A man serving a federal sentence for being behind the wheel during a high-speed rollover that led to the death of a friend and serious injuries to another has been granted day parole.
Sentenced in July 2018, Dustin Allen Tisdale, 25, had been serving his time in a minimum security facility. He was granted day parole on March 6 and will be eligible for full parole on June 30, according to a Parole Board of Canada decision. He has been accepted at a halfway house in his “preferred geographical location,” which was not provided in the decision. Conditions include no consumption of alcohol and following a treatment plan for alcohol abuse.
Devin Hawley-Barks, 21, was killed and Sara Willsie suffered long-lasting injuries in the March 12, 2016 crash on Highway 97 near Austin Road.
It was preceded by a high-speed chase of an adversary, and according to the decision, Tisdale had been swerving and tried to run him off the road.
“You passed him at a high rate of speed and hit the median, crashing your vehicle,” a review panel said in the decision. “Some estimates indicated that you were travelling in excess of 170 kilometres per hour.”
Tisdale was “highly intoxicated” at the time and had admitted to a history of driving at high speeds while under the influence of alcohol. His truck was modified to point where it was capable of travelling as much as 250 km/h.
Tisdale’s case management team
has had a concern that his did not believe there was a link between his actions and alcohol. But during a hearing, the board was told he no longer denies being an alcoholic.
Prior to the crash, Tisdale said he would drink and drive about once a month, going out to bars or bush parties. On the night of the offence, he was “desperate to get out of the house” after being at home with his wife and newborn for a few weeks.
The panel found Tisdale was “appropriately emotional” in his closing statement and noted he said he can only imagine the pain he has caused.
“You said you have moved outside the city limits and want a family life now,” the panel said.
“You said you had committed to your wife that you will not drink again.”
Home invasion suspects at large
Citizen staff
Prince George RCMP are on the lookout for two men suspected of carrying out a home invasion.
One of the two has been identified as Bradley Andre Ouellette, 29, of Prince George.
He’s described as First Nations, five-foot-three, 111 pounds with brown hair and brown eyes, a scar around his right eye and tattoos on his arms.
He and an accomplice, still to be identified, are wanted for a March 13 incident at a Columbia Road home, off Sintich Road, just south of city limits.
Initial indications are that at least two men armed with guns forcibly entered the residence but fled before police arrived, taking off with cellphones, a purse and other items. Evidence of gunfire was also located, RCMP said.
The home’s two occupants were shaken but unharmed.
Crown counsel has approved 13 charges against Ouelette. Police are asking for the public’s help in tracking down Ouellette but warn he is consid-
ered violent and should not be approached. Instead, call 911 immediately.
Anyone with information about the offence or where either of the two may be are asked to call Prince George RCMP at 250-561-3300 or anonymously contact Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-8477 or online at www.pgcrimestoppers.bc.ca (English only). You do not have to reveal your identity to Crime Stoppers. If you provide information that leads to an arrest or recovery of stolen property, you could be eligible for a cash reward.
Hate crime convict seeks to have defamation suit struck
Citizen staff
A Quesnel man convicted of promoting online hate is seeking to have dropped a defamation lawsuit brought against him by a former neo-Nazi skinhead who became dedicated to countering violent extremism.
In a notice of application filed last week, Arthur Topham says Daniel Gallant has failed to provide any material facts supporting his notice of claim. The closest Gallant has come, he says, is to make an unsubstantiated assertion that Topham called him “a liar, terrorist and conspirator of an evil network” four years ago on a website which ceased to exist in 2017. Topham “specifically denies using such words.”
Moreover, Topham asserts Gallant’s notice of civil claim, filed in March 2017, has expired because it was not served until March 1, 2019, slightly less than a year after it expired due to a lack of further action.
A hearing on the application is tentatively scheduled for April 8 in B.C. Supreme Court in Prince George.
In March 2018, Topham was sentenced to a six-month conditional sentence followed by two years of probation after a jury found him guilty of willfully promoting hatred against people of the Jewish religion. He was also ordered to refrain from posting his writings on any other internet forum where they can be read by the general public.
Dominic Scichilone, 9, and his brother Anthony, 7, behind, spent the first day of spring enjoying the first bike ride of the year in the Exhibition Grounds parking lot on Wednesday afternoon.
Airah Truant competes during the 2019 Prince George Dance Festival in Vanier Hall on Wednesday morning. The festival, which runs until Friday, is celebrating its 43rd year in Prince George
CNC hosting art show
Frank PEEBLES Citizen staff fpeebles@pgcitizen.ca
The professional artists of tomorrow are on display today, but only until Monday.
The latest College of New Caledonia art show is called Monsters Ink and demonstrates the newest of the region’s aspiring artists in the drawing and painting courses taught by Betty Kovacic.
“It gives them the experience of selecting their work, writing the didactics, and preparing the works for display, so it gives them experiences on many levels,” said Kovacic, who is one of the city’s best known visual artists. “(Library director) Kathy Plett is so wonderful and supportive of the arts, so she allows for us to have the students do two shows each year in the library, one in the fall and one in the spring.”
The student show is always as varied as the students themselves. Each exhibition is a collection of pieces each one chooses themselves from the class projects they’ve done, and since the class is always a blend of older and younger students, Canadian and foreign, from all ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds imaginable, it makes the material a true reflection of the community itself: eclectic at its core.
Mattea Belsham, 19, is one of this year’s students on the younger scale. She aspires to be a professional artist, or at least ensure art is a major part of her life no matter what she ends up doing. She said the lessons in making the art were as instructive about life as they were
about painting and drawing.
