Ready for Downtown Winterfest
Master carver Peter Vogelaar tries
Extreme cold warning issued
An extreme cold warning remains in place.
Sampson biggest spender in council campaigns
Mark NIELSEN Citizen staff mnielsen@pgcitizen.ca
The candidate who received the second highest number of votes in the race for a seat on city council was the biggest spender in last fall’s elections.
In the process of drawing 8,304 votes – second only to Brian Skakun’s 9,475 – Kyle Sampson ran up $22,107.34 in expenses according to reports released this week by Elections BC. The total is just under the $22,988.48 limit candidates could spend during the election period and made Sampson’s campaign by far and away the most expensive. Frank Everitt’s was the second priciest at $13,359.99 while Skakun, a long-time incumbent, spent just $4,550. Along with the limit on how much they could spend, candidates were prevented from accepting donations from businesses and unions while contributions from individuals were limited to $1,200 per person.
That didn’t stop Sampson from generating $20,007.75 from 40 different supporters.
received, we wouldn’t have been able to run that campaign and it’s hard to say but perhaps might have not been successful on election day,” Sampson said. “But the placing we held at the end of the day was, I think, a spectacular representation of the campaign we had and the faith people had in me, so very grateful for that.”
Among Sampson’s biggest supporters were Selen and Anita Alpay, Maria De Sousa and Drew Doig, who contributed $1,200 each. Robert Elliott, Christopher Holmes and Amanda Chandler each donated $1,000 and John Brink provided $950 spread over two donations.
dates, Garth Frizzell’s campaign is listed as the least costly at $2,994.73.
However, in contrast to others who ran in past elections, the value of reused signs is not included in Frizzell’s expenses. Reached Friday, Frizzell said the signs he used were pulled out of storage from the 2014 campaign. He spent $3,261.81 on signs and billboards during that campaign, according to Elections BC records but maintained the signs are effectively worthless now.
Environment Canada issued the warning early Friday morning in response to a cold arctic air mass has settling over the Central Interior. Add on the wind chill and you’ll want to bundle up. “The combination of cold temperatures and winds will produce wind chills of minus 40 overnight,” the agency said. “The wind chill values are expected to ease Saturday afternoon.”
As of Friday afternoon, the agency was calling for -42 C with the windchill in the morning, rising to -23 C in the afternoon with wind from northeast at 30 km/h gusting to 50 km/h but becoming light near noon.
As a first-time candidate, Sampson said he wanted to get his name known among voters and the financial support he received was instrumental. He launched his campaign well before the election period officially started and with plenty of flash as the manager at Pacific Western Brewing put his skills as a marketer and promoter to use.
“Without the support that we
The new limits are “probably a good thing,” Sampson said, in the sense that a candidate is not able to rely on “one rich friend.”
“You’re getting support from more people to run a campaign you need to run, which is recognizing perhaps the end support that you’ll have at the poll,” Sampson said. Among the successful candi-
“I don’t see a value on that, certainly there was no market value, and the depreciation after four years,” he said. “Ultimately, it’s up to the Elections BC folks but if I made a mistake then absolutely I’d go back and fix and amend.” In terms of bang for the buck, Frizzell’s campaign was also the least expensive among those who were elected at 37 cents per vote ($2,994.73; 8199 votes), followed by Brian Skakun’s at 48 cents ($4,550; 9,475 votes), Cori Ramsay’s at 68 cents ($3,879.39; 5,693 votes) Murry Krause’s at 78 cents ($6,222.94; 8,008 votes), Susan Scott’s at $1.50 ($11,685.86; 7,775 votes), Terri McConnachie’s at $1.84 ($13,078.38; 7,111 votes), Frank Everitt’s at $2 ($13,359.99; 6,680 votes), and Sampson’s at $2.62 ($22,107.34; 8,304 votes). Re-elected Mayor Lyn Hall spent $6,613.65 while challenger Willy Ens spent nothing. Documents for all candidates are posted online at princegeorgecitizen.ca.
SAMPSON
CITIZEN PHOTO BY BRENT BRAATEN
Snow blows off a roof as pedestrians walk down the alley between Third Avenue and Fourth Avenue on Friday afternoon.
Minister orders trains to use handbrakes after derailment
Lauren KRUGEL Citizen news service
CALGARY — Canada’s transport minister has ordered the use of handbrakes on all trains stopped on mountain slopes following a deadly derailment earlier this week in the Rocky Mountains.
Marc Garneau said in a statement late Friday that the order is a precaution until the cause of the derailment is determined. It takes effect immediately.
“My department has issued a Ministerial Order under the Railway Safety Act to all railway companies mandating the use of handbrakes should a train be stopped on a mountain grade after an emergency use of the air brakes. This order takes effect immediately and will remain in effect as long as necessary,” said Garneau.
“As I have said many times before, rail safety is my top priority and I will never hesitate to take appropriate actions when necessary.”
A Vancouver-bound train with 112 grain cars was parked for two hours with its air brakes engaged on a grade east of Field, B.C., when it started moving on its own early Monday. The train sped up to well over the limit before 99 cars and two locomotives hurtled off the tracks.
Three employees with Canadian Pacific Railway – engineer Andrew Dockrell, conductor Dylan Paradis and trainee Daniel Waldenberger-Bulmer – were killed.
The Transportation Safety Board has said handbrakes were not applied.
A report by the railway company details how challenging it is to run trains in frigid temperatures. It was about -20 C at the time of the crash.
“Harsh winter conditions are an inescapable reality in Canada’s northern climate,” says a document titled White Paper: Railroading in the Canadian Winter on Canadian Pacific Railway’s website.
“Winter has a profound impact on a railway’s operations and its ability to maintain service for its customers.”
The white paper said cold increases air leakage from a train’s air-brake system that results in varying air pressures between the head and tail end of a train.
“This is a major challenge.”
Trains are shortened when temperatures dip below -25 C to ensure pressure remains consistent throughout their entire length, the report said.
A union representative has said the derailed train was shorter than the 135 cars CP has run in recent years. But a veteran Boston-based engineer said 112 cars is large for a train of full grain hoppers.
“Our forefathers in the business would never have put a train together that big under those climatic conditions and expected it to run smoothly,” said Joe Mulligan with Railroad Workers United, a volunteer-run group of rank-and-file railroaders across North America. Mulligan said it would have taken a lot of
handbrakes to hold back a train so big. And there was nothing to be done once the train was in motion.
The Calgary-based railway said in the report that it also places locomotives at different points along a train in the winter. Distributing power that way makes it quicker to pressurize air brakes. The train that derailed had a locomotive at the front, middle and end.
In extreme cold, dryers are used to prevent moisture from getting into the brakes, which means it takes longer to pressurize them and do the required safety checks, said the winter railroading report.
“This unavoidably increases the train’s terminal dwell time.”
The white paper also said train speeds must be reduced in frigid temperatures - by at least 16 km/h below -25 C and by at least 32 km/h at -35 C.
Will Young, a locomotive mechanic based in Kansas City, Mo., and an organizer at Railroad Workers United, said cold weather takes a toll on many train components.
“Things break that normally don’t. Steel just becomes brittle. Rubber seals just harden and don’t work.”
Young said he suspects some sort of mechanical issue caused the braking system to lose power. That could have set off the chain of events that led to the catastrophe.
“It only takes that ever-so-slight touch of momentum.”
A train derailment is shown near Field, B.C., on Feb. 4.
Hitting the wall
Heidi Martel from Settings Event Design and Decor has some fun showing where she wanted a walk through on the snow wall in Community Foundation Park, beside Four Seasons Pool where some of the activities will take place this Sunday at Downtown Winterfest. Downtown Winterfest will also take over Canada Games Plaza as well as have a winter market inside the Civic Centre.
B.C. moves closer to money laundering inquiry
Dirk MEISSNER Citizen news service
VICTORIA — Money laundering in British Columbia has become a top issue for the federal and provincial governments with federal Finance Minister Bill Morneau vowing a “crack down” Friday, while the province considers a public inquiry.
“The importance of dealing with money laundering concerns is something that is clearly on our agenda,” said Morneau at a news conference in Victoria. “We need to be very clear, we crack down on any issues around money laundering.”
Last year, an international anti-money laundering organization said in a report that up to $1 billion annually was being filtered through some B.C. casinos by organized crime groups.
The B.C. government also cited an RCMP intelligence report that estimated up to $1 billion from the proceeds of crime was used to purchase expensive Metro Vancou-
ver homes. An RCMP official said Friday the Mounties are searching their data bases to find the report the government has cited.
Former RCMP deputy commissioner Peter German’s review last year of money laundering at some B.C. gaming outlets found casinos served as laundromats that siphoned the money to organized crime groups.
B.C. Attorney General David Eby said Morneau’s comments add support to recent commitments by the federal government to fight money laundering.
Eby and Minister of Organized Crime Reduction Bill Blair met last month to work together and share information to combat money laundering.
“I’ve seen a real shift in the interest from the federal government on this issue,” Eby said.
Two B.C. government money laundering reviews are underway and are due in March. One probe will look to identify and
Overdose deaths almost doubled in 2018
Mark NIELSEN Citizen staff mnielsen@pgcitizen.ca
Prince George was home to 46 drug-related deaths last year, according to numbers the B.C. Coroners Service released this week. That’s nearly double the 24 recorded in 2017.
“We are doing a lot and saving lives but it’s still not sufficient to overcome the overwhelming impact of the extremely toxic drug supply that people are still turning to because they are still in pain and haven’t got another alternative,” Northern Health public health officer Dr. Andrew Gray said Friday. “I’m feeling frustration and just grief that so many lives have been lost and so many friends and family members out there that, in some cases, have lost a lot of people that they’re close to.”
Province-wide, 1,489 people died from illicit drug overdoses in 2017. The highly potent and addictive opioid fentanyl was detected in 86 per cent of those deaths, according to the Coroners Service.
The numbers prompted B.C.’s mental health and addictions minister to join health officials to call for a safer drug supply to fight the rising overdose death toll while urging the federal government to open a “courageous conversation” on decriminalization.
Gray indicated support for the move.
“There is a safe supply of opioids out there, it’s the pharmaceutical supply but the only way to access that is through a prescriber to prescribe it and a pharmacist to dispense it and there is a lot of restrictions on when people are allowed to prescribe opioids and what’s considered appropriate,” he said. “And just the capacity of people to do that work with all of the other work that physicians and pharmacists have to do. It’s not sufficient to displace the black market,
which is what we need.”
At the provincial level, Gray said more people are dying of overdoses than motor vehicle accidents, suicides and homicides put together. The rate of death by overdose is now also greater than that at the peak of the HIV epidemic in the late 1980s and early 1990s, he added.
Looking ahead, Gray said he sees a “greater discussion” of decriminalization and securing a safer supply.
“It doesn’t seem to be right around the corner yet, but they seem to be more and more reasonable topics of discussion and options that are starting to be entertained,” Gray said.
At 382, Vancouver remained home to the greatest number of such deaths, up slightly from 376 in 2017. Surrey was next at 210 deaths, followed by Victoria at 94, then Kelowna at 55 and Kamloops at 48, followed by Prince George. However, at 92 per cent, Prince George saw the greatest increase from 2017.
close regulatory gaps that could be used by money launderers in the real estate and financial services sectors.
The second review will focus on identifying the scale and scope of illicit activity in the real estate market and whether money laundering is linked to horse racing and the sale of luxury vehicles.
Eby said the findings of those reviews, collaborations with the federal government on legal issues and public concern about money laundering will help the government decide if a public inquiry on money laundering is warranted.
“The premier hasn’t ruled out a public inquiry,” said Eby. “He is actively monitoring the situation and I’m doing my best to keep him and cabinet informed on this quickmoving file.”
Morneau said the federal government’s focus on money laundering spreads beyond Canada’s borders where there are global concerns with dirty money funding terrorist
organizations.
“We worry more broadly with issues like terrorist financing, which is what the global community is looking at when they think about money laundering,” he said.
But Eby said many in the global community are looking at B.C. as a jurisdiction where money laundering by organized crime has flourished.
“To some extent international concern is focusing on what’s happening in B.C.,” he said.
“We really need the feds on board here.” He said it’s difficult to fully determine the extent of money laundering in B.C., other than to conclude the numbers are increasing.
“It’s really important that whether it’s $100 million, or a billion dollars, or $2 billion, whatever it ends up being, that the issue and the need to address it remains the same and... it is only growing in urgency,” Eby said.
Internal discussions on SNC-Lavalin included Wilson-Raybould
Joan BRYDEN
Citizen news service
OTTAWA — Former attorney general
Jody Wilson-Raybould was involved in extensive, internal government discussions last fall about whether SNC-Lavalin should be allowed to avoid criminal prosecution –and government officials maintain there’s nothing wrong with that.
They argue the discussions were all perfectly within the law and, indeed, the government would have been remiss not to deliberate over the fate of the Quebec engineering and construction giant given that a prosecution could bankrupt the company and put thousands of Canadians out of work.
The officials spoke on background Friday to The Canadian Press on condition that their names not be used, even as Conservatives and New Democrats demanded investigations by a House of Commons committee and the federal ethics commissioner into allegations that Wilson-Raybould was pressured by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s office to help SNC-Lavalin avoid prosecution.
