Prince George Citizen February 14, 2019

Broken pipe destroys gymnasium floor

Frank PEEBLES Citizen staff fpeebles@pgcitizen.ca

A broken pipe has washed out the hopes of hundreds of athletes and thousands of students who use the College of New Caledonia gym.

It was in use when water came cascading through a wall and rolling across the enormous floor, on Friday.

“It was like a fire hydrant,” said one witness. “I have literally spent thousands of hours in this gym and it was brutal to watch its destruction.”

“There was about three inches of water built up before the water could be shut off, and it all came in just a few minutes,” said

CNC spokesperson Alyson Gourley-Cramer.

“It was one of our largest pipes that burst. We actually had one of our Kinesiology classes in the gym at the time. Within half an hour the water was gone but the damage was done.”

It is not certain that a replacement will be required, but frequent users of the facility said the floor was not in prime condition in the first place, and the signs of the water’s destructive powers are in evidence since the flash flood.

“We got people in to assess the situation, specialists in wooden gymnasium floors, and there is also the sub-floor to consider, but we have not heard back what the plan of action will be,” Gourley-Cramer said.

“Wooden gym floors are extremely durable,

so I can’t say if it was due for a replacement or update anyway, but we do keep it in good shape and constantly maintain it.”

It is a heavily relied upon facility in the city, one of the largest gymnasium spaces in the region.

The Prince George Youth Volleyball Club is one of its most frequent users, but also badminton, wheelchair sports, basketball, martial arts, Cedars Christian School has used it as their off-site school gym, plus it is busy with CNC’s in-house functions like intramural sports, employee pickleball, the Kinesiology classes, and other college functions like exams, student awards ceremonies, plus various public events.

It was a site used for the 2015 Canada Winter Games gymnastics events, it was

Local songwriter pens Para Nordic theme

Frank PEEBLES Citizen staff

Whenever song and sport line up together in Prince George, it seems to be Sage Bialuski waiting at the finish line.

The young singer-songwriter was only 16 when her composition Finish Line was selected to be the 2015 Canada Winter Games theme.

Now, at age 20, she was commissioned to write the theme for the 2019 World Para Nordic Skiing Championships. She called the song Know My Name and she will debut the song on Friday night at the opening ceremony, performing it live with Curtis Abriel and Nick Tindale backing up her

piano/vocal skills.

“I’m really excited,” she said, then immediately added the confession, “I’m nervous.”

It’s a constructive feeling for both sides of her Renaissance personality. In addition to her accomplishments in music, she is also a dedicated athlete. Her specialty is nordic skiing (check the last three letters of her family name: it was written in fate).

“My whole life I’ve had this sports side of me and the music side of me,” she said.

“Musically, I write a lot, composition comes easily to me, and the sports side has taught me the hard work that it takes to excel, and I’ve been able to translate that into a

song that combines those things. It’s about how there’s no rapid route when you want to be the best, just hard work, consistency, everybody thinks you’re crazy for loving it so much, but you’re devoted to your passion, you push through all those days, and you go with your heart.”

She flexes that sports dedication in her professional life right now. She has launched Bialuski Studios where she teaches piano students (contacter her through Facebook). It’s also where she composes a lot of her original material, starting with chords, progressing to melody lines, then lyrics form around those core sounds.

— see ‘IT’S ABOUT, page 3

turned into a dormitory during the wildfire evacuations the past couple of summers.

“We have a lot of community partners, some of them really long-standing, that utilize the gym. It is busy almost 90 per cent of the time,” said Gourley-Cramer. It is too early to know how these past practices will have to adjust for the future.

The flood also caused the closure of the CNC squash courts, weight room, some classrooms, and the bouldering wall. These places did not get wet, the water was confined to the gym, but air quality testing had to be conducted on the adjacent rooms to ensure healthy breathing. That was completed and the green light given on Wednesday afternoon to reopen as soon as can be arranged.

Trafficking charges draw federal time

Mark NIELSEN Citizen staff mnielsen@pgcitizen.ca

A Prince George man was sentenced Tuesday to a further two years plus a day in jail for possessing fentanyl-laced heroin, methamphetamine and cocaine while out on bail on charges of possessing the same types of drugs from a separate arrest.

In sentencing Jeffrey Austin Theriault, 26, B.C. Supreme Court Justice Francesca Marzari agreed to a joint submission from Crown and defence councils that called for 30 months in jail for possessing the heroin and concurrent terms of 24 months for the methamphetamine and the cocaine.

Less credit of 180 days for time served prior to sentencing, Theriault has a further two years plus a day to go, which means he will serve the time in a federal institution.

Theriault was out on bail facing charges from a July 2016 incident when, in July 2017, police had reason to believe he was again dealing in illicit substances.

A search warrant was executed on a home in a local trailer park where police found Theriault along with 18.18 grams of fentanyl-laced heroin, 18.09 grams of methamphetamine and 11.17 grams of cocaine as well as $7,705 in cash, scales and packaging materials.

In September 2018, Theriault

(Police) found Theriault along with 18.18 grams of fentanyl-laced heroin, 18.09 grams of methamphetamine and 11.17 grams of cocaine...

was sentenced to 20 months time served for the previous arrest, when he was found in possession of 24.33 grams of heroin, 247.12 grams of methamphetamine and 14.07 grams of cocaine.

Theriault has a Grade 11 education and is qualified to work in the oil and gas industry but has earned most of his living in the illegal drug trade. He’s also had a history of using drugs and alcohol dating back to an early age and became addicted to fentanyl in recent years.

He has also been unwilling to get treatment and counselling although he started but did not complete a program during his most recent turn in custody. However, Theriault has indicated he wants federal time to access the resources at that level. Theriault continues to face drug-related charges plus counts of assault with a weapon and unlawful confinement or imprisonment from an alleged Feb. 1, 2017 incident in Prince George.

The College of New Caledonia gym floor was damaged on Friday afternoon when a pipe in a wall burst. The floor is likely beyond repair.

CITIZEN PHOTO BY BRENT BRAATEN

Sage Bialuski has written and recorded the 2019 Para Nordic Ski Championships theme song.

Lighting urged for Ginter’s Meadow

Mark NIELSEN Citizen staff mnielsen@pgcitizen.ca

A pitch is being made to brighten Ginter’s Meadow when the sun is down.

On Monday, Michelle Lequereux, the program coordinator for the South Bowl Community Association, outlined a proposal to city council to install directional lighting in the parking lot and a section of the dog-walking area. Lequereux emphasized safety.

“Due to the lack of light, reversing your vehicle can become a hazard to dogs and people,” she said. “Many avoid using the area in the evening unless they are able

to find a friend to tag along and have a headlamp or flashlight.”

Lighting would also decrease unwanted after-hours activity, she continued.

“This would also free up the busy times in the area, so people would feel comfortable using it in the evening and late afternoon in the winter months,” she said.

A petition in favour of the initiative has drawn nearly 700 signatures since it was launched during a clean-up event in the spring.

As for the price tag, buying standard lights would cost about $7,000 ($5,000 for the first and $2,000 for the second) while leasing them from BC Hydro would work out to $2,000 to $2,500

Many avoid using the area in the evening unless they are able to find a friend to tag along and have a headlamp or flashlight.

— Michelle Lequereux

each, according to estimates Lequereux obtained from the city. Eighteen-foot solar-powered lights would cost about $8,500

each, but engineering and public works general manager Dave Dyer said they would not work well in the winter due to the lack of sunlight at that time. The SBCA would fundraise to cover a portion of the cost, Lequereux said. With a new SPCA headquarters planned for 18th Avenue and Foothills Boulevard, lighting along the walking path between the meadow and the corner should also be considered, said Lequereux, and stressed it should be directional to avoid bothering nearby homeowners. Council appeared supportive of the proposal. It also revived an ongoing

discussion about whether Ginters Meadow should be designated a city park. The city’s long-term plan calls for an extension of Foothills Boulevard through the area, but Dyer said there hasn’t been the population growth or demand to warrant the move.

“And I think University Way takes a lot of traffic that might’ve been anticipated back in the ’70s when we did have the route identified from 18th Avenue to Ferry Avenue, which would be the extension of Foothills,” he said. “But I don’t see that happening until the traffic demand warrants it and that could be a ways yet.” The SBCA will meet with staff to determine next steps.

Making a miracle

Feb. 28 to March 20 (8 p.m.

Hurst cancels FanCon appearance

Frank PEEBLES Citizen staff

fpeebles@pgcitizen.ca

An inevitable hazard of booking working professionals into a date-specific convention is, sometimes they have to go to work instead. It has happened before that Northern FanCon guests had to beg the pardon of Prince George fans due to a scheduling conflict.

A new name was added to this list Wednesday when Ryan Hurst issued an apology and stepped down from this year’s fan expo.

That act of personal communication was a first for the five-year-old event. All who have backed out in the past have done so with apologies, but never a videotaped message to explain in their own voice.

“Hey Northern FanCon, Ryan Hurst here,” he began. “I’m so sorry. There was a problem. Not on Northern FanCon’s part. But I double-booked. I’m going to be in the United States during that weekend. So sorry I can’t get out to you but my team, we are all, working really hard for me to reschedule, to get out to you next year. So sorry, thanks again. Have a blast!”

Hurst was coming to the Prince George

convention packing a thick dossier of high-profile screen roles. The consummate character actor has been a significant part of films like Remember The Titans and We Were Soldiers, but also hot TV series like Bates Motel, Outsiders, he was Beta in The Walking Dead, this year he is featured in Bosch and Paradise City, and he might be known best of all as Harry ‘Opie’ Winston in Sons Of Anarchy.

“It was a tragedy when we lost Opie the first time, and now we’ve lost him again,” said FanCon’s Norm Coyne in mock anguish, referring to the pivotal scene when Hurst’s popular character was murdered off of the Sons Of Anarchy show.

The video “speaks to the guy’s class, and we are literally working on bringing him in for next year. People are disappointed about this. He’s acted some beloved characters.”

The process of building four previous conventions for Prince George popculture fans, and one that is still in the planning stages, means that another celebrity name will soon replace Hurst on the 2019 poster, and Hurst is already looking good for 2020, so Coyne is excited for the announcements to follow in the weeks ahead.

“Right now, we have five different people who we are looking at as options to replace Ryan Hurst, and we aren’t even finished making the announcements we already had set for our 2019 roster, so we definitely have fun names upcoming. This just allows us to add one more we weren’t expecting.”

Northern FanCon happens May 3-5 at CN Centre.

Local forester honoured

Citizen staff

A Prince George forest industry veteran was bestowed with B.C.’s top honour in the profession.

John Pousette was named the 2019 Forest Professional of the Year by the Association of BC Forest Professionals (ABCFP).

“John’s career serves as an example of how integrity and commitment are key attributes necessary to achieving real and meaningful success in forestry and ensuring we are sustainably caring for B.C.’s forests for future generations,” said Morgan Kennah, ABCFP president.

Pousette works for the Ministry of Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development. According to the announcement, “He was recognized for his professional forestry work and how he engages and influences others. His contributions to the forestry profession are demonstrated in his work and leadership within the Ministry and his ongoing mentoring of many professionals as a sponsoring forester.”

Pousette also teaches at UNBC as an adjunct faculty member, and is “renowned for his service and advancement of the forestry profession through his

volunteer work” with the Canadian Institute of Forestry–Cariboo Section and the ABCFP.

Another forest professional from the region was also honoured at the ABCFP convention. Jim McLean of Lone Butte was named Registered Forest Technologist of the Year “for his detailed knowledge and understanding of cruising and residue surveying.

“The nomination for McLean spoke of how he freely shares his knowledge in a respectful and professional manner with

many forest professionals.”

Bob Craven of Campbell River, Carman Smith of Barriere, and Bill Waugh of Bowser were cited as the winners of the Distinguished Forest Professional Award for outstanding contribution to the forestry profession and for furthering the principles of the ABCFP.

Bronwen Beedle of Campbell River and Jamie Skinner from Kamloops shared in the Jim Rodney Memorial Volunteer of the Year Award for their volunteer work with the ABCFP and within their communities.

Rick Chester, a natural resource instructor at BCIT, was made an Honorary Member of the ABCFP for his many years of volunteer work with ABCFP education committees.

The ABCFP Climate Change Innovator Award was presented to eight professionals who worked on the provincial climate-based seed transfer policy, a response designed to ensure that seed matches the current climate and the climate anticipated over the next one third of a rotation.

Those winners were Brian Barber, Leslie McAuley, Diane Nicholls, Greg O’Neill, Jim Snetsinger, Margot Spence, Jack Woods and Susan Zedel.

Challenging road conditions ahead

Citizen staff

Colder temperatures across the region have led to compact, slippery snow on the roads – and to the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia urging drivers to do their part to prevent crashes. In the north central region, 51 casualty crashes occur in February due to driving too fast for the conditions or road/weather conditions, according to ICBC.

The insurer is asking drivers to adjust their driving and properly equip their vehicle for the conditions.

“Winter weather in northern B.C. presents its own set of challenging road conditions for drivers – namely, black ice, heavy snowfall and freezing rain. Road conditions in northern B.C. are changing every day,” ICBC said in a statement. “In bad weather, slow down, increase your following distance and allow extra travel time.”

Here are some additional tips for a trouble-free drive:

• Focus your full attention on the road and use extra caution when approaching intersections and corners – they may be icy.

• Consider using your headlights and taillights whenever weather is poor and visibility is reduced – not only at night – to help you see ahead and be seen by other drivers. Keep in mind that daytime running lights usually don’t activate your taillights. • Ice and snow can hit unexpectedly so make sure your tires are rated for the conditions you’ll be driving in. Check your tire pressure regularly –pressure drops in cold weather and over-inflated tires can reduce gripping.

• Clear off any snow that’s built up on your vehicle before driving including headlights, wheel wells and external sensors if you have a collision warning system.

• When severe winter weather hits, consider alternatives – carpool with a confident driver whose vehicle is equipped for the conditions, take a taxi, work from home or at least wait until the road crews have cleared major roads. Sometimes the best option is to leave the car at home.

• In poor weather, use extreme caution around snow plows. Maintain a safe following distance and don’t pass them – it’s not safe. These vehicles may be equipped with a wing blade on either of its sides which may not be visible due to the snow it sprays.

‘Its about believing in yourself’

— from page 1

“I want to be a singer-songwriter, that is the goal,” she said.

Based on past evidence, little can successfully get in the way of her aspirations. She is closing in on her ARCT certification (the most advanced piano diploma offered by the Royal Conservatory of Music), she won the Integris Young Artist competition in 2013, she has performed with the Prince George Symphony Orchestra, she has been a featured performer in various public appearances around the city in recent years, and her awards at the ski track are as numerous as her awards at the music festival.

The opening ceremony will be the only time she gets to perform Know My Name in a live setting. The recorded version will be played frequently during the World Para Nordic Ski Championships where she hopes it will help entertain the bystanders and inspire the athletes, officials, coaches and crews for each nation’s ski teams.

“Its about believing in yourself, sticking with your passion,” she said, no matter how many passions you might have.

The original song will be performed during the opening ceremonies on Friday at the Prince George Conference and Civic Centre. The free event starts at 7 p.m.

Gerry Van Caeseele and Gary Dean work on the set of Miracle Theatre’s production of Halfway There by Norm Foster. The play runs

Take another look at polls

The provincial byelection in Nanaimo last month was a lifesaver for the NDP. Had the party’s candidate lost, the seat tally in the legislature would have been tied and a general election might have followed.

The B.C. Liberals did manage to increase their share of the vote. But it wasn’t enough to overcome the huge majority won by the NDP in 2017.

The question that remains, though, is why the Liberals lost by nine points when a poll shortly before the election had them 12 points ahead. That’s a 21-point swing in just a few days.

One possibility is that the survey methodology was flawed. There do appear to have been oddities in how the sampling was constructed.

Another is that byelections are notoriously difficult to predict because voter turnout is usually low. Three thousand fewer ballots were cast than in the 2017 general election. Then again, there have been numerous occasions over the past few years when polling companies completely misread the

public’s mind. During the provincial election of 2013, we were assured the NDP was comfortably ahead. In the event, the Liberals won easily. And on the eve of the 2016 presidential election in the U.S., almost all of the surveys had the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, leading her opponent, Donald Trump, by a wide margin. Yet Trump won in the electoral college.

But another possibility exists. Perhaps the Nanaimo poll altered the outcome by changing voter intentions.

The question that remains, though, is why the Liberals lost by nine points when a poll shortly before the election had them 12 points ahead.

On this theory, before the poll was published, some NDP supporters were taking a win for granted, and told the survey firm they were voting Green. That boosted the Liberal numbers. It was only when the results were made public that they returned to the fold.

There is certainly a basis for that speculation. The Green tally collapsed from 20 per cent in 2017, to just seven per cent.

It’s possible some of those Green voters switched to the Liberal candidate. There was certainly a feeling that Finance Minister Carole James had blundered badly over the housing speculation tax.

Halfway through the campaign, James announced that 1.6 million households would have to prove, in writing, that they were not speculators. That misstep caused widespread anger.

Yet the fact remains the NDP won an election it looked almost certain to lose, according to the poll.

Did the release of that poll play a part?

The question is worth asking, because in recent years, governments across the country have taken steps to shield elections from outside influence. Financial contributions from unions and corporations have either been banned or greatly scaled back.

The amount individuals can give to a campaign has also been reduced. And limits have been set on the sum parties can spend

Worse than a wall

U.S. President Donald Trump wants a border wall – a symbolic monument to xenophobia and hate. But Democrats’ counterproposal could be even more dangerous for human rights. Rather than challenge Trump’s baseless insistence that there is a crisis, or push back on the notion immigrants are criminals who should be targeted, opponents have focused on how Trump’s plan is “medieval” or outdated. Top Democrats have repeatedly advocated for a “smart wall” or “technological wall” as an alternative to a physical barrier at the southern border. The House majority whip, Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., made a case for a “technological barrier too high to climb over, too wide to go around, and too deep to burrow under.”

These are more than just TV talking points. During the most recent round of negotiations to avert another government shutdown, Democratic lawmakers came in not just with a conciliatory offer of more than $1.3 billion for fencing, but also proposals to fund a swath of invasive surveillance technologies. Expanding these programs will simply shift migration routes to more remote terrain, leading to more unnecessary suffering, dehydration and death at the border. They also pose a grave threat to millions of citizens’ privacy and civil liberties across the nation.

Negotiators say they have reached an “agreement in principle” on border security funding. Details are scarce, as the deal is being negotiated behind closed doors. But as their previous proposals have made clear, Democratic appropriators appear ready to spend hundreds of millions

of dollars on “new cutting edge technology along the border to improve situational awareness.” If that sounds a bit dystopian, that is because it is. Lawmakers are not just proposing more cameras at ports of entry – they are pushing for the federal government to spend enormous amounts of money on technologies that can be used to trample human rights at an unprecedented scale.

Entering talks, Democrats supported more funding for the Border Patrol’s “air and marine operations” – which technology experts say is probably code for expanding U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) fleet of drones. The CBP already has the largest such fleet outside of the Defense Department and frequently “shares” its aircraft with law enforcement. Under current policies, video feeds and other data from those flights can be stored indefinitely in massive databases and shared with hundreds of government agencies and local police. We should be cautious about expanding these drone capabilities, because technology originally deployed at the border or in war zones does not tend to stay there. Too often, it later gets used against marginalized populations or political dissidents: an aerial surveillance system explicitly designed for military use in Iraq was later used to watch the residents of Baltimore, for example, and police in the San Francisco Bay area were caught using drones to spy on peaceful protesters in 2017. Unmanned aerial vehicles are already capable of vacuuming up images of millions of license plates and scanning the faces of people who live and work near the U.S. border. Having more of them could en-

able the government to conduct constant and ubiquitous video and photographic surveillance across large areas. Democrats have also called for “an expansion of risk-based targeting,” which means increasing the use of artificial intelligence software to determine which travelers should be detained and subjected to invasive screening, interrogation or incarceration. Numerous civil rights groups have already spoken out about the dangers of using this type of technology in law enforcement: artificial intelligence programs – created by humans, with human biases –frequently exhibit racial bias and can exacerbate existing forms of systemic discrimination. More funding could eventually lead to a border security system akin to the criminal justice system’s “risk assessment tools,” which help determine bail and sentencing: an algorithm could decide, in some cases, whether someone goes free or dies in ICE custody, is granted asylum or deported.

It seems only defense contractors and big tech companies stand to profit from government contracts by helping to build a “smart wall.” From start-ups to Silicon Valley giants, tech companies are looking to government contracts as a source of revenue and influence. These corporations aggressively market their surveillance tech to the government, regardless of whether it works. It is appalling that lawmakers are willing to accept the human cost of supporting these policies.

— Evan Greer is a transgender activist, musician and parent based in Boston. She is also deputy director of the viral digital rights group Fight for the Future.

SHAWN CORNELL DIRECTOR OF ADVERTISING

on advertising. The purpose is to prevent money from playing too large a role in what is supposed to be a contest between policies and vision.

