How many of us in B.C. can say “hello” in the language of the people on whose traditional territory we live, work and play? Hadih is the traditional way to say hello in the Lheidli T’enneh dialect of Dakelh.
You might find yourself expanding your vocabulary – and appreciation for the state of Indigenous languages spoken in B.C. – after visiting The Exploration Place to view the Our Living Languages: First Peoples’ Voices in BC and Mary Gouchie: Hubodulh’eh.
A traveling exhibition of interac-
tive stations, video and audio from the Royal BC Museum and First Peoples’ Cultural Council, Our Living Languages showcases the efforts of First Nations communities throughout the province to help 34 different languages survive and flourish.
Mary Gouchie: Hubodulh’eh, an in-house exhibit, showcases one Lheidli T’enneh Elder’s commitment to language revitalization. She was considered instrumental in the recovery and documentation of the written and spoken Lheidli T’enneh dialect of Dakelh.
“As part of reconciliation efforts, stimulating and facilitating the
connection to Indigenous language is a roll we are embracing,” said museum curator, Alyssa Leier.
“As part of our efforts to help preserve an increasingly endangered language, we are working on several initiatives including working with the Lheidli T’enneh on the digitization of a large collection of oral histories spoken in the Lheidli dialect of Dakelh.
“These are invaluable sources of cultural knowledge and it is critical that they are preserved. This exhibit showcases this kind of work and the urgency it requires.”
Both exhibits open on Sunday and run until Jan. 6.
Local taxi company readies for ride-hailing
Mark NIELSEN Citizen staff mnielsen@pgcitizen.ca
Prince George Taxi intends to compete on price with any ridehailing service looking to get a foothold in the city, according to manager Sam Kuuluvainen.
But whether it will be able to do so remains in question.
Clients, meanwhile, could be facing complications when trying to figure out which offers the best deal.
Both topics could become issues as at least one ride-hailing service, Ontario-based Uride, has an eye on Prince George.
According to the Passenger Transportation Board, which regulates both types of services in B.C., outfits like Uride, known as transportation network services or TNSs by the PTB, will have to charge the same “flag rate” – or initial flat rate for stepping into a car – that taxis do.
Beyond that, “passengers and drivers will be provided with an estimate of the cost of the trip or an up-front price that will be charged before they accept a ride,” PTB director Trevor Paul said in an email.
And while Paul noted that there will be no caps on the rates Uride and others like it could charge for the subsequent trip,
he said taxi companies remain subject to the rates for distance and time prescribed by the PTB.
For clients, that could mean exposure to “surge rates” from TNSs when demand for rides is particularly high.
For the taxi companies, there is the fear TNSs will undercut their per-kilometre rates while they remain handcuffed by PTB regulations on price.
That was one of the points raised in a petition to the court from the nine Vancouver area taxi companies seeking to quash the PTB’s framework for regulating the ride-hailing industry, arguing it is “patently unreasonable” and that the PTB lacks the statutory power to create the policies.
In an interview this week, Kuuluvainen said he will be seeking clarity from the PTB on how much flexbility Prince George Taxi will have with the aim of being able to drop its price on app-based calls to compete with TNSs.
Prince George Taxi has had an app similar to those offered by TNSs up and running since last September.
“It does everything a Uride app would do with exception of being able to quote a fare, because we’re not allowed to do it,” Kuuluvainen said. — see ‘WITH TAXIS, page 3
CITIZEN PHOTO BY BRENT BRAATEN
The Exploration Place to open the Our Living Languages: First Peoples’ Voices in B.C. travelling exhibition and in-house exhibit Mary Gouchie: Hubodulh’eh. A picture of the late Lheidli T’enneh elder Mary Gouchie and her note books and tapes used to preserve the Lheidli T’enneh language.
Heavy snowfall declaration part of new city snow policy
Mark NIELSEN Citizen staff
mnielsen@pgcitizen.ca
Crews will have some leeway on the time they have to clear city streets in the event of a major snowfall under a revamped snow and ice control policy approved by city council this week.
Whenever the accumulation reaches 20 cm in a 24-hour period, administration can issued a “heavy snowfall declaration” that adds another day to the time limits set out under the policy.
Moreover, for each additional eight cm that falls over that time, another 24 hours of clearing time can be added.
It also allows snow clearing crews to start work on the top-priority routes in the city’s downtown at 11 p.m., an hour earlier than usual.
The step follows on the difficulty crews had meeting timelines during the holiday season last winter when 35 cm of snow fell on the city over two days and in an interview, city public works director Gina LayteListon called it the most important of the changes set out under the new policy.
Other changes include allowing crews to work overnight in residential areas, limiting the clearing of driveway entrances to eight metres of width and, under a pilot program, assigning equipment to the College HeightsVanway area, similar to the way the Hart is treated.
Because of the way the garbage collection days fell, the so-called “blue zone” of College Heights-Vanway suffered through an extended period of uncleared streets as successive snowfalls forced crews to return to higher-priority routes while also working to clear other zones ahead of their respective collection days.
“That was quite frustrating for residents and we saw that in our service requests,”
Layte-Liston said. “So the hope is that for those outlying areas, having assigned equipment will benefit.”
Layte-Liston said the city will continue to
rely on a “retainer system” as opposed to buying more of its own equipment to clear snow, “and then trying to get the operators.”
“With the pipelines and such, it’s only going to become more difficult to find operators that we can have working for us for the winter season,” she added. “We do hire that staff for the winter season and so it isn’t year-round work for them.”
Time limits for clearing routes will remain the same – 48 hours for priority one and two routes once 7.5 cm has fallen and 72
hours after completion of priority ones and twos for the remainder of the city once 12 cm has fallen. The maximum amount of compact snow will remain at 2.5 cm.
The policy also includes standards for ice control.
Liquid salt can be applied to priority ones and twos up to 24 hours in advance of a snowfall when it shows a 60-per-cent or greater likelihood of occurring and the temperature is warmer than -20 C.
Rock salt will be selectively applied to melt snow and ice immediately after prior-
ity ones and twos are cleared whenever it’s warmer than -7 C.
Liquid salt will also be mixed into 100 per cent of abrasives and road salt prior to their application and winter crush and sand will be applied to intersections, stops, sidewalks and hills and bends on priority ones and twos whenever ice forms and on priority three areas when conditions merit. The changes also follow on a report from retired city administrator Frank Blues outlining some suggested adjustments to the way the city tackles snowfalls.
Robbery suspects sought
Citizen staff
Police are on the lookout for three suspects after a local electronics store was robbed twice in the span of eight days.
A warrant has been issued for the arrest of Chelise Danika Johnny, 19, described as Aboriginal, five-foot-four and 110 pounds with brown hair and brown eyes, in relation to an incident on Tuesday at Best Buy on Walls Avenue.
She is suspected of joining two others in grabbing items from a shelf and then rushing the exit. When an employee confronted them, one of the three brandished a knife, RCMP said.
The trio fled on bikes but two suspects were arrested the next day. Co-accused Keenan Frank Sam, 27, and a 15-year-old boy were apprehended, have been charged and remained in custody as of Friday.
A similar incident involving two other people who remain on the loose occurred on Sept. 3, RCMP said. One is described as a male with dark hair and a full beard, a tattoo on the left side of his neck and wearing a green camo ball cap, black hoody with red writing on the front and white writing on the arm, blue jeans and black runners
The other is described as an Aboriginal male with dark hair and wearing a black hoody, black ball cap with a “P” on the front, white runners, and grey track pants with a white stripe down the side.
Anyone with information on where any of the three might be is asked to contact the Prince George
RCMP at 250-561-3300 or anonymously contact Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-8477 or online at www. pgcrimestoppers.bc.ca (English only).
A bulldozer moves snow up the pile at the city snow dump at 17th Avenue and Foothills Boulevard in January. The City of Prince George revamped its now and ice control policy this week.
Knitters, crocheters, weavers and other lovers of fibre arts can gather with like-minded people during the third annual FibreFest held Sept. 22 at the Senior Citizens Activity Centre.
It started with The Great Northwest Yarn Crawl held during the summer that covered the northwest with stores in Prince Rupert, the Northwest Territories, Fort McMurray, AB and 100 mile participating along with three stores in Prince George.
Yarn Crawl participants could visit the stores throughout the summer and now some of those stores will bring representatives and their wares to a one-stop location where knitters can get those items they didn’t purchase while at the store and participate in a variety of workshops offered throughout the day.
Playing With String members Jen Boots, Bonne Leiphart and Darlene Wainwright have organized both the yarn crawl and the FibreFest.
“We are encouraging guests to bring items they have created down to FibreFest,” Leiphart said.
“Anyone whose got anything that’s kind of fun, different, whatever should bring it in and let people see it because that’s one of the really nice things about an event like this. People want to see what others are doing.”
Local stores Top Drawer, Darling Deviance and Olde Spin-
ning Wheel will be on site along with Faking Insanity from Dawson Creek and Wooly Ewe from Telkwa.
“Along with the stores there are vendors at the FibreFest,” Leiphart said.
There will be many independent yarn dyers at the event, some even spin the yarn they have dyed.
“They have absolutely gorgeous yarns and because they are doing their own it tends to be unique,” Leiphart said. There are some indie-dyers, as Leiphard calls them,
‘With taxis, there is fixed supply’
— from page 1
As it stands, taxis in Prince George charge a flag rate of $3.50 plus $2.05 per kilometre or $40 per hour, whichever is greater. It works out to $21 per hour, Kuuluvainen said.
He also said a cab from Prince George Taxi has picked up a customer within 8 1/2 minutes of getting the call, 85 per cent of the time and that the average wait time is six minutes, although it rose to eight minutes in February due to the cold and snow. While it’s licenced for 70 cabs, Kuuluvainen said it typically has 40 on the road during the day and 20 at night.
“What we do is we double shift and adjust for business volumes – on a guess, sometimes you get it right, sometimes you get it wrong,” he said.
“And there a few times a year, like New Year’s Eve, Halloween night... probably for three Saturdays in December where there might be a one-hour period where we have a really hard time keeping up, no matter what we do, other than that we don’t have people waiting an hour to come home from the bar.”
Based in Thunder Bay, Uride has submitted an application to the PTB and should know within four to eight weeks whether it will have been given the go-ahead to oper-
that have their own signature style so you just have to look at the yarn to know whose it is.
“For example, we have one Called Tumble Mountain Yarns from McBride coming in and they do absolutely lovely yarns and another one is Twisted Faye and she does a lot of fun things,” Leiphart said. “We’re getting more and more vendors that are outside our area so that people who are attending the FibreFest can see items from someone they don’t ordinarily see.”
Other things visitors can find at the event include buttons and shawl pins made out of antlers, project bags, yarn accessories like stitch markers and cubes.
And new to this year’s event is a local wood worker who will custom design knitters’ tools like doubling stands but with any twist your imagination can create. Leiphart has suggested a doubling stand end table to make it a multipurpose item suitable for a knitter’s home and the wood worker will be bringing a sample
of his creation to the FibreFest and take orders.
“I was hoping to find someone who would create knitters’ stuff because it’s a bit of a specialized niche,” Leiphart said. “And he does amazing work and he’s ready to do customized orders.” During FibreFest, there will be workshops taking place so even experienced knitters can learn something new. Workshops include instruction on mosaic stitch, which will be taught using two colours of yarn that achieves a complicated-looking design that in fact is quite simple to create, Leiphart explained. There’s also a workshop for reverse knitting, dropping stitches on purpose to create a beanie that can feature a scarf laced through its brim to give it extra panache, felting soap, how to read a knitting chart, make a market mesh bag and quick tips on things like how to do a Russian join or Icelandic bind-off, l-cords or magic loop. Each of the stores at FibreFest will contribute a prize for the draws held during the event. Everyone is welcome to attend. It’s a great place to find gifts for knitters, which might be hard to find otherwise, Leiphart said. FibreFest takes place on Sept. 22 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Senior Citizens Activity Centre, 425 Brunswick St. A light lunch will be available for purchase from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. with coffee and tea available during the day. For more information and updates about the FibreFest visit www.playing-with-string.com.
IIO investigating after man injured
Citizen staff
The Independent Investigations Office has been called in to investigate, after a man suffered a head injury during an arrest in Prince George on Thursday. According to an RCMP statement, Prince George RCMP plainclothes officers witnessed what they believed to be a drug transaction happening in the 1100-block of Third Avenue. A uniformed officer who was nearby attempted to arrest a 28-year-old Prince
ate, said founder and CEO Cody Ruberto.
While it is operating in Winnipeg and also has its eye on Vancouver, it generally operates in the smaller markets. Sudbury and North Bay in Ontario and Humboldt in Saskatchewan are among its markets according to its website.
“In smaller communities, there are different peaks than you see in a big city and you really have to take care of your drivers and ensure that they’re earning a good living,” Ruberto said. “We do a bit of a hybrid model where we’ll have some people who will schedule themselves for their shifts and do this full time and other people who float on and off the platform just with demand.”
Ruberto said he started up Uride in April 2017 after witnessing long lineups for taxis in his hometown.
“With taxis, there is fixed supply, which has made it difficult,” he said of other markets.
Through its website, it has been working to recruit drivers and Ruberto said it has drawn a good response. Drivers must have a class four licence, he emphasized.
“It’s looking promising,” Ruberto.