“I sometimes wonder why my art can’t be like that over there, or this one over here (gesturing to other students’ art in the display) but an exhibition like this shows you that your art can stand up with others, what you’re hearing is that critical inner monologue, and it’s really only a matter of differences in style.”
The students have several common assignments, so some similar works of art are easy to spot in the collection, but there are also broad and entertaining differences between the display areas to which each student was assigned.
“A lot of the assignments are very open ended, so they can guide the work from within themselves,” said Kovacic.
“They can pick any of the work they have done in the classes. They narrow it down themselves as they wish, and I’m there as a consultant or if they need an opinion.”
Belsham said the class was often encouraged to collaborate, and run ideas past each other. Dialogue was used as a classroom tool as much as a brush or easel. It gave her intellectual fuel to make choices about subject matter and how to approach certain techniques.
She pointed to one painting in particular as the one that means the most to her personally – a painted collage of images led by a person, clearly herself, contained inside a box of written words.
“It’s a painting about my dyslexia,” Belsham said. “It’s about how I feel stuck in a box when I know my brain can do great things. The school system is doing a better job, now, but when I was small
it was a huge struggle, even though I got diagnosed in Grade 1. Society needs to do a lot more to teach in the appropriate ways if a student has dyslexia. The information is there, it just has to be applied when a student needs it. That most important time is in the early grades when there is so much focus on reading and writing. In later grades when there is more focus on interpretation of information and figuring out what things mean, then it was way better.”
Art was a constant comfort, and now it is playing a central role in her education stream.
“Betty and the other students were just so kind and encouraging,” Belsham said.
“The biggest bad guy is always yourself, so between each other we tried to stay positive and supportive.”
Each of them had a work selected for purchase by the CNC permanent art collection. Each of the 18 students also got the support they needed to create their display area for the exhibition. Some of the pieces are for sale and some are not. That was an artist’s choice.
These classes are part of a university transfer program that CNC offers, so basic art techniques had to be demonstrated to get into the courses.
“My main goal is to show them how to look at their process with an artist’s eye,” Kovacic said.
“I introduced topics and techniques. We get a lot into the approach to art, unlocking ideas.”
Monsters Ink is on now at the CNC Library until Monday. The public is invited to come view the work.
BC Hydro offering grants to non-profits, charities
Citizen staff
Northern B.C. non-profits, registered charities and community organizations have the opportunity to apply for a BC Hydro community grant of up to $10,000 until March 29. Through its program, BC Hydro works with local organizations committed to making a difference in their communities with projects focused in:
NEWS IN BRIEF
Police say scammers defrauded seniors out of millions of dollars
VANCOUVER (CP) — Police are warning of a new scam that has defrauded at least five seniors out of millions of dollars. Police say fraudsters using a landline to call the victim, pretend to be either an employee of a jewelry store or a police officer and, in a complex scam, have defrauded their victims out of $3.1 million.
Vancouver police Sgt. Jason Robillard says the victim is advised their credit card has been used for a large purchase or that police need their help with a fraud investigation, and is told to hang up and call 911. But while the victim follows that advice, the scammer stays on the line playing a recorded dial tone so the senior thinks the first call has been disconnected and the second call is linking them with authorities. Instead, the call goes directly to the fraudster, who pretends to be either a police officer or a bank representative and, in a series of back and forth calls, convinces the victim to transfer sig-
MP quits Liberal caucus
Joan BRYDEN Citizen news service
OTTAWA — Celina Caesar-Chavannes has informed Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that she’s leaving the federal Liberal caucus and will sit as an Independent MP.
The Whitby, Ont., MP has been a vocal supporter of Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott, two cabinet ministers who resigned over the SNCLavalin affair.
In an interview with The Globe and Mail last week, she also accused Trudeau of yelling at her angrily when she informed him that she would not be seeking re-election this fall – an accusation the Prime Minister’s Office has denied.
In a tweet Wednesday, Caesar-Chavannes said that interview “has had unintended effects on those I care about. Although that was not the intention, it was the consequence, and I am sorry. I no longer want to distract from the great work my caucus colleagues are doing.”
But Conservatives pounced on the defection, arguing that Caesar-Chavannes’s exit, added to the departures of Wilson-Raybould and Philpott from cabinet, prove that Trudeau is a “fake feminist.”
Conservative House leader Candice Bergen said the “good old boys” in the Prime Minister’s Office wanted Wilson-Raybould to avert a criminal prosecution of SNC-Lavalin and when she refused, “she was promptly fired and silenced.
“The prime minister is really good at yelling and screaming at women, as the member from Whitby knows, and he’s also a very good actor. But, Mr. Speaker, he’s a fake feminist,” Bergen told the House of Commons.
Trudeau said he’ll take no lessons on feminism from Conservatives who “still want to challenge a woman’s right to choose” to have an abortion. Caesar-Chavannes, first elected in 2015, has been a relatively high-profile backbencher, primarily as an advocate for the rights of black Canadians. She’s gotten into several Twitter wars with Maxime Bernier, leader of the People’s Party of Canada, who once accused her of thinking “the world revolves around your skin colour.”
On another occasion, she apologized to Bernier after telling him to “check your privilege and be quiet” when he questioned funding for minority groups.
She also made news in 2016 when she openly talked about her battle with depression.