Yet it does seem possible that polls can also influence an outcome, particularly if they are released within a few days of the vote. Put another way, opinion surveys not only provide information, they might also push voters in a particular direction. Is that something we want?

There is, of course, a freedom-of-speech issue. Why shouldn’t polling companies have their say?

And media outlets are already banned from publishing poll results on election day. That probably suffices. Yet care is needed in how we deal with material of this kind. If we don’t want money to sway election results unduly, perhaps we should be equally suspicious of placing undue weight on polls. The outcome in Nanaimo does suggest that voters might have been influenced in this manner.

The lesson is that more thought is needed about the role of opinion surveys in elections.

— Victoria Times Colonist

Poverty reduction plan, Take Three

Nineteen months in power is a long time to still be dwelling on how hard it is for people to get by.

But the NDP made the point with some success during the 2017 election campaign. They made it again in their first throne speech, outlining how the new government was going to put people first.

They made it again in the second throne speech and they hit that note again Tuesday in their third throne speech.

“Too many British Columbians feel that no matter how hard they work, they can’t get ahead. … The problems facing British Columbians today are hurting people and leaving communities behind.”

Beyond the obvious recognition that working people have to struggle, it’s also a dig at the previous B.C. Liberal government, for leaving people in that predicament. That makes the point irresistible to the NDP.

reduction plan. … This important work will get underway in coming weeks.”

It ran into complications and delays. The second throne speech, in February 2018, promised: “This year your government will deliver B.C.’s first-ever poverty-reduction strategy.”

Still, judging by the gloomy rhetoric, they have a long way to go before they’ll have to abandon the reminders of the bad old days.

They can’t be expected to solve all the problems in barely a year-and-ahalf. So the point will be made for a while longer. B.C. Liberals, after all, kept referring to the NDP’s 1990s terms in power as the dark decade of decline for years after it started making people roll their eyes.

At some point, though, they’ll have to stop brooding over it, for fear of looking useless.

“Many people are working two or three jobs, commuting farther for work and spending less time with their families, just to make ends meet,” said the speech. “But no matter how hard they work, they cannot seem to get ahead.”

All of which raises the question: “What are you doing about it?”

Tuesday’s speech did claim some progress when it comes to giving people assorted breaks. The NDP has compiled a list of instances in which they have eased pressures on families, with medical-premium abolition leading the way.

Still, judging by the gloomy rhetoric, they have a long way to go before they’ll have to abandon the reminders of the bad old days.

A related point that made its third successive appearance in an NDP throne speech is an enthusiastic update on the poverty-reduction strategy.

The flagship project was hailed in the first throne speech, in September 2017. “For the first time in the history of this province, your government will work with citizens to create a legislated poverty-

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They got legislation passed last fall that formalizes the basis for the strategy. It sets targets and timelines. But there’s still no explanation of exactly how it will work or how much it will cost. The broad understanding of what’s involved is a variety of government investments to help low-income families by way of minimum-wage hikes, housing help, legal aid and skill training.

But it’s open to argument whether a law declaring the need for a strategy amounts to a strategy.

So Tuesday’s speech simply repeats last year’s promise almost verbatim.

“This year, B.C. will deliver its first-ever poverty-reduction strategy.”

There’s some expectation of real progress on releasing details of the strategy coming next month. But real progress on actually reducing poverty is a long-term project.

The speech suggests the government will keep chipping at the affordability issue. Ferry fares on major routes that were frozen last year will stay frozen, which averts a one or two per cent hike.

And there are two new attentiongrabbers that might or might not pan out. The government wants to improve the transparency of cellphone bills. It’s an open question how much jurisdiction a province has over the industry, so the fallback position is that B.C. will encourage Ottawa to deliver more affordable cellphone options.

As well, last year’s consultations on the ripoffs associated with concert tickets revealed a wide swath of resentment. So new rules are coming for live-ticket sales.

Just to keep things interesting, the government is going to bring forward measures related to the liquefied natural gas venture, which could test the confidence agreement with the Greens.

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IN THE FAST LEYNE LES LEYNE

New Democrat’s taxi-driver dad should prompt resignation, Liberals say

Citizen news service

VICTORIA — British Columbia’s Opposition Liberals are calling for New Democrat Ravi Kahlon to resign from an all-party committee reviewing ride hailing for the province because his dad holds a taxi licence.

Richmond Liberal Jas Johal said Wednesday the member from North Delta should quit the select standing committee on Crown

corporations, which is currently holding meetings and accepting submissions from representatives from the taxi and ride-hailing industries.

The committee is preparing a report that would examine and make recommendations on the implementation of ride hailing, and Johal said there’s a perception of conflict of interest with Kahlon on the committee.

“You are making recommenda-

tions to the minister that could directly impact taxi licences and the prices of those taxi licences, which would mean his father’s taxi licence,” Johal said. “I think that doesn’t pass the smell test in regards to a conflict. He should recuse himself.”

The Liberals have not taken their concerns to B.C.’s conflict of interest commissioner, said Johal.

Kahlon said his father, Navroop Singh Kahlon, has held a taxi

licence in Victoria for almost 30 years, but that should not force him to quit the committee. He said his father is preparing to retire within the next two months.

Kahlon said he did not tell Transportation Minister Claire Trevena his father was in the taxi business when he was appointed to the committee last year. Johal said he was not aware until recently that Kahlon had family ties to the taxi industry.

Mystery meat Study finds 14 per cent of sausages contain meat not listed on the label

Liam CASEY Citizen news service

A federally-funded study has found sausages sold in grocery stores in several provinces contain meat not declared on the label.

The research, conducted by a team at the University of Guelph and commissioned by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, looked at 100 sausages collected from grocery stores in three locations in Ontario, Quebec and Western Canada. All were labelled as a single type of meat.

The study found that 14 per cent of sausages sampled contained meats that weren’t on the label.

“This demonstrates a breakdown in traceability and if you have a breakdown, you have potential risk for food safety,” said lead author Robert Hanner, an associate professor with the Biodiversity Institute of Ontario at the University of Guelph.

Hanner conducted a similar study two years ago that found 20 per cent of sausages sampled had been mislabelled.

“It’s a positive story in that it is trending in the right direction,” Hanner said of the latest findings.

The team looked for beef, pork, chicken, turkey, horse, sheep and goat in the sausages.

In five beef sausage samples, for instance, researchers found sheep

Sausages are shown on a grill. A federally-funded study has found that 14 per cent of sausages sampled from grocery stores across Canada contained meats that weren’t on the label.

meat actually made up more than one per cent of the sausage.

“This is not trace carryover,”

Hanner said, adding that his team also found trace levels of sheep in 27 other samples.

“How is mutton getting into significant amount of these products, even in the trace level?” he said.

“We don’t know.”

Four of the beef sausages that

contained sheep also had pork, and one contained chicken, the study found.

All of the beef sausages contained the meat declared on the label as the predominant ingredient in the sausage, the research noted.

Among the 20 chicken sausages sampled, the study found one was predominantly made up of beef.

Another was also made up largely of beef, with 20 per cent turkey and less than five per cent chicken.

One turkey sausage likely contained bison meant, the study found.

There weren’t any unlabeled species in the pork sausages.

“At least we didn’t find horse meat this time,” Hanner said, referencing a finding from two

years ago. “(That) has personal, religious or cultural implications.”

The latest findings – published in the journal Food Research International – have food safety recall repercussions, the researcher said.

“If we have an E. coli-tainted batch of beef, we’ll recall that beef, but if it’s finding its way into pork products and things we don’t know it’s in, we can’t recall them,” he said.

Hanner said the CFIA took “follow-up actions” after his last study, but doesn’t know what they were.

“There were five turkey sausages last time that were wholly replaced by chicken and we don’t see any evidence of that this time,” he said. “That problem seems to be resolved, but we have discovered other issues, such as the mutton problem.”

The CFIA did not immediately respond to questions but has applauded Hanner’s team on his cutting edge research that uses DNA barcoding technology among other methods to figure out what’s inside the sausages.

“Scientific innovation helps protect Canada’s food supply on many levels, and DNA barcoding plays a key role through species identification,” agency’s deputy chief food safety officer, Dr. Aline Dimitri said in a statement.

AP FILE PHOTO

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Back on familiar ground

Ted CLARKE Citizen staff tclarke@pgcitizen.ca

Brittany Hudak was good as gold the last time she raced at Otway Nordic Centre.

That was four years ago at the 2015 Canada Winter Games and Hudak had a dominant week on the slopes. She won all three of her cross-country ski races and went on to make Canada Games history as the firstever para athlete to compete in the able-bodied team relay, helping Saskatchewan to an eighth-place result.

Three years later at the 2018 Paralympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, Hudak shared in a record 16-medal haul for the Canada para nordic team, winning bronze in the 12.5-kilometre biathlon.

Hudak is part of an 11-athlete Canadian team gearing up for the nine-day World Para Nordic Championships at Otway and she’s hoping the positive vibe that comes with racing in Canada will pay off in podium results. Her first race, the mid-distance 10 km standing biathlon, starts Saturday at 12:30 p.m.

“It feels like home and it feels familiar, which is nice – being a para athlete in an able-bodied relay here was pretty cool,” said Hudak, a 25-year-old native of Prince Albert, Sask. “Some of us have raced here before and always just competing on home soil is an advantage because we don’t have to travel far to get here.

“The courses are so similar to Canada Winter Games and we know what we have to do, so that’s an advantage there.”

Hudak lives and trains in Canmore, Alta., home of the senior national team she’s been part of for five years. She was born with part of her left arm missing and was into jazz dancing, track and field, basketball and badminton when she met Colette Bourgonje, a sit-skier who competed in seven Paralympics and won Canada’s first medal at the 2010 Games in Vancouver-Whistler. Bourgonje suggested the 18-year-old Hudak try skiing, and the seed was sewn.

She’s now a two-time Paralympian with two world championships on her resume, coming off a pair of seventh-place biathlon finishes in the Para World Cup in December in Vuokatti, Finland, and was eighth in the cross-country sprint. She’s entered in both disciplines in the WPNC.

Emily Young (nee Weekes) tried to keep Hudak in focus during her Canada Games race and twice came up second-best, winning two silvers for B.C.

“She got the golds and I got the silvers – it’s fun to be back,” said Young, who makes her off-season home in Kelowna. “It’s nice to

Otway trails stir up medal memories for Canadian skiers

Wednesday was an unofficial

Para Nordic Skiing Championships.

The courses are so similar to Canada Winter Games and we know what we have to do, so that’s an advantage there.

— Brittany Hudak

be close to home and we like the courses here, they’re challenging but familiar.”

Young, 28, won two Paralympic medals in Pyeongchang, both in cross-country – bronze in the 7.5 km event and she combined with sit-skier Colin Cameron of Sudbury, Ont., to win silver in the mixed relay. Young just missed the medal podium at the Para World Cup in Finland, placing fourth in the cross-country sprint.

Athletes from 19 countries have had to deal with frigid conditions for training this week at Otway. The temperature dipped down to

-33 C overnight Wednesday but the forecast calls for Saturday (-13 C) and Sunday (-11 C) to be well within the -20 C cutoff.

Young grew up in North Vancouver but she’s developed a thick skin in her five years with the national team and isn’t going to let a bit of cold weather bother her. She’s as tough as they come as one of Canada’s medal threats in

cross-country skiing and biathlon.

“It’s perfect, it’s winter and the sun is nice,” said Young.

Young was a competitive wrestler in her second year of university when she suffered an injury to her right elbow at a training camp in 2009. That led to nerve damage which keeps her arm bent at a 90-degree angle and a loss of feeling that extends to her fingers.

Changes proposed for Canadian junior curlers sparks petition

Donna SPENCER Citizen news service

Upcoming changes to the Canadian junior curling championships are facing resistance as some young curlers lament losing a year of eligibility to play in it.

Curling Canada announced last October it will shift the national junior championship starting in 2021 from January to March – which is after the world junior championship – and make it an under-20 competition instead of the current under-21 event.

An online petition criticizing the move launched in January and almost 5,000 have signed. The national governing body of curling has since introduced a three-year transitional phase ending in 2023 during which teams can carry one 21-year-old, or an “overage.”

That athlete would be too old, however, to play for Canada in the world junior championship the following calendar year. Using this year’s Canadian junior championship in Prince Albert, Sask., as an example, 16 curlers, or 13 per cent of the field, were 21. Three-quarters of Team Ontario was 21 as were the seconds for champions Tyler Tardi and Selena Sturmay.

B.C.’s Tardi and Alberta’s Sturmay are representing Canada at the world juniors starting Saturday in Liverpool, N.S.

In Saskatchewan’s three junior qualification bonspiels in September, six per cent of a total 196 participants were 21 at that time. Calgary curler Lisa Parent, who turns 19 this year, wrote the petition. She will

age out of juniors a year earlier unless she joins a team as an overage for the 2020-21 season.

“Definitely the biggest issue for me was how quickly they announced the change and how, in my first year of junior, they were taking away my last year,” Parent told The Canadian Press. “In juniors, you’ll plan a three-year schedule to peak while you’re 21. I know Curling Canada has been saying it’s only a year, but that’s what we’ve been building for since we were little kids.”

A national junior championship in late March conflicts with exam preparation for university students, which many competitive junior curlers are.

“Taking a full course load and preparing for Canadian juniors would most definitely impact my grades in my final exams,” Parent said.

And at an age where the increasing demands of school and life can cause young curlers to take a hiatus from the sport, or drop it altogether, some may now bail earlier, she said.

Curling Canada’s rationale for the alteration is the competitive season for the

majority of junior curlers is over the first week of January, when each province and territory concludes its junior playdowns.

Curling clubs have ice for another three months.

Under the new format, the number of teams in the Canadian junior championship in March will increase from 24 to 36.

In addition, the national under-18 championship will shift from April to February and increase from 24 to 48 teams. That gives juvenile teams a chance to also qualify for juniors.

So the country’s youth curlers will have both a longer competitive season and more chances to experience playing in a major event, says Nolan Thiessen, Curling Canada’s manager of championship services and athlete liaison.

“Now we’ve created a five- to six-month calendar where the athletes are engaged,” he explained.

“They can set out a five-month training, competition, rest-and-recovery as well as school-work schedule over a five-month period as a opposed to a three-month rush to try to win their provincials.

“It wasn’t about the two Team Canadas. It was about trying to create an infrastructure for real growth and development across the country over a longer period of time.”

Three-time world champion David Nedohin, who coaches a juvenile team, was among those who signed the petition.

He says he understands Curling Canada’s reasoning, but points out the competi-

Unable to continue wrestling she turned to Ironman triathlon and took up skiing five years ago.

Hudak, Young and Natalie Wilkie of Salmon Arm race each other in the standing categories of biathlon and cross-country. Wilkie, 18, won Paralympic gold in the 7.5 km classic and bronze in the sprint and also reeled in silver in the mixed relay. The Canadian team arrived Tuesday and Kyle Barber of Stirling, Ont., part of the NextGen development team, skied the Otway trails for the first time. Biathlon is his favourite discipline but the 27-year-old does better in the cross-country events in his first year competing internationally. He placed 18th in the World Cup sprint in Finland.

Barber skis in the standing category without using poles. Born with a condition called symbrachydactyly, which prevented formation of fingers on both hands, he started skiing 2 1/2 years ago when he responded to Paralympic talent search in Toronto.

Visually-impaired skier Brian McKeever, 44 (with guide Graham Nishikawa) and standing skier Mark Arendz, 28, are the household names on the Canadian team as perennial medal threats, with the 30-year-old Cameron also in that category, but the likes of Hudak, Young, Barber, Wilkie, Jesse Bachinsky (Kenora, Ont. – with guide Simon Lamarche of Victoria), Derek Zaplotinsky (Smokey Lake, Alta.), Yves Bourque (Bécancour, Que.), Ethan Hess (Pemberton) are the up-and-comers on the Canadian team who could pull off a surprise or two over the next two weeks.

“I think they’ll do just fine,” said head coach Robin McKeever. “All we worry about is racing to the best of our abilities and then whatever happens... we don’t control who else is there.

“We were (the best in the world) last year at the Paralympic Games but it’s a different year. Everybody’s training, everybody’s moving, everybody’s improving.” Races are scheduled Saturday, Sunday and Monday, followed by a training day Tuesday. Competition resumes with races next Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday.

Spectator viewing positions overlook the biathlon range and offer views of uphill and downhill sections of the course and Hudak says spectators are in for an eyeopening treat watching the best in the world compete for medals.

“You get to watch people with different abilities and how they ski with what they have, but also how good they ski,” Hudak said. “It’s not that some of us have a disability and it’s very evident. It’s very interesting to see the different disabilities but how well people still do without that extra pole or moving your legs.”

tive gap between junior and men’s and women’s competition is so much larger now than when his Randy Ferbey team recruited Carter Rycroft and Scott Pfeiffer right out of junior.

The stakes in curling have never been higher with the Olympic Games and thousands of dollars in World Curling Tour prize money and sponsorships.

It’s becoming almost impossible for a junior graduate to apprentice with a top team, he said.

“A four-year cycle ends and all of those top players go into the blender, the blender turns on and they spit out new teams,” Nedohin said. “There’s no new curlers that get involved with the top-level teams because no one is willing to take a risk on a player for four years that they don’t know.

“We have a major decline in competitive curlers coming out of juniors and going into men’s and ladies because of that gap that exists.”

A longer period of junior eligibility helps bridge the gap, Nedohin said.

“It makes sense what (Curling Canada) is saying, but it would be nice if you could find a way to at least consider the impact it might be having on some of these players trying to make that bridge into competitive men’s or ladies,” Nedohin said.

“Right now, it’s already hard enough. Backing it off another year, that’s just one more year to me that you have less opportunity to be successful before you get thrown to the wolves.”

CITIZEN PHOTO BY BRENT BRAATEN

training day at Otway Nordic Centre for competitors in the 2019 World

HUDAC

Duchess Park downs D.P. Todd in boys final

Ted

The clash of the titans in the City League senior boys basketball championship had all the ingredients to build a barn-burner and that’s exactly how it turned out.

Two of the best teams in the province – the Duchess Park Condors, ranked No. 4 among B.C. triple-A teams, and the D.P. Todd Trojans, the fifth-ranked double-A squad in the province, left it all on the floor in Wednesday’s final at the Northern Sport Centre.

In what turned out a tense thriller from start to finish, the Condors put the wraps on a 64-55 victory, winning the title for the fifth straight year.

Connor Lyons led the Condor cause offensively with 18 points, while Jackson Kuc had 12 and Caleb Lewis shot 12. Cameron Sale put up a game-high 19 points for D.P. Todd while Shane Sandhu hit for 13 and Chris Magrath had a 10-point game.

The teams traded blows in a third quarter that had four lead changes. Trojans forward Magrath, whose knee troubles made him a questionable starter for the final, gave his team a scare when he came up limping off his wonky hinge less than two minutes into the game. But until late in the contest when he had to retire to the bench in pain, he only missed a couple shifts and was dominant under the hoop, utilizing his long reach to generate timely buckets.

Sale and Emir Zejnulahovic did their part finding

the net to keep the Trojans close, with Condors guard Kuc finding his range from three-point territory. The back-and-forth quarter ended with a buzzer-beating three from Condor senior Soren Erricson, much to the delight of the Condor supporters who erupted in appreciation for their team’s 53-47 lead with a deafening roar.

The heavyweight duel persisted in the fourth quarter and Lyons continued to inflict damage. He connected on a trey and later scored one off the glass for a 60-52 lead with three minutes on the clock but the Trojans refused to go away. Sandhu’s long shot cut the gap to five but that’s as close as it got for D.P. Todd.

Lyons was the Condors’ most reliable shooter in the first half, collecting 11 points, while Lewis sunk eight. Sale put up nine points in two quarters of work and Sandhu had 10 after 20 minutes, hitting for three triples. The Condors led 30-29 at the half.

The Condors held a 3-1 edge in the season series but the Trojans came into the game knowing in their most recent clash with their cross-town rivals, Jan. 20, they beat Duchess 76-69.

Duchess Park went 5-0 in the City League regular season while the Trojans went 4-1.

The Condors will play next weekend in the North Central zone triple-A boys tournament at Prince George Secondary School. The Trojans are hosting the double-A boys zone championship, starting next Thursday.

Woods gets elevated status at Riviera

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Tiger Woods and his TGR Foundation took over the Genesis Open at Riviera two years ago, and now the PGA Tour is elevating it to the same status as tournaments hosted by Jack Nicklaus and the late Arnold Palmer. Still to be determined is whether Woods can actually win the one PGA Tour event that has his number. Riviera is where a 16-year-old Woods made his PGA Tour debut on a sponsor exemption. This is the closest PGA Tour event to where he grew up in Orange County. Riviera also is the PGA Tour course he has played the most times – nine – without winning. “It is certainly a love-hate relationship,” Woods said Wednesday after getting through his pro-am

ahead of the rain. “I love playing this golf course. I always have. I enjoyed playing up here when I was young with my dad. For some reason, I’ve only played well here one time in the tournament.”