Wilson-Raybould’s continued refusal to comment on the allegations added fuel to the political fire, started Thursday by a Globe and Mail report that she was demoted in a cabinet shuffle early last month because she refused to intervene in the SNC-Lavalin case. In a statement Friday morning, Wilson-Raybould, now veteransaffairs minister, said she is bound as the former attorney general by solicitor-client privilege and cannot publicly talk about aspects of the case.
The company has been charged with bribery and corruption over its efforts to secure government business in Libya and wants a deal, allowed under the law, to pay reparations rather than be prosecuted.
Toronto Liberal MP Arif Virani, the parliamentary secretary to current Justice Minister David Lametti, issued the most sweeping public denial of the story the government has issued so far.
“At no point has the current minister of justice or the former minister of justice been directed or pressured by the prime minister or the Prime Minister’s Office to make any decision on this or any other matter,” Virani
told the House of Commons on Friday. “The attorney general of Canada is the chief law officer of the Crown and provides legal advice to the government with the responsibility to act in the public interest. He takes those responsibilities very seriously.”
But no pressure does not mean there were no discussions about the issue, officials said. And the fact that the attorney general is supposed to be above political considerations does not mean he or she can’t be involved in those discussions.
In part, that’s because the attorney general in Canada wears a second hat as justice minister and, in that role, is expected to fully take part in all public-policy discussions around the cabinet table. Moreover, as justice minister, Wilson-Raybould was responsible for a 2018 Criminal Code amendment at the heart of the current controversy – which specifically allowed for what’s known as deferred prosecutions or remediation agreements to be negotiated rather than pursue criminal prosecutions against corporations. The amendment was intended to bring Canada in line with its other major allies,
including the United States, the United Kingdom and France, which all have similar provisions in their laws. The idea behind it is that a corporation should be held to account for wrongdoing without facing a prosecution that could bankrupt the company and make innocent employees pay the price for the actions of some unethical executives.
A guilty verdict on bribery and corruption charges would result in SNC-Lavalin being barred from government contracts in Canada for 10 years.
In turn, officials said that would likely cause foreign government contracts to dry up as well, potentially putting SNC-Lavalin out of business.
Consequently, they said, it was natural that internal discussions would have taken place after the director of public prosecutions, Kathleen Roussel, informed SNCLavalin last October that a remediation agreement would be inappropriate in this case. The company is challenging her decision in court.
SNC-Lavalin has taken out newspaper ads and heavily lobbied ministers, govern-
ment officials and even Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer and NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh to make its case for avoiding a prosecution. Quebec Premier Francois Legault has also pressured Trudeau directly to intervene on the company’s behalf. Under the law, the attorney general may issue a directive to the director of public prosecutions on how to handle a specific case, provided the directive is in writing and made public. Given the jobs at stake, officials said, the government would have failed in its duty had there not been discussion about whether to intervene in the SNC-Lavalin case. As justice minister, Wilson-Raybould would have been involved in those discussions. And even in her role as attorney general, she was not precluded from consulting her colleagues on whether to instruct the public prosecutor to negotiate a remediation agreement.
Officials pointed to a document entitled “Open and Accountable Government” on the PMO website, which spells out the conduct expected of ministers, including a lengthy section on the dual role of the justice minister and attorney general. On the matter of issuing directives to the director of public prosecutions (or “DPP”), the document says: “It is appropriate for the attorney general to consult with cabinet colleagues before exercising his or her powers under the DPP Act in respect of any criminal proceedings, in order to fully assess the public policy considerations relevant to specific prosecutorial decisions.”
(A check of an Internet archive showed that the passage has been in the document since it was first posted in 2015.)
None of that is likely to matter with opposition politicians, who maintain the whole affair smells like obstruction of justice. The Conservatives’ Scheer and the New Democrats’ Singh both called Friday for an ethics probe into the allegations. Conservatives and New Democrats on the Commons justice committee are also joining forces to get an emergency meeting next week to consider a motion calling on nine high-ranking government officials to testify, including Wilson-Raybould herself.
The list includes Lametti, the prime minister’s chief of staff Katie Telford, and his principal secretary Gerald Butts.
House leaders reviewing suspended officials’ responses
Citizen news service
British Columbia’s house leaders in the legislature say they will review written responses by two officials to a report that alleged they had engaged in flagrant overspending and questionable expenses.
Sergeant-at-arms Gary Lenz and clerk of the house Craig James submitted their responses to the report by Speaker Darryl Plecas on Thursday and denied any wrongdoing in statements to the media.
New Democrat House Leader Mike Farnworth, Liberal House Leader Mary Polak and Green House Leader Sonia Furstenau issued a brief joint statement on Friday confirming
they had received the responses. The leaders say they will thoroughly consider the responses and any decisions to release the documents publicly or change the status of the two permanent officers will be made after careful consideration of the information provided and in accordance with legal advice.
They say they will not be making any further comment on this matter at this time. Lenz and James were placed on administrative leave in November after members of the legislature learned of an ongoing RCMP investigation, and the two officials say they want their full written responses to the Speaker’s report to be made public.
Deadly violent attacks hit North Okanagan
Citizen news service
One man is dead and another has suffered non-life-threatening injuries in separate violent attacks near Vernon.
Vernon North Okanagan RCMP say the first incident occurred just before 1 a.m. when shots were fired during a targeted break-in in Lavington, about 15 kilometres east of the city.
RCMP Const. Kelly Brett says in a news release that one person in
the home was injured. About half an hour later, officers were called to a hotel to find a man with gunshot wounds, and he died a short time later.
Brett says multiple crime scenes are involved and it’s believed the break-in and fatal shooting may be related.
One man is in custody but there’s no word how that person may be connected to the attacks, although Brett said a news conference would be held later.
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FARNWORTH
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Veterans Affairs Minister Jodie Wilson-Raybould attend a swearing in ceremony at Rideau Hall in Ottawa on Jan. 14.
Quebec City mosque killer gets 40 years with no parole
Morgan LOWRIE Citizen news service
QUEBEC — Alexandre Bissonnette was driven by “racism and hatred” when he stormed into a Quebec City mosque and gunned down six worshippers in 2017, a judge said Friday as he sentenced him to 40 years in prison without possibility of parole.
Quebec Superior Court Justice Francois Huot began by saying the day of the murders “will forever be written in blood in the history of this city, this province, this country.”
But he rejected the Crown’s request for six consecutive life sentences, which would have prevented Bissonnette from seeking parole for 150 years and guaranteed that he end his life behind bars.
Huot concluded a sentence of 50 years or more would constitute cruel and unusual punishment, and he declared that the section of the Criminal Code allowing consecutive life sentences violates the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
While he did not strike down the section, he rewrote it to give himself the discretion to deliver consecutive life sentences that are not in blocks of 25 years, as had been the case. (First-degree murder carries an automatic sentence of life in prison with no possibility of parole before 25 years.)
Bissonnette, 29, pleaded guilty last March to six counts of first-degree murder and six of attempted murder after he walked into the mosque at the Islamic Cultural Centre during evening prayers on Jan. 29, 2017 and opened fire. The murder victims were Mamadou Tanou Barry, 42; Abdelkrim Hassane, 41; Khaled Belkacemi, 60; Aboubaker
Thabti, 44; Azzeddine Soufiane, 57; and Ibrahima Barry, 39.
Boufeldja Benabdallah, president of the mosque that was attacked, said community members were “stunned” by the decision and felt the judge was more concerned about the dignity of the killer than that of the victims and their families.
The Crown said it will take the time to study the 246-page decision before deciding whether to appeal. The defence also said it needs time to study the ruling.
As the judge read a detailed account of the shooter’s actions, several people in the Quebec City courtroom wept.
Huot noted that witnesses at his sentencing hearing testified that he had been severely bullied in school and had a documented history of mental health problems. He also lacked empathy, the judge said, quoting Bissonnette’s statement after the shootings: “I regret not having killed more people.”
The defence had argued Bissonnette should be eligible for parole after 25 years, but Huot said that would be too little.
The Criminal Code was amended in 2011 to allow a judge to impose consecutive sentences in cases of multiple murder, but it was clear as Huot spent nearly six hours reading the decision that he was wrestling
with the constitutionality of the provision.
In the end he sentenced Bissonnette to concurrent life sentences for five murders, and on the sixth added 15 years to bring the total to 40.
The longest prison sentence in Canada to date is 75 years without parole, which has been given to at least five triple killers since the law was changed to allow consecutive sentences.
All 250 seats in the courtroom were filled.
Among the aggravating factors Huot cited in determining the sentence were the “wellplanned and highly premeditated” nature of the crime, the number of victims, the fact they were in a house of worship and the hatred of Islam that motivated Bissonnette.
In addition to the men killed, five others were struck by bullets. The sixth attempted murder charge related to others who were nearby in the mosque.
The crime prompted an outpouring of horror and sympathy that reached across Canada and around the world, prompting a wider conversation on Islamophobia, intolerance, and the need for better understanding between communities. During a sentencing hearing last June, the conversation began to shift to the appropriate way to punish a crime that was, in many ways, unprecedented in Canadian history.
In pleading guilty, Bissonnette expressed shame and remorse for his actions but offered no clear explanation of why he did it.
In a statement read in court, he said he was “neither a terrorist nor an Islamophobe,” but rather someone who was “overcome by fear, by negative thoughts and a sort of horrible kind of despair.”
Serial killer murdered for ‘warped and sick gratification’: judge
TORONTO — A serial killer who mur-
dered eight men from Toronto’s gay village won’t be able to apply for parole for 25 years.
Bruce McArthur, 67, pleaded guilty last week to committing the crimes between 2010 and 2017.
The sentence delivered by Justice John McMahon means McArthur will not be eligible to apply for parole until he is 91 years old.
The judge says McArthur’s guilty plea was a mitigating factor, as was the age the serial killer will be when he can apply for parole.
McMahon also says he has no doubt McArthur would have continued to kill if he wasn’t arrested by police last year.
First-degree murder carries an automatic life sentence with no parole for 25 years, but a court can decide to impose consecutive periods of parole ineligibiliy for several convictions.
“The law is clear: a guilty plea is a mitigating factor. The second factor is the age of accused when he could apply for parole,” McMahon said. “The accused has saved the family, friends and community at large from enduring a graphic public trial that would have been a nightmare for everyone.”
The Crown sought a life sentence with no chance of parole for 50 years, while the defence had asked that McArthur be eligible for parole in 25 years.
McArthur’s victims were Andrew Kinsman, Selim Esen, Majeed Kayhan, Dean
Lisowick, Soroush Mahmudi, Skandaraj Navaratnam, Abdulbasir Faizi and Kirushna Kanagaratnam.
Court heard that many of them were immigrants and of South Asian or Middle Eastern descent. Some lived parts of their life in secret because of their sexual orientation. All of them had ties to the city’s LGBTQ community.
McArthur sexually assaulted and forcibly confined many of his victims before murdering them, court heard.
He killed most of the men in his bedroom, where he bound and then strangled them with rope, the court was told.
Then he posed their bodies for photographs, with many of the images featuring the same fur coat. Court heard he kept those
images in folders on his computer labelled for each of his victims, accessing some of those photographs long after the killings. McArthur dismembered all his victims and buried most of their remains in large planter pots at a home in midtown Toronto where he stored his landscaping equipment. One man’s remains were found in a garbage bin buried in a nearby ravine.
When he was arrested in January 2018, court heard that officers found a man tied to McArthur’s bed. Police later found a folder on McArthur’s computer labelled with the man’s name that contained images of him. At a two-day sentencing hearing, loved ones of McArthur’s victims spoke about the devastation, anger and struggles they experienced as a result of his crimes.
CITIZEN NEWS SERVICE PHOTO BY JACQUES BOISSINOT
Crown prosecutor Thomas Jacques reacts Friday to the judge’s sentencing for Alexandre Bissonnette who pleaded guilty after killing six people in a mosque shooting in 2017. Assistant Crown prosecutor Francois Godin looks on.
Blackface is a tool of oppression
White people designed blackface to keep black people down, to intimidate, mock and stereotype. It began during the 19th century and wasn’t about white people honuoring the talent of black people by dressing up to look like them. It was about mocking them and depicting them as lazy, stupid and less than fully human. It was a tool of oppression.
As a college kid in Virginia during the 1980s, I knew that and so did my classmates. But a whole lot of white people seem to not know that history, or understand why blackface is so offensive, whether it’s practiced by a college student or a new doctor. The turmoil in Virginia – where I have lived most of my adult life, including nine years in Richmond – may do some good if it reminds white people that a river of oppression runs through American history, deep and wide, down to today.
But the reporters rushing to the state capital to cover this important story about a poorly understood tool of white oppression are literally rushing past much larger and more powerful symbols of that oppression – symbols born of a similar desire to keep
black people down. There is no doubt that Virginia’s leaders need to be held accountable for their personal history, but every Virginia leader is responsible for the racist symbols that still loom over our lives.
The Confederate statues of Richmond’s Monument Avenue weren’t erected to honour the service of brave warriors. Those soldiers had been dead for decades before the statues went up.
No, the statues were put up by white people, beginning in the 1890s, to remind black people that, despite all that nonsense of Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant, as well as the so-called Reconstruction, we are back, and you are back down.
mockery – is king.
Statues were only about a certain kind of heritage, just as blackface was about a certain kind of storytelling. It was about hate, not history or art.
The towering likenesses of Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and Stonewall Jackson weren’t put up to celebrate history or heritage; they were put up as a message: The 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution aren’t going to help you black folks because the South has risen from that humiliation.