At the time, Caesar-Chavannes, who was initially named parliamentary secretary to the prime minister, praised Trudeau’s understanding of mental illness. She has since soured on his leadership. Throughout the SNC-Lavalin saga, she has used social media to send messages of solidarity – accompanied by a clenched-fist emoji – to WilsonRaybould and Philpott.
• Developing ideas that promote energy efficiency, reduce carbon emissions and minimize environmental impacts.
• Building the workforce of tomorrow by focusing on youth programs in trades, science, technology, engineering and math.
• Safety education. Two types of grants are available:
• Grassroots grants: funding up to $2,000 for local community-based programs.
nificant amounts of money to specific accounts overseas.
Robillard says at least five similar cases have been reported, bilking seniors of more than $3 million, but he says investigators have recovered about $2.5 million of the stolen cash.
Robillard says awareness is key to preventing such scams.
“Consider using a cell phone or make sure you are disconnected after you hang up,” he says.
First day of spring brings another day of heat
VANCOUVER (CP) — British Columbia is welcoming the first day of spring with another day of record-breaking warmth.
Environment Canada says a massive ridge of high pressure is camped over the province, keeping any bad weather at bay and delivering unseasonably high temperatures for yet another day. Forty-two record highs were posted around B.C. on Tuesday, while 26 were recorded Monday. Tuesday’s records include a temperature of 20 degrees in Victoria harbour that shattered the old mark of 16.7 degrees, set in 1878. The Canadian hot spot was Tofino on Vancouver Island where the mercury hit 24.5 degrees, smashing the previous high set in 1928 by 5.1 degrees.
• Broad Impact grants: funding up to $10,000 for organizations who wish to expand an existing program or develop a new program in multiple communities.
In 2018, Science Alliance Summer Day Camps run by the Exploration Place in Prince George received a grant as did the Central Interior BC Science Exhibition and the Northern BC Regional Science Fair. To apply or for more information, visit bchydro.com/grants.
The weather office expects the unseasonable warmth to continue Wednesday but predicts clouds, showers and cooler conditions by Friday.
Sea lion was found with gunshot wound in B.C.
HORNBY ISLAND (CP) — A conservation group says a dead sea lion that washed ashore in British Columbia this week had been shot in the head, amid calls from some fishermen for a cull.
The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society says in a news release that the flippered mammal was found on Hornby Island, and it alleges its members have also observed abuse of the animals on the water.
The society says the sea lions depend on herring for food and it’s calling on the federal government to place a moratorium on commercial roe herring fisheries in the Strait of Georgia to help stocks rebound. Meanwhile, some commercial fishermen are asking the federal government to approve a seal and sea lion cull to protect declining salmon stocks, arguing their numbers have spiked in recent years. Several scientists have disputed that claim, saying the mammals’ numbers have only rebounded to natural levels after they were depleted by human activity.
CITIZEN PHOTO BY BRENT BRAATEN
Mattea Belsham, a CNC fine art student, speaks about the art show titles Monsters Ink that is on display in the CNC library that is featuring the students’ work.
CAESER-CHAVANNES
Distant, tiny space objects full of surprises
Sarah KAPLAN Citizen news service
HOUSTON — In recent months, NASA has explored the smallest object ever orbited and the most distant body ever encountered – and found that both worlds are weirder than anyone could have imagined.
The 245-metre-wide asteroid Bennu, which is currently being studied by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, produces strange plumes of dust particles. Principal investigator Dante Lauretta, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona, called the discovery “one of the biggest surprises of my scientific career.”
Meanwhile, data collected during the New Horizons spacecraft’s New Year’s Day flight past a far-flung icy object called MU69 suggests that the body is weirdly flat. Planetary scientist William McKinnon, a co-investigator on the mission, compared the two-part body to “a meatball attached to a pancake.”
The strange findings from both missions were presented this week at the annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference outside Houston, raising questions and offering clues about how the solar system works. Though the dust plumes seen streaming off Bennu don’t pose any threat to the spacecraft, OSIRIS-REx has revealed other, less pleasant, surprises in its four months at the asteroid. Researchers said Tuesday that the surface of Bennu is far more rugged than expected; some of the boulders that comprise this cosmic “rubble pile” may be as large as 45 m across – bigger than a baseball diamond.
The finding could pose problems for plans to scoop up a sample of the asteroid’s surface material and bring it back to Earth, researchers said. Because they had believed that Bennu would be dusty, OSIRIS-REx doesn’t have a mechanism for breaking up big rocks. The mission team instead plans to give Bennu something like an air kiss, using a puff of gas to raise a cloud of dusty material and gather it into a capsule that will eventually be sent back home.
The team will need to spend the next year
or so carefully seeking a site that contains the right kind of material for this sample collection process. And when the time comes to actually grab the sample, in 2020, spacecraft operators will have a tough time navigating Bennu’s rough terrain. But NASA assured reporters Tuesday that it is up to the challenge.
“The first three months of OSIRIS-REx’s up-close investigation of Bennu have reminded us what discovery is all about –surprises, quick thinking and flexibility,” said Lori Glaze, acting director of NASA’s planetary science division.
The New Horizons spacecraft is already speeding away from MU69, an inhabitant of a dark and distant region called the Kuiper belt that surrounds the solar system
beyond Neptune. The probe is now so far from Earth it takes more than six hours for signals from the spacecraft to reach scientists on the ground.
But as data trickled down to Earth in the months since New Horizon’s historic flyby, scientists have slowly built a picture of the most distant body ever explored. Its oddball shape suggests it was formed from two smaller bodies that danced around one another in a shared orbit, getting closer and closer until they gently fused together. The entire collision would have been about as forceful as a human briskly walking into a wall, McKinnon said.
