Prince George Citizen March 19, 2019

Vigil held for massacre victims

Ted CLARKE Citizen staff

tclarke@pgcitizen.ca

Nobody is safe from hatred. It can strike anywhere at any time.

Nowhere was that more apparent than Friday afternoon in Christchurch, New Zealand, where a 28-year-old man walked into two mosques and opened fire, killing 50 Muslim worshippers and injuring 50 more.

“What they said in New Zealand was they felt so safe there, it’s a very peaceful country, so it’s really heartbreaking that’s been shattered now,” said Cathy Jackson, who joined the gathering of about 150 people at a late-afternoon vigil Saturday on the steps of Prince George city hall.

Jackson was among several people holding a candle in honour of the victims and she was encouraged by what she saw and heard during the hour-long presentation.

“I strongly believe that what we think about, we bring about, and if we think about hate and violence and put all our energy into the perpetrator then that’s what we’re go-

ing to bring about is more violence and less love,” Jackson said.

“We need to focus on the most important thing, which is love. Being together and supporting each other in whatever negative situation that might happen. Being that there are so many different nationalities here today, that made me very happy. One love, one world, it’s the only one we’ve got. ” Like Jackson, Fizza Rashid was pleased with the diversity of the crowd gathered for Saturday’s vigil, and that message of love and understanding helps the healing process.

“Seeing so many people of different faiths, different backgrounds, different cultures is really supporting and heartwarming because I feel that it enhances what everyone feels as a community in Prince George,” said Rashid, a UNBC psychology student and co-president of the South Asia Student Association.

Rashid spoke of the first victim of the shootings, 71-year-old Daud Nabi, and how he greeted his killer with the words, “hello brother,” as he walked into the Al Noor

mosque holding a shotgun.

Rashid referred to the comments of Australian senator Fraser Anning, who blamed Muslim immigration as the real cause of the bloodshed in New Zealand, and U.S. president Donald Trump’s refusal to acknowledge the rise in white supremacy movements. Neither of them reached out to the Muslim community to provide comfort in the wake of the tragedy and she said their loud words embolden groups that inspire ignorance and race- and religionbased hatred.

Rashid is of Pakistani descent and said she first encountered racism when she was three around the time of 9/11 attacks in 2001 when someone walked up to her mother and told them to go back to their country.

“There’s always that little seed of fear planted within me,” she said, “especially after things like this and the Quebec shooting a couple years ago. But ever since I’ve been here, it’s been seven years, and everyone has been incredibly kind and supportive and welcoming.”

— see ‘STAY STRONG, page 3

Shooter sentenced to five years in jail

Mark NIELSEN Citizen staff mnielsen@pgcitizen.ca

A young Prince George man was sentenced Monday to five years in prison for shooting a man who confronted him and a fellow culprit caught sneaking onto a neighbour’s property.

Less credit for time served prior to sentencing, Smitty Ralph Bent, 21, has a further three years and three-and-a-half months to serve for the Sept. 24, 2017 incident.

It was just before 11 p.m. when the man who would be the victim was in the back yard of his home on the edge of the VLA neighourhood. He heard noises from his neighbour’s yard and when he looked closer, he saw two young men. When he yelled at them, they took off.

But fed up with rampant crime in the area, the man did an “unwise thing,” the court was told, and went after them. The man grabbed his BB gun, got in his car, drove into the VLA and found them in the 2200 block of Oak Street.

He got out but left his BB gun in the car and launched into an extended, expletive-filled tirade, in part telling them to “get a life” and accusing them of “creeping around people’s backyards like little stalkers.”

In reply, one of the two he had

been berating pulled out a can of pepper spray but failed to check the direction of the wind and the spray blew back on him when he pressed the nozzle.

The man laughed and said words to the effect of “you’re such an idiot, you can’t even work a can of mace.”

By that point he had stopped moving towards the two and wasn’t yelling at them anymore. But Bent pulled out a gun of his own and pulled the trigger, firing off a .22-calibre round.

The man suffered a “throughand-through bullet wound” that punctured his right lung and splintered his shoulder blade. He nearly bled to death and ended up hospital for over a week. As of February, when a sentencing hearing was held, the victim still had trouble with his breathing and use of one of his arms, the court was told. However, he declined to provide a formal victim impact statement.

Bent and his accomplice ran away but were tracked down by the RCMP and taken into custody shortly after the incident. Bent eventually pleaded guilty to discharging a firearm with intent to wound.

The duration of Bent’s sentence was reached via a joint submission from Crown and defence counsels.

MP fighting to put Legebokoff back in maximum security

Mark NIELSEN Citizen staff

Cariboo-Prince George MP

Todd Doherty is continuing the fight to return convicted serial killer Cody Legebokoff to maximum security prison.

The Conservative MP said

Monday he has written a letter to Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale outlining his concerns with a decision that will put Legobokoff in a mediumsecurity facility starting in late January.

— see LEGEBOKOFF, page 3

CITIZEN PHOTO BY BRENT BRAATEN

Tiny dancer

Nolan Robinson competes during the 2019 Prince George Dance Festival in Vanier Hall on Monday morning. The festival is celebrating its 43rd year in Prince George. Dancers receive feedback from adjudicators and compete for prize money, provincial placements and scholarships. The festival runs until Friday. There are approximately 500 festival participants from across the province competing in ballet, jazz, contemporary, modern, hip hop, song and dance and cultural specific dances.

CITIZEN PHOTO BY JAMES DOYLE

A vigil was held on the steps of city hall on Saturday afternoon in memory of the mass shooting that recently occurred in New Zealand.

Minister of Advanced Education, Skills and Training Melanie Mark speaks with wood engineering technician Michael Billups at UNBC on Monday. Mark was in Prince George to announce $3.5 million for the university to increase its use of existing classroom space and create a centralized collaboration space for civil and environmental engineering programs starting in September.

Prince George provincial court docket

From Prince George provincial court, March 11-15, 2019:

• Kevin Scott Hammond (born 1962) was prohibited from driving for one year and fined $500 plus a $75 victim surcharge for driving while prohibited or licence suspended under the Motor Vehicle Act.

• Peter Junior Charlie (born 1981) was sentenced to seven days in jail for breaching probation. Charlie was in custody for 14 days prior to sentencing.

• Pawan Kumar Kaila (born 1984) was sentenced to 18 months probation with a suspended sentence for mischief to property over $5,000.

• Troy Alan Krebs (born 1954) was sentenced to one year probation with suspended sentence and issued a two-year firearms prohibition for possessing a firearm without a licence or registration, committed in Hudson’s Hope.

• Derek Ivan Levac (born 1973) was issued a one-year $500 recognizance after an allegation of causing fear of injury or damage.

• Branvin George Scott McLeod (born 1982) was sentenced to 14 days in jail, served on an intermittent basis, prohibited from driving for one year and fined $1,500 plus $150 in victim surcharges for driving while prohibited and driving while prohibited or licence

suspended both under the Motor Vehicle Act.

• Charles Joseph Prodeahl (born 1960) was prohibited from driving for one year and fined $500 plus a $75 victim surcharge for driving while driver’s licence is suspended under the Motor Vehicle Act.

• Miranda-Lee Storm Priddle (born 1993) was sentenced to 30 days in jail and one year probation, ordered to provide a DNA sample and issued a five-year firearms prohibition for assaulting a peace officer, committed in Prince George, and to one year probation for breaching probation, committed in Penticton.

• Jamie Michael Andrew Sugden (born 1991) was sentenced to 200 days in jail and one year probation for breaking and entering with intent to commit an indictable offence and to zero days for breaching an undertaking. Sugden was in custody for 46 days prior to sentencing.

• Walter Charles Wilson (born 1990) was sentenced to zero days in jail for two counts of breaching an undertaking or recognizance.

• Alexis Robin Fleury (born 1998) was sentenced to one year probation, issued a five-year firearms prohibition and ordered to provide a DNA sample for uttering threats and possessing a weapon for a dangerous purpose and to zero

days in jail for breaching an undertaking or recognizance. Fleury was in custody for one day prior to sentencing.

• Tyrone Craig Teed (born 1985) was sentenced to time served for breaching probation. Teed was in custody for one day prior to sentencing.

• Manjeet Singh Bhatti (born 1975) was prohibited from driving for three years for driving while prohibited under the Motor Vehicle Act and driving while disqualified under the Criminal Code. Bhatti was in custody for 52 days prior to sentencing.

• Pamela Suzanne Marie Creak (born 1961) was sentenced to one day in jail for breaching probation.

• Lash Leroux (born 1972) was sentenced to 18 days in jail and prohibited from driving for three years for driving while disqualified and fleeing police. Leroux was in custody for 64 days prior to sentencing.

• Matthew Thomas Alston (born 1983) was sentenced to 40 days in jail for breaching an undertaking or recognizance and to 30 days in jail and one year probation for possessing a weapon for dangerous purpose, possessing a controlled substance, possessing stolen property under $5,000 and two counts of breaching an undertaking or recognizance.

Alston was also issued a fiveyear firearms prohibition on the weapons charge. Alston was in custody for three days prior to sentencing.

• Christopher Lee Champagne (born 1983) was issued a oneyear $500 recognizance after an allegation of causing fear of injury or damage.

• Che Reino Hirvonen (born 1981) was sentenced to 90 days in jail for impersonation with intent to avoid arrest, committed in Quesnel, to 60 days in jail for impersonation with intent to gain advantage, committed in McBride and possessing stolen property over $5,000, committed in Abbotsford, to 14 days in jail, prohibited from driving for two years and fined $500 for driving while prohibited or licence suspended under the Motor Vehicle Act, committed in McBride, to seven days in jail and 18 months probation for driving while prohibited or licence suspended under the Motor Vehicle Act, committed in Quesnel, breaching an undertaking or recognizance, committed in Abbotsford and to time served for possessing stolen property and impersonation with intent to avoid arrest, committed in Williams Lake.

Hirvonen was also sentenced to 18 months probation and prohib-

ited from driving for two years and was in custody for 123 days prior to sentencing.

• Lucas Raymond Lizotte (born 1989) was sentenced to two years probation, issued a five-year firearms prohibition and ordered to pay $150 restitution for possessing a weapon for a dangerous purpose and two counts of careless use or storage of a firearm. Lizotte was in custody for 63 days prior to sentencing.

• Jordy Martin Visser-Hayne (born 1996) was sentenced to 45 days in jail for two counts of breaching probation, committed in Prince George, and to 21 days in jail for two counts of breaching probation, committed in Quesnel. Visser-Hayne was in custody for four days prior to sentencing. From B.C. Supreme Court in Prince George: • Emil Laverne Spelman (born 1980) was sentenced to one year in jail for using an imitation firearm in commission of an offence, to 180 days in jail for two counts of possessing a prohibited weapon and to 67 days in jail for two counts of assault causing bodily harm.

Spelman was also ordered to provide a DNA sample and issued a lifetime firearms prohibition on the counts, all committed in Mackenzie.

‘Stay strong, do not fear’

— from page 1

The Prince George mosque on Fifth Avenue near Foothills Boulevard has had many visitors over the past few days arriving with flowers and cards of condolence to help the local congregation come to terms with what happened in Christchurch. Rashid thanked the RCMP for providing additional protection at the local mosque immediately after Friday’s attack.

Hassan Rashid, Fizza’s brother and a Grade 12 student at College Heights secondary school, said it was difficult to comprehend the sheer number of people killed at the hands of one fiend in the two New Zealand mosques.

“It’s a lot to process, you can’t really take in losing 50 lives all at one time,” he said.

“It will take our community a long time to heal from this tragic terrorist event.

“He posted a 74-page manifesto of his plan and his shout-out to Trump and the (Australian) senator and I feel the person was brainwashed. Nobody in his right mind would go into a place of worship to kill anyone.”

“To be honest, yesterday going to jummah prayer I wasn’t feeling that safe.

“I just don’t understand what goes through someone’s mind to do something like that. He livestreamed it on Facebook and posted it on YouTube and there were comments from people saying like, ‘Good job.’”

Lila Mansour spoke to the crowd wearing a white hijab and said she feels comfortable practicing her religion, having been born and raised in Prince George.

She brought her two elementary schoolaged brothers with her at the gathering but with the frequency of incidents like Christchurch increasing she worries her brothers will grow up afraid to outwardly show their religion, fearing they will be attacked for their beliefs.

“To my fellow Muslims, stay strong, do not fear,” she urged.

Attendees hold up signs at a vigil that was held on the steps of city hall on Saturday afternoon in memory of the victims

mass shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand.

“I’ve never been afraid to show I’m a Muslim. Prince George is my community, I love it, they’ve always supported me and I’ve always felt their love. People have said negative things but I do feel safe.”