Jim Crow – a name rooted in blackface
If you doubt that well-documented history – if you are tempted to buy the “heritage, not hate” rhetoric – ask yourself this question: “Where are the statues of James Longstreet?” Remember: Longstreet was Lee’s most trusted general, his second in command, his “Old War Horse.” Longstreet was a brave and talented warrior for the Confederacy from beginning to end. But there aren’t any Longstreet statues in Richmond – and there weren’t any at all until 1998, in Gettysburg. That’s because his service to the United States continued after the Civil War, and he did something inconsistent with the purpose of the statues, and of blackface: he treated black people as citizens of the United States. Longstreet agreed to serve his reunified country, joined Lincoln’s Republican Party and helped Grant protect the rights of newly freed black Americans.
Longstreet committed two unforgivable sins in the eyes of white supremacists: he
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LETTERS
Issue is Cougars’ hockey ticket pricing
Re: Are we the next Cranbrook? editorial, Feb. 6. As I read this article, I had mixed feelings. Yes, the attendance (to Cougars’ games) was very good when the new ownership took over. Yes, they have poured all sorts of money into the team. Yes, we had an excellent season and a banner year. Then they started messing with the formula. We lost a lot of good players to aging out. We went into a rebuilding year. Nobody really expected a repeat of the season but hopes were high for a good year. Then we got the “exciting new pricing system” dropped on us with no warning whatsoever. My three tickets went up 60 per cent in cost. A lot of people were extremely angry, which was reflected in the drop in season ticket seats sold. Yes, they got some new ticket holders but they lost a lot of long-time supporters. We were going to drop our tickets but ended up keeping our seats and by the end of the season were paying premium prices to watch major midget hockey. We did renew again, as we love coming to the games and have
done so since the team arrived. Yes, the price dropped, but so did the number of games. The arena is nearly empty. We pay for red zone seats and quite often sit near people who have bought cheap seats and sit up in the premium areas. Mildly annoying to say the least.
We did not go to the Giants games this week for health reasons, but we haven’t missed any other games. There is still support for the team from a loyal few and are looking forward to seeing the rebuilt team unfold. But the writing was on the wall when they jacked around with the pricing system. That, not the team or the cold, is what kept people out of the rink.
Jayne Lukinchuk
Prince George
Thank you, Elvis fans
I would like to take this opportunity to thank the Prince George Citizen for their long time continued support in sponsoring the Steve Elliott Elvis Gospel Concert for the last eight years at the First Baptist Church. Each year, the net proceeds from the gospel concert go to a charity of choice with the last two years, along with this year, going to the Kordyban Lodge for cancer patients.
Unfortunately this year’s gospel show, slated for Jan. 19, had to be postponed due to a medical situation that sidelined our performer Steve Elliott but I’m happy to report he is now recovering with each passing day and will be back performing in the near future.
I would also like to thank the many people that purchased tickets for the Steve Elliott gospel concert, where he performs the gospel favourites of Elvis Presley. I’m happy to report we have now rescheduled it for Saturday, April 6t at the First Baptist Church.
I would also like to let everyone know we will honour the Jan. 19 tickets on April 6 and if people would like to purchase tickets for the upcoming show you can do so at the following locations: The Four Rivers Co-Op Convenience store and gas bar, 6749 Westgate Avenue, Koops Bike Shop, 1659 S. Nicholson St, Bibles for Mission Thrift Store, 1210 Third Avenue, First Baptist Church, 483 Gillett or at the door. Once again thank you to the Prince George Citizen for their support and all the gospel concert music fans, I hope to see everyone on Saturday, April 6. Glen (Moose) Scott Prince George
LETTERS WELCOME: The Prince George Citizen welcomes letters to the editor from our readers. Submissions should be sent by email to: letters@pgcitizen.ca. No attachments, please. They can also be faxed to 250-960-2766, or mailed to 201-1777 Third Ave., Prince George, B.C. V2L 3G7. Maximum length is 750 words and writers are limited to one submission every week. We will edit letters only to ensure clarity, good taste, for legal reasons, and occasionally for length. Although we will not include your address and telephone number in the paper, we need both for verification purposes. Unsigned or handwritten letters will not be published. The Prince George Citizen is a member of the National Newsmedia Council, which is an independent organization established to deal with acceptable journalistic practices and ethical behaviour. If you have concerns about editorial content, please contact Neil Godbout (ngodbout@pgcitizen. ca or 250-960-2759). If you are not satisfied with the response and wish to file a formal complaint, visit the web site at mediacouncil.ca or call toll-free 1-844-877-1163 for additional information.
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criticized Lee’s war leadership and he led a black militia to put down an 1874 white rebellion in Louisiana. That’s why this central figure in Civil War history is not depicted among the other Confederate statues in Richmond. The statues were only about a certain kind of heritage, just as blackface was about a certain kind of storytelling. It was about hate, not history or art. Blackface is an important subject for America and Americans must confront that part of its racist past. Those who did it or lied about it shouldn’t hold office.
Past actions matter.
But our present is filled with gigantic bronze embodiments of that same racism. They loom over Virginians every day. If Virginia’s leaders want to atone for a troubling legacy, changing state law so Richmond’s statues no longer taunt the progress of our country would be a good place to start.
Expressing bipartisan horror at blackface photos is essential but removing the statues would show all of America that Virginia really has changed.
— James Comey is a former director of the FBI and a former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.
NDP’s community benefits agreement a scam
The BC NDP launched the community benefits agreement (CBA) initiative last year with the promise that it will deliver “jobs, training and apprenticeships, and more trade opportunities for Indigenous peoples, women and youth around the province.”
Who could take issue with that?
The idea that public money on construction projects should benefit the community, and especially disadvantaged members of that community, certainly sounds right.
The criticism of CBAs has mostly been that the scheme will hand work in a non-competitive way to a small group of traditional trade unions, all of which have deep historic ties to the NDP. Much analysis has focused on the vast additional sums that projects delivered through CBAs will cost taxpayers.
But while British Columbians are outraged by the blatant cronyism of the CBA scheme, their criticism has been muted by their approval of the notion of it providing “community benefits.”
However, while there is no argument over whether the community should benefit from infrastructure work undertaken with public money, the argument is over whether the work must be handed to traditional trade unions in order for the community to benefit.
To better illustrate problems with the whole NDP CBA scheme, look to our company, LMS Reinforcing Steel Group (LMS).
LMS has long provided reinforcing steel supply and install services to many of B.C.’s largest infrastructure projects. B.C. operated and owned, LMS has provided steel supply and install for the Seato-Sky Highway, the Golden Ears Bridge, the Highway 1 expansion, the Vancouver Convention Centre, Ruskin Dam and BC Place, to name just a few. Within this province, we employ over 550 people.
LMS is not a member of a traditional trade union and is therefore effectively precluded from all infrastructure projects undertaken with CBAs. While the NDP will argue that LMS can still bid on CBA work, our employees would be forced to join the union and we could not do the work with our own employees; we would be forced to rely on any workers the union chose to dispatch to us. Effectively, LMS is excluded under the CBAs.
Excluding LMS from CBA projects might be warranted if such exclusion provided clear benefits to the community – benefits that LMS is unable or unwilling to provide. In other words, the ends of providing broad community benefits might justify the means of
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LMS exclusion.
But consider the following:
1. LMS has very few competitors for this kind of major infrastructure steel work in B.C. By excluding LMS, the competition is dramatically reduced, and the taxpayer will pay more for the work handed to our competitors.
2. Our employees rejected the traditional trade union model. LMS was raided by a traditional trade union in 2014. After the union spent many months of effort and hundreds of thousands of dollars, our employees voted to reject it by an overwhelming 4-to1 margin. LMS employees concluded that LMS pay and benefits, including an employer contributed RSP program, was preferable to what they could obtain by joining the traditional trade union.
3. LMS has an internal training and apprenticeship program that meets or exceeds what the union offers. In January 2019 alone, the LMS Academy delivered 29 classes and 127 hours of technical training to 134 employees. This training is provided on a virtually unlimited basis at no cost to our employees. Our employees apprentice toward the exact same trade designation as the union ironworkers, and LMS advances capable, hard working employees far more rapidly than the trade union ever will.
4. LMS employs far more women, First Nations members and new immigrants as ironworkers in B.C. than the trade union. By and large, construction trade unions remain bastions of white male privilege. By contrast, LMS ironworker crews in B.C. currently include 19 women, 48 First Nations workers and 20 new immigrants. Over 30 years ago, LMS introduced the first women to the ironworker trade in B.C. and we continue to enthusiastically welcome women to the trade. We work with First Nations and new immigrant groups to place their members and we employ, train and quickly advance anyone who is willing to work hard.
5. LMS gives to the communities in which it works. As just one example, LMS has donated more than $1 million to Canucks Place Children’s Hospice. Our employees are proud, contributing members of our local communities.
Norm Streu is president and chief operating officer of LMS Reinforcing Steel Group
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GUEST COLUMN NORM STREU
In West Iceland, take the glacier less traveled
Alternatives to overcrowded destinations
Danielle BRAFF Citizen news service
• In Reykjavik, scarce lagoon tickets, crawling traffic and booked restaurants.
Iceland has become the coldest tourism hot spot – and for good reason.
A relatively easy flight from practically anywhere in the United States deposits passengers a short drive away from the Blue Lagoon; an hour later, you can be neckdeep in the lava field’s natural geothermal spa.
The Golden Circle is another must-do. It’s about a 300-kilometre loop from Reykjavik to the centre of Iceland and back. Visitors pass through glorious landscapes that include molten lava eruptions and some of the most spectacular waterfalls before returning to a once relatively quiet capital city now booming with restaurants, souvenir shops, museums and bars.
While it’s still possible to find spots in Iceland that look like a mural, its go-to destinations are often overcrowded. Tickets for the Blue Lagoon are frequently sold out. The Golden Circle has become so tourist-ridden that you can simply follow the slow-moving buses rather than use GPS. And if you dare enter a Reykjavik restaurant without a reservation, you’d better be dining at 4 p.m. If you prefer the road less traveled, go here during the less popular winter months (though it’s cold and dark) or make your reservations early.
• In West Iceland, a lava tube, glacial cave, geothermal pool and more. Remarkably, however, you can experience geothermal saunas, glaciers, caves and more after driving about an hour northwest from Reykjavik to a portion of the country that seems virtually untouched by tourists: the region known as West Iceland.
The water flowing into Krauma, a geothermal bath in Reykholt, arrives directly from the smallest glacier in Iceland before being dispersed into five baths of varying temperature. (Only true Icelanders could dip more than their toes in the hottest of the baths.) If you go midweek, you may be the only people here.
Vatnshellir Cave, within Snae-
fellsjokull National Park, offers guided tours of an 8,000-year-old, below-the-surface lava cave. After descending in a spiral, wearing a provided helmet and head-lamp, you’ll feel like you’ve entered a different planet. (Pro tip: Although it may have been warm enough for a fugitive couple to allegedly live there comfortably centuries ago, it’s now bitterly cold in winter, so dress appropriately.)
If you take the Into the Glacier tour, which departs from Husafell or the Klaki base camp, depending on the season, you’ll ride in a ridiculously large vehicle – or atop a snowmobile – to Iceland’s second-largest glacier, Langjokull. Then, you’ll enter a minuscule opening into a magnificent ice cave, complete with an ice bar and an ice chapel. Yes, you can get married here.
West Iceland also offers the only full sheep farm in the country: at remote Bjarteyjarsandur, visitors
can herd sheep (traditionally, children race after the animals while adults sip whiskey and watch), shear sheep, pick wild mussels and do other chores, depending on the season. Guests can stay at one of four on-site mountain cottages, as
well as inside the farmhouse with the owners, and experience a true farm-to table meal at the farm’s tiny restaurant. Another only-in-West-Iceland experience is the Bjarnarhofn Shark Museum in the Snaefellsnes
Peninsula, where you
about
can learn all
fermented shark meat, a traditional Icelandic dish, and sample it along with Iceland’s signature spirit – Brennivín schnapps. — Braff is a writer based in Chicago. WASHINGTON POST PHOTO BY KARLY
The sun starts to set after midnight in the western-most part of the Snaefellsnes Peninsula, home to the Bjarnarhofn Shark Museum.
WASHINGTON POST PHOTOS BY JABIN BOTSFORD
ABOVE: A woman floats in the Blue Lagoon, a geothermal spa which is one of the most visited attractions in Iceland. RIGHT: The Blue Lagoon is always a popular spot. Tickets are frequently sold out.
Sports
Canadians, Beaudry fade in biathlon World Cup
Citizen news service
CANMORE, Alta. — Norway continued to dominate the biathlon World Cup in Canmore, Alta., winning the men’s relay in frigid conditions Friday for a third gold medal.
Johannes Thingnes Boe, Vetle Sjaastad Christiansen and Lars Helge Birkeland, who finished first, second and fourth respectively in the previous day’s 15-kilometre race, joined Erlend Bjoentegaard to claim victory in the 4 x 7.5 relay.
France finished second ahead of Russia in third at the Canmore Nordic Centre.
The Canadian team of Christian Gow and Scott Gow of Calgary, Jules Burnotte of Sherbrooke, Que., and Brendan Green of Hay River, N.W.T., was fourth after two legs, but faded to finish 10th.
The women’s 4 x 6k relay was won by Germany later Friday, with Norway in silver position, and France claiming bronze in a close race to the finish with Italy.