In a solar system where many objects were born out of catastrophic cataclysms, this gentle formation process is intriguing,
he added. It lends support for a theory in which the building blocks of planets slowly coalesce out of rotating clouds of pebbles, McKinnon said.
This would also explain the orientation of MU69’s two lobes, which appear to have been placed beside each other, rather than haphazardly smushed together.
It will take many more months to retrieve all the data collected during New Horizons’ brief encounter at MU69, and years to understand what it all means. Scientists still aren’t sure what made the larger of the body’s two lobes so flat; it looks as though a giant alien sat on it.
“It’s quite a spectacular object,” said the mission’s principal investigator Alan Stern.
“It caught us by surprise.”
Plastic waste an emerging threat to life
It might sometimes seem we can’t catch a break.
First, it was a threat of a nuclear winter, then ozone depletion and acid rain, followed by anthropogenic climate change, and now we are finding out the plastics upon which we have built our modern society are devastating the environment.
For some people, it is overwhelming and they simply choose not to deal with it. After all, solving a problem might mean compromising their lifestyle. Or others – in particular the younger generation – they worry about the fate of the planet. I can give them the assurance the planet will go on.
Whether we are here to enjoy it is another matter.
The history of materials is very interesting. Our most distant ancestors discovered wood and stone as building materials. One was bendable and easy to manipulate; the other strong and tough though hard to work with. Both can be recycled. For most of our existence, woody materials and stones constituted our basic building blocks.
Third world lending circles are incredible.
RELATIVITY
Consider any of the ancients wonders of the world. They were constructed from stone blocks shaped with simple tools. Feats of engineering, such as Machu Picchu, perplex stone masons to this day.
The Romans discovered cement and concrete which aided in their construction projects. They were excellent engineers with works which have lasted well over two millennia. But they weren’t the only ones building magnificent edifices. Temples in Central and South America, the Great Wall of China, and elaborate palaces throughout Southeast Asia were all constructed with stone, wood, and in some cases cement. Plus an awful lot of manual labour.
With the industrial revolution in the early 1800s, a whole range of products became available for construction. The first plastics were invented by modifying naturally
occurring fibres. The manufacture of steel was refined into large scale production. And other metals were weaned from their ores.
By the end of the 1800s, we were poised to engage in a massive surge of modern technology.
If you read through newspaper articles and magazines from the time, they present an optimistic view of the future replete with flying vehicles, horseless carriages, and every modern convenience.
We prospered. Our population grew. We occupied the globe.
And the detritus from this surge became a problem.
When there are only 500 or a 1,000 people living in an area the size of Prince George, the rate of consumption of materials is balanced against the rate of disposal through decomposition or the simple expediency of burying the material. But with a population closing in on 80,000, we have a much larger and longer lasting ecological footprint.
The world’s human population hasn’t increased quite so dramatically but it has grown from 1.6 billion in 1900 to close to eight billion today. All of these people consume resources. Our ability to
supply those resources sometimes outstrips our thinking on the consequences. Indeed our history, over the last 200 years, has many examples of “unintended consequences.”
In a recent paper on the “production, use and fate of all plastics ever made,” Roland Geyer, Jenna Jambeck and Kara Law start off by saying “a world without plastics, or synthetic organic polymers, seems unimaginable today, yet their large-scale production and use only dates back to the 1950s.”
But they point out these compounds have outgrown pretty much every other human-made material. They estimate 8.3 billion tonnes of material have been generated to date resulting in 6.3 billion tonnes of waste.
Only a small fraction has been recycled – on the order of nine per cent. About two billion remains in use but will eventually be discarded.
While the convenience of single use items – from grocery bags to soda straws to plastic cups to packaging for deodorant to any number of other items – is evident, the long term consequences of these products is now something
we need to consider.
It is not enough to simply throw them into landfills although this does offer the opportunity to capture their carbon content for a very long time.
But it is the plastics which escape the landfill which are causing the major problems. This was first noted a number of years ago when the micro-plastic beads found in facial scrubs and such were detected in the water column in the Great Lakes. These tiny particles, now termed “micro-plastics” are finding their way into the ocean at a rate of over eight million tonnes per year. And they are finding their way into our food supply as a consequence.
Filter feeders, such as clams, scallops, and mussels, have high concentration of micro-plastics. Their predators are consuming these particles which accumulate in their bodies. And at the top of the food chain, apex predators such as killer whales and humans are getting large doses.
Plastics – the wonder compounds of the 1950s – have dire consequences. Life just can’t catch a break.
Delinquency rates among these micro-loan groups, (often comprised of small collections of severely impoverished women), are very low, even lower than large commercial banks. The reason for their success rate seems to be found in the esteem these women have toward one another.
It’s one thing to default on a loan from a banker in a pair of polished Oxfords, but a woman has to look her village sister in the eye, and that’s motivation enough to get the job done.
Lending circles are cooperatives of a sort, but should not be confused with socialism. These are business women in every sense of the term. They are free to create, own and produce the products they wish, and to sell their output based on prevailing market terms, and to keep their profits. Their market is free, not contrived or centrallyplanned. Even the loans themselves are freely-negotiated and subject to the undeniable penalty of the borrowers’ communitystanding.
It’s been about 30 years since the dismantling of the communist iron curtain in 1989 and the horrors of its ruthless regimes seem to be fading in our public consciousness, especially among those born after that transition. By any measure, this amnesia is an extremely dangerous phenomenon.
