane, Jeff, Dean, Lisa and great grandchild Jake. Lorne spent most of his life as a business owner of roofing companies both in Kamloops and Prince George.
A Celebration of Life will be held at Oakdale Trailer Park at the Cabana 2400, Oakdale Way on Saturday, September 14 at 4:00pm.
GLORIA BEVERLEY (KENNEDY)
DRAGOMATZ - Born in Vancouver on December 23, 1947 died in Prince George, BC on August 31, 2019 at Hospice. Predeceased by parents Gilbert & Doreen Elizabeth Kennedy, sisters Patricia & Louise. Survived by loving husband Gary, his children, grandchildren and brother-in-law
James & his family. Service will be held at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints on 5th Ave, Saturday September 14 at 1:30pm.
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