Canada’s Sarah Beaudry, Emma Lunder, Megan Bankes and Rosanna Crawford were unable to finish the event.
“The first loop I was relaxed and gliding well at the front of the pack” says Beaudry, of Prince George. “But it didn’t go well in
the range at all.”
Tiril Eckhoff of Norway won the women’s 12.5k on Thursday.
Arctic temperatures in Alberta have forced organizers to reschedule and shorten races in Canmore. The biathletes have been racing with covered faces, or at least with tape covering their noses and cheeks.
Biathletes carry an additional three rounds of ammunition in relays. The Norwegians commented Friday that windchills ranging around minus-25 made it difficult to handle the extra bullets.
The remaining mass-start races of 15k for the men and 12.5k for the women have
been switched to sprints of 10k and 7.5k respectively, and will run Sunday.
The relay was the final race of Green’s career. The three-time Olympian, who won a world championship bronze in the 2016 relay, retired after 11 years on Canada’s biathlon team.
“Today was special,” Green said. “I tried to have a great race but also let all the little moments sink in. It’s been a great career with lots of amazing years, experiences, and people, which is what I will remember.”
The 32-year-old and Canadian teammate Crawford, who is also retiring after this season, will be married in August.
Timberwolves edge Spartans, advance to second round
Ted CLARKE Citizen staff
tclarke@pgcitizen.ca
For the first time in their seven-year U Sports Canada West Conference existence the UNBC Timberwolves are moving on to the second round of playoffs. They went in to the Langley Events Centre and defeated the Trinity Western University Spartans 80-78 in the sudden-death thriller to advance to the bestof-three quarterfinal round next weekend.
Mara Mongomo was simply magnificent. The fourth-year guard from Las Palmas, Spain set the tone with one of her best games of the season, scoring a game-high 29 points, none more clutch than the two she sank with 33 seconds left to cap a 10-2 run which gave the T-wolves the lead, after Vasiliki Louka blocked a shot at the other end of the court from Kianna Wiens.
There was a still plenty of drama left. Mongomo came up with another big block with 9.6 seconds left and the ball came to Madison Landry at the sideline, where she got double-teamed by Wiens and Nicole Franson and was called for travelling.
Sarah Buckingham in-bounded for the Spartans and got the ball back, letting go a shot from inside the key that bounced in and out of the rim into the hands of Louka, who killed the clock, cinching their first-ever playoff win.
“It’s an amazing feeling,” said Louka.
“We are so happy that we did it for the first time. It was a really nice game to watch and play. This ‘W’ it’s really important for us.
“Maria had a really good game from the beginning so we as a team tried to get her the ball and that’s what we did in the end. The ball went to the best player in the game and every other player tried to help with everything else. We
were down by eight points the last three minutes of the game and we played great defence and we won. It was a really great team win.”
Tessa Ratzlaff and Jessie Brown warmed up their shooting arms in the fourth quarter and the Spartans led 76-68 with 3:25 left but the T-wolves had an answer for that. Mongomo started the comeback with a pair form the
foul line and with the T-wolves launching a full-court press, Mongomo stole one under the bucket and sunk another two as she got fouled, then completed the three point play. Franson answered with a field goal to make it a five-point game. But Alina Shakirova hit for a triple and Landry tied it, setting the stage for Mongomo. Landry scored 17 points and
Shakirova collected 13 and had six rebounds. Louka, the T-wolves six-foot-three post, was her usual dominant self with 13 rebounds and 12 points.
The T-wolves were deadly from the foul line, making 16-of-17 attempts. They shot 47.5 per cent (28-for-59) from the field and 47.1 per cent (8-for-17) from three-point range.
Ratzlaff finished with 20 points and had eight rebounds, Brown shot 13 points and Buckingham had a 12-point game. Wiens picked up four assists and four steals and nine points.
The T-wolves held a slight edge at the end of the first quarter, leading 22-19. Mongomo, who averaged 20 points as the league’s third-most productive scorer, got off a great start with eight firstquarter points.
Mongomo kept up her torrid pace in the second quarter, hitting two triples and she had two more field goals for an 18-point half. The Spartans put together a sevenpoint run in the second quarter took their first lead of the game, prompting Sergey Shchepotkin to call his first timeout of the game.
The T-wolves responded immediately.
Abby Gibb hit from three-point range and Mongomo did the same, then put one in off the glass to tie the game 32-32. She hit her second three off the night and put in another from short range which gave UNBC a 39-34 lead to take into the locker room.
— see ‘I’M PROUD, page 11
Prince George’s Sarah Beaudry skis during World Cup biathlon women’s short 12.5 km event in Canmore, Alta., on Thursday.
HANDOUT PHOTO
UNBC Timberwolves’ player Madison Landry drives the ball forward during a game against the Trinity Western University Spartans in Langley on Friday. The Timberwovles won 80-78.
Hockey Day in Canada happening today
Gemma KARSTENS-SMITH Citizen news service
VANCOUVER — An annual celebration of everything hockey will have extra implications for many Canadian NHL teams this year.
Six of the country’s seven squads are still in the hunt for playoff spots, making each of this year’s Hockey Day in Canada matchups an opportunity to collect crucial points.
This year’s event is based in Swift Current, Sask., but the highlight takes place in Montreal, where the Canadiens host the Toronto Maple Leafs in a battle that could foreshadow a first-round playoff series.
Here’s a look at all four of today’s Hockey Day in Canada contests:
Winnipeg Jets at Ottawa Senators
Hockey Day in Canada has long been a big deal for Senators right-winger Mark Stone.
“I still remember when it was in Winnipeg and I was like seven or eight-years-old and my dad was one of the guys who got to go on camera and ask Don Cherry a question,” he said Thursday. “And I remember thinking that was the coolest thing in the world.”
The event is an opportunity to recognize a big part of Canadian culture, said Matt Duchene, a native of Haliburton, Ont.
“It just makes you proud to be Canadian. I still love getting on the outdoor rink,” said the Ottawa centre. “When I go home I have a big bunch of buddies who get together and we’re always talking hockey and we have a big group chat. It’s been really nice to be able to get home and enjoy those moments.” Stone, Duchene and the rest of the Sens will play the early game on Saturday, taking on the Winnipeg Jets in Ottawa.
The Jets are coming off a tough 5-2 loss to the Canadiens on Thursday but still sit atop the Central Division with 71 points. They’ll have to play a different game to beat Ottawa, said Brendan Lemieux.
“We just have to be better. And if we clean up our game, we can beat anybody. But if we’re not sharp, this is the NHL and they’re getting paid too, anybody can beat us,” the Jets left-winger said after the Montreal loss. Ottawa is lingering at the bottom of the Eastern Conference standings with just 45 points, but Winnipeg goalie Connor Hellebuyck said the team shouldn’t be underestimated.
Toronto Maple Leafs at Montreal Canadiens
If the hockey season ended today, these longtime rivals would meet in the playoffs for the first time since 1979.
Leafs coach Mike Babcock said this is the first time both Toronto and Montreal are excelling since he joined the franchise in 2015.
“They’re a team that’s doing well, we’re a team that’s doing well,” he said. “We’d both like to be higher in the standings. It’s an important game. They’re a good hockey club, we’re a good hockey club. Something’s
got to give.”
The Canadiens sit just a point behind the second-place Leafs in the Atlantic Division standings. Both teams are on three-game win streaks and neither has lost in regulation since Jan. 20.
Facing the Leafs in Toronto will be another “playoff-type game,” said Montreal centre Phillip Danault.
“We want to keep getting points to make the playoffs,” he said after the Canadiens’ win over Winnipeg. “We know it’s a really good team. They’re playing well, too. A lot of skill. It’s always been a big battle and rivalry against the Leafs. It’s going to be exciting.”
Babcock was watching the WinnipegMontreal game and said he saw a Canadiens team that’s playing with good speed and some hot lines.
Still, the coach is confident going into Saturday’s game.
“We’ve good players too,” he said. “And we’re going to put good players on the ice and they’re going to have to worry about defending us as well. Ideally we play right and we play fast and it turns into one heck of a hockey game.”
San Jose Sharks at Edmonton Oilers
The Oilers will be looking to build some momentum after beating the Minnesota Wild 4-1 on Thursday.
“We’ve got a blueprint for success on the
road and we’ve got to take our road game back home and not try to dance with other teams,” coach Ken Hitchcock said after the victory.
“We’re built a certain way right now and we’ve got to play this way to win hockey games. We’re doing it on the road and I see no reason why we can’t take it home and hopefully play the same way there.”
Despite a season that can be described as patchy at best, Edmonton is still in the hunt for a playoff position, sitting just two points out of a wild card spot with 53 points.
Meanwhile, San Jose is coming off a big 5-2 win over the Calgary Flames on Thursday and sits second in the Pacific Division with 71 points. They may be the only American team playing on the Hockey Day in Canada schedule, but taking part in the tradition is still important for at least one Sharks player.
“Obviously, playing in the U.S., we don’t get as many opportunities as you do in Canada, to play on Hockey Night in Canada. It’s something that I know, as Canadians, you look forward to and it’s easy to get excited for,” said Vancouver native Evander Kane.
Calgary Flames at Vancouver Canucks
The Flames top the Pacific Division with 73 points, but they head into Vancouver following Thursday’s tough home loss to San Jose.
“It didn’t go our way tonight and we’ve got a big stretch of games coming up, big road trip starting in Vancouver, so we’ve got to shake with one off and come back ready to play in Van,” Calgary centre Mark Jankowski said after the defeat.
Expectations for the Canucks weren’t high coming into the season but Vancouver remains firmly in the playoff race. They were tied with the St. Louis Blues in points on Friday, but the Blues held control of the Western Conference’s final playoff spot having played fewer games. Still, the Canucks are coming off a disappointing road swing that saw them take just three points from four games. The trip also saw three players go down with injuries. Vancouver has yet to disclose what happened to left-winger Sven Baertschi, but defenceman Alex Edler is expected to be out of the lineup for about a week with a concussion and goalie Thatcher Demko will miss about 10 days with a knee sprain. Star rookie Elias Pettersson forced overtime against the Chicago Blackhawks with a late power-play goal Thursday night, but Vancouver ultimately dropped a 4-3 decision.
“We’ve just got to get some practice in and make sure we’re all clicking and on the same page and start from scratch and just kind of erase the past and start over,” Canucks right-winger Brock Boeser said after the loss.
— With files from Darren Haynes in Calgary, Kelsey Patterson in Montreal and Lisa Wallace in Ottawa
More than 190 CFL players set to become free agents
Dan RALPH Citizen news service
Jeremy O’Day’s first foray into CFL free agency as a general manager promises to be a unique one.
As of Friday, more than 190 players were scheduled to hit the open market at noon Tuesday. That number could change with teams signing prospective free agents before the deadline, but starting quarterbacks Mike Reilly, Bo Levi Mitchell and Trevor Harris are expected to headline a deep talent pool.
With only one quarterback on Saskatchewan’s roster, it’s a position of priority for O’Day, who was named the Roughriders’ vicepresident of football operations/ GM last month.
“It will be interesting to see if everyone makes it to free agency,” O’Day said. “If they do, it’s really going to add a different dynamic because I don’t think there’s been one like it with the amount of franchise quarterbacks going to free agency.
“It’s a different year with the amount of players who’ll potentially be on the market. It’s a lot, but it’s also an opportunity.”
This won’t be O’Day’s first freeagency experience. In 2011, he became Saskatchewan’s football operations co-ordinator before being named assistant GM a year later. He was appointed vicepresident of football operations and administration in December 2015.
Toronto Argonauts GM Jim Popp also is a veteran of CFL free agency. But even he can’t remember seeing so many players poised to hit the open market.
“By sheer numbers, yes, it’s different,” said Popp. “There’s a lot of people waiting and wondering what’s going on.
“It’s going to be interesting to see how free agency is.”
There are many reasons for the abundance of free agents. They include:
• Veteran players being allowed to sign one-year deals. Many go
this route to not only keep their options open at season’s end, but also be better able to cash in quickly following a solid campaign.
• The uncertainty regarding the ’19 salary cap. That figure was $5.2 million last year but the current CBA is scheduled to expire in May. As well, the league’s minimum salary in 2018 was $54,000.
• The CFL not allowing players who sign contracts this off-season to collect signing bonuses until after a new CBA is ratified. Essentially, there’s no reason to justify signing immediately.
• More options outside the CFL. The eight-team American Alliance of Football begins play Saturday while the rejuvenated XFL has started preparing for its 2020 reincarnation. The AAF’s standard player contract covers three years and US$250,000 –$70,000, $80,000 and $100,000 – in base salaries with a chance to earn more with bonuses.
Regardless of the reasons why,
the end result is an abundance of available talent that gives GMs many options to fix whatever ails their teams.
In the CFL, the quickest fix often comes at quarterback quarterback. Reilly was the league’s highest-paid player last year at over $500,000 with the Edmonton Eskimos, but he’s expected to set a new benchmark (around $700,000) in free agency. Reilly, 34, hasn’t missed a game the last three years and thrown for more than 5,500 yards each season. After guiding Edmonton to a Grey Cup title in 2016, Reilly was the CFL’s top player the following season. He has 88 TD passes the past three years.
Reilly’s timing to hit free agency couldn’t be better. Only the Hamilton Tiger-Cats (Jeremiah Masoli) and Winnipeg Blue Bombers (Matt Nichols) have established starters under contract.