I know it doesn’t help to have a pearshaped blowhard sitting as leader of the free world and self-proclaimed icon of capitalism. (Hint: in my experience, successful businessmen and women almost never
brag, but rather blush at their own success.)
Of course there is always corruption in a free market democracy too, and it’s often brutal. But there should be no debate whatsoever about which system is preferential in terms of human rights and overall prosperity. One system walls its people in and shoots them when they try to escape.
If the other contemplates walling its border, (to keep the teaming, hungry masses out) it has to bicker with its own constituents first and it could lose that argument.
Broadly speaking, communism is not good for enterprise, although there’s one local businessman in every communist state who invariably thrives – the undertaker. Communism is the McDonald’s of statesanctioned murder, boasting over 100 million coffins served and counting.
But, they say, “I’m not a communist, I’m a social democrat, I lean left. I’m a centrist. I’m a small-l liberal.”
What is liberalism? The term means conflicting things in different times and places.
In this part of the world to be a liberal usually refers to an increase in government intervention, tempering capitalism’s sometimes cruel outcomes, but this was not always the case. The Globe and Mail notes that: “for its part, the word liberal has led a confused
life. Politically, it used to be a rallying cry for those seeking less government and more individual liberty, and more recently has been employed to mean the opposite, a call for greater government regulation.”
So does it mean something like “to wrestle power away from the hegemonic capitalist system?” Not always.
In a December 2018 editorial, The Economist referred to China’s “liberal intelligentsia,” (who were facing crackdowns by the communist regime there), as “an embattled band including free-market economists, reformist lawyers, retired officials and some business executives.”
So in this context, to be liberal is to increase the power of business mindset, versus the government.
So maybe at its core, liberalism means something like “to wrestle power away from power?” Not always. Sometimes liberalism is not really about human rights at all, but a conglomerate of left-leaning meansjustifying opinion leaders, all too willing to overlook blatant human rights abuses.
George Orwell was once a communist sympathizer, who fought on behalf of socialist causes during the Spanish Civil War. He later became disillusioned with the totalitarianism that Marx’s dream spawned, and its comfortable intellectual sympathizers, who were abundant during the Great Depression.
The visionary writer opined: “When one sees highly educated men looking on indifferently at oppression and persecution, one wonders which to despise more, their cynicism or their shortsightedness.”
And, he added, “it is the liberals who
fear liberty... any writer who adopts the totalitarian outlook, who finds excuses for persecution and the falsification of reality, thereby destroys himself as a writer.”
In our day, Globe and Mail writer Bret Stephens aptly notes that this same blind eye is prevalent among some young Western intelligentsia: “Then there are the humanitarian causes young activists generally don’t embrace... Cuba’s political prisoners. (Radical) Islamist violence against Christians in the Middle East. The vast and terrifying concentration camp that is North Korea. Where are the campus protests over any of that? The case of Venezuela ought to be an especially worthy one for college students. It is urgent. It is close by. Its victims are fighting for democracy, for human rights, for the ability to feed their children. So why the relative silence? Part of the reason is that campus activism is a left-wing phenomenon, making it awkward to target left-wing villains.”
For what it’s worth, my preferred definition of liberalism is in a more classical sense. Something like: “our inherent liberty to create, own property, trade, worship, and promote our ideas, moderately constrained by rules to mitigate our impact on others.” Under this system, we can all prosper. Mark
with
HANDOUT
A view across the asteroid Bennu’s southern hemisphere and into space shows the distribution of boulders across its surface.
B.C. to launch measles immunization campaign
Citizen news service
MEISSNER
Dirk
VICTORIA — British Columbia is starting a measles immunization catch-up drive next month in a bid to vaccinate 95 per cent of the province’s youth amid an outbreak of 19 confirmed measles cases.
Health Minister Adrian Dix said Wednesday the voluntary April to June catch-up campaign comes ahead of next fall’s mandatory immunization registration of students at B.C.’s public and private schools.
The details of the mandatory registration will be announced in May, but will not include mandatory immunizations of students, he said at a news conference.
“It’s our expectation as part of this campaign that every child who’s not immunized in B.C., or under-immunized, will have the opportunity to be immunized,” said Dix. “I would prefer a system where we ensure that everyone has the opportunity to be immunized.”
He said the mandatory registration due in September will give schools and health officials current information on the immunization status of students.
Dix said provincial data from 2018 indicates 82 per cent of seven-year-olds in the province have been immunized against measles, a number he said needs improvement.
There are likely numerous reasons why the immunization numbers have declined in B.C., including busy families, but the main focus should be increasing the vaccination numbers, he said.
The government will spend $3 million to purchase a one-year supply of the measles vaccine for the catch-up campaign.
Measles has serious, long-lasting potential complications, including pneumonia, deafness, seizures, inflammation of the brain, brain damage and death, Dix said.
In 2010, an outbreak of 87 measles cases was recorded in the province during the Winter Olympics.
Another 343 cases were reported during a 2014 outbreak in the British Columbia’s Fraser Valley, he said.
Measles is highly infectious and spreads through the air. Close contact is not needed for transmission.
The majority of the current and previous cases originated from outside of B.C., but affected non-vaccinated young people, Dix said.
“We need to take action now to raise the level of immunization,” he said. “It’s important we strive to achieve what’s sometimes called herd immunity.”
The catch-up program will be offered in schools, public health units and community health centres and also include pharmacies, Dix said.
The goal is to reach students who have never been vaccinated, but the program will
also offer second-dose shots for students who have not completed the required schedule of two vaccinations.