Mayor Lyn Hall referred to the Quebec City mosque shooting in January 2017 which killed six people and how the two incidents provoked similar outpourings of

grief and outrage, in Prince George and the rest of the world.

Prince George-Valemount MLA Shirley Bond admitted to the crowd she was nervous when she and her husband first visited the Prince George Muslim Centre when it opened in October 2011 but the Muslim community welcomed them with open arms and some have become their close friends.

Legebokoff has ‘never taken any responsibility’

— from page 1

In it, he said Legebokoff “brutally murdered” four young women and has “never taken any responsibility for his crimes or shown any remorse.”

The body of one victim, Natasha Montgomery, has never been found, Doherty noted.

“Despite numerous attempts to uncover the location of Natasha’s remains, Legebokoff has refused to provide any information and has in fact, used this piece of information as leverage to better his own personal circumstances,” Doherty said.

He also passed along a letter from Brendan Fitzpatrick, who was in charge of the B.C. RCMP major crime section during Legebokoff’s killing spree.

Fitzpatrick urged Doherty to demand answers from Goodale on why Legebokoff has been “given this generous benefit.”

“The minister needs to account for why the victim’s families were not consulted and why the police had no input into this placement,” Fitpatrick wrote.

“He needs to account for why the youngest serial murderer in Canadian history is provided the luxury of a new, less secure environment. The victim’s families have barely had a chance for their grief to numb. Now they are being victimized again.”

Goodale’s office could not be immediately reached for comment Monday.

In a statement provided to the Citizen in late February, when Doherty first raised the issue in the House of Commons, a Corrections Canada spokesperson said a “gradual and controlled release” has proven to be a better way than keeping offenders in maximum security institutions to the end of their sentence.

A medium-security institution has the

same security safeguards as maximumsecurity but allows for more interaction among offenders, she also said.

Legebokoff was sentenced Sept. 16, 2014 to life in prison without eligibility to apply for parole for 25 years for the murders of Montgomery, 24, Jill Stuchenko, 35, Cynthia Maas, 35, and Loren Leslie, 15.

The clock on his sentence began on

Nov. 27, 2013, the day he was arrested. He will be 45 years old when he can first apply for parole. Moreover, he will be eligible for day parole after 22 years and, because he was arrested before the Conservative government eliminated the so-called “faint hope” provision, Legebokoff can still apply after 15 years for a reduction in the wait.

Mansour told the crowd there is an open invitation for non-Muslims to visit the mosque.

“This is an opportunity for us to open our doors (and for non-Muslims) to learn about is and our religion,” she said.

“Our biggest fear is not of terrorism but of ignorance. Don’t be afraid to show you are a Muslim and say you are a Muslim.”

Woman hit by pickup truck

Citizen staff

Police are seeking witnesses to a pedestrianinvolved collision Sunday morning that sent a woman to hospital with critical injuries.

The incident occurred “at or near” Fifth Avenue and Ahbau Street. Police were called to the scene at 10:30 a.m.

Police said the woman was removed from under a full-size pickup truck.

The driver remained at the scene and cooperated with police. Alcohol did not appear to be a factor, RCMP said.

“The investigation is just beginning,” RCMP said. “Police would like to speak to anyone that may have witnessed this incident.”

Witnesses are asked to contact the Prince George RCMP at 250-561-3300.

Home targeted in B&E

Citizen

staff

RCMP are asking for the public’s help to track down those behind a break, enter and theft at a Cluculz Lake home late last month.

The occupants discovered their home had been hit on Feb. 24.

Given the amount of property stolen, police suspect a vehicle was used to carry the items away. They included a four-person Kawasaki side-by-side that was recovered four days later in Williams Lake.

North District RCMP’s forensic identification service was called to the scene and images from video surveillance have been secured.

But the culprits remain at large and the rest of the stolen property remains missing.

Anyone with information on the incident is asked to call the Vanderhoof RCMP at 250-5672222 or Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-8477 or online at www.pgcrimestoppers.bc.ca (English only). You do not have to reveal your identity to Crime Stoppers.

If you provide information that leads to an arrest, you could be eligible for a cash reward.

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Experts to study basic income as B.C. aims to reduce poverty

Citizen news service

SURREY — A panel of experts is looking at

whether British Columbia could provide a basic income or if the federal government would have to initiate it, says the minister responsible for the province’s poverty reduction plan.

Shane Simpson said Monday the aim of the province’s strategy is to cut the overall poverty rate by 25 per cent and child poverty by 50 per cent within five years.

He said the three experts came together six months ago and would make recommendations next year on various issues including the question of a basic income.

“That will, I think, trigger a very important debate in British Columbia about what income security looks like and about the role of basic income and the principles of basic income,” he said after announcing the guidelines for the province’s poverty reduction plan at a child care resource centre.

Ontario launched a basic income pilot project in 2017 but Premier Doug Ford cancelled it shortly after taking office last year. In February, the Ontario Superior Court denied a request that it quash the province’s decision, saying it had no power to reverse it. However, the federal government suggested last December that a guaranteed national minimum income could be an option to help some Canadians, especially those without children because they don’t benefit from the Canada Child Benefit.

Simpson said British Columbia’s TogetherBC strategy is intended to assist the 557,000 people who are living in poverty, with an aim to lift 140,000 of them out of poverty.

He said the panel of experts studying the basic income is also looking at how people could be transitioned to other work because 40 per cent of jobs could disappear through artificial intelligence. The panel is also looking at how income support programs could be delivered.

The expert panel is chaired by an economics professor from the University of British Columbia.

An associate professor from the University of Calgary and a professor emeritus from Simon Fraser University are the other two members.

TogetherBC’s programs, policies and initiatives tie together investments launched in the fall of 2017 and are being implemented over three budgets, Simpson said.

They include a focus on safe and affordable housing, cutting child-care costs for low-income families, and raising income and disability assistance rates.

Simpson said his ministry alone will offer more than $800 million in support to people by 2022 and while those programs and other plans won’t end poverty, the NDP government is confident the strategy will help some of the poorest people in B.C. Simpson, who grew up in a housing project with his sister and mother, said generational poverty can be difficult to break for some people as he discovered when one of three childhood peers he met during an election campaign in 2005 was caring for grandchildren.

“These were people who were pretty smart people. They hadn’t done anything untoward or particularly bad, they just could not break that cycle.”

Part of the TogetherBC strategy will aim to tackle that level of poverty through employment, housing and educational programs, he said.

“All of the advice that I’ve gotten says that if you want to break the cycle, starting with kids is a good place to start.”

B.C. not trying to stop Trans Mountain, but aims to protect environment: lawyer

Laura KANE Citizen news service

VANCOUVER — British Columbia is not trying to stop the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, but it is attempting to prevent environmental damage and hold the corporation responsible for the cleanup of a spill, a lawyer argued Monday.

The province’s Court of Appeal is considering a reference case filed by B.C. that asks if it has jurisdiction to regulate the transport of oil through its territory and restrict bitumen shipments from Alberta.

Joseph Arvay, who represents B.C., said the province has no “axe to grind” against pipelines and proposed amendments to its Environmental Management Act are not aimed at blocking the project.

“The purpose was never to prevent the construction or operation of the pipeline. The purpose and effect was always to protect the environment,” he told a panel of five judges.

The case asks the court to rule on the constitutional validity of the proposed amendments, which would require companies transporting hazardous substances through B.C. to obtain provincial permits.

The proposed permitting regime would order companies to provide disaster response plans and agree to compensate the province, municipalities and First Nations for any damages. If companies fail to comply with requirements, the province could suspend or cancel the permit.

A five-day hearing began Monday and the Canadian government has not yet had an opportunity to present its arguments. It says in court documents that the proposed regime must be struck down because it gives B.C. a “veto” over inter-provincial projects.

Both Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Alberta Premier Rachel Notley have

said Ottawa – not the provinces – has the authority to regulate trans-boundary pipelines.

Alberta, Saskatchewan, Trans Mountain Corp. and the Canadian Railway Association are among 13 parties that have filed documents in support of the federal government in the case.

Arvay acknowledged that B.C. Premier John Horgan said on the campaign trail in 2017, when his party was in opposition, that he would use “every tool in the toolbox” to stop the Trans Mountain expansion.

However, after Horgan’s government took power, it received legal advice that it was constitutionally unable to stop the project but it could bring in environmental legislation, Arvay said. Under questioning from the Appeal Court judges, Arvay acknowledged that the proposed permitting system could lead to a situation where the Trans Mountain pipeline would not be allowed to operate.

“But that’s really in the hands of the pipeline,” he said, adding the corporation would be responsible for ensuring it meets the permit conditions.

“That’s as it should be. The Constitution shouldn’t provide the inter-provincial undertaking... an immunity from such lawful regulation.”

Justice Harvey Groberman challenged Arvay’s assertion that B.C. must be able to enact laws to protect its environment from trans-boundary projects in case the federal government fails to do so. If the federal government didn’t regulate airplanes, for example, that could result in a disaster in the province’s airspace, Groberman noted. “But that doesn’t mean B.C. has power,” he said. “We assume the federal government is acting in the public interest... That’s just the nature of divided jurisdiction.”

Arvay outlined a number of cases that

he said have established legal precedent for B.C. to impose environmental laws on trans-boundary projects.

One such case was in 1899, when a court held that provinces and municipalities could require the Canadian Pacific Railway to keep ditches alongside its tracks clear of dirt and rubbish to prevent damage to adjacent properties, he said.

However, Justice Lauri Ann Fenlon said the ruling didn’t necessarily prevent the railway from operating if it failed to keep the ditches clear – unlike B.C.’s proposed legislation.

The federal government has purchased the Trans Mountain pipeline for $4.5 billion. The expansion would triple the capacity of the line from the Edmonton area to Burnaby and increase tanker traffic in Burrard Inlet seven-fold.

Arvay said a spill of diluted bitumen in B.C. would be disastrous. The National Energy Board heard differing opinions about the likelihood of a spill, but B.C. has the right to take precautions, he said.

“We know that things don’t go according to plan. Accidents happen,” Arvay said.

The energy board recently ruled the project is in the Canadian public interest despite adverse effects to endangered southern resident killer whales and related Indigenous culture.

Arvay said the board has concluded that the benefits of the project are national and regional in scope, but that some local communities would shoulder the burdens of the expansion.

B.C.’s opponents in the case are essentially saying provinces are powerless to hold companies accountable and reduce the risks of catastrophic harm from interprovincial projects, he argued.

“We say that the province is not required to accept such a fate, and that the province can be proactive in doing what it can to protect the environment.”

No injuries, pollution in Vancouver Harbour ship collision

RICHMOND — Transport Canada says two ships collided in Vancouver Harbour Sunday after one lost power, but no one was injured and no pollutants were released.

Liberal budget to applaud Canada’s

economy, but who deserves credit?

Andy

BLATCHFORD Citizen news service

OTTAWA — When the Liberals release the last budget of their mandate Tuesday, Canadians can expect to hear arguments that years of deficit spending have put the economy on stronger footing.

Finance Minister Bill Morneau has promised the budget will contain help for workers in need of skills training, young people looking to buy their first homes, seniors worried about their own finances, and patients with high drug costs.

“It’s an election budget... There’s been a tendency to use these as important communications vehicles – almost platform-launching vehicles,” Kevin Page, Canada’s former parliamentary budget officer, said in reference to recent budgets from federal and multiple provincial governments.

The likelihood that the Liberals will use the budget to sell their own record raises a question: who deserves credit for Canada’s strong economic run?

Job-creation numbers have been solid and the unemployment rate has fallen close to a 40-year low.

A recent Statistics Canada report said in 2017 fewer Canadians were living under the official poverty line than at any time in the last decade.

The agency credited the drop to a mix of a stronger economy and

the Liberals’ enhancement of child benefits.

Canada rode a long stretch of impressive economic growth until the final three months of 2018 before it abruptly decelerated – and nearly stalled – along with a drop in oil prices. Experts predict the economy will regain its momentum over the coming months.

But even with a surprisingly weak end to 2018, Ottawa’s financial situation is better than last November’s fall fiscal update projected.

Experts say the federal treasury pulled in more tax revenues than anticipated.

Many fully expect the Liberals to dedicate the bulk of the extra money to new promises, as they’ve done with windfalls in past budgets and economic statements.

Over the last few years, the Liberals have spent billions more than they promised in their 2015 election platform.

They vowed to post annual deficits of no more than $10 billion and to return to balance by 2019.

Instead, they’ve posted shortfalls of more than $18 billion in each of the last two years and have offered no timeline to balance the budget.

In their November update, the Liberals projected annual deficits of between $18.1 billion and $19 billion over the next three years.

Morneau has regularly argued that the Liberal plan is working.

“Our government has made

smart and responsible investments in the middle class, and Canadians are seeing concrete results,” Morneau told the House of Commons last month as he announced the budget date.