Reilly will help determine what Mitchell (Calgary Stampeders) and Harris (Ottawa Redblacks)
can command on the open market. However, a big challenge for GMs is trying to sign free agents while not knowing what the ‘19 salary cap will be.
“It’s going to be a little difficult because you don’t want undershoot it and miss out on players, but you don’t want to overshoot it and be in cap violation,” O’Day said. “It’s unique but we dealt with that five years ago (when the last CBA was expiring).”
Mitchell, 28, has led Calgary to two Grey Cups (2014, 2018) and been named the CFL’s top player twice (2016, ‘18) since becoming the starter in 2014. At age 28, the native of Katy, Texas – who is 69-15-2 as a starter – is definitely in his prime.
Mitchell worked out for seven NFL clubs this off-season, but he has not signed a contract. CFL sources say if Mitchell opts to remain in Canada, he’s not necessarily a lock to return to Calgary and would explore all of his options.
AP PHOTO
Vancouver Canucks left winger Josh Leivo, second from left, celebrates with teammates after scoring against the Chicago Blackhawks during a game on Thursday in Chicago. The Canucks play the Calgary Flames today as part of Hockey Day in Canada.
British actor Albert Finney dies at 82
Gregory KATZ Citizen news service
LONDON — Albert Finney, one of the most respected and versatile actors of his generation and the star of films as diverse as Tom Jones and Skyfall, has died. He was 82.
From his early days as a strikingly handsome and magnetic screen presence to his closing acts as a brilliant character actor, Finney was a British treasure known for charismatic work on both stage and screen.
Finney’s family said Friday that he “passed away peacefully after a short illness with those closest to him by his side.” He died Thursday from a chest infection at the Royal Marsden Hospital in London, a cancer treatment centre.
Finney burst to international fame in 1963 in the title role of Tom Jones, playing a lusty, humorous rogue who captivated audiences with his charming, devil-may-care antics.
He excelled in many other roles, including Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, a 1960 drama that was part of the “angry young man” film trend.
Finney was a rare star who managed to avoid the Hollywood limelight despite more than five
decades of worldwide fame. He was known for skipping awards ceremonies, even when he was nominated for an Oscar.
Tom Jones gained him the first of five Oscar nominations. Other nominations followed for Murder on the Orient Express, The Dresser, Under the Volcano and Erin Brockovich. Each time he fell short.
In later years he brought authority to big-budget and high-grossing action movies, including the James Bond thriller Skyfall and two of the Bourne films. He also won hearts as Daddy Warbucks in Annie.
He played an array of roles, including Winston Churchill, Pope John Paul II, a southern American lawyer, and an Irish gangster. There was no “Albert Finney”type character that he returned to again and again.
In one of his final roles, as the gruff Scotsman, Kincade, in Skyfall, he shared significant screen time with Daniel Craig as Bond and Judi Dench as M, turning the film’s final scenes into a master class of character acting.
“The world has lost a giant,” Craig said.
Although Finney rarely discussed his personal life, he said in 2012 that he had been treated for kidney cancer for five years.
He also explained why he had not attended the Academy Awards in Los Angeles even when he was nominated for the film world’s top prize.
“It seems silly to go over there and beg for an award,” he said.
The son of a bookmaker, Finney was born May 9, 1936, and grew up in northern England on the outskirts of Manchester. He took to the stage at an early age, doing a number of school plays and –
despite his lack of connections and his working-class roots – earning a place at London’s prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts.
He credited the headmaster of his local school, Eric Simms, for recommending that he attend the renowned drama school.
“He’s the reason I am an actor,” Finney said in 2012.
Finney made his first professional turn at 19 and appeared in several TV movies.
Soon, some critics were hailing him as “the next Laurence Olivier” – a commanding presence who would light up the British stage. In London, Finney excelled both in Shakespeare’s plays and in more contemporary offerings.
Still, the young man seemed determined not to pursue conventional Hollywood stardom. After an extensive screen test, he turned down the chance to play the title role in director David Lean’s epic Lawrence of Arabia, clearing the way for fellow RADA graduate Peter O’Toole to take what became a career-defining role.
But stardom came to Finney anyway in Tom Jones.
That was the role that introduced Finney to American audiences, and few would forget the sensual, blue-eyed leading man who helped the film win a Best
Picture Oscar. Finney also earned his first Best Actor nomination for his efforts and the smash hit turned him into a Hollywood leading man.
Finney had the good fortune to receive a healthy percentage of the profits from the surprise hit, giving him financial security while he was still in his 20s.
“This is a man from very humble origins who became rich when he was very young,” said Quentin Falk, author of an unauthorized biography of Finney. “It brought him a lot of side benefits. He’s a man who likes to live as well as to act. He enjoys his fine wine and cigars. He’s his own man. I find that rather admirable.”
The actor maintained a healthy skepticism about the British establishment and turned down a knighthood when it was offered, declining to become Sir Albert.
“Maybe people in America think being a ‘Sir’ is a big deal,” he said. “But I think we should all be misters together. I think the ‘Sir’ thing slightly perpetuates one of our diseases in England, which is snobbery.”
Finney is survived by his third wife, Pene Delmage, son Simon and two grandchildren. Funeral arrangements weren’t immediately known.
Studio immortalizes Big Bang Theory
David BAUDER Citizen news service
BURBANK, Calif. — Champagne briefly replaced scripts Thursday for a ceremony renaming the nondescript Stage 25 on the sprawling Warner Bros. production lot after the sitcom The Big Bang Theory. Still television’s most popular comedy, the show will exit the airwaves and the studio it has called home for 12 years this spring.
Actors Jim Parsons, Johnny Galecki, Kaley Cuoco, Mayim Bialik and the rest of the comic ensemble ran through lines for an episode that will air in early March before
studio brass joined them to unveil a plaque.
“We’re going to be miserable when this is over,” series creator Chuck Lorre told the cast and assembled crew. “I’m so sad.” Lorre said it wasn’t his call to end the series, but now that it’s been made the time feels right.
The cast rehearsed an episode that hints at some upcoming transitions with barely a flub. It’s not an unfamiliar ritual: they will have made 279 episodes by the time it all ends in May. The episode they rehearsed will be filmed before a live audience later this week.
Only four other studios at Warner Bros. have a similar plaque for
the series that filmed there, with others named for Two and a Half Men, ER, Friends and Ellen. “It’s so rewarding to put a show up in front of a live audience,” he said. “It’s exciting, it’s nervewracking, it’s heart-breaking. The audience doesn’t always respond the way you want them to and you’re trying to make it work. But it’s really a tiny bit of theatre, and that I love. I don’t want to let it go.”
The Big Bang exit marks another transition phase for television, with ABC announcing earlier this week that its five-time Emmy winner, Modern Family, will call it quits next year.
to honour Kristoff St. John
LOS ANGELES — The Young and the Restless is remembering Kristoff St. John with a series of special episodes.
The CBS soap opera on Friday will broadcast a special tribute to the actor, who played the struggling alcoholic and ladies’ man Neil Winters for 27 years. The 52-year-old died Sunday at his home in Los Angeles. The cause of death is under investigation by the medical examiner. His last episode aired Wednesday.
Young and the Restless will feature a story line that pays tribute to both Kristoff and his character beginning in late April.
St. John had played Neil Winters on the soap opera since 1991, earning nine daytime Emmy nominations.
FINNEY
ST. JOHN
Lego sequel uneven
Michael O’SULLIVAN Citizen news service
Like a well-engineered tower of brightly coloured building blocks, the Lego movie franchise, now four films strong, achieved its zenith with The Lego Batman Movie, a 2017 stand-alone spinoff of the excellent 2014 original that appealed to both young fans of the construction toys and grown-up aficionados of the brooding Caped Crusader. Funny, smart and unexpectedly moving, it was a story that could be enjoyed on multiple levels simultaneously.
Later that same year, the wobbly, less inspired The Lego Ninjago Movie hit theatres, more like a featurelength commercial for the titular TV show and its tie-in construction sets than a necessary addition to the canon.
The new The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part, while cute, enormously entertaining and stuffed with more jokes than you can count, is only a half-step up. Partly, that’s a problem that’s built into its very premise.
Picking up where the first film left off, with the Lego-size city of Bricksburg being threatened by invading aliens from a world of Duplo building blocks – Lego’s toddler-centric gateway drug for ages 18 months to five years old – The Second Part, like the first, plays out as one giant metaphor: it’s a story taking place in the imagination of a child, Finn (Jadon Sand).
Here, however, Finn’s antagonist is no longer his father (Will Ferrell), a man whose obsessive-compulsive engagement with Legos flew in the face of Finn’s more freewheeling sense of play, but his little sister, Bianca (Brooklynn Prince of The Florida Project).
Finn, now five years older and a teenager, has adopted a darker, more grown up sensibility. His Lego world is post-apocalyptic, evoking the Mad Max universe at times (along with The Matrix and other R-rated entertainments that he has, presumably, been digesting in the interim). Bianca’s imaginative universe, with which his clashes in this tale, is more, er, princess-pink.
Although both this film and the 2014 original center on a conflict between styles of play, Lego 2’s central struggle – between what’s dark, cool, edgy and grown up and what is cute, shiny, poppy and young, as a line in the film puts it – carries over to our enjoyment of the film itself.
In other words, Finn and Bianca’s failure to play well together infects the experience of watching it. Because their make-believe worlds can’t resolve their differences – threatening to lead to something called “Our-Mom-ageddon,” in which Finn and Bianca’s mother (Maya Rudolph) will relegate their toys to storage bins – there’s a persistent schism in Lego 2 itself.
In the story, that split manifests itself in numerous ways: Bianca’s main plaything, the self-absorbed queen of the Systar system, Watevra Wa’Nabi (voice of Tiffany Haddish), has kidnapped several characters from Bricksburg, including Batman (Will Arnett), whom she plans to brainwash and marry in an elaborate ceremony. (Think of it as the Lego version of a little girl’s tea party, but with her big brother’s military action figures.)
Chris Pratt’s naive Emmet Brickowski, aided by the superhero Rex Dangervest, must rescue his friends, including his ladylove Lucy (Elizabeth Banks). In a clever touch, Rex – whose last name evokes Pratt’s costume in Jurassic World – is also voiced by Pratt. But as this rift between on-screen worlds persists, so does it in the seats.
To be sure, there is much that is knowing and snarky in this most meta of movies. Rex carries a CPD – a Convenient Plot Device – and a weapon called an Implausitron. And the jokes about various performers of the Batman character – from Ben Affleck to Adam West, and everyone in between – fly like Lego bricks being hurled at each other by warring siblings. But the film’s underlying conceit, one that continually toggles back and forth between the worlds of Emmet/Watevra Wa’Nabi and Finn/Bianca, is handled less gracefully than it was in the first film. The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part is at times enormously fun, especially during a six-minute closing-credit sequence accompanied by a rap featuring the singer Beck and the Lonely Island comedy trio. But like a forced marriage between a Lego minifig and a Duplo character, its parts don’t fit together seamlessly.
— Two-and-a-half stars out of four
Abramson admits errors in book
NEW YORK (AP) — The former executive editor of The New York Times has acknowledged making some sourcing errors in her book Merchants of Truth and says she will correct them. In an email Thursday, Jill Abramson wrote that some page numbers in the sourcing notes needed to be fixed and that some sources “should have been cited as quotations in the text.”
A Twitter thread posted Wednesday by Vice correspondent Michael C. Moynihan listed several examples of passages in Abramson’s book that closely resembled the work of others.
WARNER BROS. PICTURES HANDOUT IMAGE
Emmet, voiced by Chris Pratt, faces an alien invasion in The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part.
Velvet Buzzsaw an art world slasher
Philip KENNICOTT Citizen news service
Velvet Buzzsaw, a satirical horror-show sendup of the art world, isn’t a good film, but like a lot of mediocre films, it contains a trove of meaningful anthropological data. It neither accurately depicts nor analyzes the contradictions and pathologies of America’s relationship with high art, but it is a symptom of them. If you know anything about the art world, you will groan more than you laugh. But every groan is a teachable moment.
The film, written and directed by Dan Gilroy and streaming on Netflix, is getting some buzz for its starry cast, including Jake Gyllenhaal as a cynical but influential art critic, Rene Russo as a tough-as-nails gallerist and John Malkovich as a slightly lost but serious artist trying to figure out his next move in the competitive, blue-chip art market. Art critics will be amused at the absurdity of Gyllenhaal’s character, Morf Vandewalt, who is good looking, physically fit, fashionably dressed, comfortably rich and happily bisexual, and basks in universal adulation while disposing intellectual-sounding flapdoodle with airy confidence. Most absurd: Morf has a godlike power to make or break careers, a power that hasn’t existed in the art world in decades (if it ever did, a debatable proposition).
Gilroy uses the world of celebrity-clogged art fairs, crowded gallery openings and cutthroat backroom deals as an analogue for anxieties that are fashionable in Hollywood. What does it mean to sell out? Is it possible to balance the demands of art and the exigencies of commerce?
The film’s title, Velvet Buzzsaw, refers to a rock band in which our rich and successful gallerist once played, the logo for which is tattooed on her neck. It signifies the nostalgia for a creative, carefree past about which everyone in the entertainment business has a fantasy, whether they actually had a creative, carefree past. If they ever have qualms about the fortunes they’ve made selling drivel to the masses, they need merely flagellate themselves for having lost touch with their own Velvet Buzzsaw, and in a trice, all is atoned.