He said Uride is still sorting out its pricing for Prince George but generally has charged 20 to 25 per cent less than the taxis have in other markets.
George man, who fled on a bicycle to the rail yard along First Avenue prior to being arrested. One of the officers who witnessed the initial incident attempted to stop the man on his bike, and during the attempt to stop the suspect, he suffered a head injury. The man was take to hospital, and was determined to have serious, but not life-threatening, injuries, the police statement said.
The IIO was called in to investigate whether police action or inaction lead to the man’s injury.
CITIZEN PHOTO BY BRENT BRAATEN
Bonne Leiphart and Darlene Wainwright from Fibrefest and Doug Plato from Blue Pine Woodware with the doubling stand that they all designed.
CITIZEN PHOTO BY BRENT BRAATEN
taxi seen in a rear view mirror on Brunswick Street.
RCMP seized a fishing boat near Nootka Sound, off the coast of Vancouver Island, on Wednesday over allegations of over fishing. Police seized two dozen chinook salmon, about 24 kilograms of salmon roe, 18 rock cod fillets and eight ling cod fillets.
Boat seized for over-fishing off Vancouver Island
Mounties have seized a nine-metre fishing boat and more than two dozen chinook salmon over what they say are allegations of “significant overfishing.”
The RCMP say they received a report Wednesday of possible Fisheries Act violations by those aboard the vessel on the west side of Vancouver Island near Nootka Sound. In a news release, police allege of-
NEWS IN BRIEF
House at centre of dispute in small town torn down
SCOTCH CREEK (CP) — A house that residents in the community of Scotch Creek, B.C., complained about has been torn down. The RCMP warned residents in the community, about 80 kilometres east of Kamloops, against taking matters into their own hands after an arson at the home earlier this week. The home was supposed to be vacant, but the RCMP said residents went to a house last weekend to confront its occupants about stolen property and what sounded like a gunshot was heard from inside. RCMP Cpl. Scott Linklater said in a statement that police do not condone vigilantism and they recommend the public leave investigations to them. Jay Simpson, an area director for the Columbia Shuswap Regional District, said the owner was unaware the house was being used by squatters and it was torn down on Friday. Police shooting under investigation
KELOWNA (CP) — The Mounties said officers shot and wounded a man during a
ficers with the Fisheries Department found more than two dozen chinook salmon, about 24 kilograms of salmon roe, 18 rock cod fillets and eight ling cod fillets.
Chinook populations are on the decline and the Fisheries Department has limited recreational fishermen to an allowable catch of two chinook per day in the area.
Police say three people from outside the province are expected to appear in court in November to face charges under the Fisheries Act.
confrontation Friday in a park in Kamloops. A statement from the RCMP said police received a complaint about a man jumping in front of a vehicle. It said officers found a man they believed was connected to the complaint in Bear Creek Provincial Park and he was carrying a pair of garden shears. While attempting an arrest, the RCMP said there was an interaction and the man was shot by police. Police said the injured man then ran into Okanagan Lake where he swam to a log boom. They said it took police several hours to convince him to surrender.
The Independent Investigations Office, which examines incidents of death or serious harm involving police, will conduct a probe into the shooting.
Library loans out dogs
VANCOUVER (CP) — You can take out almost anything from libraries these days, but this one requires a leash.
Eight therapy dogs will be available to borrow from the Canine Library on Saturday for 15-minute outings as part of Vancouver’s Poetry in Parks initiative.
Candie Tanaka of the Vancouver Public Library said people will have an opportunity to sit with a dog and a handler and either read from provided material or bring their own. She said the event is a chance for those who don’t own a dog to interact with one.
Intelligence officer charged for attempted espionage
Jim BRONSKILL The Canadian Press
OTTAWA — Cameron Jay Ortis, a senior RCMP intelligence official, made a brief court appearance Friday on charges of breaching Canada’s secrets law.
Ortis, 47, was charged under three sections of the Security of Information Act as well as two Criminal Code provisions, including breach of trust, for allegedly trying to disclose classified information to a foreign entity or terrorist group.
The alleged recipient, or potential recipient, isn’t specified in the charges.
“In broad strokes, the allegations are that he obtained, stored, processed sensitive information, we believe with the intent to communicate it to people that he shouldn’t be communicating it to,” prosecutor John
MacFarlane said after the Ontario court hearing in Ottawa.
“I won’t be commenting in any more detail other than that at this stage.”
An insider familiar with the case, but not authorized to speak about it publicly, said Ortis had served as director general of an RCMP intelligence unit, a civilian position.
He earned a doctorate in political science from the University of British Columbia, completing a dissertation on the international dimensions of internet security.
Brian Job, a professor of political science at the university, said by email that he’s seen Ortis very occasionally since Ortis left UBC.
“Cameron never provided details of his employment with the RCMP. Nothing in my experience with Cameron would lead me to suspect his alleged involvement in the activities for which he charged. Indeed, the exact opposite is true,” Job said.
“I am deeply shocked by the news and will have no further comment, as the matter proceeds through the courts.”
Ortis, wearing a blue dress shirt, appeared in court by video link.
MacFarlane said the Crown will argue at a coming bail proceeding that Ortis should remain in custody while his case is before the courts.
The charge sheet lists a total of seven counts against Ortis under the various provisions, dating from as early as Jan. 1, 2015,
through to Thursday, when he was arrested.
The RCMP said the charges stem from activities alleged to have occurred during his time with the force, suggesting he was active with Mounties upon being taken into custody. However, neither the RCMP nor MacFarlane would clarify whether he was employed by the force when he was charged, or if he still is.
The Mounties declined to make further comment, saying the investigation was ongoing.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau also said little about the events during a stop on the Liberal election campaign.
“I was of course made aware of the arrest,” he said. “I can assure you that the authorities are taking this extremely seriously.”
Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer tweeted that the arrest was extremely concerning. There is no indication of the recipient of the information Ortis allegedly intended to share, but Scheer said the development was “another reminder of the threats we face from foreign actors.”
“As prime minister, I will not hesitate to identify these threats and act accordingly.”
The Security of Information Act, ushered in following the 9/11 attacks in the United States, is intended to safeguard sensitive government secrets. Charges have been rare but Jeffrey Paul Delisle, a naval officer who gave classified material to Russia, pleaded guilty to offences under the act in 2012. The law forbids discussion or release of “special operational information,” including past and current confidential sources, targets of intelligence operations, names of spies, military attack plans, and encryption or other means of protecting data.
The penalty for revealing such information is up to life in prison.
Being a senior intelligence official, Ortis was designated as “permanently bound to secrecy.” Such individuals are held to a higher level of accountability than others under the secrecy law. It means unauthorized disclosures are subject to penalty whether the information is true or not and even if it was obtained after the employee left a sensitive post.
Engineers approve plan to remove toppled crane
Kevin BISSETT The Canadian Press
HALIFAX — Nova Scotia’s Labour minister says work will begin this weekend to remove a huge construction crane that collapsed onto a building in Halifax during Hurricane Dorian.
Labi Kousoulis says a structural engineering report has been completed and approved by his department and the Halifax Regional Municipality Fire Department.
The twisted, yellow structure is draped over a building that was under construction in the city’s downtown.
Video posted on social media showed the dramatic collapse at the height of the heavy rain and high winds Sept. 7.
Kousoulis said Friday the first work this weekend will see crews going from floor to floor to shore up the building in case it has been compromised.
“Posts will be put in place to ensure the building doesn’t fall in case there’s any compromised columns in it,” he told a news conference at his constituency office in Halifax.
A drone belonging to Halifax Regional Fire and Emergency could be seen flying around the building Friday to assist crews in their assessment.
“They will then pin the crane to the building. They will strap the crane to the building so as they start dismantling it, it doesn’t come apart under itself,” he said. Then a portable crane will be brought in to begin removing the damaged crane piece by piece.
Kousoulis said the work should take about two weeks, depending on the weather or any problems.
“The top part of the crane resting on the building is 67,000 pounds. You are dealing with a lot of steel and a lot of weight. That is essentially what the challenge is,” he said. The minister said the crane collapse could have been much worse, but fortunately it fell on the only unoccupied space possible and no one was hurt.
“It’s amazing the angle it fell. We were fortunate because any other way the crane fell, it would have been bouncing off occupied buildings. It would have been on the street.”
Kousoulis said he’s confident other construction cranes on the Halifax skyline are safe, but inspections will be done as a precaution.
He said some developers have taken it upon themselves to have inspections done by independent engineers.
Party leaders contend with posts, past lives from candidates
SMITH
Joanna
The Canadian Press
OTTAWA — The federal party leaders have spent the first days of the election campaign talking policy, as they’d like, and dismissing and defending candidates over old social-media posts, which they’d rather not.
Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer on Friday urged Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau to denounce controversial comments by an already-turfed Liberal candidate in Montreal, accusing the party of trying to keep anti-Semitic messages hidden from Canadians.
“I’d like to hear from Justin Trudeau why people who hold anti-Semitic views feel that their home is in the Liberal Party of Canada,” Scheer said Friday in Mississauga, Ont., after making an announcement about public transit.
Scheer grappled with questions about past controversial statements by his own candidates –one who was fired, and two who apologized and remain with the Conservative team.
Last month, the Liberals dropped Hassan Guillet as a candidate in the Montreal riding of Saint-Leonard-Saint-Michel after B’nai Brith Canada, a Jewish advocacy group, uncovered a series of old statements he made on social media that B’nai Brith described as anti-Israel and anti-Semitic.
Guillet later told reporters that he had discussed the old posts earlier that month with Liberal party officials, who reassured him they were convinced he was neither racist nor anti-Semitic.
The former imam also said he and the Liberals discussed a plan to head off any negative publicity should the posts be discovered, but when they were, he ended up being ejected as a candidate instead.
“(Trudeau) has refused to explain why he was working to keep those anti-Semitic messages hidden from the public and from Canadians,” Scheer said.
The Liberal party has said Guillet’s comments do not correspond to the party’s values. The party has not answered questions about when Liberal officials first learned of the posts.
Scheer brought up Guillet after responding to questions about troubling past statements by his own candidates.
Liberal candidate Ruby Sahota, who is seeking re-election in Brampton North, issued a tweet on Friday showing a Facebook comment from 2010 in which her Conservative rival, Arpan Khanna offhandedly used a homophobic slur apparently to tease a friend.
“I deeply regret the offensive language I used when I was a teenager,” Khanna, whom Scheer is expected to join in Brampton Friday night, said in a statement sent by a Conservative party spokesman.
“Over the past decade, I have come to understand that creating
safer and more inclusive spaces for LGBTQ+ people in Canada happens in our homes, workplaces, on social media, and in the conversations we have every day,” he said.
“I apologize unequivocally.”
Last month, the National Council of Canadian Muslims called on the Conservatives to drop Ghada Melek, who is running in Mississauga-Streetsville, over past social media posts they said were anti-Islam.
Melek has also apologized, saying that as a Coptic-Christian who cares for her homeland of Egypt, she allowed her passion to rule her in 2013.
“While these are almost entirely retweets from more than half a decade ago, I do understand how some of them may be offensive, and I do regret that as well as retweeting them,” she said in a statement issued alongside the one from Khanna.
“I will always stand with Muslim-Canadians.”
The National Council of Canadian Muslims also suggested she endorsed a speaker who supports conversion therapy for LGBTQ people.
She said the online activity in question was actually in support of Ontario’s review of its elementaryschool health curriculum, over allegations it was too blunt about some topics with children who are too young to hear about them.
“As an MP, I will represent all of my constituents, including the LGBTQ community,” she said in the statement.
“I absolutely oppose any socalled therapy or treatment that forces someone to try and change their sexual orientation against their will.”
Both of those candidates are still running for the Conservatives and when asked about that Friday,
Scheer said they had apologized.
“It’s clear that the language they used was unacceptable and offensive to the LGBT community, so I’m glad they apologized,” Scheer said.
Shortly before a leaders’ debate began Thursday night, the Conservatives announced they had dumped their candidate in Winnipeg North, Cameron Ogilvie, over “discriminatory social media posts.”
The party said he had kept the messages from view during the vetting process.
“The candidate in Winnipeg North hid those messages from the party, so we asked him to resign and we will have a new candidate in that riding,” Scheer said when asked about it Friday.
Ogilvie declined to comment when reached by telephone Friday.
Rejean Hebert, who is running for the Liberals in Trois-Rivieres, Que., was also asked about his very public past as a health minister in the Parti Quebecois government of former Quebec premier Pauline Marois.
Hebert told reporters he now believes Quebec is better off within Canada and that those in the province should focus on bigger priorities.
“I wouldn’t have joined the Liberal party if I hadn’t turned the page on the issue of Quebec sovereignty,” he said Friday.
The Green Party, meanwhile, does have a candidate who remains an avowed sovereigntist.
Pierre Nantel, who was elected as an NDP MP in 2011 and 2015 but jumped to the Greens this summer, confirmed his current support for the movement on Thursday. On Friday, Green party Leader Elizabeth May said he would remain a party member and
candidate.
However, May told CBC that the party is “re-vetting” another candidate – Mark Vercouteren in the southwestern Ontario riding of Chatham-Kent-Leamington – who as recently as last year expressed blanket opposition to a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion, contrary to Green party policy.
Meanwhile, the People’s Party of Canada also dropped one of its candidates in British Columbia.