Morneau has argued the biggerticket commitments, in areas such as child benefits and infrastructure, have been necessary to juice the economy for years to come.

He’s also insisted the deficits remain small enough that they’re fiscally prudent.

Page expects the Liberals to take credit for the economic improvements and he thinks they deserve some recognition – particularly for enhancing child benefits and an ambitious, expensive infrastructure plan, despite its slow start.

But he added Canada’s prospects have also been lifted by strong economic performances in the United States and the world as a whole.

Page said it’s difficult to know whether the Liberal deficits will actually raise Canada’s long-term growth or if they’ve mostly created a big, temporary bump in consumer spending, as the government has borrowed money and put it into Canadians pockets.

“You don’t have to be at balance. There’s nothing perfect about a zero (deficit) number in this environment,” said Page, who now heads the Institute of Fiscal Studies and Democracy think-tank at the University of Ottawa.

“Having said that, we are adding to the stock of debt and that creates potential instability down the road and we’ll have less room to manoeuvre – and future generations, definitely, are going to pay higher interest costs on the public debt.”

The Opposition Conservatives, some economists and leaders in corporate Canada have criticized the Liberal deficits, especially because they’ve come during good economic times that are traditionally thought to be when governments should pay debt off.

“My concern is, and I’ve said this to him ... privately and publicly, it’s not that you’re spending, it’s where you’re spending,” Goldy Hyder, CEO of the Business Council of Canada, said of his exchanges with Morneau. “You’re spending a lot on things that no one can really point to and can say (there’s a) direct line back to helping the economy.”

Hyder said he supported Morneau’s move last fall to use some fiscal space for new accelerated investment write-offs for businesses. He also applauds the Liberals’ commitment to invest in worker training in Tuesday’s budget and their earlier efforts on trade, immigration and child benefits.

But he insists there’s an urgent need for Canada to be more competitive on regulations and taxes if it hopes to avoid falling behind the rest of the world.

The federal department says in a statement that the bulk carrier MV Caravos Harmony lost power and collided with the MV Pan Acacia early Sunday morning. It says the Caravos Harmony was loaded with corn and sustained damage to its bow, while the Pan Acacia was waiting to load coal and has a hole on the port side of its hull above the water line.

Transport Canada says both vessel are detained in port until repairs and other follow-up actions are completed.

It says the department will ensure the vessels meet regulatory requirements and it is prepared to take immediate enforcement actions if necessary.

The Transportation Safety Board says it has deployed a team of investigators look into the incident. Board spokesman Chris Krepski said two investigators were in Vancouver on Monday.

“They’ll be inspecting the vessels,

talking to crew members, talking to any other witnesses and people who may have information about the sequence of events and taking it from there.”

The TSB is an independent agency that aims to advance transportation safety.

The website Vesselfinder.com identifies the Pan Acacia as a 2010 cargo ship from Panama and the Caravos Harmony as a 2013 bulk carrier that flies the Marshall Islands flag. The Vancouver Fraser Port Authority said the incident has not affected operations in the harbour.

Canada extends Iraq, Ukraine military missions

Mike BLANCHFIELD Citizen news service

OTTAWA — Canada has learned a lot about how to protect against foreign election meddling through its support of Ukraine in its ongoing battles with Russia, says Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland. Freeland described Ukraine as a “laboratory” for Russia’s disinformation campaigns in cyberspace as she and Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan announced Monday that Canada is extending its military missions in the eastern European country and Iraq – commitments that were both due to expire at the end of the month.

The extensions shore up Canada’s contributions to the effort to curb Russian aggression in Eastern Europe and to the fight against Islamic militants in the Middle East. Ukraine is bracing for Russian interference in its upcoming presidential election on March 31, and Freeland said the threat has implications for Canada’s own federal vote later this year.

The mission of about 200 Canadian Forces personnel in Ukraine will be extended to the end of March 2022. The Forces have been involved in Ukraine since September 2015, helping train the country’s military, which is battling Russian-backed separatist forces. Canada will also extend the Canadian Forces’ contribution to the Global Coalition Against Daesh and the NATO mission in Iraq, until the end of March 2021. Canada has about 500 military members in Iraq.

“We do need to be concerned about malign actors seeking to interfere in the elections in Ukraine and seeking to interfere in our own elections. That is all the more reason for us to be very active in countering this threat,” she said. “Ukraine tends to be a laboratory for malign intervention and disinformation.”

An aerial view of the Trans Mountain marine terminal in Burnaby. A lawyer for the British Columbia government says the province knows it cannot stop the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, but it can enact environmental laws to mitigate the harm it may cause.

Containers are stacked at the Port of Montreal on March 1 in Montreal. The coming federal budget is expected to take credit for Canada’s strong economy, but the reality is complicated.

Clichés are just empty words

As a longtime devotee of the subtle nature of our remarkable English language, the language of Shakespeare, Churchill, Martin Luther King, even Barack Obama, it seems to me that our current secondary-school English curriculum is in dire need of a unit on the erosive effect of clichés on words in search of meaning.

I don’t mean just any clichés, the kind of thing that completely flummoxes people new to our language: “pearls of wisdom,” “fit as a fiddle,” “the writing is on the wall” — all terms in common use that cannot survive any literal translation to another language.

No, I’m talking about a curricular unit that examines how the prefabricated language of meaningless clichés helps politicians and CEOs camouflage what they really want to say — or are careful not say.

Experienced politicians and other speakers display a disconcerting comfort with an array of statements that, while they mean absolutely nothing, are presented in the guise of thoughtful but unable-to-be-factchecked response: “We will improve our response to economic challenges,” “we will create good jobs going forward;” “we are working on a whole range of proposals;”

and the masterful “we are looking at a comprehensive raft of measures.”

Speaking of political life rafts, there is inevitably mention of “the dire situation we inherited from the previous government” without any explanation as to what this is describing or how it will be remedied.

U.S. President Donald Trump, the living master, the legendary 10th-degree black belt of the mendacious cliché, feeds the media with stuff such as: “I don’t know, but that is what people are telling me.”

Trump also constantly speaks about something, anything, everything, as being “the greatest of all time.”

Not to be outdone and eager to get into the resounding-sounding rhetoric game, Canadian politicians are just as quick to utter meaningless inanities, especially if a platitude serves to avoid exposing ignorance of the topic at hand: “The fact of the matter is;” “and again, if I can just make this point,” alongside the ever-trendy “there is no instant solution, it’s going to take time, there are no easy answers.”

“I don’t answer hypothetical questions” is in a category all by itself, unsullied by any attempt to say anything of consequence and intended to expose the person asking the question to be an idiot who should know better.

All this, as Shakespeare had Hamlet describe it, rolls “trippingly off the tongue” without meaning a thing.

For the powerful and those seeking to represent themselves as close to the facades of power, the repetition of clichés, banalities and stock phrases can be a valuable tactic. They all serve to fortify rhetorical armour, deflecting any attack.

Talk of “hard-working families” and “long-term economic plans” and “what we’ve said is” are all but unassailable by anybody seeking actual meaning.

Inspirational masters of the English language such as Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw understood all this very well. They explained, in typically succinct fashion, why the need for any explanation of a complex issue often drives politicians and others backward into their anthology of throwaway catchphrases when faced with a microphone.

Wilde said: “The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”

The author of The Importance of Being Earnest understood that truth and simplicity are usually the antithesis of political circumstances requiring explanations about what really happened.

Shaw, the Irish virtuoso of language, was even more acerbic when he chided

Joggers beware

As the weather warms up and roads and sidewalks become usable again, the seasonal exodus of those who want to run outside and exercise early in the morning or late at night begins anew. Unfortunately with that comes the increased chance of pedestrian versus vehicle with the pedestrian almost always losing.

One of the main causes of jogger versus vehicle is how the joggers dress, which is usually all in black without a thought given to basic pedestrian road safety. Sure you may look and feel good wearing all black but it is not conducive to good pedestrian practices when out jogging early in the morning in low light, wet dark roads or flat light situations. Please use some common sense when jogging on roads. There is no reason to jog three or four abreast on a roadway impeding traffic flow and it would make perfect sense to wear reflective clothing and/or blinking lights to alert drivers your there but sadly many joggers choose not to use these simple tricks and common sense when on a road.

I had to look good while jogging is not a very good excuse if you get hit because the driver didn’t see you.

I have no problem sharing the road with joggers but if you choose to run three or four abreast and not wear something saying “jogger here,” then you should be prepared for the possible consequence of staring at the underside of a vehicle. Remember the highway or area

roads are not designed for pedestrian use but for vehicular use.

If you choose to be on the roads, do us drivers the courtesy of letting us know you’re there.

Wearing all black clothing on a wet or dark road with minimal light can lead to a situation nobody wants because as a pedestrian hit by a vehicle leads to one of two places and neither is very entertaining for different reasons.

Dean Soiland Prince George

Voicing disapproval

I wanted to write and let city council and mayor know how disgusted I am and how obviously deliberately discouraging they have made it for those of us who pay their wages to disagree with your rich-minded, stupid hairbrained ideas for our city in terms of their ideas to borrow money in our names.

This needs changing now. We should be able to voice our disapproval in a simple straightforward manner, not a 30-page ridiculous document that must be first found online, printed off, filled out and then delivered to you by fax, which most of us don’t own or waste time, money and effort to deliver.

Come on and wake up. Go through the process as hard as it is and tell these people “no, enough already.

You are pricing regular working people out of their homes with these outrageous idiot ideas that keeps raising our property taxes in unsustainable manner.”

Stop paying ridiculous overtime

and raising city employees wages first, then think asking for tax increases.

Soon it will be just the rich who own their homes if we let them keep this up.

John Tosoff Prince George

Expressing our love

To the congregation of the Prince George Islamic Centre, it is with deep sadness in our hearts that we write this letter to you after the events that occured in Christchurch, New Zealand, where 49 people were killed and many others injured.

Our hearts break for you and your faith community in this tragic time.

We want to express our love and respect for you as brothers and sisters of faith and express our support for you as an important part of the community of Prince George.

We cannot let this type of evil shape who we are as people of faith. We need to take time to build relationships and educate ourselves about the other. At the centre of our faith lies hospitality and compassion for our neighbour. May you find healing and wholeness in the arms of our loving God. Yours in Love, Grace Anglican Church, Trinity United Church, St. Michael and All Angels Church, St. Giles Presbyterian Church, and Our Saviour’s Lutheran Church

SHAWN CORNELL DIRECTOR OF ADVERTISING

politicians and other public speakers about their abuse of “the divine gift of articulate speech.”

“Don’t sit there crooning like a bilious pigeon,” he advised.

Writing for the British publication The Independent, John Rentoul claimed that the clear winner when it came to political clichés is the classic “we have achieved a great deal, but there is still much to do,” which somehow manages to celebrate success and apologize for lack of it at the same time.

Rentoul lays part of the blame not on the speakers themselves, but on those who are employed to write speeches “full of turgid abstractions that are intended, perhaps unconsciously, to conceal the thinness of the content.”

So, to sum up, to recapitulate, as it were, let me at this stage be completely correct, absolutely open and totally honest because the message is very clear and very simple. It is safe to say that what is needed and what we want to see any time soon, is a wide range of new and better options right across the board when it comes to political rhetoric.

The Canadian people expect (fill in the blank here).

—

Solutions needed

When I was in school, students were politically active and engaged. We organized walkouts over oil spills and pollution. We protested against war. But these were one-day events.

Last Friday, and every Friday, millions of students around the world were on strike to remind world leaders climate change matters. The coordinated school strikes were inspired by a single student. They have now grown to encompass more than 100 countries.

Greta Thunberg took to heart Margaret Meade’s admonition, “never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed people can change the world: indeed it’s the only thing that ever has.” In Thunberg’s case, it was a small group of one which has quickly blossomed into a movement.

Will it change the world?

Perhaps. But there is no question the students are doing this out of commitment and not just seeking a “day off school” as some pundits claim. I know when we skipped school to protest, it was the protest which matter. Missing school was necessary but not something we did lightly.

If you hear Thunberg talk, you can feel her passion and concern. She speaks of climate change as an “existential crisis, the biggest crisis humanity ever has faced and still it has been ignored for decades.”

She is right.

Life will go on for billions of years after humans have occupied this planet but our species is at a crucial point. If we keep changing the planet at the rate we have been our actions will eventually lead to our own extinction. Life will go on but humans might not.

There have been five mass extinctions in the history of Earth. The extinction most people know about was the end of the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago when an asteroid struck the Yucatan Peninsula. Most fictional accounts speak of a rain of fire and massive floods which wiped out all of the dinosaurs. While a lot of creatures died immediately after the impact it was the thousands of years of climate impact which really brought about a loss of 75 per cent of the species alive.