Gilroy’s elision of the art world with Hollywood leads to at least one substantial misrepresentation.
The art world may be full of poseurs, pretentious twits, rapacious entrepreneurs and the forces of corporate homogenization, but in key ways, it is still a different social and economic world than the movie business. Art is not submitted to the instant evaluation of a vast, heterogenous audience. Success in the art world is gathered and accumulated.
Social contacts and entree are essential, but neither is a guarantee of fame and riches. Some of the judgments – by curators, critics (both mainstream and academic) and gallery owners – may seem capricious and unaccountable, and often they are deeply influenced by things that have nothing to do with the art itself. But those judgments are a collective product of a discrete social world and are subject to ongoing evaluation and reconsideration. It is rare that any artist gains and sustains the instant benediction of the entire art world.
And yet that’s what happens in Gilroy’s film, when a young gallery assistant discovers an apartment full of unknown work by a recently deceased artist named Ventril Dease, a psychotic loner who left behind a huge tranche of paintings mostly in the style of Francis Bacon.
These works electrify Morf and his colleagues throughout the art world, spur the jealous admiration of other artists and are instantly successful with collectors. A film that began with the possibility of some sharp social observation is quickly rerouted down a familiar Hollywood path: the idea of genius, troubled genius, transformative genius, supernatural genius.
America’s love of genius is the tribute it pays to art, for which it otherwise has little use. Genius isn’t just a matter of superlative talent, insight or creativity – it’s also destructive.
It doesn’t build on the work that came before, but annihilates it. We fetishize genius because it is too much work to figure out the complicated, often technical and sometimes arcane discourse of art, or music or science. And so, no surprise, the works of Ventril Dease turn out to have occult and murderous powers. As people start dying in horrific ways, the film devolves into something little better than a teen slasher flick, with the art world standing in for the snooty sorority girls who get their well-deserved comeuppance.
This is a perfect film for the age of Donald Trump, a revenge fantasy perpetrated against elites, who are caricatured as venal, corrupt and beyond redemption.
And despite a few attempts on the director’s part to distinguish authentic art from his parody of art as a vast con game, the film ends on a profoundly anti-art note.
NETFLIX HANDOUT PHOTO BY CLAUDETTE BARIUS
Jake Gyllenhaal plays art critic Morf Vandewalt in Velvet Buzzsaw, available on Netflix.
Surge in private sector sees new jobs, StatsCan says
Andy BLATCHFORD Citizen news service
OTTAWA — The country saw a surprise rush of 66,800 net new jobs in January in a gain fuelled by a hiring surge in the private sector, Statistics Canada said Friday.
The agency’s latest labour force survey said more people also searched for work last month, which pushed the unemployment rate to 5.8 per cent, up from its 43year low 5.6 per cent in December.
The biggest boost came from the number of private-sector employee positions, which climbed by 111,500 in January for the category’s biggest month-to-month increase since the agency started collecting the data point in 1976.
The number of self-employed positions, which can include unpaid work, declined by 60,700.
The services sector saw a gain of 99,200 positions, led by new work in wholesale and retail trade, while the goods-producing industries experienced a net loss of 32,300 jobs, the report said.
“Definitely the headline job gain was very impressive,” said BMO chief economist Douglas Porter.
“And even going into some of the details there was an incredible show of strength, supposedly, from the private sector. We actually saw a record gain in privatesector payrolls.”
But Porter was also cautious. He added that he used the word “supposedly” because monthly job numbers tend to bounce around a little bit.
It’s better, he said, to look at
the three-month and six-month trends, although he also described those results as solid in recent months.
He said it’s also important to consider that growth in Canada’s population and labour force has accelerated, thanks in large part to immigration. Due to this, the country almost needs big monthly job numbers just to keep the unemployment rate steady, Porter added.
Sherry Cooper, chief economist for Dominion Lending Centres, wrote in a research note to clients Friday called the increase in the number of people looking for work a sign of strength, even though it
upped the unemployment rate.
“This suggests there is more capacity in the economy before inflation pressures begin to mount – a big point for the Bank of Canada,” Cooper wrote.
Overall, a consensus of economists had expected the addition of 8,000 jobs for the month and a jobless rate of 5.7 per cent, according to Thomson Reuters Eikon.
Year-over-year average hourly wage growth in January for permanent employees was 1.8 per cent, which was up from December’s reading of 1.5 per cent, but still well below its May peak of 3.9 per cent.
Even with the improvement, the
January number remained just under the inflation level, which suggests Canadians’ salaries could have a tough time keeping up with rising prices for consumer goods.
The Bank of Canada has been monitoring wage growth ahead of its interest-rate decisions as it tries to determine how well indebted households can absorb higher borrowing costs. The central bank does focus on a reading called “wage common,” which incorporates payroll data from several sources, not just from the labour force survey.
Last week, Bank of Canada senior deputy governor Carolyn Wilkins said the country has been
in a “puzzling” stretch of weak wage growth at a time when the job market has been experiencing one of its biggest labour shortages in years.
She said the struggles of energyproducing provinces, which began with the late-2014 oil slump, have been a big factor that has dragged down national wage-growth numbers. The Bank of Canada has expressed confidence that wage growth will pick up its pace.
Economists said Friday’s strong report was unlikely to change the Bank of Canada’s thinking when it comes to the timing of its next rate hike. Many analysts expect governor Stephen Poloz to wait until much later in 2019 before making a move.
Friday’s Statistics Canada numbers also showed that employees worked 1.2 per cent more hours, year-over-year, compared to the 0.9 per cent reading in December.
Canada added 30,900 full-time jobs last month and 36,000 parttime positions, the report also said. More young Canadians, between the ages of 15 and 24 years old, found work last month as youth employment gained 52,800 positions. The youth jobless rate edged up to 11.2 per cent, from 11.1 per cent in December as more young people looked for work. By region, Ontario and Quebec had the biggest employment increases last month. Energy-rich Alberta, hit hard by the oil-price decline, shed jobs for a secondstraight month and saw its jobless rate rise to 6.8 per cent, up from 6.4 per cent.
Executive time a rarity among CEOs
Jena MCGREGOR Citizen news service
When three months of President Donald Trump’s private schedule was published by Axios – revealing 60 percent of his days are spent, on average, in “executive time” – social media was ablaze.
“I wonder how many hours were spent watching sharks,” tweeted filmmaker Judd Apatow, referring to reports of the president’s apparent interest in the topic. “I guess he considered himself furloughed,” snarked Robert Reich, the University of California Berkeley professor and former Clinton administration Secretary of Labour.
It turns out that some unstructured time is actually important for executive leaders, management experts say, allowing for spontaneous interactions, time to think and bandwidth for putting out internal fires. The value of that time comes down to two factors: how much leaders can really take and still do their jobs effectively and how it is spent.
A study published last year by Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter and the school’s dean, Nitin Nohria, looked at how 27 CEOs spent their time over three months, coded in 15-minute increments and catalogued 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It found that the average CEO works a relentlessly tight schedule of 9.7 hours per weekday, conducting business on nearly 80 percent of weekend days and 70 percent of vacation days. And that just 25 percent of a CEO’s work time, on average, is not scheduled in advance, and so allows for more spontaneous interactions.
Trump’s “executive time,” meanwhile – at 60 percent of his schedule – appears to be more than twice that.
“Where and how CEOs are involved determines what gets done and signals priorities for others. It also affects their legitimacy,” Nohria and Porter wrote in the 2018 piece. “A CEO’s schedule (indeed, any leader’s schedule), then, is a manifestation of how the leader leads and sends powerful messages to the rest of the organization.”
Harvard Business School professor Raffaela Sadun has also studied how executives use their time. One of the investigators behind the Executive Time Use survey, a project that has had more than 1,100 CEOs of companies in six
countries log their time in 15-minute increments, Sadun says “unstructured time” is notoriously hard to track. Her studies, she said, have found that 85 percent of CEOs’ time was spent working with other people, and just 15 percent of their time was spent alone.
“The constant impression from [CEOs] I talk to is that they’re constantly starving for time,” she said. “It would be a luxury for them to have five hours a day to think or work by themselves.”
The Axios report suggests the “executive time” may be used to disguise meetings that could be leaked and the time may include calls with heads of state that don’t appear on his schedule. Even if some, or even much, of Trump’s “executive time” is spent with others in meetings and phone calls, Sadun said, she was still struck by the difference, particularly for a job running something as complex as the U.S. government.
“What I think is true, and what the data seems to suggest, is if you work in a small organization, or if you work in an environment that is not very complex, it might work to have this informal, unstructured style,” she said. “You can walk around. You can observe. But when an organization becomes large and complex, it’s very hard.”
Trump’s background as the CEO of a family-owned business may also play a role.
“In the data we do find that family [company] CEOs are much more likely to have that unstructured approach,” she said. “I wonder if this is a case where you have a manager just carrying on with the same style of work he had prior to the White House. The danger is the style
of work needs to match the needs of the organization.”
Given the public ambiguity of Trump’s “executive time,” – some of it does seem to be spent in meetings that aren’t on official schedules – it’s hard to make comparisons. Porter and Nohria’s study finds that the average CEO takes 37 meetings in any given week and spends 72 percent of their time in meetings.
Meanwhile, the official public meetings described in Trump’s schedule, Axios noted, amounted to 77 hours over the three-month period, or an average of about 15 percent of his time.
Press secretary Sarah Sanders responded to Axios’s story saying “President Trump has a different leadership style than his predecessors and the results speak for themselves.” She added that “while he spends much of his average day in scheduled meetings, events, and calls, there is time to allow for a more creative environment.”
A tweet by director of Oval Office operations Madeleine Westerhout said what the leaked schedules do not show are “the hundreds of calls and meetings @realDonaldTrump takes everyday.”
Indeed, Trump might seem to follow some of what Nohria and Porter advocate – carving out blocks of uninterrupted time alone, making time for spontaneity that can make a leader seem accessible and authentic, not spending so much time in meetings that they can’t switch gears in the moment.
“In our debriefings, CEOs who discovered that they had left little room for spur-of-the-moment meetings were often surprised and quick to recognize the need for change,” the two wrote.
Yet what matters isn’t just whether a leader has some unstructured time, but how they use it, particularly if their role is consequential and complex or involves running an institution as sprawling as the federal government.
It “depends heavily on the leader’s role – and on what executive time is being used for,” Adam Grant, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School who studies organizational psychology and work motivation, said in an email. “Watching slanted news sources that confirm your intuitions? Bad. Reading analyses from experts that challenge your intuitions? Good.”
TRUMP
At Home
‘Granny china’ making a comeback
Jura KONCIUS Citizen news service
At dinner tables and restaurants across the country, vintage plates, even the flowery variety often dismissed as “granny china,” are making a comeback.
There’s a move to homier place settings featuring mix-and-match dishes and flatware. The look is all over Instagram and Pinterest, where posts show delicate pink cherry-blossom plates and blue transferware with pastoral scenes gracing meals at the swankiest bistros and hippest lofts.
Granny’s stuff never looked so good.
“The big white plate has had a heck of a run,” says Clark Wolf, a nationally known restaurant consultant based in New York and California, who explains that the rage for white plates originated in 1980s California. “It’s probably not going anywhere, but it has some new friends and some old friends.”
Couples are changing the assortment of china they are registering for.
“People are mixing and matching more,” says Alyssa Longobucco, style and planning editor at the Knot, a wedding website and marketplace. “Couples want their home to feel unique, and they like things that have history. They want something more than going to a big-box store and buying 50 pieces of white china.”
She cites a renewed interest in family history.
“Five or 10 years ago,” she says, “you would hear ‘I’m me and I’m modern and I don’t want any of that froufrou, old-world stuff.’ Now they want middle ground.” Even stores such as Anthropologie, Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s are offering dinnerware made to look old or worn.
“I don’t want to use the word ‘grandma chic,’ but it was part of our design concept,” says Nick Pimental, co-owner of Elle, a cozy Washington bistro, bakery and bar where the menu and decor were inspired by his wife’s grandmother Eleanor, who was known for her pies and vegetable garden.
Food
Eighty per cent of the dishes are vintage, many with casual, country patterns. Some were picked up for less than a dollar apiece at thrift shops and antique stores; some were “donations that came in from our friends and family.”
“We wanted to make it more warm, friendly, cozy and neighbourly,” Pimental says, as opposed to the “sterile or industrial feel” of nearby eateries.
Sets of formal china generally haven’t been in demand recently, and, as formal entertaining has waned, many downsizing baby boomers have gotten rid of theirs. But tablescapes using older dishes are making a comeback in homes as well.
Replacements in North Carolina is a retailer of vintage and modern tableware, with more than 11 million pieces in its inventory. The “vintage” shop on its website
is doing a brisk business. According to Julie Robbins, a Replacements marketing specialist, old china arrives at the facility every day.
“There are a lot of new uses for it. Vintage plates elevate the look of a table setting; it’s not generic yet is affordable,” she says.
“It’s more homey to mix up your china, especially if you have 10 people over for dinner and you don’t have 10 of everything,” says Liz Curtis, chief executive and founder of Table + Teaspoon, a nationwide tableware rental service. She is introducing six new tableware packages in the next few months, and three will focus on pattern play.
“The table setting sets the tone for the evening,” says Curtis, who encourages customers to mix in family pieces with rentals.