Brian Misera, who was the candidate for Coquitlam-Port Coquitlam, said on Twitter on Thursday that the party had sent him an email to revoke his status, which came a day after Misera posted a video on Twitter urging party leader Maxime Bernier to speak out more clearly against racism.
“If you can’t be adamantly clear about that, I don’t know how the hell you expect me to campaign for you,” said Misera. The same video also said he wished Bernier understood that not every member of his party is
skeptical of climate change. Johanne Mennie, executive director of the People’s Party of Canada, said in an email Friday that Misera’s candidacy was revoked because he said he was acting as the financial agent for his own campaign, which she claimed is against Elections Canada rules. However, a spokesman for Elections Canada said that while it is unusual for a candidate to be his own financial agent, it is not actually against the rules.
Misera did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday.
And Mennie did not immediately respond to a follow-up question asking what Bernier, who was campaigning on his home turf in the Beauce region of Quebec, thought of the video.
The Conservatives, NDP and Greens returned to their national tours after an evening spent sparring in Toronto, while Trudeau picked up his campaign in Quebec. Trudeau began his morning by promising a suite of policies aimed at helping small businesses, including eliminating a portion of so-called “swipe fees” that merchants must pay to credit-card companies on each transaction. The Liberals would stop creditcard companies from charging that percentage on sales taxes.
NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh was in Toronto, where he promised to put a price cap on cellphone and internet services, part of a campaign platform aimed at voters worried about being able to afford the things they need in their everyday lives.
Scheer, meanwhile, campaigned in and around the Toronto suburbs, kicking off the day at a bus garage in Mississauga. He promised to bring back the publictransit tax credit, a policy from the Stephen Harper era that’s now a core element of the Tories’ environmental plan.
May headed back to family –joining her new husband, and fellow candidate, John Kidder for an event in the B.C. riding where he’s seeking a seat.
Kidder is running in MissionMatsqui-Fraser Canyon, a riding that sprawls in a vast crescent northeast of Vancouver.
CP PHOTO
Green Party Leader Elizabeth May, Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer and NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh take part in the Maclean’s/Citytv National Leaders Debate in Toronto.
Buying votes with our money
As Larry the Liquidator said in that not-so-classic film
Other People’s Money: “I love money more than the things it can buy… but what I love more than money is other people’s money.”
With the federal election upon us, it’s time to issue a call for politicians to stop buying us off with our own money.
Every day brings politicians to a podium, stating how they will expand this service, increase support to that group and reduce some tax. But most of us understand that politicians are using our money to buy our votes.
At my tender age, I have endured well over 50 federal, provincial and municipal elections. Just for once I would like politicians of all parties to treat me as if I had a brain.
Rather than just bribing me with my own money, I would like to see politicians propose structural changes to the way government works and budgets.
Let’s start with SNC Lavalin. Regardless of whether Prime Minister Justin Trudeau apologizes to the Canadian people, to Parliament or to Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott, he should first and foremost put a stop to the ongoing corporate-political incest.
The corporate-political nexus that creates an inward-facing circle of interest between industry and government mars any pretense of even-handedness in economic policy.
The NDP’s David Lewis, the last real firebrand in Canadian federal politics, got
it exactly right when he railed against the massive subsidies and tax relief received by national and international corporations.
This issue offers a political opportunity for all parties this election season, but their silence suggests either they have no idea how to proceed, or they think the issue is unimportant. Or less benignly, they recognize that, once in power, they too will need to reward their groupies and rent-seekers, whether they’re unions, environmental groups or corporations.
This election campaign, it would be helpful if political candidates recognize the problem and explain how they plan to deal with it.
Rather than telling us how they will spend our money, political parties at the federal and provincial levels should tell us how they propose to manage our money.
Some politicians advocate simply cutting expenditures, which appears to be the fashion in several provinces with conservative governments.
But just slashing spending is mindless and divisive, inviting sharp reversals when governments change.
Whipsawing budgets simply reinforces the determination to make sure the “good guys” win next time and when they do, reward their supporters.
Let’s consider some concrete ways government can manage our money better. But first let’s rule out two ideas that seem not to work so well.
One proposal that seems reasonable is multi-year financing where governments set two- and three-year budgets as opposed
the current norm of annual budgets.
Unfortunately, politicians succumb to myopia, and tend to respond to immediate political pressures, spending big in Year 1, vowing to rein in the spending in Years 2 and 3. Not surprisingly, that rarely happens.
But where such multi-year budgets have been attempted, governments were challenged to maintain fiscal discipline and only seemed to spend more.
Now consider the idea of strong fiscal rules as advocated by the late Nobel Laureate James Buchanan.
Criticized by some as the original architect of the radical right, he nonetheless spent much of his career developing proposals to constrain politicians he perceived as failing to act in the interests of the electorate, but instead were motivated by their own self-interest.
Key to Buchanan’s approach was creating specific conditions that tie the hands of government in spending our money.
First, he proposed limits on annual increases in spending or debt. An example of that is the Swiss “brake rule.” It limits public expenditure increases to no more than the average revenue increase over several years as calculated by the Swiss Federal Department of Finance, which has some independence from politicians.
Independence in managing the brake is a second condition of a sound fiscal rule. The Swiss brake has support from the left and right, since it maintains spending when revenues drop due to recession and constrains spending in good years when revenues increase.
Resource sector changes coming
Resource management is changing in British Columbia. There have been changes to federal and provincial statues and processes that have significant impact on the work of applied biology professionals. Most recently the federal government passed Bill C-69, an Act to enact the Impact Assessment Act, the Canadian Energy Regulator Act, amend the Navigation Protection Act and to make consequential amendments to other Acts.
On the provincial stage, government has been consulting on potential changes to the Forest and Range Practices Act and regulation and is moving ahead with governance changes under the Professional Governance Act that impacts the five professional regulators that are covered under the act.
As a central hub in the province, the people of Prince George are very aware about how the natural resource sector works.
Back in March, the College of Applied Biology visited Prince George to talk to natural resource professionals and members of the
public about the scope of practice for applied biology professionals.
This session was part of a series of workshops with the goal of refining that scope of practice under the new act. What we heard in Prince George was consistent with what we heard from other parts of the province: roles need to be clearly defined, there needs to be clear and achievable pathways to registration, and professionals are working in teams now – we need to enhance this, not put up barriers.
This advice, along with other information gathered at those sessions, is forming the basis to better define current areas of practice: a sound foundation for developing the draft practice policy that will begin a more detailed conversation with government and the long list of partners who have an interest in responsible, professional resource management.
The Professional Governance Act has enabled a provision to grant practice rights to applied biology professionals. Practice rights will mean that applied biol-
ogy in the resource sector will be done by regulated professionals who are subject to oversight from the college, improving our ability to protect the public interest.
The transitions impacting professionals working in the resource sector under the Professional Governance Act will most certainly unfold in Prince George as a place where applied biology professionals, forestry professionals, engineers, geoscientists, agrologists and applied science technicians work together every day.
If you would like more information regarding the changes that are coming, the college is hosting an information and social evening at the Ramada Prince George on Sept. 19. More information can be found on the college’s website. If you have any questions regarding the College of Applied Biology or the practice of applied biology professionals, please direct your questions to Tory Davis at ea-comm@cab-bc.org.
Christine Houghton, CEO College of Applied Biology
The final condition on the Swiss brake is to set tax rates constitutionally, which limits the discretion of politicians to boost revenue just by raising taxes. If this tax constraint did not exist, politicians could increase spending by raising taxes, since that boosts revenue and then allows expenditures to increase. Balanced budget legislation, which outwardly seems to be a good fiscal rule, is actually a sham as long as governments have the ability to increase revenues just by raising taxes. Of course, it’s politically difficult to raise some taxes, especially the GST or sales taxes. But a tax on wealth, boosting the tax rate on high incomes, and socking it to corporations could have wider voter support and offer an opening to raise revenues. Fiscal budget rules must make it difficult to increase all types of taxes. Embedding rates constitutionally, as the Swiss do, is one approach, where changes require super-majorities (67 per cent of Parliament) or complex validation processes, such as support by Parliament and most, if not all, provinces and territories.
This may seem all very abstract and theoretical. But as an economist, my point is simple.
Elections are the time for politicians to present the electorate with structural options on how we run our country, and not to try to win us over with our own money.
— Gregory C. Mason is an associate professor of economics at the University of Manitoba. This article first appeared in The Conversation.
How about none of the above?
Isuppose someone has to be prime minister. I suppose some party has to win the Oct. 21 federal election. I’m just not sure who, what or why.
As the campaign commences, it is hard to recall any election with party leaders perceived so negatively and with no obvious ballot-box question. If anyone tells you today how the election will go, worry that someone would so readily lie to your face.
Campaigns matter, but this one will more than most. Its ill definition carries the same danger as does a fluke goal in playoff overtime hockey – that a seemingly benign event will be defining, that a spontaneous misstatement will be crushing, that an issue we haven’t even considered will be considerable in the outcome, or even that a Donald Trump tweet will ignite some absurd wildfire.
This will be the first campaign in which Canadians are seasoned in Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, and I’m trying to figure out how that might be anything but unhelpful. Usually in a campaign there is a villain. In this one, there appear to be three. If someone were named Noneof Theabove, we’d likely have our front-runner.
Justin Trudeau has an approval rating of 33 per cent, Andrew Scheer has an approval rating of 30 per cent, and Jagmeet Singh has an approval rating of 24 per cent. So think about this for a moment: no national party boss with any chance of forming a government starts the election campaign with more than one-third of Canadians approving of his leadership.
Their negatives (Trudeau at 55 per cent, Scheer at 42 per cent, Singh at 34 pert cent), their trend lines (none surging) and their comparables (Trudeau and Singh at half their approval highs, Scheer at two-thirds of his) are holes with no obvious available ladder.
Let the records show that the top-ranked leader is Elizabeth May. She has sagged from her 2015 high of 60 per cent to today’s 38-point rating, but she has risen steadily since her 26-point rating in mid-2018. Of course, about the most hopeful prognosis would be some sort of say in any minority government, which polls suggest today is a distinct possibility.
But solemn polls at the start of a campaign are usually chucklers by the time we vote.
Remember Tom Mulcair, the
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man who was deemed ready, and Trudeau, the man who was deemed not.
Regrettably, the leader-focused nature of how we scrutinize politics typically leaves aside serious discussion of issues. Even if theoretically a campaign might be the best time to debate matters when we give more attention to politics, Kim Campbell was correct in saying that “an election is no time to talk serious issues.” It was her largely misconstrued way of saying it isn’t practical to think we can take a deep breath and have deep discussions in the vicious climate of minute-to-minute combat.
She said that, by the way, before we had the internet.
That all being said, what we have as top issues as we start are three Es: the economy, the environment and ethics. Each will be vulnerabilities for at least one party, but the ethics issue is what I’d call the early-stage wild card of the bunch, because it’s a broad category that provides a platform for every party to be at its most hellacious while professing to be on the side of the angels. We will set a campaign record for the use of the word “trust,” I suspect. Few one-term governments are shown the door, and usually by now it is evident they are on the way out. But if I can guess – and what are these columns, if not guesswork? – Trudeau will not continue to dine as prime minister if he cannot clear trust issues from the table.
His first-day dynamics with reporters suggest he will be hounded on promised standards of office he has not met, on crossed constituencies on electoral reform and reconciliation and climate change and on educating many of us reluctantly in the arcane sphere of deferred prosecution agreements. In all these cases he has been politically beastly, exactly what he was not elected to be. He was elected to make us feel good about ourselves, not bad about him. If I can guess again, the campaign will not be about Scheer’s personal social views but about Trudeau’s capacity to catch his snap.
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KIRK LAPOINTE
Lois Lane: enemy of the people
David BETANCOURT The Washington Post
Writer Greg Rucka will be the first to tell you: Lois Lane, the greatest reporter in the history of DC Comics, subscribes to The Washington Post.
“Find me a good journalist who doesn’t actively pursue other good journalism,” he says.
In the Lois Lane maxi-series that debuted in July, Rucka and artist Mike Perkins are out to prove democracy doesn’t die in even the darkest garages of the DC universe.
When Lane wants to meet discreetly with a secret source, she’ll text them, “full Woodward.”
Rucka even has the Daily Planet’s top reporter opining on why she thinks Bob Woodward and FBI source Mark Felt’s famous garage meetings during The Post’s Watergate investigation worked: even if you can’t see someone coming, you can hear them, and scram if you must.
Lois Lane’s 12-issue tale is titled Enemy of the People, a term at times shouted from the highest political office in the country to describe reporters assigned to cover politics.
Rucka thought it necessary to mirror modern journalism with the most famous reporter in comics, who’s now covering the White House in addition to the superpowered happenings in Metropolis.
“I’ve seen criticism saying, ‘I don’t read comics to see what’s going on in the real world.’ Too bad. It’s called art. And it has to reflect what’s happening around us,” Rucka says.
“I don’t think you can tell an honest story about Lois if you’re not reflecting the state of journalism and also hostility to journalism in the world today. The danger in telling truth to power and the fear that power has of truth being told, is in and of itself, a worthy story,” he adds.
In the first issue, Lane is in the other DC universe, the District of Columbia, grilling a fictional White House press secretary on whether her administration is monetizing the separation of children from their families at the U.S. border.