Dix said letters will be sent to parents and guardians of children whose vaccination status is not up-to-date.
Education Minister Rob Fleming said safeguarding the health of students, teachers, staff and their family members is a high priority.
The school system plays a prominent role in raising awareness about the importance of childhood vaccines and increasing rates of immunization, he said.
“The point we want to make to parents and the school community today is that immunization is an effective and very easy step to take,” said Fleming.
“We should remember by taking this very small step we’re protecting those who cannot be immunized because there is a small percentage of kids who have allergies and other reasons why immunization is not effective.”
Dr. Brian Emerson, B.C.’s deputy health officer, said immunization is the best method of protecting children, families and friends from infectious diseases.
Province trying to impede pipeline, federal lawyer says
Laura KANE Citizen news service
VANCOUVER — The Canadian government says British Columbia is trying to obstruct the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion with “Trojan Horse” legislation that the province is passing off as a benign environmental measure.
Lawyer Jan Brongers asked the B.C. Court of Appeal on Wednesday to reject proposed amendments to the province’s Environmental Management Act, because the changes aim to regulate interprovincial oil projects that fall under federal jurisdiction.
“This legislation appears to be a Trojan Horse. It’s one that is designed to appear as constitutionally acceptable, local environmental protection measures,” he told a panel of five judges.
“But in substance, it’s an unconstitutional initiative that’s only logical reason for being is to limit federally-regulated pipelines and railways from moving additional heavy oil.”
The Appeal Court is hearing a reference case on the proposed amendments, which would enable B.C. to create a permitting regime for companies that transport
hazardous substances through the province.
The province has argued it’s not attempting to block Trans Mountain or any other resource project, but is aiming to protect against ecological harm and require companies to pay for damages.
Brongers said the proposed amendments are clearly intended to hinder additional oil shipments because they’re selective, narrow and targeted.
The only hazardous substance covered by the amendments is heavy oil, Brongers said, and only companies that intend to increase the amount of heavy oil they’re transporting will need to get a permit.
“We still don’t know why the volume of diluted bitumen that’s in the existing Trans Mountain pipeline is somehow deserving of an automatic exemption from the regime, but the new volumes that would be carried by the expanded Trans Mountain pipeline are not,” Brongers said.
Justice Harvey Groberman challenged Brongers on that point, saying the proposed amendments are presumably designed to deal with a new problem.
This legislation appears to be a Trojan Horse. It’s one that is designed to appear as constitutionally acceptable, local environmental protection measures.
— Jan Brongers
“The fact that it’s directed at that emerging or new problem doesn’t seem to me to prove anything other than that the legislation is targeted,” Groberman said.
The amendments also don’t apply to ships, and Brongers quoted B.C. Attorney General David Eby as saying last year that tankers were excluded because they are under federal jurisdiction.
Brongers said B.C. has suggested that heavy oil is the first of a number of hazardous substances to be
Conservatives plan filibuster over SNC-Lavalin affair
BRYDEN Citizen news service
Joan
OTTAWA — Members of Parliament were bracing Wednesday for an all-night voting marathon as opposition parties protested the Trudeau government’s efforts to shut down any further investigation into the SNC-Lavalin affair.
The Liberal majority shot down a Conservative motion calling on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to let former attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould testify more fully about her allegation that she was improperly pressured to drop a criminal prosecution of Montreal engineering giant SNC-Lavalin.
The motion was defeated by a vote of 161-134.
That set the stage for a Conservativesponsored filibuster, requiring 257 separate votes on items in the government’s spending estimates.
The voting could theoretically last 36 hours, but the Conservatives have only to keep it going until just after 10 a.m. Thursday to scrub the remainder of the parliamentary day.
The filibuster started Wednesday evening – one day after Liberals on the House of Commons justice committee used their majority to pull the plug on their investigation into the affair.
Wilson-Raybould has already testified for nearly four hours before the commit-
tee, having been granted a waiver from solicitor-client privilege and cabinet confidentiality to freely discuss events from last fall – when the inappropriate pressure was allegedly applied – until Jan. 14, when she was shuffled out of the dual justice and attorney general post to Veterans Affairs.
The Conservative motion called on Trudeau to extend the waiver of cabinet confidentiality to cover the period from Jan. 14 to mid-February, when WilsonRaybould resigned from cabinet. Wilson-Raybould has said she has more to say about what occurred after she was shuffled, but she was not in the Commons for the vote on the Conservative motion.
Nor was Jane Philpott, who resigned from cabinet in solidarity with Wilson-Raybould early this month, saying she’d lost confidence in the government’s handling of the SNC-Lavalin file. However, the Conservatives are not giving up just yet. They are asking the Commons ethics committee to launch its own investigation into the affair, starting with calling Wilson-Raybould to testify by no later than March 27. The Liberaldominated committee is to consider the request today.
Wilson-Raybould attended part of a closed-door Liberal caucus meeting Wednesday morning but Philpott did not show up.
targeted by the proposed permitting regime, but the province has not said what those other substances would be.
Premier John Horgan and other B.C. government officials have stated on multiple occasions, primarily while in opposition, that they were opposed to the Trans Mountain expansion and were looking for legal tools to stop it, Brongers noted.
After taking power in 2017, the minority NDP government received legal advice that it doesn’t have constitutional authority to directly stop the project, but it did have the authority to apply conditions and impose regulations to protect its coast, he said.