“If your guests walk in and it looks like
you spent time curating the table, it makes them think they are having an elevated experience.”
The classy Washington tavern St. Anselm is decorated with fezzes, old rugs and taxidermy, with tableware that’s just as retro: commemorative Kennedy and Bush plates, English transferware dotted with pheasants, and gilt-edged porcelain banquet plates.
“I’m always looking for vintage things for our restaurants on eBay, Etsy or antique stores,” says Randi Sirkin, vice president of creative services for Starr Restaurants, of which St. Anselm is a part.
“I do think that restaurants inspire people’s own place settings,” she says. “We show it’s fun to play with all of these plates and flatware and think outside the box.”
Some restaurants looking for vintage, however, found that newer can be better. At Fancy Radish, a cocktail mixed of bourbon, sherry and chai called Woodmaze is served from the bar in a rose-patterned floral teacup and saucer.
“We saw Washington as a bit of a fancier place, and our restaurant wanted to capture the feeling of a tea party in an English garden,” says co-owner Kate Jacoby. They started with vintage teacups but found them a bit too fragile. Then they discovered a new bold floral design by Brew to A Tea on Amazon that was perfect. Sometimes patrons are surprised their cocktail comes in a dainty cup.
“It does look like tea and you expect it to be hot, but it isn’t,” Jacoby says. “To be drinking a boozy cocktail out of a teacup is a cool change-up.”
At Maydan, one of Washington’s hottest eateries, the interiors are what co-owner Rose Previte calls “midcentury modern meets the Middle East.”
The mood extends to the previously owned dinnerware culled from around the world and used in a crazy quilt of table settings.
“With social media, you’re constantly looking for ways to make the food look pretty,” says Previte. “The dishes express who you are, whether at a restaurant or your home.”
Make sure your birdfeeders are helping, not hurting, wild birds, experts say
Dean FOSDICK
Citizen news service
Feeding birds in winter is a most popular wildlife-watching activity, yet many ornithologists say it’s often more rewarding for people than for birds. And it might even put wild birds at risk.
“Feeding birds is not necessary for their survival except in extreme weather conditions,” said Stephen Kress, vice-president for bird conservation at the National Audubon Society. “Feeders can definitely help them get through that kind of weather.”
Most birds are insect eaters
and aren’t attracted to backyard feeders. “For those birds, I recommend planting natural habitat and native plants,” Kress said.
Besides, birds who do eat seed “will be more likely to come to feeders if there is some cover nearby. They’ll be able to feed and dodge back into the safety of shrubbery.”
The most common error people make when managing bird feeders is incorrect placement – putting them in locations where birds are frightened by foot traffic, vulnerable to predation by cats, or at risk of flying into windows.
“If a feeder is within three feet of a window, it’s better,” Kress
said. “If a bird is spooked, it won’t be killed when it strikes the glass. And keep your cats indoors so they can’t stalk vulnerable birds and animals.”
Learn which bird species frequent your area so you can avoid feeder wars and understand the pecking order.
“Some birds are more aggressive at feeders,” Kress said. “Their eating habits are such that they can consume a lot and not leave much for the others.”
One answer to that is to feed at multiple locations using different kinds of seeds and feeders. Nyjer seeds, for instance, attract goldfinches, while tube feeders with
wire covers prevent large birds from entering.
Pay attention to seed quality and freshness. Unprotected seed left too long in feeders will turn mouldy, and mould can kill foraging wildlife. Refresh your feeders every few days and clean them frequently by soaking in a solution of 10 per cent bleach.
“You can feed more effectively and efficiently by using black-oil sunflower seeds, as it is the preferred seed by most feeder birds,” said Adam Rohnke, a senior Extension associate at Mississippi State University. “An added benefit is reducing waste seed (on the ground) from seed mixes which
can attract rodents.”
“Boost the number and diversity of bird species by providing different types of feeders to resemble their natural feeding behaviours,” Rohnke said in an email. “For example, grounddwelling birds such as doves, towhees and others prefer low platform feeders because they feed on the ground.”
Along with black-oil sunflower and nyjer seeds, feeder-friendly birds like suet (woodpeckers, jays, songbirds), fruit (orioles, bluebirds, waxwings) and mealworms (robins, chickadees, wrens). Do not feed wild birds anything salty.
FANCY RADISH HANDOUT PHOTO
A chai cocktail is served in a floral tea cup at Washington’s Fancy Radish restaurant. Vintage, patterned tablewear is making a comeback at restaurants and for home use.
HANDOUT PHOTO BY CORRY ARNOLD
is served on an assortment of vintage plates at the St. Anselm tavern in Washington.
Richard Harry Millns
Micky passed away February 02, 2019 at the age of 84. He will be fondly remembered by and forever missed by all who knew him. Dad, you taught me everything I know and I hope to live my life by the examples you set and be the leader you were to all of us. Sean, Rose, Tianna, Ethan and Chilli.
Bernard Stevenson April 24, 1936February 7, 2019
It is with heavy hearts that the family of Bernard Hedley Stevenson announces his passing. Survived by his children: Bernie (Joan), William (Debbi), Christine (Dale) and sisters Pat and Jean. Grandchildren: Dustin (Nancy), Kathleen (Devon), Shawn, and Jennifer (Andrew). Great Grandchildren: Maxwell, Simon, and Blake. Former wife Noela Stevenson and family. Predeceased by his late wife Muriel Stevenson and parents. Our dad was a honest and hard working man who came to Canada from England and started his family in Crescent Spur. He resided in Prince George for the last 50 years and made the community his home, as one of the pioneers of the College Heights Baptist Church. He will be greatly missed. The service will be held at College Heights Baptist Church, 5401 Moriarty Crescent, Prince George, BC Tuesday, February 12th at 1:00pm with refreshments to follow. Thanks to Dr. McCoy, Dr. VanZyl, Dr. Applebee, and his specialists. Also, special thanks to the staff at the Hospice House. In lieu of flowers, donations to the Hospice House would be greatly appreciated.
Franklyn Joseph Leeson
November 30, 1929February 5, 2019 --------89 Years--------
It is with heavy hearts the family of Frank Leeson announces his passing. His heart was tired and broken from the loss of his beloved wife Jean Leeson of 57 years on November 2, 2018.
Frank is survived by daughters, Carla (Warren) Power & Heather Moffat, grand children, Frankie McMillan, Megan (Cody) Teichroeb, Ryan Moffat, and sister, Donalda Knox. Predeceased by wife, Jean Irene Leeson, grand-daughter, Brittany McMillan, son-in-law, Blain McMillan, parents, Harry & Hazel Leeson, brothers, Harry, Alex, Dan, & Melvin Leeson, sisters, Elsie Ward, Ena Love, Evelyn Love, Hazel Larson, Ella Larson, Betty Magoon, in laws, Arthur & Ernestine Hawley.
Our dad was an honest and hardworking man. Friends and family were always welcome in his home. He had a great sense of humor and never missed an opportunity to tell a good story or make someone laugh. He lived a wonderful and adventurous life in his early years. He left Saskatchewan riding rail cars with his friend Leo at age 15. He worked on steam powered paddle boats on the Yukon River before making P.G. his forever home in the 1950’s. He then worked for La Pas Lumber, Rustads, and Thursday Lumber, before joining Lakeland Mills, where he worked loyally for 27 years until retirement. Frank was known for his abundant garden, growing cabbage, potatoes, and raspberries, which were always shared with friends and family. Frank enjoyed the company of his wild birds and fed them winter and summer, bringing much entertainment through the kitchen window. Every year, moose would find safe haven in his yard, often bringing their calves to eat the Russian Willows off the lawn in early spring. Like us they will also miss our Dad. Love you … until we meet again.
A Celebration of Life will be held Sunday February 10, 2019 at the Knights of Columbus Community Hall, 7201 Domano Blvd, Prince George Doors open at 1:30pm, Service at 2:00pm. The family would like to thank the RN’s, LPN’s, Care Aides, House Keepers, and Social Workers in the Emergency department @ UHNBC, and in particular Dr. Da Costa & family physician Dr. El Gendi; for their dedication and loving care given to Dad. Lastly, the family would like to extend a large thank you to all of Dads fantastic neighbors and friends who helped him and kept him company during these last few months.
ROBERT LLOYD
“BOB” MATTHEWS
Passed away on January 24, 2019 at the age of 61. Predeceased by mother Jean, father William “Bill” and his sister Laurel Penson. He is survived by his wife Elizabeth, daughter Cindy Matthews of Langley and grandson Logan Matthews and son Christopher Stone of Quesnel and grandson Kolby Stone. He is survived by his brother Roy (Reni) Matthews, his sisters Marilyn (Doug) Steel, Kate (Jim) Skiba and all his nieces and nephews. No service by request. In lieu of flowers, donations to charity of choice.
“Ronnie”
Ronald Russell November 18, 1935February 2, 2019
It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of our beloved Husband, Father, Grandfather, Great grandfather, Brother, Uncle, and Friend. Ronnie passed away peacefully with his loving family by his side. He was born in Doaktown, N.B. to Walter and Laura (Storey) Russell. In addition to his parents he was predeceased by his seven brothers(Lawney, Eugene, Stanley, Buddy, Wendell, Kenny and Gary) and one sister (Mildred O’Donnell). Ronnie will be greatly missed by his loving wife Jean, sons Ronald Jr. (Stacey) and Steven (Michelle), daughter Cindy Forrest, eight grandchildren, five great grandchildren, sisters Elsie McCormick and Lorenda (Ray) Betts, sistersin-law Lois Russell and Pauline Russell, numerous nieces, nephews, extended family, and good friends. As per Ronnie’s wishes, there will be no service. In lieu of flowers, if one so desires, donations to the Heart and Stroke Foundation or to the Canadian Cancer Society would be greatly appreciated.
Evelyn Muriel Capp (Reid) nee Spence August 11, 1931January 21, 2019
Our much beloved mother, Evelyn Capp, passed away peacefully at Prince George Rotary Hospice House on Jan. 21, 2019. Born and raised in Chauvin, Alberta, she married George Reid, a railway engineer, and raised a family of 4 children in Prince George. She worked at the Prince George Experimental Farm, then later as Administrator for the Prince George Senior Citizen’s Society. Evelyn and George could be found almost every weekend at Purden Mountain during the ski season. After George’s sudden passing in 1985, she eventually married another railroader, John Capp. John and Evelyn moved to Penticton and lived there happily for 22 years until John’s passing in October, 2018. While in Penticton, she was very involved in the Concordia Lutheran Church and its school. In April, 2018, Evelyn moved back to Prince George to be near her many children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Nine months later, she unexpectedly passed away after a two week illness with family and her pastor by her side. Evelyn was also predeceased by her parents, Alfred and Ethel Spence, sister Mildred (brother-in-law Bob Pickrell), mother and father-in-law, Clayton and Victoria Reid. She is survived by brother Stan (Kay) Spence, and four children Patricia (Amos) Culham, Barry (Carla) Reid, Brenda (Mike) Morton, and Robert (Christine) Reid. Surviving grandchildren are: Samantha Parent, Melanie Culham, Robyn Culham, Dayna Culham, Courtney (Kris) Carr, Amy (Jess) Morton, Benjamin Reid, and Emily Reid. Great grandchildren: Kyla, Kelly, Jamie, & Morgan Culham, Kalen & Jasper Jamison, and Corbin Carr. Great Great grandson: Joel VanKonett. Sister-in-law, Marg Ziglin. We greatly appreciate the excellent and very empathetic care from the many doctors, nurses, and care aids working in the Emergency and Surgical South wards of UHNBC, as well as those at Prince George Rotary Hospice House.
A celebration of Evelyn’s life will be held at the Zion Lutheran Church and Christian School on Saturday Feb. 16, 2019 at 11:00 am. In lieu of flowers, memorial donations can be made to the Zion Lutheran Church and Christian School or Prince George Hospice House.
Carl Schwab July 28, 1922February 5, 2019
It is with the saddest of hearts that we announce the passing of Carl Schwab. Carl passed so very peacefully with his family by his side. Carl was predeceased by son Darrel. He was an amazing husband, father, papa and great papa who will be greatly missed but never forgotten by wife Georgina, children: Debbie (Roy), Dennis (Lesley), Kelly (Evan), Carol (Larry), Danny (Janet), Sandra, Todd. Grandchildren: Makenna, Nolan (Brittney), Brennen, Jereme (Simon), Courtney (Blair), Cristen (Jayson), Kira, Kelsey(Brodie), Ryan (Saleena), Scott (Kaylee), Andrew (Aley), Adam (Rochelle), Aleah, Tony, Michael, Zachary. Great Grandchildren: Luke, Nash, James, Reid, Mason, Camila, Haellie.
Carl was an avid sports enthusiast, spending many hours watching his children, grandchildren and great grandchildren in their numerous sporting events. He was a diehard Prince George Knights fan. He had an amazing love for the Blue Jays and followed them to different venues during spring training and regular season games accompanied by family. Carl felt he was blessed to live long enough to see the firing of John Gibbons!
The family would like to thank Dr. Schokking, Jennifer and staff for the wonderful care you have given to Carl over the years. We would also like to thank Dr. Hamilton, Bryce and the nursing staff in Emergency at UHNBC for the kindness and support you showed us.
There will be a viewing and prayers at 12 noon on Monday, February 11, 2019 followed by a Funeral Service at 1:00 p.m. at Church of the Immaculate Conception, 3285 Cathedral Avenue, Prince George, B.C. In lieu of flowers please make a donation to a charity of your choice.