That was in 1999, a few months before the first major overhaul in his swing took root. He was tied with Ernie Els and Ted Tryba going to the back nine before Els ran off three straight birdies and no one could catch him. Woods was runner-up his best finish at Riviera. The real measure was in 2000, when Woods either won or was runner-up in 10 out of 11 starts on the PGA Tour.

The exception? A tie for 18th at Riviera. Woods gets another crack in what figures to be cold, wet conditions.

Condors keep clutch on city hoops trophy

Ted CLARKE Citizen staff tclarke@pgcitizen.ca

The Duchess Park Condors kept up their mid-February tradition. The City League senior girls basketball championship trophy bears the name of their school more than any other team and the Condors hoisted the cup for the sixth straight year after a 72-25 win over the College Heights Cougars in the final Wednesday night at the Northern Sport Centre.

The Condors have dominated the City League for nearly three decades, winning the title 15 times since the inaugural year, 1990-91.

Nobody had to remind Brynn Dergousoff of her team’s success in the annual game to settle city bragging rights for the next 365 days. The Condors’ Grade 12 forward is now a four-time City League champion and was one of the primary movers and shakers Wednesday, collecting a gamehigh 22 points.

“It’s been an extraordinary experience, I started as a Grade 9 so the training through all that and watching all the girls grow, and playing with a lot of different girls, has been really cool,” said Dergousoff, who’s entertaining offers to play post-secondary ball next season at Winnipeg or Simon Fraser University.

Standing a shade more than six feet tall in her Nikes, Dergousoff and her vertical advantage gave the Cougars a persistent headache. Dergousoff hit three triples in the first half and had 14 of the Condors’ 35 points as they headed to the locker room leading by 27. That earned her a seat on the bench in the second half as coach Wade Loukes leaned on his bench players to protect their healthy lead.

“We didn’t try to run the ball a lot, our team has always been known to just run the ball and push the ball,” said Dergousoff.

“We wanted to key on Isabel Fuller, she’s one of their best shooters, so she would have to pass the ball to their role players. We just kept moving the ball, that’s what we do best.”

Fuller, a City League all-star, led the Cougars with 12 points and Laura Olson turned it on in the second half, scoring all of her 10 points in the final 20 minutes. The Condors had four all-stars on the floor Wednesday, including Dergousoff, Rebecca Landry, Jasmin Schlick and Hannah Loukes.

The six-foot-three Schlick deflated the Cougars’ air attacks just by putting her arms up and her quickness pressuring the ball

City all-stars 2019

Senior girls

Rebecca Landry, Duchess Park

Brynn Dergousoff, Duchess

Park

Haley McCormack, D.P. Todd

Jasmin Schlick, Duchess Park

Isabel Fuller, College Heights

Julia Kreitz, PGSS

Naomi Dugdale, Kelly Road

Hannah Loukes, Duchess Park

Nina Gagic, PGSS

Jenna Korolek, Kelly Road

Senior boys

Cam Sale, D.P. Todd

Soren Erricson, Duchess Park

Holden Black, D.P. Todd

Ameer Dhillon, PGSS

Jordan Foster, PGSS

Connor Lewis, Duchess Park

Dan Zimmerman, Duchess Park

Randy Sandhu, D.P. Todd

Jack Kuc, Duchess Park

Harrison Faryna, Kelly Road

forced turnovers her teammates converted to points.

Landry, a UNBC Timberwolves recruit for next season, finished with 11 points, playing in her third city championship.

“A couple of their Grade 12s are good shooters and we’ve got some height on them, so we tried to make it difficult for them, force them to put the ball on the floor rather than give them open shots and that makes them work harder,” said coach Loukes. “Our girls really showed up tonight and played good defence. (Schlick) is six-foot-three and can dunk a tennis ball and she’s very active playing good perimeter defence and the other girls really helped out and did a great job. We’ve got some momentum heading into zones tomorrow.”

The Condors, ranked seventh among double-A teams in the province, went 4-0 in the City League and beat the Prince George Polars in the semifinal round last week. College Heights went 3-1 in regular-season play, then dispatched Kelly Road in the playoffs.

“At the end of the day, they’re more talented, they’re more skilled and we were hoping we could compete a little longer but they are just a better team,” said Cougars head coach Sharon Minhas.

The Cougars lost all three this season to Duchess Park but will get another crack at them in the six-team North Central double-A zone tournament which starts today at College Heights. Just one berth is available for the provincial tournament in Langley, Feb. 26 to March 2.

Sergio says sorry

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Sergio Garcia apologized in a statement and in person to the players in his group when he damaged five greens at the Saudi International. He apologized in a social media post and in an interview at his locker Wednesday at Riviera.

That has been the easy part. He has had plenty of experience over the years.

Garcia said the challenge now is to make sure it does not happen again, knowing that the scrutiny of his behaviour will be greater than ever.

“I’m sure I’m going to hear it throughout the year,” Garcia told The Associated Press in his first interview since he was disqualified Feb. 2 for the damage he did to five greens out of frustration early in the third round.

“My job is to make sure I deal

with it the best way possible, and show them that I can grow, that I can move forward and I can be who I am in the right way,” he said. “I want to face my mistakes head on. My job is to go out there and enjoy my game and show everyone that no matter what, I can be the best behaved guy in the classroom. ... I just hope I can maintain their respect.”

The Genesis Open is his first event since he lost his head early in the third round at the Saudi International, which he attributed to a personal issue that put him in a bad frame of mind at the start of the week and greens at Royal Greens in Saudi Arabia that were new, grainy and slow. He did not disclose the personal matter and said it was no excuse, and that he knew immediately he had done wrong.

Siakam, Anunoby help Toronto zap Wizards

Citizen news service

TORONTO — Pascal Siakam had 44 points and OG

Anunoby added 22, both career highs, as the Toronto Raptors rallied to down the Washington Wizards 129-120 on Wednesday for their sixth straight win Kawhi Leonard (knee soreness) was out but newly-acquired guard Jeremy Lin was in for the Raptors (43-16) in a makeshift lineup.

After trailing by 10 early, Washington was up by six at the half and pushed the lead to 12 in the third at 80-68. But a 20-2 Toronto run with Kyle Lowry leading the way turned the tide in a back-and-forth game.

The Raptors, stiffening their defence, outscored the Wizards 44-28 in the third to lead 103-93. Washington (24-34) kept clawing its way back and got to within one at 112-111. But Lowry and Siakam reeled off a 7-0 run and Toronto held firm the rest of the way as the Wizard fightback faded. It was the last game for both teams before the allstar break. The Raptors and Wizards resume play Feb. 22, with Toronto welcoming DeMar DeRozan and the San Antonio Spurs.

Both teams had six players in double figures. Bradley Beal and Jeff Green led Washington with 28 and 23, respectively. Jabari Parker had 22. Lowry had 14 points and 13 assists. Lin finished

with eight points, five assists and five rebounds. Siakam’s previous career high was 33 points with Anunoby’s at 21. Siakam, who scored 30 points in the second half, added 10 rebounds and two assists. Toronto’s 43 wins before the all-star break are a franchise record. The Raptors have won 13 of their last 14 at Scotiabank Arena and are 24-5 at home.

The Wizards, coming off a 121-112 loss Monday in Detroit, have lost five of their last seven. Toronto was the third stop of a four-game road trip. Lowry came out hot, feeding Siakam for a dunk and Green for an alley-oop layup. The Wizards, meanwhile missed their first six shots as Toronto opened an early 10-point lead at 12-2 before rallying to cut the margin to 16-14. Lin entered to a standing ovation with just over four minutes remaining in the first quarter. He promptly stole the ball, only to turn it over on the ensuing fast break. His first assist as a Raptor led to a Green three-pointer.

Lin, a nine-year NBA veteran who attended Harvard, wore the No. 17 that used to belong to the recently departed Jonas Valanciunas, now with Memphis. His Toronto debut came seven years and one day after he sank a memorable three-pointer at the final buzzer that gave the visiting New York Knicks a 90-87 win over the Raptors.

CITIZEN PHOTO BY JAMES DOYLE

Hannah Loukes of the Duchess Park Condors goes high to make a shot over the outstretched arms of College Heights Cougars defender Isabel Fuller on Wednesday night at the Northern Sport Centre during the senior girls basketball city championship game.

CLARKE Citizen staff

Now you see it...

Cariboo Cougars forward Kellan Brienen pulls off a slick move to get the puck through Valley West Giants defender Tanner Alan Dawkins on Saturday afternoon at Kin 1 in the second game of a weekend triple-header between the two B.C. Hockey Minor Midget League teams. As part of a sweep of the Giants, the Cougars won this game 3-2. They also defeated the visitors 3-0 on Friday and 6-4 on Sunday. The Cougars are third in the 10-team league with a record of 14-10-1-5.

Carter the latest to join Lions

Citizen news service

Duron Carter is a B.C. Lion.

The colourful receiver signed a oneyear deal with B.C. on Wednesday, the second day of CFL free agency.

“Players of Duron’s remarkable ability are what make our league special and he’s going to be a very big piece of our offence in 2019,” GM Ed Hervey said in a statement. “We had a lot of interest in him last year when he became available during the season and it’s great to finally get this deal done.”

The six-foot-five, 205-pound Carter split last season between the Saskatchewan Roughriders and Toronto Argonauts, registering a combined 18 catches for 230 yards and two TDs. Carter, a two-time CFL all-star, began his career in Canada with Montreal in 2013 and over five seasons has has 276 catches for 4,150 yards and 27 TDs in 73 games.

“I am looking forward to making a fresh start on the West Coast,” said Carter. “Ed and I had a number of conversations last year before I signed in Toronto which really helped me in my decision to ultimately join him in B.C.

“The opportunity to play with Mike Reilly is obviously a big factor too. Players want to have fun playing this game and it’s going to be a lot of fun in B.C. this year.”

Jennings joins Redblacks

The Ottawa Redblacks have signed quarterback Jonathon Jennings to a oneyear contract. Jennings has 980 completions for 12,497 yards and 66 touchdowns in 51 career games over four seasons with the B.C. Lions.

He had his most successful season in 2016, when the Ohio native threw for 5,226 yards and 27 touchdowns.

The move comes after former Ottawa quarterback Trevor Harris signed with Edmonton on Tuesday, the opening day of free agency.

“We are very excited to add a player of Jonathon’s pedigree to our roster,” Redblacks general manager Marcel Desjardins said in a statement. “His experience and ability will add depth and competition to the Redblacks QB position.”

Jennings joins a group of quarterbacks in Ottawa that includes Dominique Davis, Danny Collins and Will Ardnt.

The Redblacks also signed Canadian offensive lineman Philippe Gagnon, American receiver Ryan Lankford, defensive back/returner Troy Stoudermire and Canadian linebacker Nicolas Boulay.

Gagnon spent the past three seasons with Montreal, which drafted him second overall in 2016.

Lankford played the last two seasons with Winnipeg, while Stoudermire comes to Ottawa after spending last year in Calgary.

Boulay spent his first six CFL seasons with Montreal, registering 33 tackles, 69 special-teams tackles and a forced fumble in 97 games,

Loffler signs with Als

All-star Canadian safety Taylor Loffler has signed with the Montreal Alouettes.

Loffler, a three-time CFL all-star from Kelowna, was taken in the third round, No. 19 overall, in the 2016 CFL draft by Winnipeg. Last season, the 26-year-old 52 tackles, a fumble return and three interceptions in 16 games with the Bombers.

“We acquired one of the most sought after defensive players in free agency,” Alouettes GM Kavis Reed said in a statement. “We improved our defence a great deal with this acquisition.

“What Taylor has done by being selected a CFL all-star in first three CFL seasons is quite phenomenal. He represents a great signing for our organization.”

Argos make additions

Shawn Lemon is back with the Toronto Argonauts.

The veteran American defensive lineman signed with Toronto for reportedly one year Wednesday after becoming a CFL free agent Tuesday. Lemon had 11 sacks in 2018 after splitting the season between the Argos and B.C.

Lemon has also spent time in the CFL with Saskatchewan (2011, 2016), Edmonton (2012), Calgary (2013, 2014) and Ottawa (2015). He was an East Division all-star in 2016 after registering a career-high 14 sacks and is a two-time Grey Cup champion.

The Argos also signed American defensive end Tobi Antigha, who spent the last two seasons with Saskatchewan. The 25-year-old had 21 tackles, two sacks, and three interceptions, one of which was returned 52 yards for a touchdown, last year.

Sports Penguins stifle McDavid, Oilers

Citizen news service

PITTSBURGH — Matt Murray robbed Connor McDavid on a penalty shot for one of his 38 saves and the Pittsburgh Penguins beat the struggling Edmonton Oilers 3-1 on Wednesday night.

Murray’s acrobatic stop on McDavid late in the second period protected a Pittsburgh lead and the Penguins held on to sweep the season series.

Bryan Rust, Teddy Blueger and Jared McCann all scored as Pittsburgh picked up two vital points despite playing without suspended centre Evgeni Malkin, forced to sit while serving a one-game suspension for an illegal high stick. Penguins captain Sidney Crosby finished with one assist and spent large portions of the night going head to head with McDavid.

McDavid picked up an assist on Leon Draisaitl’s first-period goal but was otherwise held in check. Mikko Koskinen stopped 31 shots for the Oilers but couldn’t stop Edmonton from falling for the eighth time in nine games.

The second meeting of the season between two of the game’s biggest stars lacked the electricity of the first – when McDavid and Crosby both scored, with Crosby getting the winner in overtime back on Oct. 23 – but with considerably higher stakes, at least for Pittsburgh.

The Penguins entered play with a tenuous onepoint lead over Carolina for the second wild-card spot in the jam-packed Eastern Conference. Though Pittsburgh rode a career-high 50 saves from Murray in a one-sided road victory in Philadelphia on Monday, it also continued a pattern of one step forward, one step back.

Defenceman Olli Maatta went down in the first period with an upper-body injury that will sideline him indefinitely and the NHL ordered Malkin to sit out as penance after Malkin flung his stick wildly at Philadelphia’s Michael Raffl late in the third period, forcing Pittsburgh head coach Mike Sullivan to get creative in an effort keep his team’s fragile momentum going.

He moved Nick Bjugstad to centre the second line and reshuffled the defensive pairings, including giving Chad Ruhwedel his first appearance since Nov. 19.

It led to a bit of a sluggish start, and McDavid wasted little time taking advantage as the Penguins tried to find their footing. He got a pass in front of the Pittsburgh bench from Oscar Klefbom to spark a 2-on-1 and slid a pass over to Draisaitl that beat Murray 4:45 into the game for his 33rd of the season.

Rust gave the Penguins a needed spark early in the second period when he put together a dazzling short-handed shift with Matt Cullen that ended with Rust creeping out from behind the Edmonton net and stuffing a puck past Koskinen at 2:35.

Blueger put Pittsburgh in front at 6:10 when Kris Letang banked a pass off the side of the Edmonton net that landed on the rookie’s stick. Blueger ripped it by Koskinen for his third goal in seven career games.

McDavid’s speed provided the Oilers with a chance to tie it late in the second when he split Letang and Jake Guentzel on a breakaway. Guentzel held McDavid as he raced past and the referees awarded McDavid a penalty shot. He drifted in slowly on Murray then tried to lift the puck by the goaltender as he made his way across the crease only to have Murray snatch it out of the air with his glove as the 559th consecutive sellout crowd at PPG Paints Arena roared.

Murray kept the Oilers at bay in the third despite pretty steady pressure, and when McCann found the empty net with a minute to go the Penguins had picked up consecutive victories for just the second time in five weeks.

Adams facing claims of being inappropriate with girls

Citizen news service

NEW

YORK — A New York Times report says seven women have claimed singer-songwriter Ryan Adams offered to help them with their music careers but then turned things sexual, and he sometimes became emotional and verbally abusive.

In the story published Wednesday, a 20-year-old female musician said Adams, 44, had inappropriate conversations with her while she was 15 and 16. Identified by her middle name Ava, she said that Adams exposed himself during a video call.

Adams’ ex-wife, actress and singer Mandy Moore, said Adams was psychologically abusive toward her throughout their marriage. Their divorce was official in 2016.

The Times said the accounts have been corroborated by family members or friends who were present at the time. Adams’ lawyer denied the claims to the Times.

After the article was published, Adams tweeted Wednesday that “I am not a perfect man and I have made many mistakes.”

“To anyone I have ever hurt, however unintentionally, I apologize deeply and unreservedly,” he wrote. “But the

I would never have inappropriate interactions with someone I thought was underage. Period.

— Ryan Adams

picture that this article paints is upsettingly inaccurate. Some of its details are misrepresented; some are exaggerated; some are outright false. I would never have inappropriate interactions with someone I thought was underage. Period.”

Adams released his debut album in 2000 and has earned seven Grammy nominations. He famously covered Taylor Swift’s Grammy-winning 1989 album in 2015, a year after its release. He has also worked as a producer behind the scenes for acts like Willie Nelson and Jenny Lewis.

Last month Adams performed at a tribute concert for the late rock singer Chris Cornell.

Ava said Adams constantly questioned her about her age throughout

the nine months they exchanged text messages. The report said she never showed him any identification, and he had pet names for her body parts.

“If people knew they would say I was like R Kelley lol,” he wrote to her via text in November 2014, when he was 40 and she was 16. R. Kelly has been accused of sexual misconduct with women and girls but has denied the allegations.

“Mr. Adams unequivocally denies that he ever engaged in inappropriate online sexual communications with someone he knew was underage,” Andrew B. Brettler, Adam’s layer, told the Times.

Singers Phoebe Bridgers and Courtney Jaye said Adams behaved inappropriately during their relationships.

Moore, one of the stars of NBC’s award-winning This Is Us, burst on the scene as a teen singer and had musical success in the late 1990s and early 2000s. She claimed Adams stalled her music career and told her, “‘You’re not a real musician, because you don’t play an instrument.”’

“His controlling behaviour essentially did block my ability to make new connections in the industry during a very pivotal and potentially lucrative time –my entire mid-to-late 20s,” 34-year-old Moore said to the Times.

Paperback pioneer dead at 99

Hillel ITALIE Citizen news service

NEW YORK — Betty Ballantine, half of a groundbreaking husband-and-wife publishing team that helped invent the modern paperback and vastly expand the market for science fiction and other genres through such blockbusters as The Hobbit and Fahrenheit 451, has died.

Ballantine died Tuesday at her home in Bearsville, N.Y., granddaughter Katharyn Ballantine told The Associated Press. She was 99 and had been in declining health.

Ballantine was just 20 and attending school in England, in 1939, when she met and married 23-year-old Ian Ballantine, an American at the London School of Economics. Using a $500 wedding gift from Betty’s father, the Ballantines started out as importers of Penguin paperbacks from England and founded two enduring imprints: Bantam Books and Ballantine Books, both now part of Penguin Random House.

“We mourn the passing of Betty Ballantine, who with her husband Ian was a trailblazing contributor to the growth and development of book publishing and to the careers of countless authors and editors,” Random House president and publisher Gina Centrello said in a statement.

Paperbacks had existed in the U.S. since colonial times, but in the 1930s were limited mostly to poorly made “pulp” novels. The Ballantines took advantage of new technology in production and distribution and of a clause in copyright law discovered by Ian that waived fees on books from Britain, where quality paperbacks were much easier to find. Ian Ballantine vowed to “change the reading habits of America.”

Charging as little as a quarter, they published everything from reprints of Mark Twain novels to paperbacks of contemporary bestsellers. They helped established the paperback market for science fiction, Westerns and other genres, releasing original works and reprints by J.R.R. Tolkien, Arthur C. Clarke and H.P. Lovecraft, among others. They made their books available in drugstores, railroad stations and other non-traditional outlets. They issued some paperbacks simultaneously with the hardcover, instead of waiting several months or longer.

Their most lucrative publications came in the 1950s and ’60s, when they were running Ballantine Books. Ballantine editor Stanley Kauffmann, who later became the film critic for The New Republic, acquired Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury’s dystopian classic that came out in 1953.

Years later, a switchboard operator at Ballantine had been reading a hardcover edition of Tolkien’s The Hobbit and recommended it to the Ballantines. They offered Tolkien’s publisher, Houghton Mifflin, $2,500 each for paperback rights to The Hobbit and the three Lord of the Rings novels. Houghton Mifflin initially declined, but reconsidered when pirated editions of the books began appearing. Rights were granted to Ballantine, which included a warning on the books’ covers that Tolkien would not receive royalties from purchases of unauthorized copies.

“The whole science fiction fraternity got behind the book; this was their meat and drink,” Betty Ballantine recalled, according to Al Silverman’s The Time of Their Lives, a publishing history which came out in 2008.

The Ballantines sold their company in the late 1960s, and ended up working at Penguin Random House. Betty Ballantine’s projects included editing Shirley MacLaine’s bestselling Out On a Limb and writing a fantasy novel, The Secret Oceans, published in 1994. The Ballantines received numerous honorary awards and were voted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2008.

“We really, truly wanted and did publish books that mattered,” Ballantine told the science fiction-fantasy magazine Locus in 2002. “And science fiction matters, because it’s of the mind, it predicts, it thinks, it says, ‘Look at what’s happening here. If that’s what’s happening here and now, what’s it going to look like 10 years from now, 50 years from now, or 2,000 years from now?’ It’s a form of magic. Not abracadabra or wizardry. It is the minds of humankind that make this magic.”