Brongers quoted Horgan as telling a reporter that the proposed amendments were about ensuring that increased heavy oil shipments through the province “don’t happen in the future.”
“The proposed legislation’s real purpose and effect, is the creation of a mechanism – a tool in the toolbox – to potentially impede additional heavy oil originating outside of British Columbia from being transported through the province,” Brongers said.
The federal government has purchased the Trans Mountain pipeline for $4.5 billion and the expansion would triple the capacity of the existing line that runs from the Edmonton area to a marine terminal in Burnaby.
The governments of Alberta and Saskatchewan, as well as Trans Mountain Corp., Enbridge Inc., and the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, have filed documents in support of the federal government.
First Nations, cities and the environmental group Ecojustice have delivered arguments in support of B.C.’s proposed amendments.
Assembly of First Nations lawyer Julie McGregor urged the court to ensure its ruling respects the rights of Indigenous Peoples to make decisions about their territories.
“First Nations, as the original guardians of this environment since time immemorial, have always been concerned about the health and well-being of their lands,” she said.
“The days where government actions unilaterally infringe upon or extinguish First Nations treaty or Aboriginal rights – those days are over.”
A measles vaccine is shown on a counter top. The province is launching a campaign to increase measles vaccination rates among children.
Too much rubber stamping at city hall
For those who are wondering why I am criticizing publicly a mayor and council that I supported during the election (and continue to support, but subject to change), my thoughts are below. They are failing to take a proactive lead on important issues and are allowing unelected administrators at the city to run without proper oversight. It is costing residents, not only with increased taxes but also their voice in the decisionmaking process. The citizens of Prince George are entitled to fiscal prudence by our elected officials and administrators, which we are not getting. They are entitled to more of a say in where our tax dollars are spent, which the city has taken away by the imposition of the alternative approval process. I believe our mayor and council could do a better job on both fronts.
Just in the first five months of their mandate after the October 2018 election, mayor and council rubber stamped a massive tax increase, rubber stamped $32 million in loans ensuring more tax increases, rubber
stamped the Willow Cale Road bridge fiasco and rubber stamped a borrowing of a further $8 million in addition to the $32 million. They have failed to respond to, and by all appearances, rubber stamped the gross overtime claimed by management during the wildfires. They have failed to look at the ballooning salaries of management. They have failed to look at the increasing contingent of management employees. The rubber stamping and failures result in increased taxes on our citizens, many of whom are already struggling.
The Willow Cale bridge project was nothing less than a boondoggle, a $7 million one that our mayor and council authorized with no independent investigation that could have resulted in safeguards in place. Nor were policy changes brought in that could have mitigated future problems, not just for the bridge but all projects. Our mayor and council dropped the ball by failing to keep themselves and administration accountable to the public.
Coming off the heels of a positive $50 million referendum in October 2017 for the pool and fire hall and the October 2018
municipal election, residents were rightly alarmed to learn that now the city wanted to borrow an additional $40 million when no mention was made of this additional amount in the run up to the civic election. The city has provided no reason why it could not have put the $40 million projects on the ballot during the election.
Instead, after the election, the city administration presented these costly projects to mayor and council. Our elected officials, once again, rubber stamped the borrowing and left to the public the difficult task of coming up with over 5,000 signatures in a few weeks for each of the 11 projects in order to show disapproval.
As far as I recall, never before has the city put to the alternate approval process so many projects at once.
By so doing, instead of giving more of a say and more control over the decisionmaking process to the public, the city has taken that away. It highlights a mode of operation at the city and a culture of entitlement that needs changing. In that vein, members of our community have taken up the call to defeat the borrowing of the $32
YOUR LETTERS
Agreeing with Art
You could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I’ve agreed with Art Betke. For those playing along at home, this would be it.
Wednesday morning, for only the second time this past winter (it’s now spring, by the way), graders came through to clear out the back alley.
The city was more than content to allow our neighbourhood streets and alleys to dissolve into an apocalyptic hell-scape or perhaps an extraterrestrial vehicle test range for NASA, but now with snow and ice being barely perceptible, now they decide it’s nice enough, let’s take the hardware for a ride.
Perhaps stop at Diary Queen on the way home for a treat.
The roads, which are now starting to clear off with thanks, I guess, to global warming, remain untouched despite the assurances of the city’s master plan, published in this very newspaper.
Perhaps mayor and council should read it some time, though something tells me, their streets didn’t suffer the way the rest of ours did.
Or perhaps they like snow berms, right Mr. Skakun?
It adds that little touch of Vegas to the morning commute. “Let’s see, do I feel lucky sticking my car’s nose into the street?”
Prince George city council has basically three jobs: keep the grass cut on the ball diamonds, make sure the garbage gets picked up and keep the streets clear of snow.
If they can’t handle that with their budget, perhaps they ought to consider another line of work. I for one know where we could save a cool million or two.
I can’t wait for Hannah Wilkins’ petition.
I’ll probably camp out overnight to sign it, because something tells me there’s going to be a long line.
Ray Tracy Prince George
Smelly lemon fishy
Very interesting picture on the top of page 3 of last Wednesday’s Citizen to go along with the side article continued from page 1, re: Cannabis grow op hearing at city council on Monday.
Beside that article is the one about council having voted to borrow $8.5 million, most of which will go to pay for bridge work on Willow Cale Road. The caption under the picture (page 3) states it is an artist’s rendition of a planned grow-op site by Cannwest.
Where? On Willow Cale Road.
I agree, Chad Johnson. It does indeed reek of a “smelly lemon, a rather fishy one.