As Dad would say “Treat others as you would like to be treated”
Flesh and blood Amazon robots
The markets
today
TORONTO (CP) — Canada’s main stock index posted its fifth straight positive week of the year despite closing lower Friday. There was no clear direction on the day for North American markets, but the TSX has gained so far in 2019 after being so oversold last year, said Cavan Yie, a portfolio manager at Manulife Asset Management.
“Some of these risks that we all thought were emerging, such as global recession, such as U.S.China relations deteriorating to a point of Armageddon haven’t come to fruition,” he said.
The S&P/TSX composite index lost 70.03 points Friday to close at 15,633.33, after hitting an intraday low of 15,567.84.
The decrease was primarily driven by the energy and health care sectors.
Health care fell nearly three per cent as some cannabis shares decreased led by The Supreme Cannabis Company Inc., which was down 16.7 per cent.
The influential energy sector lost nearly one per cent led by decreases from Encana Corp., which fell by 3.8 per cent and Enbridge Inc., down 2.8 per cent on an analyst downgrade.
The sector fell even though crude prices rose on the day after the U.S. Congress took up an antiOPEC bill that would open oil producing members up to being sued by the U.S. government for collusion.
The March crude contract was up eight cents at US$52.72 per barrel and the March natural gas contract was up 3.2 cents at US$2.58 per mmBTU.
“That sector has come out strong to start the year,” Yie said. The West Texas Intermediate contract is up 16 per cent so far this year. Technologies led the TSX with support from Shopify Inc., followed by materials that sent Barrick Gold Corp. higher.
The April gold contract was up US$4.30 at US$1,318.50 an ounce and the March copper contract was down 1.8 cents at US$2.81 a pound.
In New York, the Dow Jones industrial average was down 63.20 points at 25,106.33. The S&P 500 index was up 1.83 points at 2,707.88, while the Nasdaq composite was up 9.85 points at 7,298.20.
The Canadian dollar traded at an average of 75.36 cents US compared with an average of 75.27 cents US on Thursday after Statistics Canada said the economy added 66,800 jobs in January.
“The Canadian jobs report was very, very surprisingly positive,” Yie said, noting growth by both full-time and part-time employment driven by the private sector.
Citizen news service
With their two young kids in tow, Juston and Kristen Herbert drove to a Target near their home outside Scottsdale, Ariz. It was time to get to work.
The Herberts were on the hunt for all of the Contigo water bottles the store had in stock, and kept the camera rolling for their 6,400 YouTube subscribers. Within minutes, an employee pulled out 32 two-packs – sold on clearance for $5 each – from a back storage room. For two people who recently left their jobs in finance, the blue-and-black plastic bottles might as well have been made of gold.
The Herberts would resell the two-packs on Amazon for $19.95. Subtracting some taxes and fees, they’d clear $6.16 in profit. All told, the Herbert’s 10-minute Target run earned them $198.
Juston, 30, and Kristen, 28, estimate they can reel in $150,000 this year from their newest gig: retail arbitrage. The basic idea is to buy up a bunch of the same item – from water bottles to vacuums to Monopoly boards – and then resell them online for a handsome profit.
For some, this is just a lucrative side hustle – perhaps to climb out of debt or save up for a Disney World vacation. For others, it has become their primary way of earning a living. And beyond that, the Herberts say, this work is helping them build up $50,000 so they can adopt a child.
“If we’re showing that you can come up with big money for an adoption,” Kristen said, “you can come up with big money to get yourself out of a hole, credit card debt or a house payment.”
While the idea to buy something cheap and sell it at a higher price is age-old, retail arbitrage has emerged in the digital age.
Chris Green wrote one of the go-to how-to books on the topic, titled Retail Arbitrage. And he’s helped popularize the moniker.
The term seems to be having a moment. In December, according to Google Trends, searches for “retail arbitrage” spiked on YouTube, where aficionados post videos of their shopping and reselling sprees. (One reseller, who has more than 52,000 YouTube subscribers, filmed his 22-hour buying binge through 17 Walmarts. He filled his trunk with 182 Monopoly games and flipped most of them in one night for $2,500.)
In the early 2000s, resellers started flipping products on eBay. But Green’s guide focused on the engine behind many of these small businesses: Fulfillment By Amazon, or FBA. Through FBA, people can add their own products to Amazon’s vast online catalogue. Sellers package their products and ship them to Amazon warehouses, where they are stored until an order comes in. Amazon takes it from there – pulling an item off the warehouse shelf and getting it to the customer’s door.
Green, who’s been dubbed the “godfather of retail arbitrage,” used to be a sales representative for Bosch Power Tools. He started reselling power tools on eBay in the early 2000s.
“Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.”
Mark Twain
Then, with the rise of Android and iPhone apps that can scan products and track down major sales, Green realized retail arbitrage could work for anyone, even those who didn’t know the inner workings of an industry.
“I used to teach grandmas to do it,” Green said.
For Mike “Reezy Resells” Rezendes, retail arbitrage has been a kind of salvation. Rezendes said he grew up in a troubled household and was married with a child by 16. As a teenager, he noticed commercials for eBay on TV and started selling whatever he could rummage around the house, like his Nintendo and its games and controllers.
Now, Rezendes, 34, has been reselling items online full-time for 14 years. His YouTube channel, “Reezy Resells,” has more than 85,000 subscribers (Rezendes calls his followers “Reezy’s ninjas.”) He runs his company with his best friend from high school and oversees a small team who buy up goods from stores like Nike, Marshalls and Ross.
Last year, the company saw $800,000 in gross sales for about $240,000 in profit. In January, he got more than $8,000 in ad revenue from YouTube.
One day last month, Rezendes had more than 100 pairs of Nike shoes in his garage that he planned to ship to Amazon. He was working on a YouTube video breaking down how he bought 100 Nerf guns from Target.com and flipped them for $1,500.
Rezendes, who lives in Santa Cruz, Calif., said retail arbitrage has kept him from having to fill a 9-to-5 desk job. But he also knows online resellers and small-business owners like him are crucial to Amazon’s model.
Amazon “needs people like me to fill all the holes in the marketplace,” he said.
“We’re literally flesh-and-blood robots for Amazon,” Rezendes said.
The retail giant hasn’t shied away from promoting its small businesses: in 2018, the number of small and medium-size businesses that passed $1 million in sales in Amazon stores worldwide grew by 20 percent. Thirdparty sales are growing at a faster rate than first-party sales online, the company said last month.
You’ll find Shane Myers on YouTube as the “Rise N Grind Picker” – with 15,000 YouTube subscribers.
Three years ago, with $20 in his savings account, Myers started reselling thrift store merchandise on eBay. He turned to Amazon in August. By September, Myers had churned out more than $2,000 selling used books alone. In his first three months back on retail arbitrage, he’d paid off all his credit card debt and car payments.
Myers, 31, pays $30 a month for an app called BrickSeek, which helps him find markdowns at big-box stores like Walmart and Target. A few weeks ago, Myers hit multiple Walmarts within a 150-mile radius and came home with 218 packages of lightbulbs. He found them on clearance for $2 each. He marked up the price and netted $4 to $5 on each package.
The grand total: more than $1,100 in profit. Myers hopes that within the next year and a half he can move to retail arbitrage full time and will have paid off his house. And he hopes he’ll never miss his daughter’s birthday again for work, like when he was clocking in at his old day job in retail.
“I see money everywhere,” Myers said. “If I walk into a store, it’s just like a dollar sign sitting on the shelf.”
Juston Herbert fixes his
CITIZEN NEWS
Herbert, with their children, have built a business in
arbitrage, which is the art of buying consumer goods at brick and mortar stores and selling them for a profit online.
Work continues to end female genital circumcision
Citizen news service
Kadiatou Balde grew up in a Senegalese village with the tradition of female genital mutilation.
She never had a choice, but now as a community elder she is helping to banish the practice, one conversation at a time.
She started speaking out about the longtaboo issue when the Grandmothers Project came to her village.
“We grandmothers made a commitment to no longer excise our little girls,” she said. “We met and talked with the village chief and the parents of the children. We discussed with them the consequences of female genital mutilation and together we agreed to denounce anyone who practices.”
More than 200 million girls and women alive today have experienced female genital mutilation, or FGM, in 30 countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia, according to the World Health Organization.
Wednesday was the International Day of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation, and many organizations, led by the United Nations, are reaffirming their commitment to end what has been called a violation of human rights.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is expected to call for increased global action to end the practice.
Female circumcision can lead to longterm physical, psychological and social consequences, according to the U.N. children’s agency, UNICEF, which calls the practice “a violation of medical ethics.”
The procedure varies.
It involves the partial or total removal of the external female genitalia or other injury to the female genital organs for non-medical reasons, according to WHO. FGM can affect sexual intercourse and lead to problems with childbirth.
In some cases, HIV is spread via the tools used, and excessive bleeding or badly done procedures can lead to death.
In Senegal, where the practice is illegal, the rate of FGM has fallen to about 26 per cent, according to Amnesty International.
In neighbouring Mali, the rate is above 91 per cent, and in Guinea it is 96 per cent, according to 28 Too Many, a London-based organization dedicated to ending the practice.
Somalia and Djibouti in the Horn of Africa have the world’s highest rates.
Some women defend FGM, believing it benefits cleanliness and hygiene, aids marriage prospects, preserves virginity and is a religious requirement, according to 28 Too Many.
Multiple efforts around the world are working to debunk these beliefs with education and dialogue.
And yet some resistance remains. Though illegal in many countries, FGM at times is carried out on babies to reduce the risk of being caught.
UNICEF has called on governments to bring forward new policies and legislation against the practice.
It also says religious leaders must strike down myths that FGM has a basis in religion.
Some Muslim leaders who have participated in the Senegal-based Grandmother Project have expressed support.
“I was convinced that it was neither a recommendation of Islam, much less a
prophetic tradition,” said the imam of Lambatara in the south. He has supported the decision by local grandmothers to oppose the practice.
The Grandmother Project uses a multigenerational approach that also involves village chiefs and men.
“It’s so obvious for us that it’s the grandmothers who are the people behind FGM. Given their experience, they perpetuate it because that’s what they know,” said program director Judi Aubel. “What our work has shown is that they have the authority to change it.”
The program began in 2008 and has
Searching for certainty
Is it possible to have certainty? Can anyone know the truth about the way things really are?
If anything is true, it is this: there is a way, one way, in which this world has come about. In that one most basic sense, we know there are not multiple truths. There is a real history – a story that actually happened, a story that has brought the world (and us) to the very moment that we call now. And this history, the true one, determines the meaning (or meaninglessness) of our lives right now as well as what the future holds (or doesn’t). But can we know what that true story was and is?
It is clear by this time in our philosophical and cultural history that certainty cannot be found or had by any person alone. We all have too limited a perspective and too short of a life to come to an understanding of the way things really are. Nobody was there at the beginning of all things and nobody can travel to the end of all things. That is, if there is an end and a beginning. Nobody can tell us – no scientist, no philosopher, no priest.
CLERGY COMMENT
TIM SCHOUTEN
P.G. CANADIAN REFORMED CHURCH
There is only one possibility of certainty in this world. There must be one being, one knower, who knows all. If there is no knower we will never know the real story. That does not mean there is such a knower.
But without one there is no possibility of certainty.
There is only one possibility of certainty in this world. There must be one being, one knower, who knows all – and who shares that knowledge with us. A deist knower does not share and in not sharing leaves us unknowing. That does not mean deism is not true. But it gives no possibility of certainty.
There is only one possibility of certainty in this world. There must be one being, one knower, who knows, who shares that knowledge with us, and who absolutely
convinces our minds that it is truth. Our minds doubt the reality of the things seemingly most certain, even of our very selves. Perhaps we are a dream. Perhaps our thoughts are only chemical reactions. Perhaps, perhaps. And if things so seemingly certain are not secure then how are we to know history, reality, and meaning? The knower may share the truth – but how are we to know it is really the truth? How can we be certain? We cannot be certain unless that certainty is worked in us.
There is only one possibility of certainty in this world. It must be revealed to us and worked in us by a knower – a knower who in the entirety of humanity and history is only attested to in the triune god of the Christian Scriptures –Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. That does not prove that there is such a god. But if such a god is our only chance of certainty and meaning should we not pursue him to the end?
Herein lies the challenge for you who live in doubt and uncertainty. Nobody can prove the existence of this knower to you except the knower himself. And he, the only
spread to 57 villages in Senegal.
Once grandmothers are taught about the negative effects of FGM, they hold dialogues on the subject with other generations in their villages.
“On an individual level, some suffered, some not so much, a few died, but it’s been taboo to discuss it,” Aubel said of the women and their experiences over the years.
The hope is to expand the program to other countries, while Amnesty International has said it plans to pursue a similar approach in Burkina Faso and Sierra Leone, where FGM rates are 76 per cent and 88, respectively.
true god, has promised to enlighten and confirm those who ask. Should you not ask? Perhaps you are afraid he might answer?
“Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened.
will give him a scorpion? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” Luke 11:9-13.
What father among you, if his son asks for a fish, will instead of a fish give him a serpent; or if he asks for an egg,
CITIZEN NEWS SERVICE FILE PHOTO
Women from Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi participate in a march in Nairobi, Kenya, in 2015 to protest against early marriage, sexual harassment, female genital mutilation and all forms of violence and inequality against women.