In the other mass extinction events, it was arguably long slow changes to climate and habitat which resulted in the demise of life. The event marking the end of the Permian, some 251 million years ago, was our narrowest escape after 96 per cent of species in the fossil record went extinct.

I mention this because we appear to be in another extinction event and like the proverbial frog

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in warm water, we are not paying attention as the water is warming slowly. According to the story, the frog is eventually boiled alive. Actually, this is not what really happens. The frog is smart enough to get out of the water.

Is humanity?

This is the question Ms. Thunberg and all of the students are asking. Are we smart enough to recognize the danger climate change poses and to do something about it? Can we get ourselves out of the hot water?

For many people, the answer would appear to be: “what hot water? Things look fine to me!” Things will always look fine until they don’t. Climate change is a non-linear phenomenon with multiple feedback loops and chaotic behaviour. The consequences are very real and they are happening.

On CBC’s The Current last Friday, high school student Aditi Narayanan from Pheonix, Arizona, summed it up by saying “I don’t know how much you all know about Arizona but it’s a very very very hot state… we went from 48 as our average over the summer to like in the 50s Celsius. So we’ve seen the summers get hotter and hotter and we’ve seen how drought has been an issue in our state and how water conservation is another huge issue on the ballot.”

Things are only going to get worse over the coming decades and it is today’s youth who will bear the brunt. It is only fitting we should listen to them.

One area of critically importance is to rethink the engineering of all of our infrastructure and buildings. This past Monday, Melanie Mark, the Minister of Advanced Education, Skills, and Training Minister, was at UNBC to announce support for the new civil and environmental engineering degree programs.

Environmental engineering is all about thinking through the materials and processes we put in place in the built environment. Passive buildings with properly designed shells could cut heating costs by a factor of ten decreasing demand for fossil fuel consumption. Utilizing wood as a construction material captures carbon instead of emitting large quantities as required by concrete and steel. This approach is one step in the right direction. It might not solve Ms. Thunberg’s existential crisis all by itself but it is a good start. Our government should be justifiably proud of their support.

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Geoff Johnson, Victoria Times Colonist

Leaders speak out against hate in wake of massacre

Citizen news service

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau delivered an emotional clarion call Monday as he urged people of all political stripes to turn the page on hateful ideology and condemn the sort of intolerance that fuelled the brutal killing of 50 Muslims in New Zealand.

A visibly angry Trudeau denounced the “small, toxic segments” of society that peddle the belief diversity is a weakness, spewing hatred and inciting brutality.

“We see it here in Canada – in online harassment, anonymous letters, defaced places of worship, acts of violence and even murder,” he told the House of Commons as party leaders expressed solidarity with the victims in Christchurch and their families.

“When we fail to denounce hatred with total conviction, we empower those people and legitimize their violence.”

Trudeau expressed sorrow at the many attacks in recent years that have taken the lives of defenceless people at mosques, temples, churches, synagogues, concerts,

schools and malls.

“I’m sick and tired of extending our thoughts and our prayers. People around the world are exhausted by the carnage,” he said. “We have to chase out this hatred from our parties, fight it online, denounce it at town halls, push back when it reaches our

front door.”

Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer joined Trudeau in stressing the need to condemn all racist ideologies and doctrines of prejudice.

Canada has, from its inception, been a country built on values that transcend religious, ethnic and linguistic divides, Scheer said. “This is who we are, and this is who we will always be. Those who think otherwise have no place in our democracy.”

In his maiden speech to the Commons, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh said the use of dehumanizing language and making immigration out to be a threat can breed fear and fuel hatred.

“Let’s open our hearts and replace the ignorance, the lack of knowledge with understanding, which will create the climate for compassion, so we care for one another,” he said.

Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale suggested Friday’s deadly mass shooting, which killed 50 people and wounded 50 more as they gathered at a pair of Christchurch

Vancouver MP bumped up in cabinet shuffle

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau turned Monday to erstwhile leadership rival Joyce Murray to fill the second void in his cabinet triggered by the SNC-Lavalin affair. In his third shuffle in two months, Trudeau elevated the veteran Vancouver MP to president of the Treasury Board, a cabinet slot vacated two weeks ago by Jane Philpott. Philpott resigned in solidarity with former attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould, who quit last month amid allegations she was improperly pressured by Trudeau, his staff and others to halt a criminal prosecution of SNC-Lavalin on bribery and corruption charges related to contracts in Libya.

Wilson-Raybould’s departure came one month after she was moved out of the justice portfolio and into Veterans Affairs in a small mid-January shuffle prompted by Scott Brison’s retirement from politics. Her exit precipitated another small shuffle on Mar. 1, but then Philpott resigned a few days later, saying she no longer had confidence in the government’s handling of the SNC-Lavalin file.

Had Trudeau named Murray to Brison’s vacated spot at Treasury Board back in January, it’s likely the entire controversy over the Montreal engineering giant would have been avoided.

Murray, who finished a distant second behind Trudeau in the Liberal party’s 2013 leadership race, said it’s time to move on from the controversy and focus on the government’s efforts to reduce poverty, tackle climate change and create jobs.

“The past few weeks have been difficult, and I have expressed my confidence in our prime minister and our support for the work we are doing on behalf of Canadians,” she said after a swearing-in ceremony at Rideau Hall. “We all want to work together to further that agenda over the coming months until the October election.”

Murray said she looks forward to having Philpott and WilsonRaybould continue in the Liberal caucus under Trudeau’s leadership, if that’s their choice. But she said she doesn’t need to hear any more from Wilson-Raybould on the SNC-Lavalin issue.

The prime minister has been clear there was “a failure of com-

munication,” said Murray. “He will be leading our team in looking at how we can do better.”

Wilson-Raybould, who testified at the House of Commons justice committee for nearly four hours, has indicated she has more to say, particularly about the period after she was moved to Veterans Affairs, which was not covered by a waiver of solicitor-client privilege and cabinet confidentiality. However, the Liberals are so far using their majority to try to shut the matter down, blocking opposition parties’ efforts to recall Wilson-Raybould at committee.

Murray, 64, was first elected in 2008 in Vancouver Quadra. She had served previously as a minister in British Columbia’s provincial government. Her appointment to cabinet is a promotion from her role as parliamentary secretary to the president of the Treasury Board. It also allows Trudeau to maintain gender balance around the cabinet table.

Treasury Board is a less visible ministry concerned with the nuts and bolts of government operations, but it has the potential for scandal if it falters in its stewardship of federal spending.

mosques, will spur parliamentarians to take a careful look at Canada’s gun laws. The massacre has sparked a global sense of concern that will prompt Canadian politicians to make some timely decisions, Goodale said Monday after appearing before a Senate committee.

Goodale said cabinet colleague Bill Blair will deliver recommendations soon, having been asked last August by Trudeau to study the possibility of a full ban on handguns and assault weapons in Canada.

A visibly galvanized Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s prime minister, said her government plans to announce gun-law reforms within days.

A bill already before Canada’s Senate would, among other things, expand the scope of background checks on those who want to acquire guns here.

The bill would also require gun retailers keep records of firearms inventory and sales, and ensure the purchaser of a rifle or shotgun presents a firearms licence, while the seller would have to verify it.

SINGH

Privy Council clerk Michael Wernick resigns

Joan BRYDEN Citizen news service

OTTAWA — The SNC-Lavalin affair claimed its fourth resignation Monday as Michael Wernick announced he will step down as the country’s top public servant, having concluded he’s lost the trust of opposition parties.

Opposition parties have been calling for the clerk of the Privy Council’s resignation since he first vehemently rejected allegations that he and others improperly pressured former attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould to halt a criminal prosecution of SNC-Lavalin. Wernick’s combative testimony to the House of Commons justice committee was denounced as partisan and unbecoming of a senior bureaucrat.

Also on Monday, the Liberals who make up a majority on that committee said publicly that they believe it has done all it can, or should, to investigate the affair.

In a letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Monday, Wernick said he will retire before this fall’s federal election campaign kicks

off. He noted that the clerk is supposed to be “an impartial arbiter of whether serious foreign interference” occurs during the campaign, as part of a new federal watchdog panel, and is also supposed to be ready to help whichever party is elected to form government – two roles he no longer believes he can fulfil.

“It is now apparent that there is no path for me to have a relationship of mutual trust and respect with the leaders of the opposition parties,” Wernick wrote.

“I wish to relinquish these roles before the election. It is essential that Canadians continue to see their world-leading public service as non-partisan and there to provide excellent services to Canadians and the governments they elect.”

Wernick, who has served in senior public service roles for nearly 38 years, has been clerk of the Privy Council since 2016, shortly after the Trudeau Liberals assumed office. Government insiders have said he wanted to retire as clerk a year ago but was persuaded to stay on.

Wilson-Raybould has ac-

cused Wernick of making “veiled threats” that she’d lose her job as justice minister and attorney general if she didn’t cave in to pressure last fall from Trudeau and his senior staff to halt the criminal prosecution of SNCLavalin on charges of bribery and corruption related to contracts in Libya. She has said they pushed her to instruct the director of public prosecutions to negotiate a remediation agreement with the

Montreal engineering giant, which would have forced the company to pay stiff penalties but let it avoid the risk of a criminal conviction that could threaten its financial viability.

Wernick has denied the accusation and maintained that all concerned acted with the highest standards of integrity.

Wilson-Raybould’s concerns about undue pressure only surfaced publicly after she was moved out of the justice portfolio to Veterans Affairs in a mid-January cabinet shuffle. She resigned from cabinet a month later. Her exit was followed by the departure of Trudeau’s principal secretary, Gerald Butts, and then the resignation from cabinet of Jane Philpott, who cited loss of confidence in the government’s handling of the SNC-Lavalin affair.

Wernick’s decision to quit as well proves “this SNC-Lavalin scandal is even bigger than we thought,” said Conservative MP Pierre Poilievre.

Trudeau said he intends to name Ian Shugart, currently deputy minister of foreign affairs, to replace Wernick.

On his way into the House of Commons, Trudeau thanked the clerk for his “extraordinary service to Canada over many, many decades” and credited his government’s accomplishments “definitely in large part” to Wernick’s leadership of the public service. Trudeau did not respond when asked if he’d sought Wernick’s resignation but his office later said he had not.

Wernick’s letter was released minutes before MPs reconvened for their first question period after a two-week March break, an exchange that proved explosive almost from the get-go.

Opposition members erupted in protest when Trudeau announced he’d appointed former Liberal justice minister Anne McLellan as a special adviser to explore what he called “important questions” about the relationship between the federal government and the minister of justice, who plays a dual role as attorney general.

While the justice minister is a political player, the attorney general is supposed to make independent, impartial decisions about prosecutions.

WERNICK

Spruce Kings look for win No. 3 against Chilliwack

Blazers keep playoff hopes alive in Cats’ finale

Ted CLARKE Citizen staff tclarke@pgcitizen.ca

The Kamloops Blazers wriggled off the hook again, just like they’ve done so many times lately when they get to play in Prince George.

In their 4-2 win Saturday at CN Centre the Blazers exposed the weaknesses that have plagued the Prince George Cougars all season long. Their inability to hold a lead was one last shot to the solar plexus as they contemplate what went wrong in yet another non-playoff season

For the Blazers, the Cougar collapse meant they live to see another day in a onegame playoff tonight at home against the Kelowna Rockets – the seventh tiebreaker in WHL history.

It all went south on the Cougars in a five-minute span of the third period, just after Cole Moberg scored a shorthanded goal that put the Cats ahead 2-1, which shot a spike of delirium into the season-high crowd of 5,178.

The Cougars had barely stopped celebrating Moberg’s shot that deflected in off a Blazer defender when Jermaine Loewen lined up for the face-off and caught the Cougar defence napping. His tying shot from the left hash mark one second after the Cougar penalty expired beat Taylor Gauthier. The goal, 15:54 into the third period, came just 15 seconds after Moberg scored.

The Cougars had a chance to gain the lead again less a minute later when Blazers defenceman Luke Zazula was sent to the penalty box. But Cougars defenceman Rhett Rhinehart was unable to avoid a rushing Connor Zary and coughed up the puck at Kamloops blueline. Zary took off and finished his shorthanded breakaway with a backhand deke for his 24th goal of the season.

Loewen finished it off with one more, into an empty net, and the Blazers had their 11th straight win on Prince George ice.

The teams were deadlocked 1-1 heading into the third period. The Cougars outshot the Blazers 14-4 in the second period and Moberg came close on a breakaway chance but was unable to unleash a good shot. Moberg finished his sophomore season with 13

Centre during the Cougar’s awards brunch.

goals and 40 points - third in Cougar scoring – but he’ll have to wait until next season to try again for his first taste of the playoffs.