Lane is ejected from the news conference and has her press privileges revoked. (She ends up
moving on to investigate other stories, including a suicide in Russia where it looks like foul play was involved.)
This isn’t the first time Lois Lane has had her own comic book.
From 1958 to 1974, DC ran Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane, a series that Rucka admits made its protagonist an occasional sideshow and nuisance to Superman.
DC’s Lois Lane of 2019 is anything but.
Rucka brought over the kissing scandal he inherited from Brian Michael Bendis’ current run writing Action Comics and Superman for DC.
In a smartphone world where everyone has a camera in their pocket, Lane is photographed kissing Superman.
The problem?
She’s married to Clark Kent, who the world doesn’t know is Superman. It leads to attacks on her character, with the double standard that no one seems to be pointing a finger at the Man of Steel.
“Let’s be honest. What’s our society like?” Rucka asks. “Who’s that (drama) going to get aimed at. It ain’t going to get aimed at (Superman).”
In the third issue, Superman
‘True legend’ Eddie Money mourned
The Associated Press
Eddie Money, who left behind a career as a New York police officer to become one of the top-selling rock stars of the 1970s and ‘80s, with hits like Two Tickets to Paradise and Take Me Home Tonight, has died. He was 70.
Publicist Cindy Ronzoni provided a statement from the family and said Money died Friday morning in Los Angeles. Money had recently announced that he had advanced cancer.
In 1987, the husky-voiced, blue collar performer received a best rock vocal Grammy nomination for Take Me Home Tonight, which featured a cameo from Ronnie Spector.
“It is with heavy hearts that we say goodbye to our loving husband and father,” the statement said.
“It’s so hard to imagine our world without him, however he will live on forever through his music.”
He announced his cancer diagnosis via a video last month from his AXS TV reality series Real Money. In the video, Money says he discovered he had cancer after what he thought was a routine checkup. He said the disease had spread to his liver and lymph nodes. Money said it hit him “really, really hard.”
He had numerous health problems recently, including heart valve surgery earlier this year and pneumonia after the procedure, leading to his cancellation of a planned summer tour.
Bon Jovi guitarist Richie Sambora tweeted “God Bless Eddie Money,” while Debbie Gibson called him a “true legend.”
Comedian Kevin James posted on his Instagram account a picture of Money when he appeared on his TV series King of Queens, and wrote, “Gonna miss you, pal. May God grant you peace. Thank you for your incredible talent and kind heart! You and your family remain in my prayers.”
The New York City native was born Edward Joseph Mahoney. Money grew up in a family of police officers and served two years as a New York City police officer
swoops in to save her from an assassination attempt that may or may not have been intended for her.
Lane’s source, who could have implicated very powerful people, ends up dead.
But she’s less than thrilled to have been “rescued” – she’s the one looking to protect Superman for once. And she lets Superman know it. Rucka says its just a day in the life of a married couple, super or otherwise.
“Every now and then they’ve got to disagree. They love each other. They trust each other. The
before he decided he’d rather be a singer, according to his website.
“I grew up with respect for the idea of preserving law and order, and then all of a sudden cops became pigs and it broke my heart,” Money told Rolling Stone in 1978.
Two Tickets to Paradise and Baby Hold On both reached the top 30 in the late 1970s and his self-titled debut album went platinum.
In the Take Me Home Tonight”cameo, Spector reprised one of her signature hits from the 1960s as she crooned “Be my little baby,” which she first sang on the Ronettes’ Be My Baby. Money remembered calling Spector, still traumatized from her years with ex-husband-producer Phil Spector, and convincing her to sing on his record.
“I said, ‘Ronnie, I got this song that’s truly amazing and it’s a tribute to you. It would be so great if you came out and did it with me,”’ he told hippopress.com in 2015. “When she got there, she didn’t even remember it; she had a mental block against (Phil) Spector. But then she came out and did the song.”
Money’s other hits included
Maybe I’m a Fool, Walk On Water and Think I’m in Love.
He had few successes after the 1980s, but he continued to tour and record, and for decades would open the summer concert season at DTE Energy Music Theatre in
Clarkston, Michigan. Meanwhile,
Two Tickets to Paradise became a favourite on classic rock radio stations and was heard everywhere from The Simpsons to The Office.
The song was also featured in a Geico commercial, with Money himself appearing in the ad as the hammy owner of a travel agency.
For years, he lived too much like a rock star. In 1980, he sustained nerve damage in his legs after overdosing on alcohol and barbiturates, a near-tragedy he wrote about on his hit 1982 album No Control.
He continued to struggle with alcohol addiction before joining a 12-step program in 2001. “I came to the realization that I didn’t really need (alcohol) for my quick wit,” he told CNN in 2003.
Money did manage the rare rock achievement of a long-term marriage, more than 30 years to Laurie Harris, who would say that at first she confused him with John Mellencamp. The Moneys had five children, Zachary, Jessica, Joseph, Desmond, and Julian.
A born troublemaker, he was thrown out of one high school for forging his report card. He later moved to Berkeley, Calif., changed his name to “Money” and had enough success in the Bay Area clubs, even performing for a time with Janis Joplin’s former backing group, to attract the attention of famed rock promoter Bill Graham. Money was signed by Columbia Records and by the end of the decade was a big enough act to open for the Rolling Stones, although the job didn’t last as long as expected.
“I had a hit with Two Tickets and everybody loved me; I was getting too many encores,” Money told hippopress.com. “We were supposed to have six dates (with the Stones), and we only worked four. The way I see it is this – if you’re gonna get fired from a Rolling Stones tour, get fired for being too good.”
A representative for AXS TV said the final five episodes of his series will air on Thursdays. The channel will also air a tribute to Money on Sunday, including a concert and an interview with Dan Rather on his show The Big Interview.
marriage is a good one. You know, a lot of times you hear that once characters hook up, the drama’s gone. No. It’s not. And it’s insulting to every couple who has been happily together for more than 18 months.”
That happiness has led to another kissing controversy: the fact that Lois and Superman smooch so much in this series. Rucka says readers should prepare for more of that.
“They are intimate. They are honest. They annoy each other. They (tick) each other off. They make up,” he says. “They make it work.”
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Left, the cover to Lois Lane No. 3 from DC Comics, written by Greg Rucka and illustrated by Mike Perkins. Right, the 1958 cover to Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane No. 9.
How to travel as a solo parent
Nevin MARTELL
Special To The Washington Post
There’s an adage that shows up on far too many travel-themed Pinterest boards, but still rings true: “It’s not where you go, it’s who you’re with.”
However, sometimes it’s who’s not with you that can have the biggest impact.
Although my six-year-old son, Zephyr, and I have camped together, we’ve never been out of the country without my wife. That changed recently, when I tested my parenting powers by traveling alone with him to Grand Cayman in the Cayman Islands for five days. (My wife’s work commitments didn’t allow her to make the trip, but she wholeheartedly supported the venture.)
When I mentioned our plans to friends, they often said, “That sounds like a great bonding opportunity for you two!”
And quickly added, “But won’t it be stressful doing it alone?”
I knew the experience would be a test for both of us.
Would he follow directions, stay engaged and feel fulfilled?
And would I be able to keep a watchful eye on him, manage the pressure and create a winning itinerary that appealed to both of us?
Most of all, would we enjoy ourselves?
Any parent who is leaving their partner behind to embark on a solo adventure with their child grapples with these questions. But if the excursion is conceived and executed properly, it will be an enriching experience that will become a treasured memory for both of you.
My overarching goal for the trip was to model positive behavior.
After all, I was asking my son to be tantrum-free, go-with-the-flow when confronted with delays or diversions from the itinerary, be unfailingly polite and stay consistently engaged.
The least I could do was live up to those same standards. If it worked out, this would be the first of many father-son jaunts around the globe.
Ensuring we had a good vacation started weeks before we left. I chose the Cayman Islands because they are two quick flights away from our home in the Washington, D.C., area (roughly six hours with a layover, though there is a shorter direct flight available) and boast lots of multi-age activities of varying intensities.
I don’t recommend your first solo expedition be a hike up to Machu Picchu or sailing out to a remote island in Vanuatu. Save those trips for when you’re both seasoned travellers – and your spouse is more comfortable with a more ambitious outing.
Picking a family-friendly hotel is equally key.
We stayed at the Kimpton Seafire, which is oceanfront, sports an epic pool packed with fantastical floaties, and has lots of programming designed for its littler guests. This is not the time to roll the dice and rent an Airbnb with no reviews from fellow parents. Go with a safe option and save yourself the worry (or, worse yet, a housing disaster in paradise).
Packing properly for your child is a must. Bring an assortment of clothes for a variety of scenarios – in our case, swimming as much as possible, hiking at the botanical garden and blue iguana sanctuary, dining out at nice restaurants – plus the necessary health and wellness products. Trying to find a particular vitamin, a tube of reasonably priced sunscreen or a well-fitting pair of swim trunks can be a torturous, time-wasting scavenger hunt.
Diversions are equally critical. My son was in charge of filling his backpack with a stuffed animal of choice, pencils and crayons, and a diary to draw in.
I brought individually packaged Lego minifigures, Kinder eggs and coloring books to dole out at slower moments on the trip, like when we were flying or enjoying a longer meal.
I generally avoid using a screen as a pacifier, though he was al-
lowed to watch movies on our flights.
Usually, I’m all for leaving my options open and embracing the unexpected when traveling, but having an itinerary is helpful if it’s just you and your child.
You can plot out a reasonable number of activities, while building in plenty of downtime. Do not overschedule.
I repeat: Do not overschedule.
It may seem like a great idea to maximize your time at a destination by cramming in every possible sightseeing stop, cultural destination and “unique experience,” but both you and your child will end up feeling more stressed than #blessed.
By the time you return home, you’ll need a vacation from your vacation.
Instead, focus on a few of the most meaningful opportunities and really savour them.
My approach when traveling with my son is to book one morning activity and another in the afternoon.
I believe it’s important to include both familiar options and new experiences for your child. To expand my son’s horizons, he took a fantastic cooking class for kids at the Ritz-Carlton, we got up close and personal with the island’s native blue iguanas, and we went on a catamaran cruise featuring two snorkeling opportunities.
The first time he tried, it didn’t go well. Instead of frolicking with the stingrays present, he ended up swallowing a small percentage of the Caribbean Sea.
But at the second snorkeling spot, a helpful crew member offered to pull around a life ring for Zephyr to hold.
That way, he could focus on
keeping his mohawk-topped head down and breathing through the snorkel.
Success!
A squad of squid was spotted. There was a sunken ship to marvel over. And we saw Dory from Finding Nemo – twice.
I’m never going to forget that time we spent floating over the reef, each of us excitedly pointing out each new discovery. More important, it ignited an interest in Zephyr and from the moment he got back on board the catamaran he has been pestering me to go snorkeling again. I aimed to keep my son on his usual sleep schedule, because a tired traveller is a cranky companion. This was easier than anticipated. By bedtime each night, he was too tired to want to stay up any later.
I made a point of waking up
first, so I could have a cup of coffee and a moment to myself before I was on Poppa duty.
Some parents might instead opt for a late-night glass of wine after junior is asleep. Either way, you need some me-time amid all the we-time.
Several times every day, my son and I checked in with my wife by video chatting, texting updates or sharing photos.
This helped her feel connected and kept her up on our adventures – while reassuring her that neither of us was severely sunburned or gored by a rogue stingray. It’s inevitable your partner will feel they’re missing out, so make them as much a part of the experience as technology (and time) allows. Bringing them a thoughtful souvenir (or two) doesn’t hurt either!
I’m happy to report we arrived back home safe and sound – and enjoyed ourselves immensely. I
couldn’t have been prouder of how my son conducted himself and how eagerly he threw himself into every activity. The trip produced so many treasured memories. I can still see Zephyr crouching down next to one of the island’s blue iguanas, the radiant turquoise of his mohawk finding an analog in the lizard’s spiky spines.
I could sense the depth of my son’s awe, and it was a privilege to witness a moment of such wonder in his life. Through it all, we missed my wife.
But there will be other opportunities for us to travel together as a family.
Regardless, I’m already looking forward to traveling with my son again.
I’m not sure where we’re going, but I know I’ll be happy going with him.
WASHINGTON POST PHOTOS
Above, the author’s son Zephyr Martell, 6, plays in the Caribbean Sea on Grand Cayman’s Seven Mile Beach. Right, the Queen Elizabeth II Botanic Park on Grand Cayman offers visitors a chance to get a close look at the island’s native blue iguana.
Sports
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O’Dine holding fundraising event
Submitted
After a frightening crash and compression fracture in her spine ended her season early last spring, this year Meryeta O’Dine is taking a new approach to the coming winter. This year, she is going to enter into the Freeride Big Mountain competitions to expand her knowledge and passion for snow sports.
“I’m really excited this year to be putting my hand into a new aspect of snowboarding, as I’ve been solely focused on snowboardcross. I have not been able to connect to other aspects of snowboarding that I love and reflect on a different process that can make me a better snowboarder. Because
for me this year, snowboarding is about a lot more than placing your best, its about reconnecting to the joy of finding your best.”
Her recovery plan and many months of intense physical training has paid off. O’Dine achieved her lifetime best results SBX National Team standardized physical fitness testing, surprising her entire technical team after injury and deciding to train in Prince George.
Missing the end of the previous season meant she landed 14th overall in the World Cup standings for 2019.