Ian Ballantine died in 1995. Their son, Richard Ballantine, was a popular cycling writer and enthusiast who died in 2013. The Ballantines had three grandchildren.

Betty Ballantine, the daughter of a British colonial officer, was born Elizabeth Jones in India in 1919. She remembered being taught to read by her father at age three and was so absorbed by Charles Dickens and other authors that she would acknowledge having a hard time understanding that the characters in their books weren’t real. Ian Ballantine was the cousin of one of her classmates in England. Soon after marrying, Ian and Betty travelled by ship back to his native New York. They established the U.S. division of Penguin Books, and worked out of their apartment. In 1945, they founded Bantam Books, then part of Grosset & Dunlap, and went into business for themselves seven years later with Ballantine Books. One memorable Ballantine release was inspired by a hoax. In 1956, nighttime radio personality Jean Shepherd was telling listeners that they should ask for a new novel called I, Libertine, by Frederick R. Ewing. Bestsellers at the time were based in part on requests at bookstores and demand was so high that I, Libertine appeared on some lists. But, as Shepherd’s fans knew, and the public only later found out, neither book nor author existed. So Ian Ballantine convinced a friend, science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon, to write – and write quickly – an actual I, Libertine. Shepherd, who provided the book’s outline, recalled years later that Sturgeon worked so hard he fell asleep before he finished the manuscript. Betty Ballantine stepped in, handled the last chapter and I, Libertine went to print.

AP FILE PHOTO

Singer Ryan Adams poses for a portrait in New York in September 2015.

BALLANTINE

Scientists study volcanoes to understand past, future climate

Hina ALAM Citizen news service

VANCOUVER — Scientists are trying to reconstruct what the environment and climate of southwest B.C. looked like over the past two million years by studying volcanoes that erupted under the glaciers.

Alex Wilson, a University of British Columbia PhD student and part of the research team, said in order to make predictions about the climate in the future, scientists need to understand the past. He uses a combination of field analysis and radiometric dating to calculate when an eruption occurred and if it was beneath ice to infer what was happening with the climate going back millions of years.

“We want to understand how ice sheets have behaved in British Columbia in the past because we want to know how the glaciers in British Columbia grow and retreat in relation to the glaciers of the rest of the world,” he said.

Research so far has shown that large ice sheets have expanded or melted many times over two million years, said Wilson, who is conducting the study with his supervisor at the university, volcanologist Kelly Russell. Wilson said most existing climate records using ice cores in Greenland and Antarctica only go back 400,000 years but earlier information could help predict what’s in the future as Earth’s climate changes.

“One reason that we are so worried is that we don’t know what will happen. But there are clues in the ancient history of the Earth. The climate has fluctuated in the past, many times in the past. It has been colder and warmer than it is now.”

Wilson said the Garibaldi Volcanic Belt, along B.C.’s Sea to Sky corridor north of Vancouver, has seen warm periods and times when the volcanoes were buried under ice sheets.

More than 100 volcanoes have erupted either close to or under the ice over the last two million years, he said. And when volcanoes erupt beneath gla-

ciers the surrounding water causes them to behave in strange ways. Volcanoes are more explosive and ice can freeze the flow of lava, creating unique geological features, he said.

“The rocks that we see are a little different. They are complicated,” he said. “They show evidence for interacting with a lot of water when they erupt.”

By looking at the rock formations, Wilson and Russell have been able to provide evidence of at least three ancient so-called glaciations over the past one million years, where large ice sheets covered the southwest part of B.C.

“We have very special volcanoes that there aren’t examples of these anywhere else in the world. They are unique to British Columbia.”

One of the best examples of these strange formations is the flat-top, steepsided volcano known as The Table, not far from Garibaldi Lake. It erupted about 100,000 years ago, he said.

“There aren’t any other examples of The Table anywhere else in the world,” Wilson said. “It doesn’t look like a typical volcano, like a cone or a crater.”

The warming climate has also uncovered new information for researchers, he said.

“A lot of the glaciers are melting very rapidly in B.C. They are retreating back and those glaciers are exposing rock that we haven’t seen before,” he said. “We have actually discovered a number of new volcanoes we didn’t know about.”

Wilson is also trying to understand if growing and retreating ice sheets could trigger or cause volcanic eruptions.

Ice sheets are extremely heavy, which can stress the Earth’s crust and influence how magmas move through the crust, he said.

“There was once two kilometre of ice loaded on southwestern B.C.”

There is compelling evidence in Iceland to suggest that melting glaciers cause an eight-fold increase in volcanic eruptions, he said.

A century of science behind the modern periodic table

To continue our story of the periodic table, we must consider that for much of the 1800s chemists worked in a strange state of indeterminacy. While the concept of an atom had been proposed in 1808 by John Dalton, the actual existence of discrete atomic entities was fiercely debated. For the most part, the idea of atoms was considered an accounting trick which allowed chemists to discuss chemical compounds and properties. Not everyone agreed.

Stanislao Cannizzaro’s suggestion for the organization of the elements based on atomic weight was met by some with derision. After all, with no proof atoms existed, what did these weights actually measure?

It was against this back drop that Dmitri Mendeleev, Lothar Meyer, John Newcomb, and others worked to understand the relationships between the elements. As mentioned last week, Mendeleev is given credit for finally formulating and publishing the first periodic table.

In part, this is because he recognized there were elements missing from his table allowing him to make predictions about their chemical and physical properties.

For example, one of the elements he called eka-silicon which literally translates as “beyond silicon.”

In 1871, he predicted a gray metallic substance with an atomic weight of 72 and a density of 5.5 grams per cubic centimetre.

When germanium was discovered in 1886, it was indeed a gray metallic substance with an atomic weight of 72.59 and a density of 5.47 grams per cubic centimetre.

Mendeleev was also able to predict the formulas and chemical properties of the oxide, chloride and sulfide while describing how to isolate the pure element accurately.

If Mendeleev had only been able to do this with one element it might have been an amazing guess but he actually predicted just as accurately the chemical properties of a number of elements missing from his table.

As each empty slot was filled in, confidence grew in the periodic system of the elements. And the atomic theory gained traction.

It was another 35 years, give or take, before the last bastions fell and science finally accepted atoms as physical entities.

And it required a shift in our understanding of the universe.

Throughout the 19th century, a number of experiments left scientists perplexed. For example, in the 1860s, Robert Bunsen and Gustav Kirchhoff developed a spectroscope which allowed them to identify elements within a flame by their emission lines. Using this technique, they were able to discover cesium, rubidium and a mystery element found in the spectroscopic signature of the sun which they called helium.

Emission lines from elements were a problem. What were these lines?

Why did they have specific and seemingly fixed positions in the spectrum? What was the relationship which gave rise to the line spacing? These questions remained unanswered for a number of decades although the relationship was resolved to be an inverse square of a numerical series.

In the 1890s, Henri Becquerel noted the decomposition of atoms and J.J. Thompson measured the size of the electron. Atoms appeared to be neither indestructible nor the smallest piece of matter. Electrons by any standard are roughly 2,000 times smaller by mass than the hydrogen atom.

Around the same time, Sir William Ramsay discovered a whole new column for the periodic table. He had been conducting work on liquefied air and noted a fraction which persistently remained gaseous. Careful separation of the gas led to the discovery of Argon. Further work, allowed Ramsay and coworkers to isolate all of the “inert” gases –helium, neon, krypton and xenon. Eventually radon joined the family.

Confirmation of helium as present in our atmosphere and in the sun was a major step forward in astrophysics, eventually leading to our understanding of nuclear fusion. In 1894, Mac Planck turned his attention to the black-body problem which had been troubling physicists.

In 1900, he answered the problem by proposing Planck’s law which is familiar to anyone who has done high school physics. Essentially it says the energy of a photon is proportional to its frequency. The proportionality constant is known as Planck’s constant.

All of this work led to an understanding of atoms as discrete particles. Planck’s work argued even light existed as discrete units. Photons of light were quantized.

The final step in the process was realized by Albert Einstein who wrote a paper in 1905 pointing out the statistical distribution of velocities for atoms and molecules in a gas provided an explanation for Brownian motion. Here was a physically observable manifestation of atoms as real, discrete entities capable of manifesting in the macroscopic world.

How is this related to the periodic table? It to a century for scientists to accept atoms as real entities but the questions then became “what are atoms composed of?” and “how does one element differ from another?”

This leads us to the world of quantum mechanics next week.

A closer look at some unimaginably ancient fossils suggests complex life may have evolved much earlier than previously thought. In a paper published Wednesday, a team of researchers say they’ve found evidence that tiny, slug-like beings, shown encased in a rock in a handout photo, were squirming around in the mud of shallow seas about 2.1 billion years ago.

Fossils reveal two-billion-year-old life

EDMONTON — A closer look at some unimaginably ancient fossils suggests complex life may have evolved much earlier and more quickly than scientists previously thought.

“If these are complex life forms, what it tells you is that evolution happened much quicker than we think,” said Kurt Konhauser, one of the authors of a paper that says tiny, slug-like beings were squirming about in the mud of shallow seas about 2.1 billion years ago. That would push back the date at which complex life appeared by about 1.5 billion years.

The fossils in question, the longest of which would have been shorter than a paper clip, have been known about for years, Konhauser said. Everyone thought they were immobile – until now.

“We provide evidence that these things actually moved,” the University of Alberta professor said Wednesday.

The researchers, using new techniques, found what they say are tracks in what would have been sea-floor sediments which would have been rich in bacteria that the organism probably fed on.

“You’ve got little squiggles in the sediment. Whatever it was, it was moving up and down, pushing the sediment out of its way. They’re looking for something to eat.” Scientists who study the young Earth say bacteria began to fill the atmosphere with oxygen about 2.5 billion years ago. But about two billion years ago, something happened that reduced levels of that vital gas below what was needed to support life sophisticated enough to move on its own. It took eons to replace that oxygen. That’s why current theories suggest complex life didn’t appear until about 600 million years ago, when self-propelled multi-celled animals began to appear in the ocean.

But if Konhauser and his colleagues are right, complex life developed much earlier. And it happened quickly enough to occur in that window between the atmosphere developing adequate oxygen and whatever happened to remove it.

What were those life forms like?

Konhauser suggests they may have been something like modern slime moulds, which can survive as single-celled organisms but sometimes band together in what’s called a slug phase to go from place to place in search of food.

HANDOUT PHOTO BY ALEX WILSON

A researcher conducts geological field sampling on Little Ring Mountain, a B.C. volcano that erupted beneath the Cordilleran Ice Sheet 50,000 years ago.

Bob WEBER Citizen news service

UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA HANDOUT PHOTO BY DR. ABDER EL ALBANI

“Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.” — Mark Twain Call 250-562-2441 to go large

Gov’t to hold limited hearings on Wilson-Raybould affair

Joan BRYDEN Citizen news service

OTTAWA — Liberals faced accusations of a coverup Wednesday after they agreed to hold limited committee hearings into an allegation that former attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould was improperly pressured to help SNC-Lavalin avoid criminal prosecution.

Their short list of three proposed witnesses does not include Wilson-Raybould, who resigned from cabinet Tuesday.

The five Liberal MPs on the House of Commons justice committee used their majority to block an opposition motion that would have seen the committee hear from nine key players in the controversy, including Wilson-Raybould, current Justice Minister David Lametti, clerk of the Privy Council Michael Wernick and senior aides in the Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s office, including chief of staff Katie Telford and principal secretary Gerald Butts.

Liberals approved instead their own motion, which called on the committee to hear from just Lametti, Wernick and the deputy justice minister – although more could be added next week after getting legal advice, behind closed doors, on what steps the committee needs to take to avoid interfering with two ongoing court cases involving SNC-Lavalin. The Montreal engineering giant has been charged with bribery and corruption involving contracts in Libya.

The Liberals defeated an attempt by New Democrat MP Nathan Cullen to strike a compromise of six witnesses, adding Butts and two other senior PMO aides who were heavily involved in the SNC-Lavalin file.

They also defeated a Conservative motion calling on Trudeau to immediately waive solicitor-client privilege, which WilsonRaybould has cited as preventing her from commenting on the allegation.

The Liberal motion calls on the committee to study the legal principles at the root of the controversy – including the recently added Criminal Code provision that made it legal to negotiate remediation agreements in cases of corporate corruption, a form of plea bargain in which a company pays restitution, but avoids criminal prosecution that could bankrupt it.

The motion also included looking at the so-called Shawcross doctrine, which spells out the degree to which an attorney general may consult with cabinet colleagues about a prosecution.

“That is not an investigation, that is simply going through the motions,” Cullen said after the meeting, accusing the Liberals of “battening down the hatches” to prevent any truth from coming to light.

“Liberals seem to think that this should be just a sort of study group, a book club to look at all sorts of interesting ideas about the law rather than the scandal that’s right

in front of Canadians.”

Conservative MP Michael Cooper said the Liberals’ motion is “part of a coverup” and an attempt at creating “a diversion” with lengthy hearings on legal principles.

“At the end of the day, this is really not that complicated. This is about the fact that certain officials in the PMO were alleged to have put pressure on the former attorney general to interfere in a criminal investigation, nothing more, nothing less... The Liberals aren’t interested in that. They’re interested in covering this up.”

Liberal MP Randy Boissonnault, who proposed the successful motion, defended the Liberals’ refusal to call Wilson-Raybould to hear her side of the story. He said she’s bound by a rule that prohibits a former minister from commenting on her previous portfolio and by solicitor-client privilege, noting that Wilson-Raybould has hired a former Supreme Court justice to advise her on what she can say.

“I think it’s important for Ms. WilsonRaybould to speak to Canadians on her own terms. It doesn’t need to be something we do here at the justice committee,” he said. Trudeau, meanwhile, was sticking to his

message that Wilson-Raybould had a duty to speak up months ago if she had concerns about the way the government was handling the SNC-Lavalin case.

At a short appearance in Sudbury, Ont., Trudeau dodged a question about what reason Wilson-Raybould gave about why she resigned from cabinet, leaving the microphone rather than answering.

Wilson-Raybould was demoted to the veterans affairs post in a January cabinet shuffle. A Globe and Mail report, attributed to unnamed sources, last week alleged the PMO leaned on her instruct the director of public prosecutions to negotiate a remediation agreement with SNC-Lavalin.

Trudeau has denied any improper pressure was put on Wilson-Raybould and maintains she never mentioned any concern about that to him.

Prior to the committee meeting, Conservative MP Lisa Raitt said if Liberals believe Trudeau, they should support “without hesitation” the opposition motion for a full investigation into the affair.

“But if they defeat or they water it down in any way, it is nothing less than an admission of guilt.”

Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer, who is touring New Brunswick, repeated the same message a short time later. He accused Trudeau of “trying to paint himself as the victim in all of this,” while “publicly impugning (Wilson-Raybould’s) character in a way that prevents her from speaking for herself.”

Raitt said the Conservatives will now pursue other options to get to the bottom of the matter.

Among the options, she mentioned a judicial inquiry or an investigation by a Senate committee. She did not rule out asking the RCMP to investigate.

Federal ethics commissioner Mario Dion has initiated his own investigation into the matter, specifically whether there’s been a violation of the Conflict of Interest Act.

In the wake of the allegations and Dion’s review, SNC-Lavalin had its debt rating downgraded Wednesday by Standard & Poor’s to BBB- from BBB.

The agency cited the criminal charges against the engineering and construction giant and the possibility of a 10-year ban from bidding on federal contracts among its reasons for the downgrade.

Ex-gymnastics coach found not guilty of sex assault

Nicole THOMPSON Citizen news service

SARNIA, Ont. — A former highranking gymnastics coach was acquitted of sexual assault and sexual exploitation Wednesday after a judge found the testimony of the complainant sincere but said the police investigation into the case was severely flawed.

Dave Brubaker, the former head coach of the women’s national team, was accused of sexually assaulting a young gymnast years ago and had vehemently denied the allegations against him.

The trial heard that the sole investigating officer was related to the complainant and made her the godmother of his child during the course of the probe. Court also heard that the officer shared details of Brubaker’s police interview with the woman, who cannot be identified.

Justice Deborah Austin said the Crown’s case was damaged by the relationship between the

complainant and the officer, who she said abandoned both his oath of impartiality and his oath of secrecy.

“I don’t criticize him for being a good friend... I do criticize the decision to also at the same time take on the role of sole investigating officer in the case,” she said.

“These things do affect the reliability of the Crown’s case. These issues cannot be ignored.”

Austin said, however, that none of her critique of the officer should be interpreted as an indictment of the complainant.

“She was forthright and appeared to be doing her best, generally,” the judge said.

“It was sincere and genuine.”

At the beginning of the trial in October, the complainant, who is now in her 30s, testified that Brubaker would kiss her on the lips to say hello and goodbye starting when she was 12 years old.

She also said he touched her inappropriately during sports

massages and spooned her in bed while taking naps before practice – allegations Brubaker strongly denied.

The former coach testified that while he did kiss the complainant on the lips, it was meant as a fatherly gesture. He also said he never took naps with the woman, and that the massages were necessary to alleviate the aches and

injuries that come with being an advanced gymnast.

Brubaker hugged his wife after the judge’s decision while his supporters applauded in court.

He was arrested in December 2017 and was interviewed by the lone officer on the case – a procedure the judge found was conducted in a particularly concerning way.

“The statement contains unusually long commentary and monologue by the investigating officer and the questions were broad and wide-ranging,” Austin said, suggesting the officer acted as a “conduit” for the complainant.

The most damning part of the statement, she said, was that Brubaker said he was “guilty of crossing a line.”

The officer, however, did not ask Brubaker to clarify what “line” he crossed or in what ways he crossed it, Austin said.

She also noted that the officer read aloud to the complainant a letter of apology that Brubaker

wrote during the interview to the woman, another gymnast and his wife. The officer told the trial he assumed it would be fine to share the letter, because the apology was “ambiguous” in nature.

“This was a curious explanation when he had to have known it was part of the evidence he was gathering,” Austin said, noting that it was all the more odd because of the officer’s good reputation.

Outside court, Brubaker’s defence lawyer argued that the officer should be investigated for the way the probe was carried out.

“He owes (Brubaker) more than (an apology). He turned his life upside down,” Patrick Ducharme said.

Brubaker was placed on administrative leave by Gymnastics Canada following his arrest.

The organization is now embarking on its own internal investigation into the allegations levelled against Brubaker.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Minister of Justice and then-attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould take part in the grand entrance prior to the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation commission on Dec. 15, 2015 in Ottawa.

BRUBAKER

LINDSAY,CeliaMarjorie February22,1945-February11,2019 It’swithdeepsadnessweannouncethesudden passingofourmother,grandmother,andfriend, CeliaLindsay,onFebruary11,2019,attheageof73. Celiapassedawaypeacefullywithherlovingson,Bill, byherside.Shewaspredeceasedbyherhusband, Bill;herparents,HaroldW.andHelenMoggey;and herbrother,Glen.Celiawillbegreatlymissedbyher belovedson,Bill;daughter-in-law,Krista;andher grandsons,NolanandAndrew,whowerethelights ofherlife.Alsosurvivedbyhersiblings,Chrissy (Ruth),Dianne(Bill),Bruce(Selena),andKaren (Steve);aswellasmanyniecesandnephews. Celiawasawonderfulwomanwithahugeheart.She lovedtolaughandspendtimewithhermanyfriends especiallyher"CrazyMOAAGirls".Celiaworkedhard everydayofherlifeandwasquicktolendahandto anyoneinneed.Wewillforevermisshermany storiesandhersmile. ACelebrationofLifeforCeliawilltakeplacelaterthis springinPrinceGeorge.Inlieuofflowers,wekindly requestadonationbemadetotheAlzheimerSociety ofBC.

Catharina Blok (nee Witvoet) March 21, 1931 – February 5, 2019

Catharina (Rini) passed away at home, in the arms of her husband Dirk. She was a loving wife, mother, grandmother and great grandmother. She had a smile and laugh that filled the room with sunshine.

Rini was born in the Netherlands, a daughter of Albertus and Geesje Witvoet. She was predeceased by her brother Harry Witvoet and grand daughter, Shannon Parsons.

In January, 1953, Rini sailed from Rotterdam, Netherlands to Halifax with only a trunk full of belongings and entered Canada through Pier 21 leaving her family behind. She bravely boarded the train and travelled across Canada to Edmonton sitting up the whole way. There she met up with her fiancé, Dirk Blok and they were married the next day, January 30th. They just celebrated their 66th wedding anniversary. Together with her husband, Dirk, they built a life from next to nothing, providing their children with support and opportunities.

Rini and Dirk established their home in Prince George where they raised four children: Richard Blok (Lynn), Gerda Blok-Wilson (Galt), Maria James (Brian Shaw), and Maureen Parsons (Grant). She (Oma) loved her grandchildren: Nathan and Blake Blok; Claire, Andrea and Stephanie Wilson; David, Liah and Corey Parsons and her 12 great grandchildren.