“It’s just how the season went for us, we’d get a lead or be tied and the last five minutes of just any span of a couple minutes we’d lose it there, it’s crappy but that’s how it finished,” said Moberg. “I was super-happy at the time we took the lead there but at the end of the day it wasn’t enough. It’s hard.”

The Cougars lost seven of the nine games against Kamloops in the season series but the improvement was noticeable the last three times the teams met. The Cougars ended their team-record 17-game losing streak with a shootout win Feb. 22 in Kamloops and came close to winning both games on the last weekend of the season.

“It’s tough, we felt like we built some momentum down the stretch, especially in

the

the Portland games and we played really well in last night Kamloops and tonight and just found that old habit of finding a way to lose instead of finding a way to win,” said Cougars assistant coach Steve O’Rourke.

The Cougars graduating players - centre Josh Curtis, left winger Mike MacLean and defenceman Joel Lakusta – played their last WHL game Saturday and with a last-place team the changes will run deeper than that by the time the puck drops next season.

“We’ll be spending the next few days together looking at what could have happened and just looking into the future,” said Moberg. “Obviously it’s not going to be the same team next year, we’re going to have guys who won’t be back and it’d going to be sad to see them go.”

On Sunday, the team held its annual awards brunch at the Civic Centre.

Cariboo Cats moving on to semifinals

Citizen staff

The Cariboo Cougars made it a clean sweep Saturday.

Their 4-2 win over the Greater Vancouver Canadians at Kin 1 clinched the best-of-three quarterfinal series 2-0, setting up a semifinal match next weekend with the Vancouver North West Hawks.

Brett Fudger scored two goals and Brennan Bott and John Herrington also found the net for the Cougars. Easton Elmer and Lukas Olson were the Canadians’ marksmen.

Bott and Herrington scored late in the first period, after Elmer had tied it 1-1 on a Vancouver power play 18:26 into the first.

The Canadians made it a 3-2 game when they cashed in a 3-on2 chance 1:40 into the second period. But Fudger restored the two-goal lead 18:34 into the period when he redirected a pas from Grady Thomas in the slot in front of goalie Geo Wilson.

Devin Chapman picked up the win in net for the Cougars, who won the opener Friday 8-2.

Cariboo Cougars forward Fischer O’Brien chips the puck over the stick of Greater

Saturday

Cariboo will host the next round against the Chiefs, with games scheduled Friday and Saturday (both at 7 p.m.) and, if needed, Sunday (10 a.m.). Vancouver North East finished third in the regular season with a 25-8-5-2 record and 57 points, two behind the second-place Cougars (27-85-0). The Chiefs eliminated the

Vancouver North West Hawks 2-0, winning both games in Burnaby by 3-2 counts.

The other semifinal matchup this weekend in Abbotsford pits the first-place Fraser Valley Thunderbirds (26-9-1-1) against the fourth-place Okanagan Rockets (24-12-1-3). The T-birds are the defending league champions.

The winners were:

• Brett Connolly Award (rookie of the year): Tyson Upper

• Jeff Zorn Award (academic excellence): Josh Curtis

• Chris Masomn Award (most three-star selections): Taylor Gauthier

• Dorothy Johnson Memorial Award (voted by the fans): Taylor Gauthier

• Fan Club Bursary Award: Josh Curtis

• Spirit of the North Healthcare Foundation

Humanitarian Award: Isaiah DiLaura

• Troy Bourke Award (offensive player of the year): Vladislav Mikhalchuk

• Eric Brewer Award (best defensive player): Cole Moberg

• Michael Fogolin Award (voted by the players): Josh Curtis and Josh Maser

• Dan Hamhuis Award (team MVP): Josh Maser

Andreescu wins title

Gregory STRONG Citizen news service

Bianca Andreescu wasn’t lacking for determination in her stunning upset of Angelique Kerber in the final of the BNP Paribas Open.

The Canadian teenager essentially let out a battle cry midway through the third set – “I want this so bad!” – during her on-court meeting with coach Sylvain Bruneau. Andreescu won four of the next five games to complete a 6-4, 3-6, 6-4 victory for her first career WTA Tour title on Sunday in Indian Wells, Calif.

“To be honest, I felt the moment when she stood up from her chair – the energy was there,” Bruneau said Monday.

“Because sometimes a player, they’re beaten up a little bit, and they (struggle) out of the chair. I just felt it was like – boom. I just felt it. We said a few more words and I just felt she was ready to go. She did it and my hat goes off to her. That’s pretty amazing

what she did.” Bruneau had just over a minute to talk with Andreescu, who looked like she was starting to fade against the three-time Grand Slam champion.

The physical toll was obvious. An icebag soothed Andreescu’s burning legs. She had already received treatment in the right arm and shoulder area. Her feet felt torched and she said she was having trouble moving on the court.

Andreescu, 18, also was searching for answers against an experienced veteran who’s considered one of the best counterpunchers in the game. Midway through their chat, Andreescu extended the fingers on her left hand, tossed her energy drink in her bag and made the emphatic “I want this so bad!” declaration.

“When Bianca said that, I knew there was a door for me to try to ignite something in her because I know that she’s a tremendous fighter,” he said. “I knew it was important for me to try to help her to the finish line.”

CITIZEN PHOTO BY JAMES DOYLE

Vancouver Canadians defender Trevor Wong on

afternoon at Kin 1.

CITIZEN PHOTO BY JAMES DOYLE

Prince George Cougars forward Josh Maser poses with

Dan Hamhuis Award on Sunday afternoon at Prince George Civic

The Dan Hamhuis Award is given to the most valuable player on the team.

All the right moves

Meet the 50-and-older dance squad

thrilling crowds at NBA basketball games

Vivian Lewis was captain of her high school’s cheerleading squad in 1966, but she stopped cheering when she went to college and got married. Three daughters, six grandchildren and three great-grandchildren later, she’s back to performing – but now she’s doing scream-making, sweat-dripping, hipshaking hip-hop – in front of thousands of people. Lewis, 71, is part of Wizdom, the Washington Wizards’ new dance troupe – with members who are all 50 and older – that was created to whip up fans at Capital One Arena.

It seems to be working.

“The first performance that they did, you would have thought that we won the game,” said Derric Whitfield, Wizdom’s director. “They get a really intense crowd response – people standing up out of their seats, standing ovation.”

Wizdom’s 20 members, ages 50 to 76, sport red and blue jumpsuits and white sneakers as they bring a new choreographed routine for seven of the season’s 40 home games.

They dance mostly during timeouts, while the Wizards’ regular dance troupe, the Wizards Dancers, perform at halftime and other breaks during the game.

Whitfield, who selected the Wizdom dancers from a pool of 50 people in a nail-biting process documented on the YouTube series Road to Wizdom, produced by AARP, said he’s breaking barriers and stereotypes with the team.

“What I want to prove with this team is, everyone can dance,” Whitfield said to the cameras. “Dance is for people of all ages.”

The Wizards added the 50-and-over dance squad amid a $40 million offseason revamp of their arena and an expansion of their in-game entertainment. At least a dozen other NBA teams, including the Chicago Bulls and the Golden State Warriors, have dance teams for older adults. Whitfield said he had been hoping for a while to create one.

Make no mistake, he said: Wizdom dancers are not second-rate performers.

Their moves are precise, and they pop with energy. Whitfield said the dancers relate to fans on a different level than the Wizards Dancers or the Wiz Kids, who are between six and 14 years old.

Initially, there’s a bit of surprise from the audience that the Wizdom dancers can still shake it, he said, and then there’s plenty of whoops and hollers.

“The fans really get behind them, and it’s an instant support that they get because they’re older,” Whitfield said. “But when they come out and they’re performing these moves and executing them as great as they are, the shock value is another thing, as well, that gets the crowd.”

Like the kids’ team, the Wizdom dancers perform only at select games to make the learning process

manageable. The squad first took the court Nov. 24 and has performed twice since.

Its most recent performance was Friday, when the Wizards faced off against the Charlotte Hornets. Dancers are paid by the hour, with help from a sponsorship from AARP.

The Wizdom dancers practice for two hours on most Sundays, usually with three rehearsals between each performance. They learn their minute-long routine at the first practice, hone their formation at the second rehearsal and refine the whole dance on the last day.

Whitfield said he mixes older songs with current hits for Wizdom so the dancers can perform to music from their past and show off their newer steps. The group’s first routine included the 1986 funk single Candy by Cameo, Bubblegum by Jason Derulo and Tootsee Roll, released by rap group 69 Boyz in 1994.

While some dancers have retired from their day jobs, others are employed in education, information technology and other fields. One woman used to perform with the Bullettes, the all-female dance team before the Washington Bullets became the Wizards in 1997.

Wizdom dancer Janet West, 58, was a cheerleader for the Washington Redskins when they won the Super Bowl in 1983. She said she heard about Wizdom through the Redskins’ alumni association and found the idea “intoxicatingly exciting.”

“Once you’ve been in that arena and you have the crowd and the audience, it’s really an exciting thought to be back in that forum and have all that excitement around you by performing at 50-something,” said West. “It seemed like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

West is a professional bodybuilder, bikini competitor and personal trainer, but she said she thinks fans can relate to the fact that most Wizdom dancers look like people they might meet on the street.

“I think that if these were just a team of 40-somethings and we all looked physically fit, it might not be as inspirational to the outside world as seeing people who have survived great challenges in their life and also look like their grandmothers and their greatgrandmothers,” West said.

Wizdom has been such a success that the Wizards will hold tryouts again this fall for adults 50 and over who think they can make the cut.

Like the members of all the Wizards’ dance teams, current Wizdom dancers will have to audition again if they want to perform next season.

Lewis plans to try out again, although she said she expects many more dancers will audition now that word of the team has spread.

But no matter, Lewis said.

She’s ready and she’s staying focused on the success of the squad.

“It’s not about me,” she said. “It’s about what you can give and what you can do.”

Citizen news service

CITIZEN NEWS SERVICE PHOTO

The Washington Wizdom dancers perform during the Washington Wizards game on Friday.

CITIZEN NEWS SERVICE PHOTO

Washington Wizdom dancer Tanya Riley, 50, performs during the Washington Wizards game on Friday.

Kings on fire, crush Chilliwack Chiefs

Ted CLARKE Citizen staff

Last year in the BCHL playoffs the Chilliwack Chiefs made it extremely difficult for the Prince George Spruce Kings, pushing them to brink of elimination in the first round before losing to the Kings in Game 7. What a difference a season makes.

The Spruce Kings destroyed the Chiefs 8-0 Monday night in front of a near-capacity crowd of 1,697 at Rolling Mix Concrete Arena to take a 3-0 lead in the best-of-seven Mainland Division final series.

It was the second lopsided win for Kings in the series and they will have a chance to sweep the Chiefs when they return to the same rink for Game 4 tonight.

Ben Poisson’s natural hat trick inspired the Kings to their seventh win in eight playoff games so far. They scored five power-play goals and the score was a true reflection of how decisively they manhandled the Chiefs.

“The series isn’t over yet but certainly our group has played extremely well and really buckled down against a good Chilliwack team, I mean they won our league for a reason,” said Kings general manager Mike Hawes.

“Our group has really hit their stride right now and they’re peaking at the right time and really doing a good job and we saw that tonight.”

The Kings returned nearly half the roster from last year’s team that came up just three wins shot of winning the BCHL championship, while just five Chefs players in their lineup Monday were with the team that lost to Prince George but came back to win the RBC Cup junior A national championship as the host team.

“We did well in the playoffs last year and it was hard road for us and they absolutely learned a ton, they learned what it takes to win in the playoffs,” said Hawes. “It’s a different brand of hockey and everybody needs to be committed to the one goal and I know for sure we are.”

Logan Neaton picked up his sec-

ond shutout of the series, stopping 13 shots as his team outshot the Chiefs 46-13.

The Spruce Kings came out bashing bodies and could not have asked for a better start. Lucas Vanroboys took a puck left for him at the ringette line by linemate Nolan Welsh and had a free pass to the net, finishing with a backhand deke on goalie Daniel Chenard with just 3:47 off the clock.

Twenty-seven seconds after the goal, Chiefs winger Cole Donhauser got caught his stick in the face of Patrick Cozzi and was sent off for four minutes for a double minor. The first penalty was down

to the last 10 seconds when Layton Ahac took advantage of the screen in front of Chenard and let go a low snapshot that caught the net to the far side.

Before the second penalty had expired, Welsh dug the puck out of a crowd in the slot to feed Ben Poisson and he ripped a shot in for his sixth of the playoffs. The Kings captain made it a 4-0 count on another Kings; power play when he teed off on Ahac’s perfect feed into the face-off circle. Chenard had no chance of stopping that rocket.

“Ben has been an absolute stud for us here, he was champing at bit at the start of the playoffs because

he missed the majority of it last year (with a spleen injury),” said Hawes. “He’s been such a good leader, leading the way offensively and in both ends of the ice.”