“This season I have less and more going on. I’m focusing on refreshing myself between World Cups, not just physically but men-
I’m really excited this year to be putting my hand into a new aspect of snowboarding, as I’ve been solely focused on snowboard-cross.
— Meryeta
O’Dine
tally. Anyone in their right mind will be excited to show up for their dream job, but you won’t be able to do your dream job if your head’s
in the game and your emotions are elsewhere. Family illness affected me deeply last season, and it’s up to me this year to reconnect with myself, my passions and my process.”
This year’s World Cup circuit will hold eight races, hosted in various countries throughout Europe, including China in February, which will be a great preview for the 2022 Winter Olympics venue. The exciting addition of the snowboard cross team event in the Olympics provides another opportunity to race with Canadian teammates.
“The test event in China is an exciting event especially because we can use it as a mock build up to the Olympics. We get to learn the
UNBC women hit the road to Saskatchewan
Ted CLARKE Citizen staff
After a pair of wins last weekend to start the season the UNBC women sit all alone atop the U Sports Canada West Pacific Division standings, heading into a battle of the unbeatens with the Prairie Division-leading University of Saskatchewan Huskies.
The T-wolves will travel to Saskatoon to play the Huskies Saturday afternoon, then head to Regina to face the Cougars on Sunday.
The hot feet of third-year striker Sofia Jones have spiced the T-wolves’ attack and her two-goal, one assist weekend shot UNBC into first place. Jones scored two goals in a 3-0 win Saturday over the UBC-Okanagan Heat of Kelowna and also factored in the scoring in their opening 1-0 triumph Thursday at Masich Place Stadium over the Thompson Rivers University WolfPack of Kamloops. Paige Payne had the only goal, set up by a pass from Jones, a San Francisco native in her second season at UNBC.
Earlier this week, Jones received recognition of her outstanding efforts when she was named winner of the Canada West Conference third star of the week
award. Since UNBC joined U Sports/CIS in 2012, the T-wolves women’s soccer team has never opened a season winning its first two games.
“The first two games went well, it was a good start for the girls, they’re happy,” said T-wolves head coach Neil Sedgwick.
“It was a great weekend for Sofia and the team. The whole group works so well together and they complement one another. I’m excited all the time to watch how in sync they are when the whole group is on the field, not just in games but in training as well.”
Although they outshot the WolfPack 18-8 and had 10 shots on goal compared to their opponents’ six, Sedgwick said the outcome could have gone either way and his team could not afford to let off the gas, which was a lesson learned for the T-wolves.
“(The WolfPack) competed right to the end, they’re a tough team to play against,” said Sedgwick.
“I’m incredibly proud of our girls because they recognized we were still in a one-nil game and right to the end they tackled where they needed to tackle and headed the ball where they needed to head it away and limited TRU’s chances.
“UBC-O is such a well-organized team and incredibly competitive and I’m really happy the way the team stuck to the gameplan for 90 minutes. We were fortunate to score early and we had a bit of an advantage and were able to get a couple in a quick sequence that kind of put the game out of reach, but it was really an even game.”
Last season the T-wolves (3-8-3) finished sixth in the Pacific Division and went on to win the first playoff game in team history, beating Manitoba in Winnipeg, before eventually falling to the UBC Thunderbirds in the second round.
This year’s team has just one fifthyear player, defender Julia Babicz, but have three players in their fourth season including Payne (a Canada West secondteam all-star in 2018), Ashley Volk and Mara McCleary.
They’re surrounded by a cast of six third-year veterans, including goalies Madison Doyle and Brooke Molby, seven second-year players and seven U Sports rookies.
“Everyone’s doing their part and I think that’s the togetherness that gave up our success last year and we hope it does the same this year,” said Sedgwick.
venue, the snow, and conditions while we’re there and try to capture the Olympic balls-out feeling on the course we’re riding.” Currently, O’Dine is the only Olympic athlete living and training in Prince George. Government funding only covers a small portion of racing costs. Even with sponsorships and a full-time job, it’s still difficult to cover all of the costs.
As a result, she’s holding a fundraising evening at the Kinsmen Hall next Saturday that will include a buffet dinner, a comedy show featuring her mom Virginia O’Dine plus special guests, a silent auction, followed by a dance. Tickets are available for purchase at Grizzly North Auto Shop.
Raptors launch team-branded hijabs
TORONTO — The Toronto Raptors say a new line of team-branded hijabs is part of a broader effort to be more inclusive to fans of all cultures.
The team’s parent company, Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, unveiled the Nike Pro hijabs emblazoned with the team logo in a social media post on Friday.
In doing so, they say the Raptors became the first team in the National Basketball Association to offer an athletic hijab for Muslim women.
MLSE Senior Marketing Director Jerry Ferguson says the organization was inspired to create the hijabs by a local Muslim women’s organization known as the Hijabi Ballers.
Ferguson says MLSE designed the gear in collaboration with the women, who regularly play basketball at a community court associated with the team.
He says the Raptors want to send a message of inclusion to its widely diverse fan base, which grew substantially during the playoff run that saw the team win its first NBA championship earlier this year. Ferguson says having hijabs available to female Muslim athletes who wish to wear them allows the team to send a message of tolerance.
Michelle McQUIGGE The Canadian Press
Local snowboard cross racer Meryeta O’Dine is holding a fundraising event at the Kinsmen Hall next Saturday.
Big football crowd raises Cougars’ spirits
Ted CLARKE Citizen staff tclarke@pgcitizen.ca
If they only took into account the final score, the inaugural Spirit Bowl was a bit of a downer for the Prince George Polars.
The College Heights Cougars hammered them 40-0 in front of about a 1,000 witnesses at Masich Place Stadium, perhaps the all-time biggest Prince George crowd ever to watch a high school football game.
But that healthy audience of predominantly Polar supporters made the first exhibition game of the Northern Conference season a special occasion for both teams.
The buzz emanating from the stands fired up the Cougars and the festive atmosphere all those students and parents created helped take the sting out of the loss for the Polars, who had most of student population backing them, with class dismissed for the weekend in their adjacent school up the hill.
Throughout the game the College Heights offensive line –Lucas Jacobs, Alex Ribeiro, Ryan Sandhu, Ian Hall and Alec Graham – gave quarterback Jerome Erickson the luxury of time and plenty of real estate to work with, which opened up plenty of options downfield and four Cougars found end-zone rewards.
College Heights got the ball first and scored on its opening drive, a 56-yard pitch-and-run from Erickson to Austin Adams. Erickson booted the convert to make it a 7-0 game. The first Polar drive stalled and the Cougars quickly got into the red zone and finished with a six-yard Alex Thanos touchdown
run. The Cougars gained possession to start the second quarter and Thanos took off on a run that moved the ball 55 yards, but the play was called back by a holding penalty. On the next play, Hayden Matheson broke a few tackles and took to the house with a 65-yard run which made it 20-0.
“That crowd was amazing,” said the Grade 11 Matheson.
“We heard it was going to be all PGSS kids but we came out and heard nothing but cheers. The adrenaline just starts pumping, you’re ready to play a football game when that happens. We prepared all through spring and going into August we worked out butts off and definitely came out and executed today. It’s what we expected, we worked our butts off and if you look at the scoreboard, it shows it.”
The third quarter began with Erickson calling his own number and he scored from seven yards out. Erickson showed his arm strength late in the quarter when he spotted Thanos in the end zone and threw a dart from 25 yards away to nail his sure-handed receiver.
In the fourth quarter, Austin Adams caught a TD pass from 18 yards out, which Erickson converted to cap the scoring.
Polars quarterback Dillan Brandner, who played on the Polars senior team as a Grade 10 player last year, handed the ball often to fullback Brayden Michell, one of only a few Grade 12 holdovers from last year’s P.G. Bowl champions. The workhorse Michell touched off a promising drive with a 17-yard scamper late in the opening half and followed up with a short run that left PGSS with the ball on the College Heights 18yard line but they ran out of time
and the first half ended.
“It was the first big game of our season and we were up against a serious team here, they’re very skilled and I guess we weren’t ready for this one, but we tried out best out there,” said the 16-yearold Brandner. “The team was looking pretty shabby at the beginning, we only had 12 guys, but just in the past week we brought it up to 19 or 20. I lot of the new guys don’t know what they’re doing but we’re trying to teach them the best to make a good team again, like last year.”
Most of the Cougars played together the past two seasons on the junior team and they’ve been practicing the past month for their first senior season. That polish and seasoning proved overwhelming to the Polars, who lost most of their senior players last year to graduation.
“We definitely have growing pains and things to learn from, we have a lot of guys who need to learn the game of football,” said Michell, 17.
“I liked having all the fans but it sucks to disappoint them.
“This game is going to humble us, some of the new guys thought it would turn out differently and underestimated our opponents. I’m going to try and get these guys’ heads right and not let it get to them and let it beat them down. It’s just growing pains.”
The Cougars want to host their own Spirit Bowl next year at College Heights Secondary School, which would give them home crowd advantage and the Polars said they would gladly make the trek to serve as their opponents.
“We have to do this again,” said Cougars head coach Grant Erickson. “I’m hoping to talk to our
Spruce Kings rule Grizzlies
Prince George Spruce Kings have shaken that little squirrel monkey off their backs.
The defending B.C. Hockey League-champion Spruce Kings topped the Victoria Grizzlies 6-1 and earned their first victory of the young season Friday night at Rolling Mix Concrete Arena. The Kings jumped out to a 3-0 lead. Prince
George defenceman
Evan Orr, a Michigan Tech recruit who joined the Kings this week from the NAHL, opened the scoring 3:57 into the game. Before the period ended, Andrew Seaman and Corey Cunningham added to the total with their first goals of the season.
Ryan MacAllister, Chong Min Lee also scored for the Kings (1-1-1), who led 5-1 after two periods. Cunningham completed the rout
(school administrators) to see if we can host one at College Heights next year. It’s just fantastic. High school is all about making memories and they’re not going to forget this.”
The Polars were obviously disappointed by the lopsided outcome but they weren’t hanging their heads after the game and came out of the room in high spirits after singing Happy Birthday to head coach Pat Bonnett, who turns 67 on Wednesday.
“I told them at the end, I said, ‘if you don’t quit, we’re not quitting on you, we’ll get better,’” said Bonnett.
“We have guys who came out on Tuesday, the first time they’ve ever played football, and they were in positions they didn’t know where they were going. But that’s just an excuse. Unfortunately the guys didn’t come out when we started practicing back in August.
“But it was a good learning experience. They will grow exponentially by actually competing in a game, versus practices. We always tell our kids, ‘if you come with a positive attitude and energy and enthusiasm, we’ll teach you how to play the game,’ and there’s a lot of teaching left to do. A losing game builds character, so we just built a lot of character.”
The Polars will have a week or so to work out some of the bugs before their next exhibition game next Saturday in Vanderhoof against the Nechako Valley Vikings. The Cougars will play their next game that same day in Salmon Arm.
The Kelly Road Roadrunners will host top-ranked double-A varsity G.W. Graham of Chilliwack Grizzlies in an exhibition tilt next Saturday at Masich.
with a powerplay goal in third period. Darwin Lakoduk scored the only goal for Grizzlies, whose record dropped to 0-2-0.
Jack McGovern, in his first start with a Spruce Kings, made 27 saves for his first career BCHL win. Joe Howe took the loss in goal for Victoria. The Kings outshot the Grizzlies 30-28.
The Kings will host the Penticton Vees tonight (7 p.m.) at RMCA.
T-wolves put bite on Cougars
Ted
The Mount Royal University Cougars can kiss goodbye their undefeated season.
The UNBC Timberwolves took care of that business, beating the Cougars 3-2 on a rainy night under the lights Friday at Masich Place Stadium to hand the visitors from Calgary their first loss after five straight wins to start the Canada West men’s soccer season.
Anthony Preston, the Twolves’ homegrown sophomore midfielder, picked a great time to nail down his first goal of the season at the 69-minute mark and his game-winner was a beauty. He took a pass from Owen Stewart at his feet, deftly deked around Daniel Harrison and let rip a howitzer from 25 yards out high into the net.
“I’ve been playing a little more defensive this season and I do enjoy it back there but this game the coach thought maybe a more offensive look for me would benefit the team,” said the 19-year-old Preston.
“I had earlier chances in the game and when that what came I saw the defender coming out, so I figured if I faked the shot he might go for it and I just kind of swept the ball and when I looked up it was in the goal.”
For UNBC, knocking off the Prairie Division leaders has to rank as one of their biggest wins ever, and Preston did not disagree.
“This is right up there with the UBC win a couple of seasons ago, because they were 5-0 coming in and we definitely needed this win pushing for playoffs,” said Preston.
Goalie Rob Goodey had an outstanding night for UNBC. He was aggressive coming out to swallow loose balls and win 50-50 battles and paid the price late in the game when he got the worst of a high-speed collision with Andre Griffiths. But Goodey stayed in the game and was there to make a gamesaving two-handed stop near the end of the game to deny Benedikt Mehl in injury time from 30 yards out.
“What a save,” said UNBC head coach Steve Simonson. “We were going to sub him out when he got into that collision but clearly he was OK because that was an unbelievable save to keep us at 3-2.”