Rini’s many passions included music, gardening, philanthropy, reading, wildlife observation, church life and faith in God, celebrations and good food. She shared these enthusiastically with all she met. Rini was a founding member of the Prince George Cantata Singers and supported the development of the performing arts in the city. Her beautiful contralto voice warmed the hearts of Prince George audiences for years and her vegetable and flower gardens were the envy of many professional gardeners. Her gardening skills transferred to reforestation and she worked for TAWA Enterprises through Western Canada during the 1980s along with Dirk.

Rini’s family is grateful to everyone who contributed to her care. Dirk, her soulmate since 14 years of age, provided round the clock care for the last three years. She often commented that she had won the million dollar lottery when she met him. Rini lived truthfully and expressed her love unconditionally. She embraced and was so grateful for her good fortune and new life in Canada. She will be missed greatly but the memories will live on.

A celebration of life will be held Friday, February 22, 2pm St Giles Presbyterian Church, 1500 Edmonton St. Rini and Dirk helped to provide clean water to 15 communities across Southern Ethiopia. The number one killer in the world is contaminated water and in lieu of flowers, donations may be made to HOPE International Development Agency for similar development: www.hope-international.com

Charlie Archer Rogers Mar 3, 1931 - Feb 12, 2019

Passed away peacefully on Tuesday Feb 12, 2019, at the age of 87. Survived by his loving wife Jeannette, 5 children Bruce (Ieva), Brenda (Tim), John (Anne), Greg (Pat), Carolyn (Gary).

Memorial Service will be held on Sat Feb 16, 2019 from 1:00 to 4:00pm at Elder Citizens Recreation Centre 1692 10th Ave. in Lieu of flowers please make donations to the Prince George Hospice Society.

JOYCE MARJORIE

MAGEE

December 17, 1929January 29, 2019

It is with great sadness we announce the passing of our sister. She was predeceased by her 2 daughters Marjorie and Judy, her infant son Lyle and sister Frances. She is survived by her 3 grandsons, Rocky, Jonathon and Neale, 3 great grandchildren Katherine, Jaden and Cameron, sisters Marian and June, brother Garry (Ruby) as well as s numerous nieces and nephews. She was loved by many and will be greatly missed by all who knew her. A small gathering to remember Joyce will be held at a later date.

Yvonne Mary Delima Gagnon

Yvonne Mary Delima Gagnon, 62, of Prince George, passed away peacefully with her loved ones close by on February 12, 2019. Born January 21, 1957 in Prince George. She is predeceased by her mother Ellen Gagnon, and her brothers James and Robert. She is survived by her dad Alphonse Gagnon, her sisters; Brenda, Bernadette, Merlyn, and Rose and her brothers; Darwin and Leslie, her children; Crystal, Alphonse, Mandy, Shanda, and Jordan, her grandchildren Lane, Ashley, Zaidin, and Brielle, and her great-grandson Liam, and many nieces and nephews. There will be a wake from Thursday February 14 at 1pm to Saturday February 16 at 10am at the family home. There will be a service at Assman’s funeral home on Saturday February 16th at 1pm with a luncheon to follow at the Prince George Native Friendship Centre. Please join us in remembering our mom, grandma, great grandma, daughter, sister, auntie, niece, and friend.

Gerard Joseph Kehoe March 19, 1948- February 5, 2019

It is with a heavy heart that we announce the passing of Gerard Kehoe. Gerard passed very peacefully with his grandson, Jesse, by his side. He was an amazing friend, father, grandpa and great grandpa who will be greatly missed. He was an amazing grandfather to many grandchildren and two great grandchildren, Jordan and Logan. Gerard was a long time truck driver and equipment operator spending a lot of his time in camps. Whenever he was home from camp he loved to spend as much time as possible with his many grandchildren and developed a close bond with them all. Gerard had a long and hard battle with cancer and had beat it once. The family would like to say a special thanks to the amazing staff at Simon Fraser Lodge, Dr. Larson, and to Gerard’s close friends Doug and Janet for helping care for him throughout his battle. Gerard’s Celebration of Life will be held at the Elks Community Centre (Formerly Moose Hall) at 633 Douglas Street, Prince George, B.C. on Saturday February 16th at 11am. In lieu of flowers please make a donation to a charity of your choice.

We’ll miss your infectious laugh!

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Cenovus vows to build crude-by-rail capacity

Citizen news service

CALGARY — The CEO of Cenovus Energy Inc. says the company is going ahead with plans to raise its crude-by-rail shipments to 100,000 barrels per day this year, despite criticism from other major producers that Alberta’s forced production cuts have destroyed rail’s profitability.

The Calgary-based company is confident that the province will encourage growth in crude-by-rail as an alternative to delayed new export pipelines going forward, Alex Pourbaix said Wednesday on a conference call.

“I remind everybody that although we are in a very low differential (price) period right now, we are literally six weeks into this curtailment initiative,” he said.

“I think there’s been a lot of noise... but I do expect that the government is going to act to continue to look at those volumes to ensure they’re at the right level

to incent rail to get on.”

Pourbaix’s comments are in sharp contrast to criticism of the provincial program’s affect on rail economics by Steve Williams, CEO of Suncor Energy Inc., and Rich

Living next to the IRS

We were looking forward to schooling these chumps. For several months we anticipated the international contest, matching up our Burnaby Minor rep talent against an American select team from that thriving (not) hockey hotbed of Bellevue, Wash. It was 1976, the year of the (Soviet) Super Series 76, another international tournament of much renown, or infamy depending on your point of view. Most of us felt a mixture of pride and embarrassment when the Philadelphia Flyers humbled the Russian Red Army team a few days before our game. With the Russian team losing badly, star Russian competitor, Valeri Kharlamov was levelled by one of the Flyers, and in protest, the Russian coach pulled his team off the ice. The Russians only finally returned after the U.S. cash they had been promised for the game was pulled off the table. Dollar trumps ruble, and the Red Army team returned to finish their humiliation. This (according to Igor Larionov’s biography) was a game that lived on in Russian folklore for decades thereafter, and not in a happy way.

To Canadians it was iconic for different reasons. What we saw was a bunch of cry-baby commies who conceded their first defeat of the tournament because they didn’t have their incompetent, cheat-faced Russian ref to rig the game for them. Boo hoo.

It was in these sorts of chippy shoulder pads we dressed that

Sunday morning in Bellevue. Our team showed up to the game looking for an international incident of our own.

“Do they even have a real ice rink here? I heard it’s fake ice, made of plastic, and the players use roller skates.”

“Somebody told my mom that Trudeau and Ford were both secretly planning to come to the game!” “Your mom smokes weed!”

For all of our bluster, and supposed superiority, what we found that day was a disciplined, hardhitting, big tough hockey team, much like ours. They skated with us stride-for-stride, and stood up to our body checks like… well, like Canadians. And I really liked playing them. We all did. And we seriously respected them ever after.

The game ended in a 1-1 tie.

Our seventh and last installment on IRS Taxation of U.S. Persons in Canada concedes that this is a very light touch on an incredibly complex problem. U.S. taxes are goofily complicated, and only made worse across borders.

One doesn’t just walk out of Alcatraz

Over the years, the U.S. has had a number of regimes that govern how one can exit (escape) the U.S. tax system. These regimes involve the renunciation of U.S. citizen-

Kruger, CEO of Imperial Oil Ltd.

Kruger said Imperial would reduce its rail shipments of crude to “near zero” this month from about 168,000 bpd in December because the difference between western Canadian and U.S. benchmark oil prices had narrowed to the point that it didn’t cover the additional cost of using rail to send oil to the U.S. Gulf Coast refining complex.

Pourbaix said in an interview that Cenovus isn’t making much, but it isn’t losing money on the 20,000 bpd of oil it is now shipping by rail into the U.S. and he expects profitability to improve as the company begins receiving and filling about 4,000 newly built rail tankers in the next few weeks.

He pointed out Western Canadian Select bitumen-blend oil is at times fetching a premium to New York-traded West Texas Intermediate prices at Gulf Coast refineries because of a shortage of competing crude from Venezuela

ship or green cards, as applicable. Under the most recent regime enacted in 2008, it is possible that an exit tax will be payable if one of the following is true:

• Their average annual net income tax in the U.S. was more than $160,000 in the previous five years.

• Their net worth is at least U.S. $2 million.

• U.S. tax returns have not been filed over the previous five years. In the event that they meet any of these tests, if they choose to expatriate, then they will be deemed to have sold their assets at that time, triggering potential capital gains. Any gains in excess of U.S. $690,000 (the current exemption for covered expatriates) will be taxed at current capital gains tax rates. If you do not meet any of these tests, (hint – you want to fail these tests) then you will not be a covered expatriate, and you can renounce your citizenship or relinquish your green card, and from that time, exit the U.S. tax system.

There is an exception for those who meet the above tests if they are a dual citizen at birth and live outside the U.S., or have not lived in the U.S. for more than 10 years and have not yet reached 18 years old.

If you are a covered expatriate, there are rules that cover most of the other assets you own, retirement plans that you are part of, or interests in trusts or other legal structures, all of which should be addressed but are beyond the scope of this article.

and Mexico.

Cenovus also announced Wednesday it has increased its shipping commitment on the proposed Keystone XL pipeline from Alberta to the Gulf Coast from 50,000 to 150,000 bpd.

Pourbaix said part of the increase is being provided at no cost by the Alberta government.

When the province committed a year ago with builder TransCanada Corp. to take 50,000 bpd on the pipeline, it agreed that it would stand aside if there was private sector demand, Premier Rachel Notley said later at an event in Calgary.

“Not surprisingly, (TransCanada) discovered there’s tremendous demand within the private sector... so we were pleased to be able to do that with Cenovus,” she said.

Alberta Energy later confirmed that Cenovus is assuming the entire 50,000-bpd commitment, along with the 20-year toll agreement.

One caveat to be aware of is that a covered expatriate who gifts assets either during life or upon death, to a U.S. citizen or green card holder, will subject the latter to U.S. gift tax upon receipt of the gift at a flat tax rate of 40 per cent. This means that before deciding to exit the U.S. tax system, if you will be a covered expatriate, then you need to consider the tax status of your heirs and factor this into your overall estate and tax planning.

For those who meet the above tests, with proper planning, the use of many of the strategies discussed in this series to reduce your net worth may be used to ensure you can expatriate without falling into the classification of covered expatriate.

Now what?

Understatement: the U.S. tax system and the tax treaties involved across borders are cumbersome. It is vital you seek professional expertise from qualified cross border tax and/or legal professionals. These specialists are few and far between in Western Canada, but they do exist. See your advisor, or me for a list if you need it.

Mark Ryan is an investment advisor with RBC Dominion Securities Inc. (Member–Canadian Investor Protection Fund), and these are Ryan’s views, and not those of RBC Dominion Securities. This article is for information purposes only. Please consult with a professional advisor before taking any action based on information in this article. See Ryan’s website at: http://dir. rbcinvestments.com/mark.ryan

a trade deal with China. The S&P/TSX composite index closed down 15.37 points at 15,626.73, after hitting an intraday high of 15,689.66. In New York, the Dow Jones industrial average was up 117.51 points at 25,543.27. The S&P 500 index was up 8.30 points at 2,753.03, while the Nasdaq composite was up 5.76 points at 7,420.38.

“We both started off on a leg up just on the hopes that there could be that breakthrough in that trade war with China, and also the president saying that they’re moving closer to avoiding a government shutdown, but that kind of faded,” said Jayson Moss, research analyst at Franklin Bissett Investment Management.

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio later tweeted that he plans to introduce a bill that would end the tax advantage of share buy-backs over dividends.

“That took a bit of steam out of markets in the U.S. and I think that kind of took the Canadian market with it a bit,” Moss said. The Toronto stock market fell as a broad weakness led by technology and materials more than offset gains from the health care and energy sectors.

Several marijuana producers pushed the sector to a 1.9 per cent gain, led by The Green Organic Dutchman Holdings Ltd., which rose 7.55 per cent, and Canopy Growth Corp. up 4.8 per cent. The energy sector rose about one per cent as the price of West Texas Intermediate increased 1.7 per cent on Saudi Arabia saying it would deliver deeper cuts to crude production.

“The expectation that if a U.S.China trade deal is ultimately reached, it could result in improved demand for oil, so that’s really lifting all the energy producers and related companies including suppliers,” added Moss.

The March crude contract closed up 80 cents at US$53.90 per barrel and the March natural gas contract was down 11.3 cents at US$2.57

POURBAIX

9

Burlesque

foxxie follies comes to the Playhouse

Page 20

Para Nordic

Worlds

Prince George’s otway nordic centre is ready to host the championship that sees athletes from 20 countries compete from feb. 15 to 24.

Thursday, february 14, 2019

TransformaTion

of HeaTHer rose

The Occupation of Heather Rose became the occupation of Jennifier Cundy-Scott.

This play, a seminal work by Canadian playwright star Nancy Lill, was the first production ever done by upstart professional drama company Theatre Northwest (TNW) in Prince George.

The year was 1994 and Cundy-Scott (she was Cundy-Ma back then) was the first actor ever employed by TNW. She was also as young, naive and ego-informed as the character.

Heather Rose was a newly minted nurse set to take on the injustices and maladies of the world and Cundy-Scott was fresh from her graduation at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Los Angeles. She couldn’t believe that her first professional gig would be back in her hometown.

A lot has happened in the 25 years since she stood on stage as the first TNW actor in the first TNW play. When she saw that Theatre Northwest was remounting the show for its silver anniversary season, she was vortexed back to those halcyon years and took a long look at all the flashbacks along the way.

The most noticeable image is an irony at which Cundy-Scott herself marvels. She did not pursue acting, after her TNW triumph. Instead, she became – can you believe it? – a nurse. Her performance and her character’s traits played a direct role in this choice.

“I’ve done a complete life change,” Cundy-Scott told The Citizen. “At the time my two girls were just babies. Now they are 27 and 25, which is unbelievable to me. I remember with the travelling

that it was quite hard to be apart from them and I remember thinking to myself ‘hmmm, I don’t know if this lifestyle is sustainable.’ I decided I wanted to focus more on my family life, concentrate on the kids.”

Life had several stages for Cundy-Scott, with several twists in the plot. Her first marriage ended; another one blossomed. She moved to the States and, as a dual citizen of Canada and the U.S., was able to live 18 years in Washington and Hawaii. It was while living in Las Vegas that she was finally accredited as a nurse.

“You’re never too young or too old to start anything,” she said. “I always had a passion for nursing. I had an elementary school teacher tell me once that I should be a nurse, but I had the acting bug. I wanted to do that first. As I was performing the play, I remember thinking that this role, the profession of the character, was somehow a part of me. I believe it’s a calling. You don’t become a nurse, you are a nurse inside of yourself. Definitely the play put it back in my head that I should pursue that as my true profession. And what I loved about the plot of that story is this nurse, Heather Rose, was so excited to get out and make a change in the world, but there was this immaturity at the core of her being. I was about 23 at that time, so I had some of that, too, and I think most young people have that, at least a little bit. She was thinking she could walk into a diverse culture, another world, and tell those people how they could live their lives. Now, as a nurse for real, I am faced with this quite a lot – people who choose to live their life a certain way I don’t understand – and it is not my job to tell them how best to live their life. It’s my job to help them live their lives as they feel is best for them.

Heather Rose wasn’t very culturally com-

Jennifier Cundy poses for a photograph for The Citizen in 1989 before leaving

George to pursue an acting career in Los Angeles.

petent, is how I would describe her, and we learn that in our nurses’ training to be respectful of differences in cultures and in belief systems and we have no magic wand, we are there to help people but not change people.”

One can only change one’s self, as Cundy-Scott demonstrated when she shifted gears from the stage to the operating room.

Continued on page 2

Prince GeorGe’s weekly news

frank peebles

97/16 staff

97/16 file photo

Prince

LocaL actor Looks back on the theatre northWest roLe that changed her Life

Continued from page 1

She switched again when she moved into primary care nursing, doing house calls in Prince George. It’s a version of the job she loves because of the personal interactions, and that interactive touch is what won her the 2015 Daisy Award “for exceptional nursing” handed out in Everett, Wash., by the Daisy Foundation and AONE-American Organization of Nurse Executives.

“That was the best day at work ever, and that’s what Heather Rose wanted. She wasn’t going about it in the right way, but its how she wanted to have an impact,” said Cundy-Scott.

Even her experience with the play contained an element of that outreach.

TNW did not yet have a home theatre, so a few Prince George performances were done at the College of New Caledonia (some were command performances for the Northern Interior Health Unit, North East Native Health Conference, Community Arts Council, that year’s Wimmin’s Conference, and a show especially for local nurses) but then also on tour for the regional communities of Kersley, Mackenzie, Vanderhoof, Fort St. James, Burns Lake, Williams Lake, Quesnel, McBride, Wells, Fraser Lake, Hixon, Smithers and Terrace.

Cundy-Scott came back to Prince George a few years ago along with hus-

band Doug who “has been a real trooper” in cold weather to which he is not accustomed.

She has not ventured back into the acting and dancing that were such formative aspects of her youth here.

As a dancer, Cundy-Scott won the top prize (the Norman & Sophie Blackstock Scholarship) at the 1986 Dance Festival for her ballet prowess. The same year she represented her hometown at the B.C. Festival of the Arts held in Prince George.

The same year she worked with director Sonia Church and choreographer Judy Russell in a Prince George Theatre Workshop production of Anne of Green Gables, for which her singing and acting were praised by critics.

A year later, she starred opposite Kennedy Goodkey in the PGSS production of Guys & Dolls directed again by Church but this time Cundy-Scott was also that show’s choreographer. Citizen reviewer Arnold Olson said at the time “one cannot refer to this production without running smack into the considerable talent exhibited by Jennifier Cundy. One member of the audience condensed the reference into the comment ‘That lead girl was marvelous’ as if the musical were hers alone.”

Goodkey then called on her to join his youth-led hit show Summer Stage ‘87 along with Brian Clarke, Don Mitchell, Demetri Goritsas, Traci Steves, David

Hooper (with whom she performed an acclaimed dance duet), Nicholas Harrison, Emmanuel Soupidis, Chris Clugston and James Marshall.

She had a role in the Prince George Theatre Workshop production of Barefoot in the Park in 1990, then got the lead in their 1991 production of Nuts.

Cundy-Scott then directed the Centrestage Dinner Theatre production of Beyond Therapy in early ‘92 alongside her brother Derrick Cundy McCandless, Bas Rynsewyn, Stuart Gilby, Susannah Edwards, Ryan Cardwell and Allison Haley.

During that time, Cundy-Scott also shared with Debbie McGladdery the teaching of children’s theatre classes at the P.G. Playhouse.

Now that she is settled in Prince George amongst family and friends, her children grown, and her master’s degree in nursing recently completed, she is finally feeling enough personal space to perhaps get back into the performing arts scene of the city.

The first step will be going to see the new TNW production of the part she knew so well and played such a pivotal role in return for hers.

The Occupation of Heather Rose is on now until Feb. 24 starring nationally celebrated Cariboo actor Julia Mackey.

Get tickets 24-7 at TNW’s website or in person at Books & Company.

97/16 file photo

Jennifier Cundy-Ma returned to Prince George in 1994 to play the lead role in The Occupation of Heather Rose, the first-ever Theatre Northwest production. TNW is currently restaging the play during its 25th anniversary season, with Julia Mackey in the lead role.

seeing stories through different lens

christiNe hiNzmaNN 97/16 staff

“You know better to do better,” Camille MacDonald said about going out and starting her own video production and social media advertising company called Pop Media.

Most people will remember MacDonald for her work as reporter/anchor at local television station CKPG, which was her first real job out of journalism school.

“I’ve become one of those people who was supposed to be here for a year and now here I am – I think I’m a lifer,” MacDonald laughed.

She said she never thought she’d start her own business but here she is today with hundreds of projects completed in the two short years since she started.

“I just saw what was happening in the social media world and I found it really exciting that people were using content in a new way,” MacDonald said. “It was almost like a mixture of advertising and storytelling.”

Things do evolve as a business gets more established and Dan Johnson joined the team a year ago when MacDonald started having to turn away business because she couldn’t meet the demand alone. Johnson and MacDonald met at CKPG while they both worked there and each came from a different area of the Lower Mainland. At CKPG, Johnson was a writer and producer in charge of creating local commercials before he decided to join MacDonald in further developing Pop Media.

The two are also a couple who share a home together and have a cat. Linus is a rescue from the Humane Society. “We don’t even like cats,” Johnson joked. (MacDonald said they love their little lemon loaf.)

She said when she started the business she knew it was going to be Prince George and people centred.

“It was like news stories but with an extra kick to it,” Johnson jumped in to explain what role the multimedia and advertising aspects contributed to the projects.

“A lot of what we do is about video content but also targeting that content to a particular audience which I don’t think news has generally done,” MacDonald said. “The first year was me trying to figure out so many things. I’d never been in business before so that alone was and continues to be a lot to figure out and it was pretty much a blur.”

Johnson said that working as a journalist for television, MacDonald would be accompanied by a camera operator.