The Kings applied relentless pressure in the second period and continued to overwhelm their opponents, outskating with an aggressive style that led to more turnovers. Like the one Nick Poisson caused 13 minutes into the third period. He gained the puck on the right wing and set up his older brother in the slot to complete the hat trick with a hard shot into the top corner. Ahac, expected to go high in the

NHL draft in June, had a halfdozen scouts watching his every move from their perches in the rink Monday and he gave another box for them to check off on the Kings’ sixth goal. The 17-year-old defenceman sped into the corner with the puck and just before he was about to go behind the net he put the puck right on the blade of Welsh’s stick in front for his first of the playoffs.

Nick Bochen cashed in a twoman advantage to make it 7-0 heading into the second intermission. The shots were 32-10 after 40 minutes. That spelled the end of the night for Chenard, replaced by Nolan Hildebrand to start the third period. Jay Keranen’s power-play goal was the only goal Hildebrand would allow on the 14 shots he faced.

The Kings put themselves in position to sweep the series when they topped the Chiefs twice in their own barn, 7-0 and 3-2 on the weekend.

The Poisson brothers and defenceman Max Coyle, with his first of the playoffs, scored for the Kings Saturday in their one-goal victory. Harrison Blaisdell and Kevin Wall replied for the Chiefs in that one.

Chilliwack (42-15-1-0) finished with a league-best 85 points, one more than the Spruce Kings (39-13-1-5), and that gave the Chiefs the right to host the first two games of the series. Aside from brief stretches of Game 2, the Chiefs have failed to find the form that made them so difficult to beat throughout the season. They haven’t been able to match the Spruce Kings speed and it’s obvious the Kings, who played 24 playoff games last year in their run to the league final are leaning on their depth and experience to crank up their intensity up to a new level.

The Mainland champions will advance to the Coastal Conference championship series against the Island champion., either the Victoria Grizzlies or Powell River Kings. The Grizzlies took a 2-1 lead in that best-of-seven affair with a 5-0 win Monday night in Powell River.

Bobcats tie North Shore in provincial opener

Ted CLARKE Citizen staff

After a month between meaningful games, it took the North East Bobcats a period and a half to get up to game speed.

By that time, thanks to some alert goaltending from Tysen Smith, the Bobcats trailed the North Shore Winter Club Winterhawks by only the slimmest of margins in their opening game Monday morning at the bantam Tier 1 provincial hockey championship at Kin 1.

Jobey Pearson staked the

‘Hawks to a 1-0 lead with a power-play goal, taking advantage of puck that hit a seam in the boards to score the opener, 1:23 into the second period. The ‘Cats erased the deficit 7:45 into the period, on a North Central power play, when defenceman Tye Peters took a cross-crease pass from Decker Mucjin and blasted it into the net.

The Bobcats leaned heavily on Smith’s puckstopping abilities throughout the game and especially in the third period when forced to kill a series of penalties,

but hung on to tie the Hawks 1-1.

“A few penalties in the third took away our momentum but we had our chances to win that game too - the penalty-kill was great and the power play was good, we scored a nice one,” said Bobcats head coach Mirsad Mucjin. “We’re going to build off this games and have a big one (Monday night) and get back to our full-season form. Our last competitive game was the 17th of February.

“This is a long marathon and we’re not going to sprint too

TUESDAY, APR. 2 x-Red Deer at Prince Albert, 7 p.m. (MDT) Saskatoon (2) vs. Moose Jaw (3)

FRIDAY, MAR. 22 Moose Jaw at Saskatoon, 7 p.m. (MDT)

SATURDAY, MAR. 23 Moose Jaw at Saskatoon, 7 p.m. (MDT)

TUESDAY, MAR. 26 Saskatoon at Moose Jaw, 7 p.m. (MDT)

WEDNESDAY, MAR. 27 Saskatoon at Moose Jaw, 7 p.m. (MDT)

FRIDAY, MAR. 29 x-Moose Jaw at Saskatoon, 7 p.m. (MDT)

SATURDAY, MAR. 30 x-Saskatoon at Moose Jaw, 7 p.m. (MDT)

MONDAY, APR. 1 x-Moose Jaw at Saskatoon, 7 p.m. (MDT)

CENTRAL DIVISION Edmonton (1) vs. Medicine Hat (WC1)

SATURDAY, MAR. 23 Medicine Hat at Edmonton, 7:30 p.m. (MDT)

SUNDAY, MAR. 24

Medicine Hat at Edmonton, 6 p.m. (MDT)

TUESDAY, MAR. 26 Edmonton at Medicine Hat, 7 p.m. (MDT)

WEDNESDAY, MAR. 27 Edmonton at Medicine Hat, 7 p.m. (MDT)

FRIDAY, MAR. 29 x-Medicine Hat at Edmonton, 7 p.m. (MDT)

SUNDAY, MAR. 31 x-Edmonton at Medicine Hat, 6 p.m. (MDT)

TUESDAY, APR. 2

x-Medicine Hat at Edmonton, 7 p.m. (MDT)

Lethbridge (2) vs. Calgary (3)

FRIDAY, MAR. 22

Calgary at Lethbridge, 7 p.m. (MDT)

SATURDAY, MAR. 23 Calgary at Lethbridge, 7 p.m. (MDT)

TUESDAY, MAR. 26 Lethbridge at Calgary, 7 p.m. (MDT)

THURSDAY, MAR. 28 Lethbridge at Calgary, 7 p.m. (MDT)

SATURDAY, MAR. 30 x-Calgary at Lethbridge, 7 p.m. (MDT) SUNDAY, MAR. 31 x-Lethbridge at Calgary, 4 p.m. (MDT)

TUESDAY, APR. 2 x-Calgary at Lethbridge, 7 p.m. (MDT)

WESTERN CONFERENCE

B.C. DIVISION Vancouver (1) vs. Seattle (WC2) FRIDAY, MAR. 22 Seattle at Vancouver, 7:30 p.m. (PDT) SATURDAY, MAR. 23 Seattle at Vancouver, 7 p.m. (PDT) TUESDAY, MAR. 26 Vancouver at Seattle, 7:05 p.m. (PDT) WEDNESDAY, MAR. 27 Vancouver at Seattle, 7:05 p.m. (PDT) FRIDAY, MAR. 29 x-Seattle at Vancouver, 7:05 p.m. (PDT) SATURDAY, MAR. 30 x-Vancouver at Seattle, 6:05 p.m. (PDT)

TUESDAY, APR. 2 x-Seattle at Vancouver, 7 p.m. (PDT) Victoria (2) vs. Kamloops/Kelowna (3) FRIDAY’S GAME Kamloops/Kelowna at Victoria, 7:05 p.m. (PDT) SATURDAY, MAR. 23 Kamloops/Kelowna at Victoria, 7:05 p.m. (PDT)

Remainder of Schedule, TBD U.S. DIVISION Everett (1) vs. Tri-City (WC2) FRIDAY, MAR. 22

(MDT)

Tri-City at Everett, 7:35 p.m. (PDT)

SATURDAY, MAR. 23 Tri-City at Everett, 7:05 p.m. (PDT)

WEDNESDAY, MAR. 27 Everett at Tri-City, 7:05 p.m. (PDT)

THURSDAY, MAR. 28 Everett at Tri-City, 7:05 p.m. (PDT) SATURDAY, MAR. 30 x-Tri-City at Everett, 7:05 p.m. (PDT) SUNDAY, MAR. 31 x-Everett at Tri-City, 5:05 p.m. (PDT)

TUESDAY, APR. 2 x-Tri-City at Everett, 7:05 p.m. (PDT) Spokane (2) vs. Portland (3) FRIDAY, MAR. 22 Portland at Spokane, 7:05 PDT SATURDAY, MAR. 23 Portland at Spokane, 7:05 PDT

TUESDAY, MAR. 26

MAR. 27

MAR. 30 x-Portland at Spokane, 7:05 PDT MONDAY,

early. It’s a lot of hockey by Thursday night and that’s our plan to get there.”

The Bobcats play regularseason games in the Okanagan Mainline Hockey Association and finished tied with Kamloops for first place. Vernon beat Kamloops in the league final.

As the only North Central zone Tier 1 team, the Bobcats did not participate in the OMAHA playoffs.

The Bobcats went on to beat the Victoria Racquet Club Kings 7-5 in the late game Monday night.

Victoria lost its opener 2-1 to Cloverdale earlier Monday. North Central returns to the ice in the six-team tournament Tuesday at 7:45 p.m. to face the Vernon Kings. The Bobcats roster also includes forwards Nico Myatovic, Amar Powar, Scott Cousins, Brady McIsaac, Chase Pacheco, Max Sanford, Dylan Illett, Dawson Davis, Leighton Pillipow and Joshua Sale; defencemen Matyas Mocilac, Zachary Leslie, Mitchell Lennox, Tymon Sankopulos and Benjamin Sullivan; and goalie Jasper Tait.

RESULT Trail 5 Vernon 4 (OT) FRIDAY’S RESULT Trail 3 Vernon 1 TUESDAY’S GAME Vernon at Trail, 7 p.m. WEDNESDAY’S GAME Vernon at Trail, 7 p.m.

FRIDAY, MAR. 22 x-Trail at Vernon, 7 p.m. SATURDAY, MAR. 23 x-Vernon at Trail, 7 p.m. MONDAY, MAR. 25 x-Trail at Vernon, 7 p.m. x - played only if necessary.

MONDAY’S RESULTS MAINLAND DIVISION final Prince George Spruce Kings vs. Chilliwack Chiefs (Spruce Kings lead best-of-seven series 3-0) Game 3 summary CHIEFS 0 AT SPRUCE KINGS 8 First Period 1. Prince George, Vanroboys 2 (Welsh) 3:47 2. Prince George, Ahac 3 (Coyle, Cozzi) 6:03 (pp) 3. Prince George, B.Poisson 6 (Welsh, Cozzi) 6:52 (pp) 4. Prince George, B.Poisson (Coyle, Ahac) 10:53 (pp) Penalties – Donhauser CWK (double high-sticking) 4:12, Slipec CWK (tripping) 10:27, Vanroboys PG (cross-checking) 15:02. Second Period

5. Prince George, B.Poisson 8 (N.Poisson) 10:53

6. Prince George, Welsh 1 (Ahac, Manz) 17:42

7. Prince George, Bochen 2 (Anhorn) 18:21

Penalties – Nelson CWK (roughing), Brar PG (roughing) 14:38, Nelson CWK (roughing, misconduct) 18:01, Brind’Amour CWK (roughing) 18:08, Donhauser CWK (misconduct) 18:21. Third Period 8. Prince George, Keranen 1 (Schleppe, WatsonBrawn) 12;37 (pp) Penalties – Nameth CWK (slashing) 0:15, Wall CWK (slashing) 5:36, Wutzke CWK (boarding) 7:07. Wall CWK (slashing)

CITIZEN PHOTO BY JAMES DOYLE

Prince George Spruce Kings forward Patrick Cozzi battles Chilliwack Chiefs defender Nathan Kelly for the loose puck on the back of the net on Monday night at Rolling Mix Concrete Arena.

YouTube no match for hate videos

Citizen news service

As a grisly video recorded by the alleged perpetrator of Friday’s bloody massacres at two New Zealand mosques played out on YouTube and other social media, Neal Mohan, 6,000 kilometres away in San Bruno, Calif., had the sinking realization that his company was going to be overmatched – again. Mohan, YouTube’s chief product officer, had assembled a group of senior executives known internally as “incident commanders” who jump into crises, such as when footage of a suicide or shooting spreads online.

The team worked through the night, trying to identify and remove tens of thousands of videos – many repackaged or recut versions of the original footage that showed the murders. As soon as the group took down one, another would appear, as quickly as one per second in the hours after the shooting, Mohan said.

As its efforts faltered, the team finally took unprecedented steps – including temporarily disabling several search functions and cutting off human review features to speed the removal of videos flagged by automated systems. Many of the new clips were altered in ways that outsmarted the company’s detection systems.

“This was a tragedy that was almost designed for the purpose of going viral,” Mohan said. “We’ve made progress, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have a lot of work ahead of us, and this incident has shown that, especially in the case of more viral videos like this one, there’s more work to be done.”

The uploads came more rapidly and in far greater volume than during previous mass shootings, Mohan said. Video, mainly from the point of view of victims, spread online from the shootings at a concert in Las Vegas in October 2017 and at a Pittsburgh synagogue this past October. But neither incident included a live-stream recorded by the perpetrator. In New Zealand, the shooter apparently wore a body-mounted camera as he fired into crowds of worshipers.