The T-wolves scored first, an own-goal that skipped off the leg of Mount Royal defender Daniel Harrison. Jonah Smith pushed the ball ahead to Owen Stewart and his shot caught a piece of Harrison’s shin before it trickled into the net behind goalie David Schaefer. That came 30 minutes in.
The Cougars tied it six minutes later on a rebound tap-in. Dane Domie’s shot ricocheted off Goodey right to David Dudek.
Domie gave Mount Royal a 2-1 lead in the opening minute of the second half, zipping a low shot along the ground that rolled in just inside the post behind Goodey.
Stu Rowlands brought the Twolves back to even terms at 56 minutes converting on a corner kick that was laid perfectly at his feet by Japanese import Kensho Ando. The T-wolves kept the pressure on and on a quick rush up the field Preston was denied by fifth-year defender Trevor MacPhee.
Citizen staff
CITIZEN PHOTO BY BRENT BRAATEN
PGSS Polar Brayden Michell, right with the ball, is chased down by College Heights Thomas Matthews during Spirit Bowl football game at Masich Placer Stadium.
CLARKE Citizen staff
Dangerous hot zones spreading
Chris MOONEY
The Washington Post
The day the yellow clams turned black is seared in Ramón Agüero’s memory.
It was the summer of 1994. A few days earlier, he had collected a generous haul, 20 buckets of the thin-shelled, cold-water clams, which burrow a foot deep into the sand along a 20-km stretch of beach near Barra del Chuy, just south of the Brazilian border. Agüero had been digging up these clams since childhood, a livelihood passed on for generations along these shores.
But on this day, Agüero returned to find a disastrous sight: the beach covered in dead clams.
“Kilometre after kilometre, as far as our eyes could see. All of them dead, rotten, opened up,” remembered Agüero, now 70. “They were all black, and had a fetid odor.”
He wept at the sight.
The clam die-off was an alarming marker of a new climate era, an early sign of this coastline’s transformation. Scientists now suspect the event was linked to a gigantic blob of warm water extending from the Uruguayan coast far into the South Atlantic, a blob that has only gotten warmer in the years since.
The mysterious blob covers 337,000 square kilometres of ocean, an area nearly twice as big as this small country. And it has been heating up extremely rapidly – by over 2 C – over the past century, double the global average. At its centre, it’s grown even hotter, warming by as much as 3 C, according to one analysis.
The entire global ocean is warming, but some parts are changing much faster than others – and the hot spot off Uruguay is one of the fastest. It was first identified by scientists in 2012, but it is still poorly understood and has received virtually no public attention.
What researchers do know is that the hot zone here has driven mass die-offs of clams, dangerous ocean heat waves and algal blooms, and wide-ranging shifts in Uruguay’s fish catch.
The South Atlantic blob is part of a global trend: around the planet, enormous ocean currents are traveling to new locations. As these currents relocate, waters are growing warmer. Scientists have found similar hot spots along the western stretches of four other oceans – the North Atlantic, the North Pacific, the South Pacific, and the Indian.
A Washington Post analysis of multiple temperature data sets found numerous locations around the globe that have warmed by at least 2 C over the past century. That’s a number that scientists and policymakers have identified as a red line if the planet is to avoid catastrophic and irreversible consequences. But in regions large and small, that point has already been reached.
A study of data from Berkeley Earth shows how the temperature average of the last five years compares with 1880-1899:
• The Post analyzed four data sets, and found: roughly one-tenth of the globe has already warmed by more than 2 C, when the last five years are compared with the mid- to late 1800s. That’s more than five times the size of the United States.
• About 20 per cent of the planet has warmed by 1.5 C, a point at which scientists say the impacts of climate change grow significantly more intense.
• The fastest-warming zones include the Arctic, much of the Middle East, Europe and northern Asia, and key expanses of ocean.
A large part of Canada is at 2 C or higher.
Some entire countries, including Switzerland and Kazakhstan, have warmed by 2 C. Austria has said the same about its famed Alps.
The percentage of the globe that has exceeded 2 C varies depending on the time periods considered. Over the past five years, eight to 11 percent of the globe crossed the threshold, The Post found, while over the past 10 years, the figures drop slightly to between fiveand nine per cent. Considering just the past five years increases the area by roughly 40 per cent.
These hot spots are the scenes of a critical acceleration, places where geophysical processes are amplifying the general warming trend. They unveil which parts of the Earth will suffer the largest changes.
Extreme warming is helping to fuel wildfires in Alaska, shrink glaciers in the Alps and melt permafrost across Canada’s Northwest Territories. It is altering marine ecosystems and upending the lives of fishermen who depend on them, from Africa to South
America to Asia.
It is making already hot places in the Middle East unbearable for outdoor workers and altering forests, lakes and rivers in the United States. It has thawed the winters of New England and transformed the summers of Siberia.
Over the past five years, Earth has passed a significant threshold. The planet is now more than 1 C warmer than it was in the mid- to late 1800s, before industrialization spread across the world.
The Post’s analysis relied upon four separate temperature records from the U.S. government and scientific researchers. Variations in the data sets themselves, and how they were analyzed, produce somewhat different assessments of the extent of the planet that has warmed by 2C.
Because the Earth goes through a number of natural cycles, climate scientists consider long periods, of multiple years, to analyze temperature change. The Post’s analysis considered two “preindustrial” periods – the 50 years from 1850 to 1899 and the 20 years from 1880 to 1899. It also considered two end periods, the past five years and the past 10, which were compared with the two preindustrial periods to determine the amount of warming that has taken place.
The past five years are by far the hottest – and display the most numerous and expansive 2C hot spots. And while five years may be a brief period in climatic terms, 2019 is already following the same ultrawarm pathway.
Barring some dramatic event like a major volcanic eruption –which can cause temporary global cooling by spewing ash that blocks the sun – scientists expect this to continue and steadily worsen.
“We’re not going to really cool down much in the future, so the last five years are indicative of the new normal,” said Zeke Hausfather, a researcher with Berkeley
Earth, which produces one of the data sets The Post analyzed. While the global data sets do not agree about what is happening to every stretch of the Earth, they show unmistakable patterns.
For instance, an intriguing group of ocean hot spots appears again and again. One cause? The tropics are expanding.
Straddling the equator, the tropics are already hot because they receive the most sunlight. As the sun hits the tropics, enormous columns of air rise skyward and then outward. But as greenhouse gases trap more heat, those columns of air are pushed farther toward the north and south poles.
Air that rises in the tropics falls back down over the middle latitudes. With a warming planet, though, the air is falling in different places.
One region where that air sinks is the South Atlantic Ocean, where the tropical expansion has led to a southward shift in the location of a gigantic counterclockwise circulation of winds. These winds, in turn, drive key ocean currents, including a warm, salty, 100-kmwide stream called the Brazil Current, which is being pushed even farther south.
Near Uruguay, the Brazil Current collides with the cold and nutrient-rich Malvinas Current that flows north from waters off Argentina. Where the two currents meet – what is known as the “confluence” – features sudden temperature contrasts and fosters rich fisheries. But that zone, too, is on the move. Research suggests it is shifting southward at a rate of more than 70 km per decade.
When temperatures rise 1.5 to 2 C for the globe, according to a recent report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, one of the most severely affected ocean animals will be bivalve species – clams, oysters, mussels and their relatives. Above
1.8 C or so, they face “very high risks” of population decline if not extinction, the report said. Climate change can make for winners and losers, especially when it comes to fisheries. Along the U.S. coast, fast-warming waters drove lobsters away from southern New England and into the Gulf of Maine, leading to crashing fisheries in one spot and a boom in another. That could be happening here, too. Still, the overall consequences of these oceanic changes are likely to be negative, Franco said. Fisheries in Uruguay and Brazil are projected to decline by more than a quarter by the end of the century.
That could mean major harm to any number of small-scale fisheries, far beyond the community that gathers the yellow clam. According to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, workers in these smaller, often local and subsistence-driven
fisheries account for 90 per cent of all fishery workers around the globe, largely in developing countries. In many cases, they are earning the equivalent of less than $1 per day. Scientists say they are struggling to keep up with the impacts of a warming world, whether measuring changes in the Arctic or disappearing kelp forests in the southern Pacific.
“We’re really playing catch-up,” said marine scientist Boris Worm of Dalhousie University in Canada.
“Everything we base our civilization on is based on the accumulated experience from the last 7,000 years, about how the world works, and how we can survive in this world that had an exceptionally stable climate.
“And we’re shifting away from that equilibrium at breakneck speed now. We’re living in a noanalog world that none of us has any experience with.”
Top, the sun rises behind an empty yellow clam shell sitting on the beach in Barra Del Chuy, Uruguay. Above, this map, using data from Berkeley Earth, shows how the temperature average of the last five years compares with 1880-1899. Below, the rise in global average temperatures.
Entrepreneur bets on a high-tech water bottle
Currencies
OTTAWA (CP) —
The markets today
TORONTO (CP) — Canada’s main stock index hit a new record high, fuelled by gains in the financial sector and fresh signs of easing trade tensions between the U.S. and China, but U.S. major stock indexes ended the day mixed. The TSX surged for the second day in a row as China announced that it would lift punitive tariffs imposed on U.S. soybeans, pork and some other farm goods, the latest olive branch extended between the two major economic powers. Much talk about recession fears in recent weeks has now given way to renewed optimism about the U.S.-China trade relationship, and room still remains for stocks to go even higher, said Allan Small, senior investment adviser at HollisWealth. The S&P/TSX composite index closed up 39.14 points at 16,682.42, after trading as high as 16,756.11 earlier in the morning. That surpassed the intraday record of 16,696.40 and the previous best-ever close of 16,669.40.
Thomas HEATH The Washington Post
If I’d told a buddy to hydrate (even if I knew what that meant, which I didn’t) when I was growing up in Syracuse, N.Y., in the 1960s, he would have thought I was mocking him.
A water break on the outdoor basketball court where we all hung out meant running to the fire station next to the playground and using the fountain. Better yet, if you had a dime or 15 cents, you could buy a Royal Palm soda.
Soda is a dirty word today – both diet and sugared. So is plastic.
Hydration is everything. And now, everyone knows what it means.
So why the obsession with water? Entre-
preneur Jonathon Perrelli is introducing an electronic smart bottle called LifeFuels that he hopes will do for hydration what Fitbit has done for walking.
LifeFuels, based in Reston, Va., uses cartridges to shoot peach, citrus or blackberry-acai flavoring, as well as vitamins and minerals, into its smart water bottle. The bottle syncs to an iPhone app to enable you to record your intake of fluids and nutrients such as potassium and sodium.
“People like data,” Perrelli said. “They want customization, portability and the ability to understand why they feel the way they do. And they want to track it all.”
Perrelli has bet $1 million of his own cash and spent the better part of a decade on LifeFuels. After raising $25 million, the company is launching this month in league with its partner, Massachusetts-based beverage giant Keurig Dr Pepper. They hope the apparatus creates a new coolness vibe around healthful sports drinks.
A week from turning 64, I am not the LifeFuels target audience.
Why do I need some motorized water bottle with its R2-D2 blinking lights and its spritzes?
Why surrender the one-liter plastic bottle of Dasani water that I drink at my cubicle each day?
“Are you able to infuse vitamins into your Dasani bottle?” Perrelli asked me. “Do you know how many electrolytes you are taking? Are you aware of how many drinks you took yesterday?”
Point taken. Though I do remember how many glasses of Macallan 18 I drank the other day.
I don’t know if anyone is going to get rich off this, but the spirited Perrelli thinks he is onto something.
“We supply you with actionable insights,” the 47-year-old entrepreneur said.
He has checked several boxes of importance to LifeFuels’ target customer – an urban, ecoobservant, health-minded consumer.
First is hydration. Dehydration is a major cause of emergency room visits in the United States, Perrelli said. Drinking about two liters, or half a gallon, of water a day is a common recommendation.
Next is data. LifeFuels works with smartphones, which gives millennials yet another reason to tap into their iPhones.
Then there’s sustainability. At $179 a bottle,
you aren’t going to cast the LifeFuels vessel into the trash. It should last for years and appeal to anyone who is against single-use plastic stuff.
LifeFuels comes nicely packaged in a box that includes the 16.9-ounce bottle, a rechargeable base, an electric charger and an initial supply of three flavored fuel pods. There’s also a series of slick online videos with instructions.
LifeFuels is a direct-to-consumer product that goes on sale online Monday. The key to its success will be selling subscriptions to people so that they buy the pods on autopilot – at $9.99 a pod, or about 33 cents a serving – thus creating a stream of recurring revenue.
“Fuel pod usage is important to our longterm success,” Perrelli said.
The bottles are manufactured in China, and everything else is made in the United States, including the flavored fuel pods. The user screws a fuel pod into the base of the bottle and pushes a button to squirt enough concentrate for one serving.
Perrelli has been a student of supply and demand, and of the psychology of marketing, since he was a youth growing up in Northern Virginia, where he first sold candy to fellow students and then graduated to fireworks. He pocketed $7,000 one summer on a $400 fireworks investment.
“Fireworks had insane margins,” Perrelli said. “Entrepreneurship has always been part of who I am.” He used the cash to buy his first stocks, in General Motors and Coca-Cola.
Perrelli graduated from Virginia Tech in 1995 with a degree in finance, and he has had several hits and a few misses in a quarter-century of investing.