“Now she’s operating the camera, editing and doing the interviews,” Johnson added, who said taking the leap from the secure job at CKPG to independent business partner was a big one.

“But if I stayed I knew where I was going to be in a year,” Johnson explained.

“If I made this leap we didn’t know where we could be and obviously that worked out because by the end of the year we were in New York working.”

Locations included McBride, doing a major project promoting the opportunities and lifestyle offered in the Robson Valley, creating memories at a wedding in Mexico and, of course, the trip to New York.

“We’ve done helicopter weddings and tons of events,” he said.

“There’s never a dull moment,” she said.

Ideally Pop Media would like to reach out to the northern part of the province because MacDonald and Johnson consider it untapped territory and the north needs its stories told, too.

“We create social media video campaigns,” MacDonald said. “Whether that’s one video or a series of videos we work with the client to understand their goals and who they’re trying to reach and then we work backwards to create video that will appeal to their audience and we pair that with advertising on social media to reach more people online.”

MacDonald and Johnson each brings something different to the table when it comes to making Pop Media a success.

“We have very complementary skills,” MacDonald said. “We don’t really overlap too much. Dan has amazing production skills and I come from a world of the daily story so he’s really helped me understand how to plan and produce content in a more productive way than, you know –”

“Show up and see what happens,”

Johnson filled in the end of the thought.

MacDonald said she appreciates Johnson up and quitting his secure job to take a chance with her.

“I think it’s normalized for him a bit because his parents and grandparents each owned their own business,” MacDonald said. “I don’t think it was such a wacky thing for him to do.”

Johnson said he was looking for more, including the responsibility of going out on his own.

“I needed a light under my ass to go out and do my best work,” he said.

“And nothing sets a light under your ass like –” she began.

“Having to pay your mortgage,” he finished and they laughed together. “So lots of startups like this sees one person working as the other tries something like this. I think we’re in a unique position where we put everything on the line to do this and we’re kind of in it together at this point.”

“And we’re making it work,” she said.

Johnson said he couldn’t do this without MacDonald.

“Camille has this whole other part of the business where she’s socializing and going and meeting the clients and it’s sales but it’s so much deeper than sales,”

Johnson said. “It comes from a true love of community and wanting to be involved – and not that I don’t have that but I’m computer boy. So you combine all that with the journalism chops and I’ve set up the camera and she knows what questions to ask so the arc of the story is already being thought of in the moment as we’re driving to the location and there’s strengths where maybe the other person doesn’t have those strengths and I think just being a team of two makes us super agile.”

They’ve kept the equipment simple to allow mobility when it counts. The quality is in the equipment they have chosen and they know keeping it simple allows for the best approach when dealing with camera-shy people.

“What we are trying to capture is real life and that’s the most amazing back drop of all,” MacDonald said. “And it really does go to a deeper level than just running ads.”

MacDonald sites Boogie with the Stars as an example. Tim and Carli Bennett competed in the dance competition and did a really sweet dance, she said.

“I just felt like wow, they’re kids when they’re grown up are going to be able to watch this and see what their parents were like when they were young and they did this cool thing in front of a bunch of people and isn’t that wild,” MacDonald said. “The work that we do is capturing memories in a way that our families have never had before and so that’s just kind of our mission.”

97/16 photo by Brent Braaten

Camille MacDonald and Dan Johnson of Pop Media above are seen out and about in Prince George while below in this handout photo they were in Gary Vaynerchuk’s office in New York City as part of one of their many work assignments.

Couple spent life Caring for others

In November of 2014, Dr. Phil Staniland was officially recognized for his contributions and long-term service as a family physician in Prince George to both his community and to the University Hospital of Northern BC. The Prince George Medical Staff Society and Northern Health presented him with a plaque in recognition of his long and exemplary medical service from December 1968 to March 2010.

Phil was born in 1934. He was raised and educated in Broughton, North Lincolnshire, England.

In England at the time, the country adhered to the National Service Act of 1948 which formulated National Service as peacetime conscription; which meant

seNiors’ sceNe

Kathy nadalin

that healthy males 17 to 21 years of age were expected to serve in the armed forces for 18 months and remain on the reserve list for four years.

Phil’s father was a war veteran and suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) from injuries he received during the war. His mother felt strongly that she did not want her son to have to go into the army. The solution was to move to Canada and join a great uncle in Vancouver. Phil and his father left for Vancouver in 1953 and his mother and two sisters followed three months later.

His father found work in a packing plant as a meat cutter. Phil was 17 and he wanted to study chemistry to be a scientist in metallurgy. He had finished his secondary schooling in England and upon his arrival in Canada he took Grade 13 at King Edward High School. He attended UBC for the next three years and earned a degree in physiology and sociology. For the next three years he studied theology – a broad field that included biblical studies, ministry and religious studies – and attended seminars.

He went on to serve as the United Church minister in Invermere for three years and that is when he met his future wife Jean Rickson.

Jean was born in Powell River in 1933. She grew up wanting to be a nurse so after high school she took the four-year

nursing program at UBC and earned her degree in nursing. She was working as a nurse in Kimberly when she met Phil.

All the public health nurses in the area met for a monthly business meeting in Cranbrook. A nurse from Invermere wanted to introduce Jean to her church minister Phil Staniland. At first, Jean declined the offer because she was not interested in looking for a boyfriend let alone a husband. Eventually in early 1961, she attended a dance in Invermere, met Phil and they got married in October that same year.

Jean explained, “After we got married, we moved to Vancouver. I kept working as a public health nurse and Phil went to medical school. He graduated from medical school in 1967, served his internship in family medicine from 1967-68 at the Royal Columbian Hospital, passed all the rotations as required and we moved to Prince George in 1968.

“Doctors were needed in Prince George so we decided to check it out. We liked the community and agreed that we would only stay for five years. When the five years were up it was our children who wanted to stay. We had a family meeting and our very young boys reminded Phil that he was not a bank manager that was forced to move by the company and that he had choices and could stay if he wanted too. We stayed and as it turned out we are still here and the children are now living at the coast.”

Phil and Jean had three children; Jeffrey Thomas Phillip, Ann Christine (deceased) and Andrew James William. They have three grandsons that are perfect in every way.

Phil started his own medical practice in 1968 and shared space with Dr. Umesh Khare for many years.

Subsequently, he took further training and obtained membership in family medicine a few years later. In the meantime, having volunteered on the executive of the College of Family Physicians of Canada, in the B.C. division, Phil was invited to become a Fellow of the Royal College of Family Physicians of Canada.

Phil taught in the medical training program at UNBC, did locums and established Prince George Palliative Care Service in 2005. He retired completely in 2012 after a very successful 44-year medical career.

Phil said, “I moved into palliative care and it was the best thing that I did. Palliative care is medical care focused on im-

proving the quality of the life of patients with serious illnesses by treating symptoms and providing emotional support. I worked with the families facing the problems associated with a life-threatening illness of their loved ones.

“We were the third palliative care unit in the province at the time. We had a team of physicians, nurses, dieticians and pharmacists in the program and we met once a week to discuss cases and plan conferences. It was always rewarding and retiring in 2012 as the medical director of the Palliative Care for Northern Medical was the pinnacle of my career.”

Over the years Phil and Jean were always willing to give back to their community. Phil served on the board of AiMHi, the Prince George Association for Community Living in the mid-1970s, volunteered at the Rotary Hospice House and sang with the Cantata Singers for nearly 20 years. He was a member of the Forever Young Choir, the drama club and served on the board of directors at the Elder Citizens Recreation Centre. He coached speed skating for about three years and served on the board of the Speed Skating Club.

Phil said, “Now at the age of 85, I no longer serve on executive positions and Jean and I have both retired from volunteering. We used to travel to Europe and all over B.C. but now we are using the time to just enjoy our retirement here in Prince George.”

Jean explained, “We moved into our Prince George family home in 1968 and we have been here ever since. I was surprised to learn that my longtime university friend Marguerite Fox lived just down the street. She was working as a teacher and I was working as a nurse when we ran into one another only to learn that we were neighbors. Phil and I have been married for 58 years but I have been friends with Marguerite even longer than that.

“We eventually formed the Dalhousie neighbourhood weekly craft group along with Marguerite and my other neighbours; Roberta Barnes, Margaret Dunlop, Karen Pavich, Nancy Spensley, Donna Hills and Sylvia Swennumson. We used to make and donate many items to local fundraisers but now after 40 years we just meet, do some knitting, enjoy snacks and have great conversations mainly about our children, grandchildren and great grandchildren and of course we all have coveted photos to share.”

97/16 photo by Brent Braaten dr. Phil and Jean staniland’s life’s work was dedicated to helping others.

A plAy, VAlentine’s speciAls And hockey

The Occupation of Heather Rose

Until Sunday, Feb. 24 at Theatre NorthWest, #36-556 North Nechako Rd., The Occupation of Heather Rose will be presented. It’s the first play ever staged by Theatre Northwest. Twenty-five years later the theatre is bringing it back. It’s a beautiful heartwarming and inspiring play that charts the growth in understanding of a naïve nurse working on the Snake Lake Reserve in Northern Ontario. For more information call 250614-0039 or email FOH@theatrenorthwest.com.

CrossRoads Valentine’s Day Mix & Mingle

Thursday from 6 to 11 p.m. at CrossRoads Brewing, 508 George St., there’s no need for a date this Valentine’s Day. Join the first Mix and Mingle at CrossRoads. Tickets are $25 and include all you can eat pizza, a complimentary drink, Mix and Mingle Bingo, a chance at winning a prize, fun and games. This is a 19+ event. Please bring two pieces of ID and plan a safe ride home. For more information call 250-614-2337.

Record | Revise Exhibition Opening

Thursday from 7:30 to 9 p.m. at the Two Rivers Gallery, 725 Canada Games Way, everyone is invited to attend the opening of the newest Galleria Exhibition – Record | Revise featuring local artists Maureen Faulkner, Annerose Georgeson, Anna-Maria Lawrie, Cat Sivertsen and Roanne Whitticase. For more information call 250-614-7800 or email visitorservices@tworiversgallery.ca.

Spruce Kings Hockey

Thursday and Saturday from 7 to 9:30 p.m. at the Rolling Mix Concrete Arena, 888 Dominion St., hockey fans are invited to catch the action close up as the Spruce King play on the road to the RBC cup. For more information visit www. sprucekings.bc.ca.

Valentine’s Dinner at Cornerstone

Thursday and Friday from 4:30 to 8:30 p.m. at Cornerstone Kitchen & Lounge, 444 George St., celebrate Valentine’s Day by enjoying a chef-created three-course

menu, including a complimentary glass of sparkling wine. $90 per couple or $45 per person. Call for reservations at 250561-5676 or email cornerstone@ramadaprincegeorge.com.

Prince George Cougars

Friday and Saturday at 7 p.m. at CN Centre, 2187 Ospika Blvd., come support the Cougars in their regular season on their way to the championship. For more information visit www pgcougars.com.

Subtotal Live

Friday at 7 p.m. at the Oakroom Grill, 104-1023 Central St. West, Roman Kozlowski, Mike Howe and Brad Martin are excited to be back playing at the Oakroom Grill. No cover charge. For more information call 250-277-1882 or email oakroomgrill@hotmail.com.

World Para Nordic Skiing Championships

Friday until Sunday February 24 at the Caledonia Nordic Ski Club, 8141 Otway Rd., the World Para Nordic Skiing Championships see para nordic athletes who are grouped into three classes for competition (sitting, standing, and visu-

ally impaired) who will compete in four cross-country skiing and four biathlon medal events over a period of 10 days. There will be about 140 athletes from 20 different Nations, over 200 coaches and officials at the event. For more information visit www.caledonianordic.com.

Intro to DSLR Camera

Saturday from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Omineca Arts Centre, 369 Victoria St., everyone is invited to the admission-bydonation event, which is an introduction to the DSLR camera and the basics of getting cinematic shots. The workshop will go through the essentials of photography, the functions of the DSLR camera, lenses, and photographic composition and then move into a quick overview of some editing basics in Adobe Lightroom. Please register for this workshop by emailing Darrin.Rigo@gmail.com.

Family Gaming Afternoon

Saturday from 1 to 3 p.m. at the Bob Harkins Branch, Prince George Public Library, 888 Canada Games Way, bring the whole family to this gaming afternoon. Choose from tabletop board games or video games. For more information call 250-563-9251 or emial ask@pgpl.ca.

DemanD change on global scale

Canadian General Romeo Dallarie stated “at its heart the Rwandan story is the failure of humanity to heed a call for help from an endangered people.”

It would be nice to believe that the world learned its lesson in Rwanda, where nearly one million people were slaughtered in a period of roughly 90 days as the world stood by and watched. Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth. The Rwandan Genocide spilled into Zaire, destabilized the country, resulting in the formation of a new country, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and a horrendous civil war that has resulted in millions, yes millions, of deaths over more than 20 years.

Not only that, but the most vile weapon used in this war has been the rape of innocent Congolese women and girls. Today, the eastern DRC is the most dangerous place in the world to be female.

Does the fact that the world has allowed this to continue for so long demonstrate that we have done little to address the issues of sexism and racism?

Have we forgotten that we share one planet and that what happens to one person happens to all of us? The assault on one woman is an assault on all women, on all of our sisters, daughters, mothers and spouses. The rape of thousands upon thousands upon thousands of women is an attack upon the soul of the earth. Yet the media refuses to take this issue seriously. Why do we have to put up with hours of speculation regarding the supposed crimes of ridiculous politicians, yet

LessoNs iN

LearNiNg

Gerry ChidiaC

hear nothing of the Congo? When then U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tried to address these serious issues in 2009 by visiting the Congo, reporters focused on the fact that she was slightly annoyed at being called “Mr. Clinton” rather than upon the crimes happening all around her.

And what of industry? Is it a coincidence that incidences of rape are most prevalent in areas where there is mining? Jewelry and electronics companies use “conflict minerals” from these regions to keep their prices down and consumers buy their products.

Governments also refuse to take a stand. In 2014, the Conservative government in Canada defeated the “Conflict Minerals” bill of NDP member Paul Dewar. Though the Liberals supported Dewar’s bill, since they have taken office they have done little to hold Canadian mining companies, which are very prevalent in the Congo, to an acceptable standard of ethics.

Some are indeed trying to make a difference and they hold a light for others to follow. Apple has made an effort to not only avoid conflict minerals in their products, they have invested in development projects in the DRC. The same can be said for Canadian mining company

Banro, which has taken its social responsibility very seriously. Canadian actor Ryan Gosling has been very active in the cause for peace in the DRC, as has Eve Ensler, the writer of the Vagina Monologues.

Yet the most honourable individuals in the face of these crimes have been the Congolese themselves. Nobel Peace Prize winner Dr. Denis Muwege has operated on thousands of rape victims and has worked with Ensler and teams of Congolese women in helping them to find their voices and heal.

It may seem ironic, but it is these women who are the greatest source hope in brining change to the DRC and perhaps

to all of humanity. Indeed, Liberian Nobel laureate Leymah Gbowee has called the eastern Congo, “the world capital for sisterhood and solidarity.”

True power does not rest with the violent, it lies with those of integrity and courage.

Now it is up to us to pay attention to what is happening in the DRC and demand change. It is time to stand forward with our beautiful and powerful Congolese sisters and say enough is enough. Gerry Chidiac is a champion for social enlightenment, inspiring others to find their greatness in making the world a better place. For more of his writings, go to www.gerrychidiac.com.

97/16 news service photo by richard drew

Nobel Peace Prize winner Leymah Gbowee, from Liberia, addresses the 73rd session of the united Nations General assembly, at uN headquarters last fall.

health

When to take those health supplements

Whether multivitamins and other dietary supplements are necessary for the general population is a source of debate. Supplements remain recommended for certain populations with specific conditions – such as pregnant women who should take folic acid to reduce the risk of neural tube defects, or children in developing countries whose diets do not provide enough vitamin A and iron. But recent studies have found there is insufficient evidence to recommend multivitamin supplements to the average healthy American, and that in fact, taking too much of certain vitamins can cause harm.

These studies seem to have little effect on the global supplement industry, which is worth an estimated $128 billion, according to 2017 data from the Nutrition Business Journal, or on the American public. Fifty-two percent of respondents to the 2011-2012 U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey reported using dietary supplements – unchanged from the 1999-2000 survey.

As a registered dietitian, I believe a nutritious diet is the best way to achieve a healthy foundation. Supplements (as the name suggests) can be used as a complement to help a person with certain deficiencies meet their nutrient needs. If you’re taking a supplement because of such a deficiency, you should try to take it in a way that could promote optimal absorption. Supplement timing can seem complicated, so let’s simplify when to take some of the most common dietary supplements and why.

When to take supplements

There is debate about whether taking your vitamins in the morning or at night is best. The theory goes that because you’re getting nutrients throughout the day from food, having your nutrition supplements at night helps your body get some nutrition as you sleep.

But Jeffrey Blumberg, a professor of nutrition science and policy at Tufts University in Boston, says, “Digestion slows down during sleep, so taking your nutrient supplement late at night would not be associated with an efficient absorption.”

Neil Levin, a clinical nutritionist at NOW Foods, agrees that morning is best for multivitamins and any B vitamins.

“Multivitamins tend to do best when taken earlier in the day, as the B vitamins in them might stimulate metabolism and brain function too much for a relaxing evening or before bed,” Levin says. Although morning is probably ideal, the best time of day is the time you’ll remember. Put the supplement bottles on your kitchen counter next to your coffee maker, so they jog your memory when you reach for your morning cup. Or keep them in your lunch bag or briefcase so you’ll remember them.

With food or without?

Most supplements should be taken with food to reduce the chances they’ll upset your stomach and to stimulate digestion and improve absorption. For a select few, it really doesn’t matter if you take them on an empty stomach. So which ones should you pay attention to?

Iron, magnesium and fish oil supplements are the most common culprits for digestive upset when taken on an empty stomach, so take extra care to have these with a meal or snack.

Fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E and K are better absorbed when you have them with a meal or snack that contains at least a teaspoon of fat, about five grams.

The same goes for your multivitamin, which contains these vitamins. For example, if you’re taking your multivitamin with your breakfast, make sure you’re having some almond butter with your oatmeal or avocado with your eggs and toast.

For probiotics, preliminary research suggests taking them with a meal or 30 minutes before a meal could be better than taking them after eating.

Hydration is also important, Blumberg says. “Fluid intake is especially important for the disintegration of the supplement tablet or capsule and for dissolution of water-soluble nutrients such as vitamin C and B vitamins,” he says.

So be sure to wash down all supplements with a tall glass of water.

The main exception to the “take with food” rule for dietary supplements is with certain types of minerals. Only chelated mineral supplements can be taken without food, Levin says. Chelation occurs when a mineral has been bound to an acid, so it doesn’t rely on your stomach acid to break it down. Calcium citrate and magnesium glycinate are the main examples. (If this level of detail is overwhelming, take your supplements with food to cover your bases.)

Better together

Some nutrient dynamic duos include

vitamin D to boost calcium absorption and vitamin C to boost iron absorption. That’s why taking in these nutrients simultaneously via supplements or boosting with food sources is ideal. A classic example is having your iron supplements with a glass of orange juice to get the absorption-boosting effects of the vitamin C.

Better apart

Calcium can affect your body’s absorption of iron, zinc and magnesium. I recommend taking any calcium supplements at a different meal than any iron supplements or your multivitamin. Also, your body absorbs calcium more effectively when you take 600 milligrams or less at a time. If you’re taking more than that per day, you’ll want to split up the dosage into morning and evening doses. Fibre is another nutrient you’ll want to take apart from other supplements and medications because it interferes with absorption. I recommend doing so before bed if you aren’t taking anything else at that time.

Here’s a sample schedule for optimal absorption of the supplements named. With breakfast

Multivitamin or prenatal multivitamin/ folic acid

B vitamins

Omega-3s

Probiotics

With lunch

Calcium

Vitamin D

With dinner

Iron

Vitamin C

Before bed

Fiber supplement (with a large glass of water)

If it isn’t practical for you to remember to take supplements at lunch or other points during the day, don’t worry. Have your multivitamin and any fat-soluble vitamins (A, D, E and K) with food that contains some fat, keep your calcium and iron separate, and you’ll be fine. You’ll be even better off if you focus on eating nutritious whole foods, because science suggests that this, rather than supplements, is the optimal way to get your nutrients.

Brissette is a registered dietitian, nutrition writer, TV contributor and president of 80TwentyNutrition.com.

97/16 news service file photo A customer shops at a GNC store in New York in 2013.

christy brissette

97/16 wire service

Five myths about valeNtiNe’s Day

maNDy leN catroN 97/16 wire service

It was Liz Lemon, the protagonist of television’s 30 Rock, who noted that the word lovers really tends to bum people out – “unless it’s between the words meat and pizza.” But it’s February and lovers are everywhere, celebrating the holiday we love to hate.

Valentine’s Day occupies a strange space in modern culture. The occasion is defined by its strong traditions but few of us know anything about where they came from. When it comes to this celebration of love, misinformation abounds.

Myth No. 1: Valentine’s Day was invented by greeting card companies.