Each public tragedy that has played out on YouTube has exposed a profound flaw in its design that allows hate or conspiracies to flourish online. Despite being one of the crown jewels of Google’s stable of massively profitable and popular online services, for many hours, YouTube could not stop the flood of users who uploaded and re-uploaded the footage showing the mass murder of Muslims. About 24 hours later – after round-the-clock toil – company officials felt the problem was controlled, but acknowledged that the broader challenges were far from resolved.

“Every time a tragedy like this happens we learn something new, and in this case it was the unprecedented volume” of videos, Mohan said. “Frankly, I would have liked to get a handle on this earlier.”

The company – which has come under increasing fire for allowing Russians to interfere in the 2016 election through its site and for being slow to catch inappropriate content –has worked behind the scenes for more than a year to improve its systems for detecting

and removing problematic videos. It has hired thousands of human content moderators and has built new software that can direct viewers to more authoritative news sources more quickly during times of crises.

But YouTube’s struggles during and after the New Zealand shooting have brought into sharp relief the limits of the computerized systems and operations that Silicon Valley companies have developed to manage the massive volumes of user-generated content on their sprawling services. In this case, humans determined to beat the company’s detection tools won the day – to the horror of people watching around the world.

The attack at one of the two mosques was live-streamed by the alleged shooter on Facebook, and it was almost instantaneously uploaded to other video sites, most prominently YouTube. The shooter appealed to online communities, particularly supporters of the YouTube star PewDiePie, to share the video. (PewDiePie, whose real name is Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg, immediately disavowed the alleged shooter.)

Many of the uploaders made small modifications to the video, such as adding watermarks or logos to the footage or altering the size of the clips, to defeat YouTube’s ability to detect and remove it. Some even turned the people in the footage into animations, as if a video game was playing out. For many hours, video of the attack could be easily found using such simple basic terms as “New Zealand.”

Facebook said it removed 1.5 million videos depicting images from the shooting in the first 24 hours after it happened – with 1.2 million of those blocked by software at the moment of upload. Reddit, Twitter, and other platforms also scrambled to limit the spread of content related to the attack. YouTube declined to say how many videos it removed.

U.K.

Pedro Domingos, a professor of computer science at the University of Washington, said that artificial intelligence is much less sophisticated than many people believe, and Silicon Valley companies often portray their systems as more powerful than they actually are. In fact, even the most advanced artificial intelligence systems still are fooled in ways that a human would easily detect.

“In a way, they’re kind of caught in a bind when something like this happens because they need to explain that their AI is really fallible,” Domingos said. “The AI is really not entirely up to the job.”

Other experts believe that the continuous spread of horrific content cannot be weeded out completely by social media companies when the core feature of their products enables people to post content without a prior review. Even if the companies hired tens of thousands more moderators, the decisions these humans make are prone to subjectivity error – and AI will never be able to make the subtle judgment calls needed in many cases.

Former YouTube engineer Guillaume Chaslot, who left the company in 2013 and now runs the watchdog group AlgoTransparency, says the company has not made the fixes necessary to make its platform safe and likely won’t without more public pressure.

Unless users stop using YouTube, they have no real incentive to make big changes,” he said. “It’s still whack-a-mole fixes, and the problems come back every time.”

Political pressure is growing. Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.) singled out YouTube in a sharply worded statement Friday. And both Democrats and Republicans have called on social media companies to be more aggressive in policing their platforms to better control the spread of extremist, hateful ideologies and the violence they sometimes provoke.

speaker scuttles

May’s Brexit vote plan

Citizen news service

The speaker of Britain’s House of Commons dealt a potentially fatal blow to Prime Minister Theresa May’s ailing Brexit deal on Monday, saying the government couldn’t keep asking lawmakers to vote on the same deal they have already rejected twice.

The government intends to try a third time to get lawmakers to back the deal, ideally before May joins EU leaders Thursdays at a Brussels summit where she is set to ask the bloc to postpone Britain’s departure.

May has warned opponents that failure to approve the deal would mean a long, and possibly indefinite, delay to Brexit.

Speaker John Bercow said Monday that centuries-old parliamentary rules prevent a motion being brought back repeatedly for votes in the same session of Parliament.

He said the government could not “resubmit to the House the same proposition or substantially the same proposition.”

He said a new motion would have to be “fundamentally different. Not different in terms of wording, but different in terms of substance.”

May has said that if her deal is approved, she will ask EU leaders to extend the Brexit deadline until June 30 so that Parliament

has time to approve the necessary legislation.

If it isn’t, she will have to seek a longer extension that would mean Britain participating in May 23-26 elections for the European Parliament – something the government is keen to avoid.

May’s goal is to win over Northern Ireland’s small, powerbrokering Democratic Unionist Party.

The DUP’s 10 lawmakers prop up May’s Conservative government, and their support could influence pro-Brexit Conservatives to drop their opposition to the deal.

Still, May faces a struggle to reverse the huge margins of defeat for the agreement in Parliament. It was rejected by 230 votes in January and by 149 votes last week.

There was no sign of a breakthrough Monday, and the government faced a deadline of the end of Tuesday to decide whether they have enough votes to pass the deal, so that a vote can be held on Wednesday.

May’s spokesman, James Slack, said the government would only hold a vote if there is “a realistic prospect of success.”

British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt said Monday he saw “cautious signs of encouragement” that the deal might make it through Parliament this week.

The

TSX composite index closed up 111.02 points to 16,251.37. That’s the highest level since last August and just 1.9 per cent off its all-time high set last July. The Toronto market has slowly been creeping up since a blockbuster first two months of the year that nearly recovered all losses from late last year. There’s a chance the TSX will set a new record in the coming weeks but will likely consolidate just short of that high until spurred by another catalyst, says Mike Archibald, associate portfolio manager with AGF Investments Inc. He says the market has been fairly steady in March, rising 1.6 per cent so far in the month after gaining 12.5 per cent in January and February. The market was helped Monday by a 2.3 per cent hike in the health care sector as Green Organic Dutchman Holdings Ltd. and Hexo Corp. led the cannabis stocks.

The key energy sector rose 1.9 per cent on the back of OPEC cancelling its April meeting, leaving oil supply cuts in place until at least June.

The May crude contract for U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude was up 56 cents to US$59.38 per barrel. That’s the highest price since Nov. 12. The energy sector was also helped by the April natural gas contract gaining 5.5 cents at US$2.85 per mmBTU. The financial sector was up 0.87 per cent as Manulife Financial Corp. rose 3.1 per cent after it announced that a Saskatchewan court ruled in its favour in its legal fight with hedge fund Mosten Investment LP over insurance contracts. Materials led on the downside as the price of gold dipped. The April gold contract was down US$1.40 at US$1,301.50 an ounce and the May copper contract was up 0.3 of a cent at US$2.91 a pound. The Canadian dollar traded at an average of 74.93 cents US compared with an average of 74.95 cents US on Friday. In New York, the Dow Jones industrial average was up 65.23 points at 25,914.10. The S&P 500 index was up 10.46 points at 2,832.94, while the Nasdaq composite was up 25.95 points at 7,714.48.

The U.S.

CITIZEN NEWS SERVICE PHOTO

Students light candles as they gather for a vigil to commemorate victims of Friday’s shooting, outside the Al Noor mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, on Monday.

Junos all Hart (and Shawn Mendes)

Citizen news service

Corey Hart didn’t call it a comeback, but at the Juno Awards on Sunday the 1980s hitmaker proved his lengthy break from performing hasn’t stalled his stage presence.

The Sunglasses at Night singer-songwriter delivered an emotional speech thanking his family and fans as he was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame on the broadcast.

“I believe music and love are the most enduring and powerful forces of good in the world,” Hart told the crowd after throwing his fist in the air, with tears in his eyes, on the Junos stage in London, Ont.

“Without you, my songs would have no home, and they would ultimately be unrequited and empty.”

Hart then closed out the Junos with a performance straight out of a retro playlist. He started with his ballad Never Surrender”on piano, before jumping behind a microphone stand – and sliding on his sunglasses – for a vibrant take on his timeless pop hit.

The performance capped off a diverse showcase of Canadian talent hosted by Sarah McLachlan that saw a list of marquee winners, including Shawn Mendes, Jessie Reyez and Arkells.

Mendes was the biggest winner as he picked up album of the year – which added to the four Junos he won in a pre-telecast ceremony held on Saturday.

But he wasn’t able to attend the event because he’s in the midst of a European tour.

However, the pop superstar didn’t sit out the show entirely.

The Junos included a pre-recorded performance of In My Blood taped in Amsterdam on March 4, where he jokingly told the audience to “try to sound Canadian.”

Hamilton-founded rock act Arkells won group of the year before performing their rousing track Hand Me Downs amid a steady rain of confetti.

German-Canadian pop singer Bulow was named breakthrough artist and Brett Kissel won country album. Avril Lavigne was the fan choice in an award that’s voted on by viewers.

A message of unity and love carried throughout the broadcast, which opened with Loud Luxury, the DJ pair who met at the city’s Western University.

They welcomed the school’s marching band and cheerleaders to kick off the show with a bombastic performance of their dance hit Body.

Host Sarah McLachlan stepped onto the stage at Budweiser Gardens shortly after-

Brooks & Dunn named to country hall of fame

Citizen news service

Country hit-making duo Brooks & Dunn are riding a resurgence of interest in 90s-era country music with a new album celebrating their top-selling singles, a longstanding Las Vegas residency and now an invitation to join the Country Music Hall of Fame.

The duo, along with comedic singer Ray Stevens and record label head Jerry Bradley, were announced Monday as this year’s inductees and will be formally inducted during a ceremony later this year.

Their new album, Reboot, out April 5, features the duo on new versions of their hits with today’s country stars such as Kacey Musgraves, Luke Combs and Kane Brown.

With more than 20 No. 1 country hits, the Grammy-winning pair is the most awarded duo by the Country Music Association, earning 14 vocal duo awards over their careers. They started as solo singers but were encouraged to join up as a duo and had immediate success with a string of hits, starting with Brand New Man, My Next Broken Heart, Neon Moon and Boot Scootin’ Boogie.

With multi-platinum sales, they became one of country’s biggest touring acts for decades, combining Brooks’ big personality and guitar work and Ronnie’s singing.

“Back in the day, in the 90s, everything was sensationalized and country had hit arenas and stadiums,” Dunn said. “We jumped right in on all fours.”

The duo split up in 2010 and they both started working on solo projects, but reunited in 2015 for what’s turned into a four-year residency in Las Vegas with Reba McEntire.

Stevens, 80, is known for singing zany hits like The Streak, but also sentimental ones like the Grammy-winning Everything Is Beautiful. Bradley was the former head of RCA Records’ Nashville office and worked with Waylon Jennings, Dolly Parton, Ronnie Milsap, Charley Pride and Alabama. Under his helm, the label produced the first platinum-selling country record, Wanted! The Outlaws, a compilation album among Jennings, Willie Nelson, Jessi Colter and Tompall Glaser.

wards, offering a subtle jab at U.S. President Donald Trump.

“You know when you live someplace peaceful and beautiful, and then you get a crazy neighbour?” McLachlan asked the crowd.

“And they start causing all sorts of trouble, like putting up weird walls, picking fights with all the other neighbours?”

McLachlan added that she hoped that neighbour would be gone by 2020, and shifted the conversation to a lighter place saying that music is “reminding us that we’re all in this together.”

Last year’s breakthrough artist Reyez brought home her second Juno for R&B/

soul recording of the year, and thanked her Colombian-immigrant parents for their support.

“I feel like I’m really grateful that my parents chose Canada and I feel like there’s open arms here, and it’s very apparent,” Reyez said backstage.

“If I was raised somewhere else, or born somewhere else, I feel like I wouldn’t have been as encouraged to wave both flags – but in Canada you wave your parents’ flag and you wave the Canadian flag.”

Jeremy Dutcher performed Sakomawit from his album “Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa,” underneath black and white photographs of his Wolastoq ancestors.

Dutcher won the Indigenous music album award at a Saturday pre-telecast gala for his project, which has him singing with recordings of his elders made more than a hundred years ago.

Backstage, Dutcher spoke about the thrilling experience of performing in the Wolastoq language on national television.

“It feels like possibility,” he said.

“Representation. These bodies on stage. I didn’t see that (growing up), so it gives me hope for what’s to come. Because kids now can go and see queerness, see Indigeneity, can see all of these beautiful diverse things on a stage – what kind of possibilities does that breathe into a life?”

Canadian Music Hall of Fame inductee Corey Hart performs at the Juno Awards in London, Ont., on Sunday.

Seniors Taking up running later in life

Anne MIDGETTE Citizen news service

On Feb. 1, 2018, I put on a pair of sneakers and went for a run for the first time in more than 30 years.