The first home run came after four years at Northern Virginia-based UUNet, an early
internet service provider where Perrelli was employee No. 238 in a workforce that grew to more than 12,000.
He made $1 million from its stock in a few years, and he used the cash to dabble in real estate and buy stakes in several start-ups, including eTantrum, Plesk, Shadow Group and Social Tables. In eight years or so, Perrelli has made 35 investments through Fortify, a small-seed venture capital firm begun in 2011. Perrelli said 20 of those start-ups failed, nine broke even or made a profit for investors, and 10 are still active investments awaiting an outcome. Investing success often comes down to timing.
“A brilliant idea at the wrong time is destined to fail,” Perrelli said.
He thinks he has the timing – and the target customer – just right for LifeFuels. The idea came to him in 2006, when Perrelli’s then-wife was pregnant with their third child.
“She was having a challenging time staying hydrated and consuming the recommended nutrients and vitamins,” Perrelli said.
He began monitoring her water consumption, first with Post-it notes and then with a computer spreadsheet. Sensing a business there, he started noodling with ideas and arrived at an early concept of the LifeFuels bottle. It took eight years to turn the idea into reality as he began researching the beverage, health, consumer-electronics and app-development industries.
“I picked up the idea again in 2014 when smartphones had become commonplace and all things fitness were ripe for tracking,” he said. LifeFuels now has a full-scale bottle-manufacturing line in China. It recently finished a pilot program that tested the product with more than 300 investors, friends and family.
Jonathon Perrelli is the founder and CEO of LifeFuels, based in Reston, Va. The company sells a high-tech hydration system.
How Africa is changing the Catholic Church Religion
Elizabeth A. FOSTER
Special To The Washington Post
Pope Francis began a three-nation Africa tour last week, and for good reason. Africa has the fastest-growing Catholic population on the planet, which is projected to reach nearly 350 million by 2050.
As Francis reaches out to this growing population of the faithful, he would do well to look to the history of Catholicism in the region. He should do so not just to connect Catholic Africans to their past, but to underscore his own message of change. As a reformer who seeks to shake up the church, Francis can draw inspiration from Africans who played a key role in the reorientation of Catholicism in the 1950s and 1960s.
Francis’s visit comes at a moment when Catholicism is in the midst of a titanic shift, comparable in historical importance to its early spread in the Roman Empire or to the upheavals of the Protestant Reformation. The church’s strength in its longtime strongholds in Europe is evaporating. Priestly vocations are so rare there that bishops increasingly rely on clergy from Africa to lead their churches. In 2015, for example, there were over 1,000 francophone African priests working in France.
The church’s growth in Africa is part of its stunning success in the global south, which the election of Francis, the first Latin American pope, reflects.
What is equally remarkable is that the Catholic transformation in Africa has come about in the space of only two generations. Consider the fact that there were no modern African saints in the church until 1964, when Paul VI canonized the Ugandan martyrs during the Second Vatican Council. Moreover, no sitting pope had set foot in sub-Saharan Africa until 50 years ago, when Paul went to Uganda to visit the new saints’ shrine in the summer of 1969.
At that time, though much of Africa had become independent from European control, the church still relied heavily on missionaries from the former colonial powers to tend its African flocks. African prelates occupied the most visible episcopal seats beginning in the late 1950s, but there were not enough of them, nor enough African priests, to go around. Yet today, these same missionary societies are increasingly African in composition.
The venerable Society of Missionaries of Africa, founded by the French Cardinal Charles Lavigerie and known colloquially as the White Fathers, is currently headed by a Zambian, Father Stanley Lubungo. How did this transition happen so quickly? And why did it take place in the second half of the 20th century?
After all, European Catholic missionaries had been evangelizing Africa for decades, sometimes centuries, before that. Why did a process that had proceeded incrementally for a long time suddenly accelerate exponentially?
The era of decolonization between 1945 and 1965 was the crucial turning point. After the Second World War, even as European powers were trying desperately to hold on to their African colonies, the Vatican began distancing itself from colonial regimes and exhorting European missionaries to train their own African replacements as quickly as possible.
At first, the Vatican thought almost exclusively in terms of having enough local
clergy on the ground to man the pulpits should Europeans be expelled from a given territory.
But “decolonizing” the church came to mean much more than that, thanks to African Catholic intellectuals, clergy and laity who called on the hierarchy to make Catholicism more hospitable to Africans. For them, this meant holding Catholicism to its fundamental claim to be universal, and not merely European. It had to be able to embrace African culture, African values and African people.
The most prominent among these activist African Catholics was Alioune Diop, a Senegalese convert from Islam who was the behind-the-scenes organizer of the negritude movement.
Negritude, which first emerged among African and Afro-Caribbean francophone writers in mid-20th-century Paris, celebrated black literature, art and culture, while rejecting colonialism and assimilation to European norms.
Diop founded the bilingual journal Présence Africaine, which published the work of black writers, thinkers and artists, and a publishing house and a bookstore of the same name.
He founded the Society of African Culture, and he organized landmark international conferences of black artists and intellectuals in Paris in 1956, Rome in 1959 and Dakar in 1966. Diop also cultivated a self-consciously Catholic strand of negritude that used all of these platforms to push for a new, more inclusive vision of Catholicism.
Beginning in the late 1940s, Diop was a tireless advocate for the reform of his adopted faith, and he gained the ear of Popes John XXIII and Paul VI.
During the Second Vatican Council, he organized a standing lobby in Rome of the Catholics of the Society of African Culture. In 1963, in the midst of the council, he lamented on Vatican radio that African Catholics had to “borrow theological thought, spirituality, liturgy” from the West and expressed his wish that they be able to “express their African personhood at the very heart of Catholicism.”
Diop felt it was time for Africans, long on the receiving end of missionary instruction, to give some of their own wisdom to the church. He cited, for example, the openness toward Islam that characterized the Catholics of his native Senegal. This idea was advanced during the council by the young African archbishop of Dakar, Hyacinthe Thiandoum, and was reflected in its final teachings.
There was an important connection, therefore, between the decolonization of Africa and the reorientation of Catholicism at the Second Vatican Council. Yes, there were the symbolic gestures of canonizing African saints, or the elevation of Paul Zoungrana, the first francophone African cardinal, who read one of the council’s closing messages to the faithful in 1965.
Yet there was also the spirit of dialogue with other faiths, greater openness to the world beyond Europe and solidarity with the impoverished peoples of the developing world. African Catholic intellectuals insisted that they had knowledge, born of their unique cultures and of their experience of colonization, to share with European Catholics. The hierarchy listened to them, which set the stage for the church’s rapid expansion in Africa.
It does not follow, however, that African Catholics are now aligned with progressive
Europeans, even though the two groups were allied against colonialism and racism in the 1950s and 1960s. On the contrary, many, though certainly not all, of today’s African prelates, clergy and laity are more socially conservative than their European counterparts, and some African Catholic leaders are skeptical of Francis. Cardinal Robert Sarah, a prominent traditionalist from Guinea, has denounced the “idolatry of Western freedom” as an “Apocalyptic beast” and has criticized same-sex marriage, gender fluidity, divorce, abortion and euthanasia as vital threats to the family.
Leftist European and American Catholics are often dismayed by such strident points of view, yet it is important to remember that Diop, regardless of whether he would have agreed with Sarah, had argued that African Catholics should not have to conform to prevailing European ideas and values.
Given the growth of the faith in Africa, it seems reasonable to expect that an African may be in Francis’s seat before another two generations pass, and perhaps much sooner. It is hard to see how European dominance of the College of Cardinals can persist indefinitely, given the demographics of the church. African leadership could take the church in a more progressive direction in some ways, but it might do quite the opposite in others.
The only certainty is that while all roads still lead to Rome for now, the historic seat of the church is increasingly on the remote periphery of a new Catholic empire of the global south.
— Elizabeth A. Foster is associate professor of history at Tufts University. Her most recent book is African Catholic: Decolonization and the Transformation of the Church.
Church offers the comfort of community
Living in a gorgeous northern landscape we are blessed this time of year with hillsides covered in hues of yellow, orange, red and green.
CLERGY COMMENT
KIMI ORTON GATEWAY CHURCH
In the autumn season, the deciduous or broadleaf trees around us reduce themselves to their trunks and branches that are their toughest parts so they can survive the climate change through our harsh winters. But did you know that evergreen trees hang onto their foliage through the winter because their leaves are covered in a wax that helps protect them from the plunging winter temperatures? This wax is made up of anti-freeze chemicals that protect the leaf and help them to survive through the winter climate.
my neighbours, some are bright in colour and yet fragile on the interior like the broadleaf trees in the winter. And some are like the sturdy evergreen tress that seem to stay steady no matter the outside temperatures.
I thought to myself what is the difference between the two?
This got me thinking about the variety of people that I live beside in this fantastic northern community I call home. The people I participate with in life are as varied as the colourful foliage I see across the city.
When I take a closer look at
Is there an outside element that helps some people to live healthier productive lives?
I think what the anti-freeze chemicals on the evergreen tree do to protect it, community does for us. I dare say when we live isolated walled up lives without meaningful relationships, we can be like the fragile autumn broad-
leaf, falling to the ground, dry and brittle.
But when we live in community, it offers us a buffer to the harsh elements around us called life. Loving community is a place where there is safety, vulnerability and authenticity. It’s a give and take relationship where partnership grows as we spur each other on to not just survive another season but thrive in it.
So then my next question is, where do you find community?
A sport team? Work? School? Are you open and engaged in finding deeper friendships? Would you consider church a community that would be life giving to you?
I can certainly say that through all the seasons I’ve encountered in life, relationships within my church community have been a place of retreat and rejuvenation. If you don’t belong to a church community, maybe it’s time to try one out.
Not only is P.G. a city of diverse landscape, but of a diverse Christian community.
And I’m sure there is a loving church family out there that would be a fit for you.
I encourage you to give it a try, so when winter comes you have strength and support of community to help you successfully flourish through another season.
AP PHOTO
Pope Francis delivers his message during his visit to the City of Friendship community in Akamasoa, Madagascar, last Sunday.
Why do we assume people tell the truth?
Wray HERBERT Special To The Washington Post
Malcolm Gladwell has written several best-selling books since The Tipping Point in 2000, and by now his method is well known. He begins by translating a body of psychological research into breezy prose, then draws connections to contemporary and historical events that demonstrate the psychological principles in action. Depending on the reader, these connections are either entertaining and insightful or wild and tendentious, even misleading. Talking to Strangers, Gladwell’s exploration of deception and misunderstanding in human communication, is sure to find both types of reader.
Gladwell is impressive in his range of historical conundrums. Why, he asks, was British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain completely bamboozled by Adolf Hitler when, in 1938, the rising German leader assured Chamberlain of his benign intentions in Europe? Why did so many intelligent investors trust their fortunes to scheming financier Bernie Madoff? How do missed signals about desire and intimacy turn into date rape? Why are highly-trained intelligence officers often oblivious to spies in their ranks? These fascinating puzzles, and many others, add up to what Gladwell labels the Stranger Problem. We are constantly interacting with people whom we don’t know well, if at all, and Gladwell believes that our psychological clumsiness in these situations leads to all sorts of misunderstanding and heartache. He devotes fully three chapters to the work of Tim Levine, an expert on deception, to illuminate our ineptitude when encountering strangers. For example, one of the fundamental psychological concepts to emerge from Levine’s deception studies is “default to truth.” Given the choice to believe a stranger or not, humans tend overwhelmingly to believe, to trust, to give the benefit of the doubt. This is counterintuitive. It doesn’t make any sense, from an evolutionary point of view, that the human mind would be biased toward such a generosity of spirit; suspicion and mistrust would seem to be much more adaptive in a dangerous world. Yet Levine’s results, according to Gladwell, are unassailable; everyone from FBI agents to lawyers to intelligence workers opts to believe rather than to question strangers’ claims.
This powerful cognitive bias is reinforced by other psychological tendencies that make it even harder to get a good read on strangers’ intentions. Most notably, the author argues, humans expect strangers to be transparent, to reveal their thoughts and emotions in their demeanor, body language and actions. But they don’t – not reliably. People who are nervous and sweaty and otherwise guilty-looking are just as likely to be telling the truth as they are to be lying. And the cool and collected may simply be good at the confidence game.
This “mismatch” is the source of many misunderstandings. Consider the case of Amanda Knox, an American studying in Italy who was falsely accused of murdering her roommate. She ended up spending six years in prison before being acquitted and released; her only crime was not acting contrite, being too cheerful in the midst of a murder investigation. Or consider Madoff, who had a style that was trustworthy and reassuring, even while he was stealing millions of dollars from investors. His tone and manner were a psychological mismatch with the greedy and felonious mind at work below the surface. Gladwell is especially interested in the psychology underlying failures of community policing. Indeed, he begins and ends this book with the sad case of Sandra Bland, quoting extensively from the public record to support his analysis. Bland was a young black woman from Chicago who was in Prairie View, Tex., for a job interview when she was pulled over by a white police officer, Brian Encinia, for not signaling a lane change. It was a routine, minor traffic stop, and should have stayed that way, but it escalated and escalated. In the end, Bland was arrested and thrown into jail, where she committed suicide three days later. Gladwell’s exhaustive analysis of the Bland case is unconvincing and troubling. He wants to link this tragic encounter to Encinia’s paranoid style of policing, a nationwide trend among officers rooted in the cognitive biases he discusses. But in arguing his case so single-mindedly, Gladwell seems naively oblivious to a more obvious reason for this tragic encounter: racism. It’s not that cognitive biases don’t play a part, even an important part, but racist attitudes and practices seem a much more likely explanation for this unfortunate incident.