“Valentine’s Day only exists to sell greeting cards.” It’s the complaint of cynical ex-boyfriends everywhere. In the 2004 film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Jim Carey’s character, Joel, says the holiday was “invented by greeting card companies to make people feel like crap.”

Even the myth-busting website Snopes. com has a page discussing this common trope.

As it turns out, Valentine’s Day – and Valentine’s Day cards – existed long before commercialization. The Victorians exchanged tokens, notes and handmade cards on Feb. 14. The tradition really took off when postal infrastructure improved in the mid-19th century. The English penny post made sending romantic notes both affordable and anonymous, meaning the otherwise stuffy Victorians

were free to express sentiments that ranged from risque flirtation to what the London Review called “scandalous productions, vilely drawn, wretchedly engraved, and hastily dabbed over with staring colours.”

Corporate interests were quick to capitalize on Victorian traditions. In 1868, Cadbury was the first to put chocolates in a heart-shaped box. Mass-manufactured greeting cards were introduced in the United States in 1849 and sold by Hallmark in 1913.

A 2015 survey found that 66 per cent of respondents agreed that “the consumerism surrounding Valentine’s Day has ruined the romance.”

But that didn’t stop Americans from spending a record $20.1 billion on Valentine’s Day in 2018, with an astounding $751 million of that devoted to gifts for their truest loves: their pets.

Myth No. 2: Saint Valentine set the tone for this lovers’ holiday.

It’s natural to assume that there must be some historical connection between romantic love and the man named Saint Valentine. According to ThoughtCo, “he was sent to jail” for performing illegal weddings. Get Fed, a Catholic website, says that “his intercession was called upon by lovers and engaged and married couples after his entrance into eternal life.”

Even priests use the holiday as an opportunity to imagine what kind of advice the saint would offer today’s married couples.

The truth is much less romantic. According to Lisa Bitel, a historian of

Christianity, “our modern holiday is a beautiful fiction.”

Bitel points out that there were several third-century saints named Valentine, at least one of whom was decapitated on Feb. 14.

Most likely, the feast of Saint Valentine commemorates the martyrdom of two men, but while we have some idea of when and how they died, historians know almost nothing about their lives.

The Oxford Dictionary of Saints pulls no punches on the subject: “The connection of lovers with St. Valentine, with all its consequences for the printing and retailing industries, is one of the less likely results of the cult of the Roman martyrs.”

Most likely, the romantic stories were invented centuries after the martyrs’ gruesome deaths.

Myth No. 3: Feb. 14 has always been a celebration of love.

We inherited our contemporary version of Valentine’s Day from the Victorians, but some accounts – such as a story last year in Lifehacker and another from NPR on The Dark Origins of Valentine’s Day – have argued that the history of the holiday can be traced all the way back to ancient Rome. In mid-February, the Romans celebrated Lupercalia, a drunken festival that involved hitting women with the hide of a sacrificial goat in hopes of increasing their fertility. The celebration was ultimately denounced by Pope Gelasius in the late fifth century and it fell out of favour, but some suspect that its lusty spirit carried over into Valentine’s Day traditions.

The links to Lupercalia, though, don’t hold up well to investigation. Geoffrey Chaucer appears to have been the first person to imbue St. Valentine’s feast day with romantic associations back in the 14th century. In his poem Parlement of Foules, Chaucer imagines Valentine’s Day as the occasion for birds to convene and choose their mates. Literary historian Jack Oruch points out that the holiday had no romantic pretenses “either literary or social in customs, before Chaucer.”

Given the thousand-year gap between Lupercalia and the imaginary avian assembly, it seems unlikely the two were related.

Myth No. 4: Cupid is the incarnation of sweetness and romance.

When it comes to Valentine’s Day iconography, no one is more popular than Cupid, the rosy-cheeked cherub. In the neoclassical vision of Peter Paul Rubens, for instance, he flutters around Venus playfully. A similar creature powders the cheeks of a female centaur in Disney’s 1940 film Fantasia.

But he wasn’t always a chubby toddler in a loincloth. Cupid is the Roman incarnation of the Greek god Eros, who first appears in Theogony by the poet Hesiod. This god, the “loveliest of all the Immortals,” was far from adorable. Eros wielded power over god and mortal alike, making men’s bodies “go limp, mastering their minds and subduing their wills.”

Classical depictions of Eros (from pottery in the fifth century B.C., for instance) feature a young man who is both beautiful and dangerous. In the Roman myth of Cupid and Psyche, Cupid is defined by his seductive powers – and his reputation wasn’t exactly mild: In the sixth century, Archbishop Isidore of Seville called Cupid a “demon of fornication.”

By the Renaissance, artists began depicting a younger Cupid, often with

his mother, Venus, though occasionally still in disturbingly seductive situations, as in An Allegory With Venus and Cupid by Bronzino. Baroque and rococo artists embraced the childlike Cupid by combining him with the biblical figure of the cherub. These fat, winged babies were responsible for provoking love rather than participating in it. His lascivious past long forgotten, the new Cupid was a beloved character on Victorian Valentine’s Day cards, which is probably how we wound up with such an adorably innocent matchmaker today.

Myth No. 5: Valentine’s Day is pretty miserable for single people.

Marie Claire asserts that “we all know Valentine’s Day is deeply unpleasant if you’re single,” while GQ offers the single man’s “self-loathing guide” for the holiday. But you don’t have to pick up a magazine to notice the absurd amount of condescending pity aimed at single folks on this holiday. Psychologist Bella DePaulo points out that the way we talk about Valentine’s Day implies that those who are paired up “are happier people –even better people – than singles.”

Our culture would have you believe that it’s either a romantic candlelight dinner for two or watching Bridget Jones’s Diary on repeat in your bathrobe while doing bicep curls with a pint of rocky road.

Luckily there are reams of research on the lives of single people and it shows that being alone is a far cry from being lonely.

Sociologist Erik Klinenberg discovered that almost everyone who lives alone does so because they choose to, noting that one of his “most powerful findings is that nothing is lonelier than living with the wrong person.”

Studies show that single people are more likely to have strong ties to friends and neighbours than their married friends do. They also place a higher value on meaningful work and experience more personal growth than those who are married.

So if your coupled friends can’t stop giving you pitying glances this time of year, just remind them that getting married doesn’t change your long-term happiness.

Mandy Len Catron is the author of How to Fall in Love With Anyone: A Memoir in Essays.

National Gallery image Cupid wasn’t always a cute, innocent toddler in a loincloth, as an allegory With Venus and Cupid, a painting by bronzino, circa 1545, shows.

Scene

Fan-tastic Follies sashay into Playhouse

frank peebles 97/16 staff

No one can accuse Sasparilla Foxx of not having any skin in the game.

The burlesque dance instructor drives from her hometown of Quesnel up to Prince George on a semi-regular basis to spread the nudes – make that news – of this old-school brand of entertainment. She also drops in on Williams Lake, Fort St. James and other locations around the area because a grassroots burlesque movement calls her into action.

“There is so much demand for it, I can’t keep up,” she said on a recent visit to Prince George for a weekend class with some P.G. rookies. “You need an instructor here really badly. I’ve been trying to come up for classes, and some have come down to my studio in Quesnel for lessons, and I am trying to find a way to get here more regularly. I’m the mama hen of burlesque in the Central Interior, and there are more and more chicks getting into it.”

She does her work on Prince George trips at Angel’s Aerial Fitness Studio. It has been going so well that Saturday, when she hosts a full burlesque show at the P.G. Playhouse, it will be a mix of local dancers in amongst the veterans she brings from Quesnel for these events.

“They (the aspiring Prince George performers) are so newby,” she laughed. “It keeps it fresh. I have a blast with them, and it’s such a great feeling when you’re backstage with dancers who’ve been with me for eight years and dancers who are about to do their first public performance.

“As you can imagine, anything goes in burlesque so that backstage mix of personalities is a lot of fun to be a part of, and feel that energy between people. And your audiences in Prince George are awesome. It’s like half the audience is there to watch the thee-ahh-tahhh and half the audience thinks they’re at a hockey game and that is just great. It’s a great vibe. Everyone is there to appreciate it in their own way.”

The Sasparilla Foxx group works under the troupe name Foxxie Follies. They are regularly on the Quesnel stage at The Occidental show club, a venue to which she gives her own personal ovation for their support and outreach.

And how could you not be supportive, she said somewhat facetiously. Due to the sexual innuendo, she knows there are populations of society that disapprove of burlesque but it is only innuendo.

No one actually strips to nothing, it is just, in her view and in the hearts of those who do it for recreation, simply a way to have some fun, build some body image, celebrate the fun side of the human form and our natural urges. In the local area, it is done by the full gender spectrum, all ages, all ethnicities, and certainly all body types with equal welcome.

In their visits to Prince George, they have held shows at a number of performance spaces and, as the audience embrace has grown wider, they took the step to move onto the P.G. Playhouse stage.

“It took the show up a notch just being in that room,” she said. “The stage, the dressing rooms, the technical capabilities, the way the audience is situated, it’s all great. I love P.G. You guys are blowing up. I have a really busy dance studio in Quesnel (she teaches ballet, jazz, hiphop, tap and modern classes), I’m like the Judy Russell there, but we are sure jealous of all the arts and entertainment and show spaces you have here in Prince George.”

What Quesnel has that Prince George does not is an annual burlesque fest. Sasparilla Foxx is the impresario for the Itty Bitty Burlesque Festival set this year for April 25-27.

There are professional headliners who come to perform from all over Canada and the United States, plus a large number of local and provincial dancers who earn their way in by video application. Foxx said she was hopeful that Prince George dancers would enter and the application window is open on the festival’s Facebook page.

Before the festival, though, are some all local showcases. The next Foxxie Follies event is Saturday at the Prince George Playhouse (there is another on March 16 for those marking calendars). Tickets for the upcoming show can be purchased at the downtown location of Simply Beautiful or online at the Eventbrite website.

Look up the ValenTease Burlesque Variety Show.

97/16 handout photo

sasparilla Foxx, head of the Foxxie Follies, is bringing her show, including lots her friends, to the Prince George Playhouse saturday.

Scene

ConneCtions, partners led to northern FanCon

We were hot on the heels of the excitement that Sons of Anarchy star Kim Coates had jumpstarted the city with.

His appearance at Pine Centre was a massive success in engaging hundreds of fans for photos and autographs. Prince George was abuzz with the new direction of the BCNE. The stage was set for what was next.

But what was next?

BCNE president Alex Huber and I came up with something spectacular. We had seen the throes of Sons of Anarchy fans turn out for Kim Coates.

It only made sense to follow up that appearance with someone else from the hit series – Ron Perlman. In order for that to happen, we sought sponsorship support from Brent Marshall but that was not enough. In truly inspiring form, Alex was so committed to the idea that he invested some of his own personal resources to make it all happen.

Flash forward to our pursuit of Ron Perlman. As luck would have it, we were able to book him through an agent Denise Crosby (Star Trek: the Next Generation, Pet Sematary) had recommended to us – Gary Hasson.

As I mentioned in an earlier column, it is never just as simple as picking up the phone and booking the guest but Gary’s agency (BookCelebrities.com) does make it as easy for you as possible. We attribute much of the foundation of Northern FanCon to the attention we received from this agency as we started. In the particular booking of Perlman, we could not have asked for a better situation than what they offered us.

In most cases, an agent rep will accompany the appearing celebrity guest to the event at which they are booked.

The agent rep’s job is to make sure the celebrity guest is taken care of, doesn’t have to handle money, and is on hand to deal with any situations that might arise. This likely comes as no surprise to you

but what came as a surprise to us was who the agency sent with Perlman for our booking. BookCelebrities.com sent us a man by the name of Barry Greenberg –Gary Hasson’s business partner. We could not have asked for a better person on the ground to support us in the event than Barry.

It was almost surreal that they were sending him. We were about to have the chance to explain face to face our vision for what would eventually become Northern FanCon to a leader in the celebrity appearance business.

Perlman and Greenberg arrived in Prince George according to plan. The BCNE had a ton going on that year and Ron’s appearance was the crown jewel. He would do a series of autograph signings and photos throughout the day and we chose to do an interview with him by Citizen reporter Frank Peebles live on the midway.

In retrospect, the latter piece here was

a huge risk but it was absolutely stunning. Imagine thousands of people in the midway and when Perlman took the stage, everyone stopped in their tracks to watch.

You could hear a pin drop.

To date, that is still one of my favourite moments of the FanCon history. Before Barry and Ron flew out the next day, I said my goodbyes and Barry said to review the roster of BookCelebrities. com for options for the inaugural year of Northern FanCon. It did not take long that day to decide on who we wanted to book as our first guest. We wanted William Shatner.

97/16 file photo

Amanda Holoien has her picture taken with Ron Perlman by Leah Coghlan. They were the first two in line to see the star at the BCNE in the summer of 2014.

Coyne toss

norm Coyne

SportS

Fan gets tattoo oF Brett Connelly getting a tattoo

scott alleN 97/16 wire service

Washington Capitals fan Tyler Duchaine knew he wanted to get a tattoo to commemorate the franchise’s first Stanley Cup title, but the 29-year-old couldn’t decide on a design.

Inspiration came from an unlikely source: a photo of Capitals forward and Prince George native Brett Connolly looking casual as can be, eating a slice of pizza while getting the Super Mario Bros. character Bowser tattooed on his arm during the team’s championship bender last June.

What if, Duchaine thought, while watching the Capitals on TV last month, he got a tattoo of Connolly getting his tattoo on that alcohol-fueled day? Duchaine’s friends loved the idea, as did his wife, Lindsey. He tweeted the glorious photo of Connolly, which originated from an Instagram story, and vowed to follow through on his idea if he got 10,000 retweets. It was an ambitious, perhaps unattainable goal.

“Screw it,” Duchaine tweeted 20 minutes later. “I’ll do it for 1,000.”

Less than 24 hours later, he surpassed that mark.The reality was that Duchaine had already committed, in his mind, to getting the tattoo, regardless of how many retweets he got.

“That’s crazy,” Connolly told The Athletic’s Chris Kuc when informed of Duchaine’s plan.

“I’d love to be there, I’ll pay for it if I have to, too,” fellow Capitals forward Devante Smith-Pelly said. “I mean, I wanna see that done for sure.”

In January, Duchaine contacted Tattoo Paradise. That’s the shop where Connolly and several of his teammates got inked two days after winning the Stanley Cup, as part of their nonstop celebration that also included pounding beers at Nationals Park and frolicking in the fountains at the Georgetown Waterfront. Duchaine arranged a consultation with Billy Bennett, the artist who tattooed Connolly, and explained his out-there idea.

“He was down,” Duchaine said of Bennett’s response. “This was a cool opportunity for him because he had never tattooed himself on someone else before, so that was sweet. We decided on a style and basic details. He sent me a few mockups of the line work and then just went to town.”

Over the course of roughly 90 minutes, Bennett tattooed an image of himself tattooing Connolly on Duchaine’s left biceps. When Duchaine scheduled the appointment he didn’t realize it was the day of the Super Bowl, but of all the possible years to miss the NFL’s biggest game to get a tattoo of a bearded man eating pizza on your arm, he picked a good one. Duchaine chose that day because the Capitals were off that night (he attended their Super Bowl matinee loss to the Bruins) and also on Monday, increasing the likelihood that Connolly and

Smith-Pelly would accept the invitation he extended to them during the all-star break. The players ultimately had to pass – “they probably had a Super Bowl party at Ovi’s,” Duchaine said – but Duchaine’s wife and several friends tagged along for moral support and to live-stream the experience on Twitter. During the procedure, one viewer commented that all 11 people in his apartment to ostensibly watch the Super Bowl were watching Duchaine get inked instead.

“Do you have any regrets?” Duchaine’s wife asked.

“No, of course not,” he replied. “As long as I’ve had to think about this, I am very happy.”

Unlike Connolly, who sat in a chair while getting his tattoo eight months ago, Duchaine lay on a table. That would’ve made it difficult to consume a slice of pizza to really complete the

“Inkception.”

“They also say you shouldn’t eat and get tattoos,” Duchaine said. “I’m sure that afternoon in June there was an exception to many rules.”

Duchaine, who hopes to show Connolly and Smith-Pelly the finished product at some point, said he doesn’t plan to share any close-up photos of his new tattoo until the redness has started to fade and “it can really stand out.”

“It’s going to remind me, of course, of the Cup run, and that it all sort of ended in a moment that we all got to share,” he said. “I look at that photo and I think that could’ve been any of us fans. Looking at Conno in that seat, eating that pizza, with that ‘I don’t really care’ look on his face, that could’ve been me, that could’ve been any of us. That was the feeling of that celebration. They felt it just like we did.”

97/16 news service file photo during the super bowl on Feb. 3, Washington Capitals fan Tyler duchaine got a tattoo, right, of brett Connolly getting a tattoo while eating a slice of pizza, left, in June.

Forget ‘boyFriend’ and ‘girlFriend’

Why millenials prefer using the word ‘partner’

After Gavin Newsom was sworn in as the governor of California earlier this month, his wife, Jennifer, announced her decision to forgo the traditional title of “first lady.” She will be known, instead, as California’s “first partner.”

Jennifer Siebel Newsom, who wrote and directed Miss Representation, a documentary about the underrepresentation of women in leadership, fashioned this term to signal her commitment to gender equality.

“Being First Partner is about inclusion, breaking down stereotypes, and valuing the partnerships that allow any of us to succeed,” she tweeted in January: “Being First Partner is about inclusion, breaking down stereotypes, and valuing the partnerships that allow any of us to succeed. Grateful for this opportunity to continue advocating for a more equitable future –now let’s get to work!”

But with this new title, reflected on the governor’s official website, Siebel Newsom is also publicly validating her constituency’s changing lexicon.

All over the country, particularly in bright blue states like California, people are swapping the words boyfriend and girlfriend – and even husband and wife –for the word partner.

According to data compiled by Google Trends, the search term “my partner” has been steadily gaining traction: it’s more than eight times more popular today

than it was 15 years ago.

“There are so many words that you first hear and think, ‘That’s weird.’ Then they begin to seem more normal,” said Deborah Tannen, a professor of linguistics at Georgetown, who studies the language of relationships. “That’s definitely happened with the word partner.”

Originally used to describe a business relationship, partner was slowly adopted by the gay community in the mid to late 1980s, said Michael Bronski, a professor of women and gender studies at Harvard University.

As the AIDS epidemic rattled the country, he added, it became critical for gay people to signal the seriousness of their romantic relationships, both to healthcare professionals to gain access at hospitals, and, eventually, to their employers, once companies began to extend healthcare benefits to domestic partners. After the term domestic partnership gained significant legal and popular recognition, partner became the default word for much of the LGBT community until same-sex marriage was legalized in the United States in 2015.

More recently, straight couples have started saying partner, with the term gaining most traction among young people in highly educated, liberal enclaves. On certain college campuses, several students said, it would come across as strange, even rude, to use the terms boyfriend or girlfriend in lieu of the more inclusive, gender-neutral partner.

“At Harvard, everyone is very polite and liberal,” Bronski said.

The clearest explanation for the word’s spike in popularity is the lack of any other good options. Unmarried people in serious relationships, in particular, face a gaping linguistic hole. Boyfriend and girlfriend are too high school. Significant other sounds like it belongs on a legal document. Lover connotes too much sex for everyday use; companion, not enough.

Partner, on the other hand, implies a set of values that many couples find appealing.

the words husband and wife.

“Those words carry a lot of baggage,” she said, conjuring 1950s images of the man who comes home expecting dinner on the table; the woman who bears sole responsibility for raising the children.

If Takakjian gets married, she also plans to continue using the word partner, especially at work.

“There is still so much societal pressure for a woman to step back at work once she gets married,” she said.

Takakjian worries about the stereotypes that partners at her firm – many of whom are white men over 50 – associate with the word wife.

“They might think, ‘Now she’s probably thinking about babies, she’s probably going to quit. We don’t need to put her on the important cases, we don’t need to give her as many opportunities.”

The word partner, Takakjian said, could be one way to challenge those assumptions.

The growing preference for partner over husband and wife could suggest a shift that goes beyond labels and language.

When Time magazine asked readers in 2010 whether marriage was becoming obsolete, 39 per cent said yes – up from 28 per cent when Time posed the same question in 1978.

“It’s a word that says, ‘We are equal components of this relationship,’” said Katie Takakjian, a 25-year-old lawyer based in Los Angeles, who started using the term partner while interviewing at law firms. One of the youngest students in her law school’s graduating class, Takakjian told me, she worried the word boyfriend could make her seem even younger.

If you get married in your 20s, and you’re part of a college-educated crowd, it might feel old-fashioned or even embarrassing to admit you’re married.

— Andrew Cherling, Professor at Johns Hopkins University

For a long time, a wedding was the only way to signal the depth and seriousness of a romantic relationship, said Amy Shackelford, founder and CEO of the feminist wedding planning company Modern Rebel.

“But we work with couples who get married six years, nine years, 12 years, after they started dating,” she told me. “You think they weren’t serious before then?”