To say I was never a runner is a mild way to sum up a life of active antipathy to the activity. Exercise was never my thing – undertaken periodically, at best, in an effort to force my body to become a smaller size. My previous adult foray into running had taken place one afternoon in college when, wearing a motley assortment of athletic gear, I gasped my way toward the football stadium with a stitch in my side, stopped partway, returned to the dorm and decided to take up swimming instead. Yet here I was in my 50s, feeling heavy and out of shape, in a pair of sneakers I bought when I took tennis lessons in 1999 and an oversized neon pink sweatshirt from Roswell, N.M., with an alien on it, gasping my way again along the pavement, experiencing a Proustian wave of unfortunate past associations. I blame technology.

It was my computer that got me to run again – and not just because sitting at it for years without exercising had gotten me into bad shape. On social media, I vicariously followed other people’s fitness successes: an overweight mom who became a marathon runner, a friend who walked and ran off half her body weight, a music critic colleague who tweeted her day’s playlist after each run. Online, I kept seeing articles about the benefits of exercise; if it were an over-the-counter drug, one doctor said, everyone would buy it. And then there was an app: Couch25K (that’s “couch to 5K”), a program that led you from square one to running five kilometres in just eight weeks, which two members of my extended family had used with success. In my supposedly busy life, joining a gym had always seemed like an insurmountable hurdle. But I can always download an app.

Then I met up with one of my oldest friends for breakfast. “I’ve started running,” she said, and maybe that, coming from a lifelong habit of sisterly competition, is what pushed me over the edge and got me actually to start a couple of weeks later.

The beauty of an app is that it removes decision fatigue. It tells you exactly what to do and when to do it, three days a week, starting with running in mere 60-second intervals. And the beauty of running is that it’s solitary – nobody has to know how long you’ve been doing it. Winded? For all that passerby knows, you’ve already run five

miles. Or so you tell yourself. I did betray my newness to the sport by my choice of venue. We had recently moved to a new neighborhood, and I didn’t know my way around. So I began by running in the tennis centre parking lot.

Motivation at the beginning is not so hard. I was sure that if I just followed what the app said, I was going to be perfectly fit within a few months.

After two days, I bought some good running shoes to replace the tennis sneakers (fighting down self-consciousness in the store; after all, they didn’t know I wasn’t a runner and wasn’t really entitled to be there) and those were a motivator, too, bright and springy and sporty-looking. Then there was the park. The tennis centre parking lot is at one side of a sprawling national park that turned out to be interlaced with wooded trails along a rock-strewn river. I ran through ranks of tree trunks, warm beige in the morning sun, rising from a crust of frozen snow, their branches latticed against the pale blue sky.

At the end of the third week, I posted a picture on Instagram hashtagged #morningrun. My close friends immediately took notice. “Have you been hacked?” one commented.

“Wait,” another wrote, “you were the one who was running?

From what?”

It took me eight weeks, until the end of the Couch25K program, to realize that, like so many goals

throughout one’s life – losing the weight, finding the boyfriend, publishing the book – running five kilometres was going to be the beginning of something, rather than the end. I didn’t even make it to 5K by the end of the eighth week: The final day has you run for 30 minutes without stopping, which is only 5K if you run fast enough. It took me another couple of weeks to hit the 5K mark. Then that felt anticlimactic, so I registered for an actual race in the fall. Feeling empty without the app’s guidance, I discovered there are a wealth of running apps that will chart your distance and pace and create training programs, and downloaded another one. The hardest thing about starting to run in middle age was not the running itself. The hardest thing was running through my own prejudices and fears. I had always seen exercise as a means to an end, rather than something I might do for its own sake, and it was hard to shake the idea that the perfect body was the ultimate goal, or shake disappointment when it failed to appear. Nor did running become magically easy to do; it felt hard most days, and I remained dismayingly slow. Fear held me back like mud – fear I was doing it wrong, fear I was going to injure myself and have to stop (something reinforced in me by the many friends who told me they were former runners until they had blown out their knees, or developed arthritis). I began having

shooting pains down the back of one leg, and worried that my running career was over until Facebook, probably triggered by my repeated googling of “hip pain,” popped up an article about the piriformis, a small muscle in the pelvic area, that exactly described all my symptoms as well as some stretching exercises that, within a few weeks, alleviated them. I was afraid of being cold, until I learned the exhilaration of going out in freezing weather and, rather than fighting it, coexisted with it, working up body heat inside the insulated running jacket that had replaced my pink sweatshirt, breath escaping in white puffs. I finally ran my first official 5K race, in the pouring rain, and finished side by side with another middleaged woman. That felt anticlimactic, too, so I signed up for another.

The benefits were not the ones I had expected, either.

As a competitive person who has always measured achievement on a large scale and wants quick results, it took me a long time to realize that I was more focused, sleeping better and slightly less stressed.

Then there was the pleasure of uninterrupted listening to music and audiobooks, finding that some pieces of music grew even more vivid when printed into my mind by the pounding of my feet. I got extra adrenaline, listening to Dora Pejacevic’s Symphony in F-sharp minor, from my indignation that this composer is so unknown; Da-

vid Lang’s The Day, with a litany of people’s memories of personal milestones, became a series of affirmations; and I learned the Hamilton soundtrack by heart. I hadn’t thought about how seeing me start running would affect my son, let alone considered that running would become something he wanted to do along with me, a treasured weekend activity. It didn’t occur to me that running while traveling would show me places I never otherwise would have seen, like the panoramic views over Prague from a hilltop park. And on the most superficial level, I enjoyed, for the first time in my life, buying athletic gear and actually using it.

I’ve read a lot of these stories, and I know how they’re supposed to end: with me running a marathon, or getting faster, or going down several clothing sizes. But this is not a story of great athletic achievement. I haven’t yet run more than seven km at a stretch, or even averaged that 10-minute mile.

Here’s what I did achieve: I did lose 10 kg. I did run three 5K races, each a tiny bit faster than the last. I did run an average of three times a week, through vacations and work trips, heat and rain and snow, all year long.

And after a lifetime of seeing my body as something I had to fight, I feel, for the first time, that it and I are working together.

It’s been more than a year now, and I’m still running.

Taking up running later in life can open up new pleasures in life while making you stronger and healthier.

Big pharma propaganda seeks to sway seniors

Citizen news service

As ominous music plays in the background, the narrator of a radio ad warns that a U.S. government proposal to apply international pricing to certain drugs would be a nightmare for American seniors.

The one-minute spot is the handiwork of the Alliance for Patient Access, a non-profit group that gives off a consumer-friendly vibe but is bankrolled by the powerful pharmaceutical industry.

It’s also closely aligned with a Washington lobbying and public relations firm, Woodberry Associates, whose president, Brian Kennedy, is the non-profit’s executive director.

As Congress and U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration aim to lower prescription drug costs, outside groups like the Alliance for Patient Access are seeking to sway the outcome.

But not all of these organizations are clear about who they actually represent. Their names can obscure the source of the message, and they’re cagey about where they get their funding.

Yet even a small degree of separation can be valuable for pharmaceutical companies at a time when the industry faces stiff political headwinds.

Drug prices may provide a rare bipartisan issue on which Congress and the White House could collaborate on legislation ahead of the 2020 elections.

In a prelude of sorts, the Senate Finance Committee last month grilled drug company executives over the cost of their products.

Anger is bubbling up from their constituents. A February poll by the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation found nearly one in four Americans taking prescription drugs have difficultly affording their medications.

Although majorities of the public trust pharmaceutical companies to develop new and effective drugs, only 25 per cent trust them to price their products fairly – down from 41 per cent in 2008.

Susan Hepworth, a spokeswoman for the Alliance and Woodberry, described the nonprofit as “a national network of physicians that advocates for patient access to the medicines they prescribe.”

Through the Alliance, she said, doctors “can share their perspectives about the benefits of respecting the physician-patient relationship, clinical decision making and personalized, patient-centred health care.” It’s no surprise, Hepworth said, that the group’s backers include companies that manufacture medicines.

She declined to answer questions about the radio ad.

The one-minute spot singles out for criticism a Trump administration proposal to gradually shift Medicare payments for drugs administered in doctors’ offices to a level based on international prices.

Prices in other countries, including Canada, are lower because governments directly negotiate with manufacturers. But drugmakers have assailed the Trump plan, arguing it smacks of government pricesetting and would lead to socialized health care.

The Alliance’s radio spot makes the same argument, using nearly identical language. Under the Trump proposal, the ad says, “cancer treatment would be paid based on rates from countries with European-style health care, where access to new medicine is rationed and patients often wait months for care.”

Tax filings for 2015 through 2017, the most recent available, show the Alliance has paid Woodberry’s consultants more than $1 million.

Brendan Fischer of the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center said the transactions may raise red flags.

“Nonprofits are supposed to promote social welfare, not operate to provide a private benefit to any person or entity,” Fischer said. “A non-profit could run afoul of tax law if it is substantially benefiting a nonprofit officer’s for-profit consulting firm.”

Hepworth said Woodberry is a consultancy with a division that specializes in nonprofit coalition management and that the money paid to the firm’s people represents a small amount of the Alliance’s expenditures for those years.

The Alliance “files all of the appropriate paperwork with the IRS and takes the extra step of making available on its website a

current list of its supporters,” according to Hepworth. The link to this list takes a bit of searching to find, however.

The Alliance’s money comes from more than three dozen associate members and financial supporters, which include several of the largest pharmaceutical companies. Among them are AbbVie, manufacturer of Humira, the blockbuster drug for immune system conditions; AstraZeneca, maker of the cholesterol drug Crestor; Bristol-Myers Squibb, maker of the blood thinner Eliquis; and Pfizer, maker of Lyrica for nerve pain.

The group’s leaders are medical doctors based outside of Washington; those identified in the tax records as directors aren’t paid for the one hour per month, on average, of work they do for the non-profit.

But several of them have earned tens of thousands of dollars in consulting and speaker fees from the health care industry, including companies that back the Alliance.

For example, Dr. Jack Schim, a neurologist in California and an Alliance director, was paid nearly $329,000 between 2015 and 2017, with the bulk of the money coming from Allergan, maker of wrinkle treatment Botox, according to a database maintained by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Schim was one of the top-ranking physicians in his specialty for these payments.

While the Alliance names its supporters, it doesn’t disclose how much each has contributed.

Federal rules permit groups structured as tax-exempt social welfare organizations to say little about their benefactors.

Social welfare organizations like the Alliance also may engage in limited political activities so long as politics isn’t their primary focus.

Known by their IRS designation as 501(c) (4)s, they typically are civic-minded groups such as homeowner associations and volunteer fire departments.

The Alliance spent $13.6 million in 2015 and 2016 on awards to recognize dozens of members of Congress who, according to Hepworth, “have championed patient access in the Medicare program.”

The lawmakers, who are barred by ethics rules from accepting monetary gifts, are presented with a plaque and are praised in press releases and advertisements. Recent recipients include Rep. Scott Peters, DCalif., and Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn. Tax records for the drugmakers’ influential trade association, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, provide a bit of insight into the Alliance’s finances.

The association, known as PhRMA, identifies the recipients of its grants and contributions.

It donated more than $1.8 million to the Alliance between 2009 and 2016 and since 2016 gave another $215,000 to two smaller offshoots – the Institute for Patient Access and the Global Alliance for Patient Access.

PhRMA’s largest single contribution, $1.4 million, came in 2016 when Trump, then a candidate for president, and Democratic contender Hillary Clinton rattled drug companies with their pledges to take aggressive steps to bring down prescription medication costs.

“Groups like the Alliance for Patient Access often act as foils for the pharmaceutical industry instead of advancing patient interests,” said Steven Knievel of the nonpartisan watchdog group Public Citizen.

“They advocate for policies where industry and patient interests align. But any time drug prices are on the table, they toe the line of their corporate backers.”

Kennedy, a former top official at the Republican Governors Association, registered the Alliance in June 2006 in Iowa; he lists an address in Bettendorf on the certificate. He registered Woodberry Associates as an LLC nearly five months later, also in Iowa. Kennedy is the Alliance’s executive director and Woodberry’s president. The non-profit and the business share an office in downtown Washington.

The bulk of the more than $1 million paid to Woodberry between 2015 and 2017 was for consulting services that Hepworth said ranged from managing Alliance working groups to the development and promotion of white papers, podcasts and social media posts.

Kennedy also received more than $457,000 in reimbursements for travel, hotels and catering contracts.

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Carol Repetowski passed away peacefully in PG Rotary Hospice House March 8, 2019. Carol is survived by her children: Sheryl (Terry), Scott (Barbara) and Paul; grandchildren: Ann-Marie, Jacob and Luke Metcalfe. Predeceased by her husband Peter. Memorial Service to be held from Hixon Lighthouse Community Church on Saturday March 23 at 1:00pm.

Leo Joseph Denis July 2, 1925March 13, 2019

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