If Gladwell is right, if we are by nature too naively unquestioning, if that’s the core of the Stranger Problem, what’s the solution? There are no hard lessons here, but the conclusion seems humane. Being overly trustful may have unhappy consequences at times but abandoning trust as a defense against predation and deception is worse.
— Wray Herbert has written about psychological science and mental health for many years.
Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book is Talking to Strangers.
Modern politics as deep horror
William SHEEHAN Special To The Washington Post
Stephen King’s highflying career nearly came to an end when he was struck by an out-of-control vehicle 20 years ago near his home in rural Maine. The decades since that near-fatal encounter have been a kind of bonus round and King has taken full advantage. His output during this period includes more than 20 novels and several collections of short fiction, along with numerous screenplays and assorted nonfiction. Always prolific, King seems to have tapped into a bottomless reservoir of narrative. The Institute is the latest and it is classic King, with an extra measure of urgency and anger. Beneath its extravagant plot and typically propulsive prose, the book is animated by a central concern that could not be more relevant: the inhumane treatment of children.
King once famously remarked on his willingness to “go for the gross-out” should a fictional situation require it. He has, of course, done so to great effect over many books and many years, and his place at the forefront of America’s literary boogeymen is beyond dispute. But King’s ability to generate worldclass scares has never been the most important aspect of his work. More central to his enduring popularity is his ability to create textured, credible portraits of real people beset by appalling circumstances and struggling, often futilely, to survive. Lately, King has turned his empathetic vision outward, addressing the social and political crises pressing down on us all. Last year’s Elevation was a lovely, fable-like novella about the divisions running like fault lines through the country. The Institute is a very different sort of book that takes an equally hard look at who – and what – we have become.
The Institute begins in DuPray, S.C., far from the eventual centre of the narrative. King quickly introduces us to the town and its denizens, chief among them Tim Jamieson, a roving former policeman who will play a vital role in the dramas to come. The action then shifts to Minneapolis and to the home of the novel’s protagonist, 12-year-old Luke Ellis. Luke is a bona fide, off-the-charts genius who possesses a minor talent for telekinesis. The story begins in earnest when a trio of thugs invade Luke’s home, kill his parents and carry him off to the dark destination of the novel’s title.
The Institute is a clandestine organization located deep in the Maine woods. It exists for one purpose only: to study, enhance and exploit the paranormal talents (telepathy and telekinesis, for the most part) of its youthful prisoners. Through invasive techniques that amount to little more than torture, the Institute staff attempts to transform their charges into psychic weapons in an endless war against political enemies. The ensuing narrative invites us to ponder the image of children separated from their parents and forced to live in brutal circumstances, all to serve the purposes of powerful men.
The bulk of the action takes place in the Institute itself and concerns the concerted efforts of a group of traumatized kids to understand and utilize their own abilities, and to turn those abilities against their captors. The result is a scenario that plays to the author’s strengths. Few writers have King’s ability to create credible young people whose nascent qualities prefigure the adults they will (with luck) become. And even fewer have the imaginative resources that King brings to bear on his portrait of life at the Institute, a life filled with large and small cruelties, and with a chilling indifference to the effect those cruelties have on the most vulnerable among us. The Institute, King tells us, not only destroys its chosen victims. It also destroys the “moral compass” of those who work there too long. Once again, the real world peers out from behind the curtain of King’s fiction.
Two notable ironies drive the novel to its conclusion. The first is the fact that Institute personnel, in focusing so completely on Luke’s minor telekinetic abilities, ignore the one weapon he can use against them: his prodigious intellect. Second, in creating human “weapons” to be used against perceived enemies, the Institute has created a weapon to be used against itself. Through the combination of Luke’s intellect and the linked mental efforts of the imprisoned children – particularly a powerfully psychic 10-year-old named Avery Dixon – a revolution takes place, shifting the balance of power dramatically. Luke escapes and finds his way south to the town of DuPray, where unexpected help awaits.
Throughout his long career, King has been committed to the bedrock notion that stories matter, that they help us understand both ourselves and the world we inhabit. The Institute, filled as it is with anger, sorrow, empathy and, yes, hope, reiterates that commitment with undiminished power. It is a firstrate entertainment that has something important to say. We all need to listen.
— William Sheehan is the author of At the Foot of the Story Tree: An Inquiry into the Fiction
of Peter Straub.
HANDOUT IMAGE
The cover of Stephen King’s latest novel, The Institute.
A very Brady renovation
The Brady Bunch kids come home for an extreme makeover
Hank STUEVER
The Washington Post
Susan Olsen, who has long since accepted the fact that the world will always know her as the lisping kid sister of the Brady family, says she had never bothered to go look at the house on Dilling Street in North Hollywood. Except for exciting location shoots in Hawaii and the Grand Canyon, her childhood experience of co-starring in the The Brady Bunch kept mainly to Stage 5 at the Paramount lot in Los Angeles.
One day, in 2011, something weirdly magical happened.
Her friend, the songwriter and artist Allee Willis, called Olsen and said, “I’ve got the Wienermobile tomorrow,” and asked if she wanted to tool around in it with her.
Why not?
One thing led to another on their drive, and the famous Oscar Mayer promotional vehicle eventually ended up at the Brady house – so-called because it’s the house originally seen in the exterior establishing shots of the TV show, which premiered 50 years ago this month. Tourists seem to always be there, taking selfies and lurking around.
“Allee says, to her dying day, she will never forget the look on all the tourists’ faces,” Olsen said, “when the Wienermobile pulled up and Cindy Brady got out.”
After hearing Olsen tell that story to a roomful of rapt TV critics in July, I wished for an enormous, gilt-framed, realist painting of this wholly American moment: at the centre of the painting is the house that is merely a false representation of what everybody believes it to be; to one side is the Weinermobile, a perfect melding of technology with mass-produced appetite; out of it emerges the one true Cindy; in the background are the faces of startled onlookers.
And, maybe, while we’re at it, we could add in the majestic presence of a 10-point buck, and George Washington, and palm trees against a pinky-blue California dusk. Instead I will settle for a homerenovation show.
Unlike others in their boomer and Generation X cohort – who every day wage the epic family battle of what to do with mom and dad’s old house and copious belongings, while split-level suburban ramblers are sold as teardowns and thrift stores bulge with unwanted yet meaningfully meaningless mid-century bric-a-brac – the original actors who played the six stepsiblings on the ultimate ‘70s sitcom The Brady Bunch have returned to TV to perform this emotional ritual in reverse.
On the irresistibly nostalgic fourepisode miniseries A Very Brady Renovation (premiering Monday on HGTV), the Brady kids reunite to assist some of the network’s stars with a massive, six-month remodeling of the house. To put it back precisely as the audience perceived it.
The original Brady Bunch ran for five seasons, followed by a permanent loop of reruns, revivals and remakes in the pop-culture consciousness.
Those kid actors are now in their late 50s to mid 60s. (Imagine: Marcia on Medicare.)
Robert Reed, who played their father, Mike Brady, died in 1992. Florence Henderson, who played their mother, Carol, died in 2016.
Ann B. Davis, who played their beloved housekeeper, Alice, died in 2014. Without having to explicitly say so, A Very Brady Renovation works as a curious form of closure, which is slightly more interesting than its more obvious acts of groovy restoration.
Cheerful and inviting as the show might be, its mission is to put everything back the way it was, the way mom and dad had it – a final attempt to see if we can Make Brady America Great Again, down to finding the right pattern for the tastefully garish living room sofa,
Above, from left, the original cast of kids on The Brady Bunch – Maureen McCormick, Christopher Knight, Susan Olsen, Mike Lookinland, Eve Plumb and Barry Williams, stand in front of the house that served as the exterior of the family home. Right, the Brady actors worked with several HGTV show cast members for A Very Brady Renovation. Bottom right, The Property Brothers hosts Drew Scott, left, and Jonathan Scott, second from right, help Maureen McCormick, who played Marcia Brady, and Christopher Knight, who portrayed Peter Brady, revamp the house.
or using 3-D printing technology to restore the horse statuette that sits on a credenza, or hunting for the correct finial knobs that go on the backs of the dining room chairs.
A significant part of Monday’s episode is spent debating whether it will be acceptable to rebuild the famous Brady stairway with 11 steps instead of 12.
To bring up the fact that none of it was ever real – that A Very Brady Renovation is indeed a costly and pointless attempt to put a layer of new fake on top of the old fake – is to look for logic where it need not exist.
As the house comes together, the Brady cast’s faces reflect an almost profound wonder at the passage of time.
The show is covertly speaking to us about mortality.
It tells us something about the surprising degree to which the past can be retrieved, to say nothing of the lengths that 21stcentury TV producers will go to retrieve it.
“It’s a strange kind of place between fiction and reality,” says Christopher Knight (aka middle son Peter Brady), as he gazes around in the house/not-thehouse in the first episode.
“It’s the Brady Zone,” Olsen adds.
Much was made of the house’s availability when it went on the market in 2018, as-is, for the first time since 1973. (Asking price: $1.88 million.)
The house has for years been a drive-by curiosity; the former owners’ attempts at privacy included painting it pale pink and erecting a decorative, kneehigh brick wall on the lawn’s perimeter.
Still, it is unmistakably the house.
Hundreds of purchase offers poured in (including one from former boy-band singer Lance Bass), but HGTV prevailed, and set about recruiting the very Brady
actors to participate in this very corny effort.
Several of them, it turns out, were dutiful yuppies who became savvy real estate investors, gaining some hands-on renovation experience along the way.
With the help of a design chief, a contractor and a construction crew, a grand plan emerges to make the inside of the house conform precisely to The Brady Bunch stage interiors – from the orange Formica in the kitchen to the Jack-and-Jill bathroom shared by the six kids, to the groovy attic that a teenage Greg Brady (Barry Williams) claimed for his own, to the resentment of his stepsister Marcia (Maureen McCormick).
Shepherded by HGTV’s favorite camera hogs, The Property Brothers (Jonathan and Drew Scott), and with help from the stars of Restored by the Fords, Hidden Potential, Flea Market Flip and Good Bones, the project involves turning the one-story house into a twostory house, to add some 2,000 square feet of new living space without changing the essential street view.
“Just know that if any of this is wrong, we’ll be put out to dry,” Drew Scott warns his HGTV colleagues. “All of America will know exactly what this house is supposed to look like.”
In fact, all of America pitched in: the hunt for vintage furnishings became an online group effort, with collectors proudly volunteering their wares – down to the decorative plastic grapes on a coffee table and a curio cabinet that
stands between the dining room and kitchen.
Other treasures were unearthed in deep storage at Paramount.
And what becomes of the house, once finished?
Turning it into a museum won’t work for the neighborhood, which has suffered enough Brady mania.
HGTV is giving away a week’s stay at the house as part of a promotional contest, but beyond that, the network’s plans for the property are unknown.
A more interesting question is what becomes of the people.
At HGTV’s news conference and a ‘70s-themed cocktail party in Beverly Hills – at which guests could have their picture taken and inserted into the centre Alice spot on a souvenir 3-by-3 Brady Bunch grid – the actors seemed particularly comfortable, mingling cheerfully in the crowd.
There is no question or joke or heartfelt sentiment that they have
not heard before.
Many of them worked hard to get beyond Bradyness, others used it for what it was. To some degree – remarkable amid known cases of child-actor syndrome – they mostly stayed out of headlines. They stayed out of prison. They stayed alive. They kept working, some in other fields.
Mike Lookinland, who played Bobby Brady, has spent the past 14 years running a company that makes concrete countertops. When the group agrees to take a professional Brady gig, he said he has to call Williams or Knight and ask if he can borrow their agent. While A Very Brady Renovation succeeds as a metaphorical exercise in the ersatz, the real fascination lies in that other story, about six people who spent their lives being Brady and Not Brady, and the preservation of one’s truest self.
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.
It is with great sadness the family announces the passing of Les. Survived by wife Jane, sons: Richard (Holly), Dean (Lisa), Larry (Kathy), daughter Tracy (Bill) Laing, 11 grandchildren and 4 great grandchildren, sister Irene (Norman) Miller, brother Larry (Fay) and numerous other family members. Predeceased by mother Elsie, father Dan, brothers Gordon and Harvey. Thank you to Dr. Steven Chang and staff at UHNBC and to the staff at the Hospice House for their compassionate care. No funeral by request. Grave side service and interment at Prince George Cemetery, Friday, October 25, 2019 at 11:00am.
Elizabeth Stewart (nee McLeod) September 17, 1940 September 7, 2019
It is with heavy hearts that we announce the passing of a loving wife, mother, auntie and friend, Liz Stewart. She was surrounded by her family, and will be greatly missed by Mel, Jenny (Brad), Gord (Krista) and grandpuppies Meeko and Eggsy; sister Laura (Dave), brother Stan (Bev), as well her many nieces, nephews and friends. A Celebration of Life will be held at Assmans Funeral Home on September 21, 2019 at 1:00 pm. In lieu of flowers, donations in Mom’s name to either the Prince George Hospice Society or the Cancer Society would be appreciated.