The word partner, she said, gives couples the power to publicly announce a lasting adult commitment, without an engagement or a wedding. If the couple does decide to get married, the ceremony itself serves not to solidify the relationship, but to celebrate it, surrounded by family and friends.

Many couples continue to use the word partner even after they’re married. Shackelford, who got married in November, has a visceral negative reaction to

Millennials, who are marrying later in life than any previous generation, increasingly view the institution as “dated,” said Andrew Cherlin, a professor of sociology and the family at Johns Hopkins University.

“If you get married in your 20s, and you’re part of a college-educated crowd, it might feel old-fashioned or even embarrassing to admit that you’re married.” Because today’s young newlyweds are far less eager to trumpet their marital status, he told me, they’re gravitating to partner.

But some members of the LGBT community are skeptical.

“It’s a joke we all know,” said Sean Drohan, a teacher based in New York City who identifies as gay. “If I was making a movie for a gay audience, and a straight couple introduced themselves as partners, that would definitely get a laugh.”

For most of his life, Drohan told me, he assumed he’d never be able to get married and struggled with which words to attach to his romantic relationships, present and future.

His father, he remembers, used the word lover, which felt awkward and strangely disparaging. Gay people, he said, “have had the experience of treading weirdly over different words,” ultimately finding partner. “That was our word,” he said, “and it kind of sucks for other people to want in on that.”

He is especially dubious of people who use the term as what he calls a “performance of wokeness,” an attempt to publicly showcase their progressive worldview.

“If they want to say partner, people of relative privilege should take a moment to reflect on their word choice,” Coco Romack wrote for Broadly last fall. “It never hurts to check yourself by asking, ‘why am I choosing to identify this way?’”

Drohan knows many straight people have good answers to that question. He finds the most obvious one particularly compelling.

“There is no non-marriage marriage term, for anyone,” Drohan said. “So on a logistical level, partner just makes sense.”

97/16 news service photo

Gavin Newsom hugs his wife Jennifer siebel Newsom as he celebrates at an election night party in Los angeles after he defeated republican opponent John Cox to become governor of California on Nov. 6.

HigHland spring fling offers life lessons

Home AgAiN Megan kuklis

Iwas suckered into signing up for a dance festival.

Not for me, (although that would be interesting), but for my daughter who has fallen under the spell of Highland Dance.

When I was a young girl, I was briefly in ballet and when I was around 10, I joined tap for some unknown reason. Highland Dance was never something that I thought about, or really noticed, but I vaguely remember that my cousins Highland danced when we were kids.

In my young and carefree years as a young adult in university, I joined a belly dance class and I absolutely loved it. I loved the blingy costumes, the music, the sisterhood and the way that my body grew stronger and more flexible. Plus, it was really fun.

Being able to shimmy was a fun party trick that no one asked me to do. I was not able to continue belly dance with any sort of regularity after I had kids because the classes started (started!) at 8:30 p.m. in the evenings.

Who wants to leave the house again at 8:30 p.m.? I sure didn’t and, as such, my own dancing career has fallen by the wayside. (When I say dancing career, please note that it was never actually going to be a “career” for me, but instead a fun way to exercise and to get out of the

house). But I still love dance. I love ballet and contemporary dance. I love watching So You Think You Can Dance once the wretched auditions are over and they get on with the beautiful dancing. My kids love to dance and we regularly have dance parties in the evenings to shake the sillies out before bedtime.

When I put the kids in dance last year, hip hop for my son and ballet for my daughter, I just wanted them to enjoy learning more about dance and to get some fun exercise. It has been great. Rarely do they complain that it is time for dance and they like to practice the “sweet dance moves” that they learned

that week. When I asked them in September if they wanted to join dance again this year, the answer was a resounding “Yes!”

My daughter wanted to do ballet again and she also wanted to learn to dance, like “the girls with the socks.”

Not knowing anything about Highland except for the fact that I liked the socks too, we agreed and signed her up for Highland as well as ballet.

Little did I know that those socks cost around $200. And those cute little tartan kilts, oh, they run around $800 new. Luckily, there are lots of used costumes floating around and the other dance families are happy to help you learn the ropes, borrow clothes and understand

this baffling new language of stamps and Scots Dance cards and exams and such. It is a lovely community and I am grateful for the other moms that are helping me and the older girls who are such lovely role models for my little girl.

I was feeling weak when my daughter’s teacher had suggested she join a festival so she could learn what competitive dancing was like in a supportive environment.

“It will be good for her,” she said. “She’s ready,” she said.

Sighing, I asked, “How much?” and off we went during the coldest morning in February to the Civic Centre for a Highland Dance competition.

We were really proud of our girl. She wasn’t nervous and went up on stage and gave it her all with another little girl from her studio.

The only issue was that our sweet girl thought she was going to win first place. I explained that because she only just started dancing, she might not win and I asked her what was she going to do if one of her friends won instead. She thought for a moment and then said that she would clap for them and tell them “good job.”

When she didn’t place, she held herself together onstage and clapped as the other girls who had been dancing for years received their trophies and only when she came back to the audience did she start to cry. We hugged her and told her we were proud of her.

And we are.

Maybe it is good for her – $200 socks are a small (not really small) price to pay for something that makes her try her best and light up from the inside.

97/16 file photo

The infamous highland socks as seen during the 2015 reel North highland dance Competition at the Civic Centre.

s ee solu T ion on page 22

Prince GeorGe ready for Para nordic Worlds

ted clarke

97/16 staff

John Huybers has seen his Caledonia Nordic Ski Club host big events like the Canada Winter Games in 2015 and Canadian cross-country ski championships in 2005.

But never has Otway Nordic Centre gone global as host of an international event like it will this weekend with the start of the World Para Nordic Championships. Otway is wired for sight and sound and the host Caledonia club prepared to let a worldwide internet audience see for themselves what the city has to offer as a ski destination.

“It’s our first world championship and Caledonia Nordic is used to big competitions, but this is being livestreamed into Europe, so literally there are millions of viewers and it’s a great way to advertise northern British Columbia and Prince George itself, for its facility” said Caledonia club president John Huybers.

“People are going to see the ski club on TV in Europe and know about Prince George.”

As soon as it was announced in December 2016 that Prince George had won the right to host the event, the wheels were already in motion. The club latched on to $350,000 provincial tourism grant to help pay for a $250,000 snowmaking system which was installed late last year. While the big dumps that came right around Christmas mean artificial snow won’t likely be needed for the 10-day event, it will be there as a legacy to help attract future championships.

97/16 file photo

John Huybers, president of the Caladonia Nordic Ski club, talked about government funding at Otway Nordic Centre in January 2018.

“As a condition for hosting this event we needed to put snowmaking in, which gave us a huge base, and conditions are fantastic right now,” said Huybers.

“There’s the slight negative of the cold weather but we can’t do anything about that.

“It’s going to stay cool but we shouldn’t have to cancel anything. We have two training days that we can move around in case we lose any days to cold weather. We have the advantage that we’re starting the events 10 a.m., which is dinnertime in Europe, and that’s what they want, prime-time viewing.”

The WPNC combine cross-country skiing and biathlon and in both disciplines

there are three race categories – sitting, standing and visually-impaired. The races begin Saturday with the 10- and 12.5-kilometre biathlon events. Crosscountry takes the spotlight Sunday at Otway with free technique 10 km and 7.5 km events. Races follow on Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday. Races start at 10 a.m. and will be done by 4 p.m. each day.

Cross-country racers will compete in four events – freestyle sprint, middistance, long-distance classic technique, open/mixed relay. Biathletes will have three events – sprint, individual and middistance.

Medal ceremonies will follow on each race day at 7 p.m. and the Prince George Civic Centre auditorium. The hour-long opening ceremonies start this Friday at 6 p.m. at Canada Games Plaza.

While there will be free parking available at the site, there is a park and ride bus shuttle service to Otway that leaves twice daily from the Aquatic Centre (8:30 or 9 a.m., and 11 a.m.) and a return bus leaves from Otway twice a day (noon and between 2 and 4 p.m.).

The event is staged every two years. Local organizing committee chair Kevin Pettersen got a firsthand look at what it takes to host a Para Nordic World Cup last year in Canmore and also attended the 2017 WPNS in Finstrau, Germany.

“Finstrau is a very sparsely-populated area near the Czech Republic and it was kind of like a resort community so they had logistics (problems) around getting teams from all these little pensions and hotels, 40 or 50 minutes away, to the venue and back,” Pettersen said. “I think we’re real fortunate here for how close we are to our airport to our downtown to the venue.

“A lot of the pieces are coming together now. We were all along going to have live streaming and the International Paralympic Committee kicked in extra money so we can do everything we had envisioned. We wanted to be able to showcase and promote Prince George with video vignettes of the city and they’re totally on board with that, so that will go out around the world. We’ve been pushing the frontiers with the IPC in a lot of ways and I think they are appreciating it that we are taking it to the next level.”

Pettersen and his committee have done their homework creating a brand that’s helping to market the event which has won the approval of the IPC and they’re ready for the athletes, some of whom are already in Prince George testing out the slopes at Otway.

The Korean team arrived last week and skiers from the Ukraine and Great Britain were out testing the trail on the weekend. Team Canada was due to arrive on Monday. Most of the athletes raced a month ago at the IPC World Cup No. 2 in Ostersund, Sweden, Jan. 12-19.

The 13-member Canadian team includes skier/biathlete Mark Arendz of Hartsville, P.E.I., a World Cup and world championships multi-medalist, and visually-impaired skier Brian McKeever and his guide Graham Nisikawa, both of Canmore. McKeever, Canada’s most decorated Paralympian, will be making his return to Otway Nordic Centre, having first raced there in the 2005 Western Canadian cross-country championships.

McKeever is the top-ranked visuallyimpaired male cross-country skier in the IPC world list, while Arendz is second in standing-skiing biathlon and fourth in cross-country.

Also on the Canadian team list are: Emily Young (North Vancouver, standing cross-country/biathlon), ranked third in the world in cross-country and ninth in biathlon.

The team also includes Natalie Wilkie (Salmon Arm, standing cross-country); Ethan Hess (Pemberton); Collin Cameron (Sudbury, Ont.); Brittany Hudac (Prince Albert, Sask., standing crosscountry, biathlon); Russell Kennedy (Canmore, ski guide); Derek Zaplotinsky (Smokey Lake, Alta., sit-skiing); Kyle Barber (Lively, Ont.); Simon Lamarche (Quebec, ski guide); Yves Bourque (Bécancour, Que., sit-skiing); Jesse Bachinsky (Kenora, Ont., visually-impaired skiing).

The first World Cup event of the year was held December in Vuokatti, Finland, where athletes were tested to determine each individual’s level of impairment for the rest of the season.

The classification is based on activity limitations and which muscles they can use and each athlete is assigned a percentage used as a multiplier to determine final times in races.

The timing software takes into account the level of impairment and figures out the adjusted times. In sprints, which utilize a hunter start format, athletes with a higher level of impairment start the race ahead of those with less impairment and whoever gets to the finish first wins.

The event will feature 120 athletes from 19 countries bringing 60 support staff for six days of competition. The participating countries are: Canada, United States, Armenia, Austria, Belarus, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Great Britain, Japan, Kazakhstan, Republic of Korea, Mongolia, Norway, Poland, Sweden, Tajikistan, and Ukraine.

Russia and China won’t compete in Prince George and three of the smallest teams from Brazil, Croatia and Switzerland also declined invitations.

Russia is still under competition ban which expires March 15 for doping violations during the 2018 Olympics. China is in a diplomatic squabble with Canada and the United States over the arrest of Hauwei executive Meng Wanzhou and won’t be sending its team.

“We have the strongest teams here,” said Pettersen. “It’s not like the ones that dropped out were big strong teams. Ukraine, Canada and Norway are all here and it will be the best of the best.”

More information is available on the event website at www.2019worldparanordic.ca.

How to prepare a draft separation agreement

b.c. provincial court

When couples separate, they have options for creating a separation agreement – they can use a lawyer to negotiate or engage in private mediation, and now they can use an online resource, the MyLawBC Dialogue Tool, to prepare a draft for review by lawyers.

The Legal Services Society (LSS), B.C.’s legal aid provider, has recently improved its Dialogue Tool, one of the interactive, online pathways on the MyLawBC website.

One factor to consider when deciding which option to use is whether there has been violence in the relationship or whether there is any court order restricting contact with the other party. In that case you should definitely talk to a lawyer first, since communicating through the Dialogue Tool may be inappropriate or prohibited by the court order.

The Dialogue Tool helps you create a separation agreement that addresses your family’s needs. You make important decisions about your children, money, home, and other property.

You start with an intake process where you answer questions about your situation and set out your ideas for the future. You create an account to do this, and your information is saved. Once you finish this step, MyLawBC sends an email to your ex-spouse inviting them to join in the process.

If you both finish this step, the system looks at your and your ex-spouse’s answers and creates a custom template separation agreement for you both to fill out.

Your custom agreement includes legal clauses, with blank spaces where you and your ex-spouse add your own information. During this negotiation process, you and your ex-spouse can leave online messages for each other as you work out the finer details of your agreement.

The Dialogue Tool also contains links to helpful resources about child support, parenting time, tips on negotiation, and more.

Once you both agree on every detail, you can download a completed separation agreement for you both to sign. Once signed, the agreement is legally binding, so it’s important to have a law-

Where have the social conservatives gone?

Across my Facebook feed this week, a meme of U.S. President Donald Trump, smiling benevolently and words from his State of the Union address: “let’s work together to build a culture that cherishes innocent life. And let us reaffirm a fundamental truth; all children, born and unborn, are made in the image of Holy God.”

Trump?

A poster boy for social conservatism? Ask nearly every public figure and politician and you will know that there is an ever-lengthening list of topics they can’t be seen to have an opinion on, or feel forced to affirm some new idea cooked up by those idealists cooking up ever better ways for us to get along so that we don’t have to ever disagree (gasp!) on anything, because of the political risk. Perhaps the reason for Trump’s popularity among social conservatives lies in the fact that Trump funded his own nomination run, and so owes no man anything, and can say whatever he wants?

Or maybe because, like other unprincipled politicians before him, he will say whatever he needs to get re-elected? So we are left with this very odd picture, this aberration of this serial adulterer, verbal brawler, with a quick trigger finger on Twitter, and whatever else you may wish to call him, being used as a poster boy for what is arguably the most conservative political position on our continent.

Wasn’t there anyone else?

thinking aloud

trudy klassen

Reminds me of another 2016 U.S. election meme “America, really, you have 350,000,000 people and these are the best two you could come up with?

Where have all the social conservatives gone?

Or maybe a better question is why don’t they speak up?

Have social conservatives become lilylivered?

Can’t defend those views?

Or are just too nice?

Preston Manning’s book Faith, Leadership and Public Life lies on my coffee table.

I need to actually read it but already I have found intriguing ideas: “The abolitionists working with Wilberforce were zealous for the cause... but they didn’t rely exclusively on these elements in communicating their cause. They also meticulously and assiduously armed themselves with the facts, and this required research – exhaustive, thorough, and comprehensive research.”

A meme about the value of human life deserves better than someone so widely known to be so combative, but why is he the only world leader willing to say what probably most other leaders privately think?

yer look over the agreement before you sign it. One way to find lawyers willing to provide this service is to check Unbundling.ca for its list of BC lawyers providing unbundled services or see Finding a lawyer or legal advice at provincialcourt. bc.ca.

Since MyLawBC’s launch, LSS gathered feedback about the Dialogue Tool from both real-world users and user testing sessions.

Based on this feedback, they made a number of improvements to the tool. Some of those changes are to the tool’s backend and may not be readily apparent.

Here are some you might notice:

• The questions asked during the intake process are rearranged to follow an order that users thought was more natural.

• The legal clauses given to users are updated to make them easier to understand.

• A new section shows the original text of the legal clauses in the template so you can refer back to it after you edit them. LSS has heard a lot of positive things about the Dialogue Tool, and hopes with these changes to hear even more. You can try out the improved Dialogue Tool or learn more about it on MyLawBC.com.

97/16 handout photo MyLawbC offers a diaglogue tool for those seeking a separation agreement.

HeroiN, tHe woNder drug

sideBArs to HistorY

WilloW ARunE

Heroin is now recognized as a scourge of modern society. We spend millions of dollars annually on our attempts to stop distribution of the drug and more millions on treatment for those who become addicted.

But back when it was first synthesized in the later part of the 19th century, it was viewed as a wonder drug for the treatment of pain and many illnesses. It was sold over the counter without any prescription.

Opium was the source. By 1805, the painkillers morphine and codeine had been derived from opium. With the growing concern of addiction, morphine – then not thought to be addictive – was used to treat opium addiction. Overtime, the addictive nature of morphine became known.

In 1874, an English chemist developed a process to make an even more powerful painkiller from morphine. A contemporary study concluded that in animals the drug produced: “... great prostration, fear, sleepiness speedily following the administration, the eyes being sensitive and pupils dilated, considerable salivation being produced in dogs, and slight tendency to vomiting in some cases, but no actual emesis (vomiting). Respira-

tion was at first quickened, but subsequently reduced, and the heart’s action was diminished and rendered irregular. Marked want of coordinating power over the muscular movements and the loss of power in the pelvis and hind limbs, together with a diminution of temperature in the rectum of about four degrees, were the most noticeable effects.”

Twenty years later, the Bayer Pharmaceutical Company in Germany, famous for its Aspirin, was able to produce this new painkiller commercially. The name

heroin probably comes from the German word “heroisch” meaning “large, powerful, extreme, one with pronounced effect even in small doses.”

It was viewed as a wonder drug and soon became almost as popular as the company’s Aspirin. Other drug companies soon copied the process and heroin flooded the marketplace.

Once again, it was thought that this new drug was not addictive.

Used to treat morphine addiction, it was popular as a painkiller. It was recom-

mended for all types medical issues and especially for children.

While opium was initially thought to be only a Chinese problem in Canada, Mackenzie King saw it spreading to other Canadians after he met with opium dealers in Vancouver. Starting with the Opium Act of 1908, Canada incrementally regulated and banned various drugs. In 1914, the United States passed a law regulating the use of heroin and by 1924 the drug was totally banned.

There were two “heroin epidemics,” according to American medical reports, one in the 1940s and the other during the Vietnam War.

Recently, some countries, including Canada, have used pharmaceutical-grade heroin to treat addiction to street drugs, a treatment returning to the initial reason for heroin’s development.

In Vancouver, the Crosstown Clinic provides heroin to registered users as England has done for almost a century. It is believed that one in 10 addicts do not respond to the more traditional treatment such as methadone. For those affected finding a safe and supervised place is a way of avoiding the perils of street drugs and building a new life. Under the Stephen Harper government, this treatment was banned; with increasing overdosing and deaths, the Liberal government cancelled the ban and the Crosstown treatment started up again. Every new development brings both good and bad. The history of heroin serves as an example of good intentions gone very wrong.

Solution to: nFl DiviSionS

97/16 photo by Dutch national Archives via Wikimedia Commons

Mackenzie King saw heroin addiction spreading to Canadians in Vancouver, not just to asians as first believed.

These spectacular pants harken back to childhood

robin givhan 97/16 wire service

NEW YORK — If you grew up in an area where winter meant below-freezing temperatures and the occasional blizzard, then perhaps you have a strong memory of being zipped into a snowsuit – a quilted onsie of warmth. You wore it when the snow reached knee height. You wore it when you built a snowman and when you made snow angels. It was your snow day uniform. Sometimes the cuffs of the snowsuit had little clips where you could attach your mittens for easy access. Snowsuits were both practical and a little bit ridiculous. The most famous snowsuit of them all may be the red one worn by Ralph’s little brother Randy in A Christmas Story, the one that made him famously howl, “I can’t put my arms down!”

If snowsuits are part of your past and you have fond memories of them, then you will be delighted by a particular pair of red plaid trousers created by designer Rachel Comey for fall 2019. She paired them with a shimmering charcoal gray top, turning snow pants into a chic cocktail ensemble. But even if such Northern nostalgia is foreign to you

and all you see is quilting that vaguely recalls an old-fashioned bedspread, no matter. These pants still are delightful. They also happen to be constructed from a fabric woven from post-consumer water bottles.

The quilting was part of an eclectic collection that also included blanket coats, patterned sweaters that hint of a vintage store treasure hunt, plenty of plaids and a lot of sparkles. But there was something about the curving stitches and the delicate fluff of the quilted pieces that made them look especially inviting. They were cozy but also sophisticated.

Comey is the sort of designer who doesn’t play by the rules of trend forecasters and colour consultants. Her clothes always look as though they have emerged from some family scrapbook or private diary. They are her personal story and yet because they exude such humanity, they serve as a reminder that often the personal can be universal and that individual eccentricities and quirks are the things that make us compelling. Our clothes can tell the world who we are and they can remind us of who we used to be.

And a pair of quilted pants can bring us immense joy.

97/16 news service photo by Maria Valentino rachel Comey fall-winter 2019 collection see red plaid quilted pants a fashion statement.

97/16 news service photo by Maria Valentino rachel Comey featured an eclectic collection that included blanket coats, plenty of plaids and a lot of sparkles.