Joan McKay Prince George
Giving the keys away
Neil Godbout’s well documented editorial, City council’s mistakes piling up, reminded me of the time my then eight-yearold son, who had never driven a vehicle, came to me and said he wanted to drive my car and asked
for the keys. If I had given him the keys and he wrecked the car, who is responsible?
Is it my eight-year-old son who eagerly wanted to try driving my car or am I since I gave him the keys?
To elect people, albeit well meaning and sincere, to city council who have never run a large company and expect them to provide the kind of leadership and sound judgment that it takes to run a company as large as the city of Prince George is not only naive but irresponsible on the part of the electorate. Lessons to be learned as we approach the voting booth for the next federal election.
Arnold Loberg Prince George
Citizenship concern
A 94 year old man from Waterloo, Ont., is facing revocation of his citizenship demanded by Jewish groups because he lacked information of his activities during the Second World War. But wait – I remember Justin Trudeau saying a Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian echoed by his ministers. All depends I guess on who you anger. He wouldn’t strip Omar Khadr of his citizenship even though his father and brother both fought against our troops while his mother collected welfare in Toronto.
Think about that, Canadians. Phil Gatehouse Prince George
million (the city has made it so that the additional $8 million requires no public approval).
I encourage everyone to sign. Neil Godbout’s March 14 editorial minces no words and he is correct when he says, “like the bridge, these problems can be fixed but taking responsibility and ownership has to start now.” It is time for our mayor and council to reflect, reassess their decisions and start doing their job for which they have been elected. It is still not too late to review again the borrowing of the $40 million, send the plans back, find cost efficiencies, cut projects that are not needed and return with a more reasonable proposal that the public can vote on by referendum. It is still not too late to investigate the bridge fiasco, nor too late to look into management overtime, salaries and the bloat.
In Neil Godbout’s Feb. 19 editorial, we together challenged mayor and council to a formal public debate on city tax increases and spending. So far, no one has accepted our challenge. That challenge remains open.
— Bobby Deepak, Prince George
Heavy spending in election budget
The cliché is that preelection budgets are jammed with goodies.
The reality for Justin Trudeau is that he needs these goodies in a way he didn’t think he would.
He was exceptional in courting millennials in the 2015 election but lost their attention by doing such things as jettisoning electoral reform and sluggishly legalizing cannabis.
Now he has found a way to help them buy their first homes and stay in his tent. He was focused in his first mandate on helping lift people into the middle class, even though there are so many other ways to pick their pockets.
Now he has found late-stage promises like mid-life learning support to induce their support at the polls in the fall.
He forgot entirely about seniors. Now in his budget, he is signalling his understanding of the necessary commitment to them – they, after all, vote in disproportionate numbers, and there are more and more of them and more to come.
Enter the prospect of pharmacare, if still faint in nature.
He appeared at first benign about business, then ham-handed in handling small business concerns about taxation and big business concerns about competitiveness and productivity.
On the former, he has generally patched things up over time, with some hard feelings remaining; on the latter, his budget Tuesday suggests he either doesn’t think it matters for his political health or doesn’t actually care. The yellowing and reform-needing tax code might outlive the lifespan of paper. You can almost hear someone saying: “Businesses don’t vote. People do.”
Some governments would look at the recent operating surplus and say it was time to prune taxes as the country is stricken with economic stagnation and heads toward the first round of uncertainty in a decade. That would leave some manoeuvrability if the storm hits shore.
But the Liberals have determined in the time-honoured tradition of election cycles that it is again the moment to spend – as they have in their first term, for that matter, at a 6.5 per cent annual rate of growth – to improve their lately shakier odds of re-election.
For a government that has
been at the helm during prosperous times, the Liberals have not demonstrated much interest in scrubbing the balance sheet. Its projections suggest the deficit for the year ending March 31 will drop to $14.9 billion from $19 billion – thanks to revenue, not prudence – then rocket again to nearly $20 billion in the following two years. Their optimism is that it is halved by 2023-24, after the second-next election.
They haven’t extensively targeted spending programs that have outlived usefulness, nor particularly enabled through some support programs the next wave of wealth generation.
The extra $1.4 billion commitment to skills training will not hurt – workers 25 to 64 will accumulate credits of $250 annually to a maximum $5,000 – but will not necessarily align the needs of the labour market because they are not particularly targeted. You will need to read the budget documents and fall listlessly into a hallucination to find anything to propel investment or corporate tax competitiveness.
In riding the revenue wave and pointing to lifetime lows in unemployment, the Liberals have taken a what-me-worry? pose.
They are content to sustain a debt-to-GDP ratio, maybe lower it a bit – all the while rolling out nearly $23 billion in new programs in the half-dozen years ahead.
This spendthrifty character could be a regret in a matter in a year or so, but that is a matter for a year or so.
Meantime there is an election machinery that needs to fire on all cylinders, have talking points for each riding it hounds, and nothing approaching sour medicine to spoon out.
To that end, Finance Minister Bill Morneau is straight out of Central Casting in the role of using our money – and, I suppose, our childrens’ – to supply the illusion of improvement in our lives.
In October we will know if Canada want a new actor and screenplay.
Kirk LaPointe is editor-in-chief of Business in Vancouver and vice-president, editorial, of Glacier Media.
LETTERS WELCOME: The Prince George Citizen welcomes letters to the editor from our readers. Submissions should be sent by email to: letters@pgcitizen.ca. No attachments, please. They can also be faxed to 250-960-2766, or mailed to 201-1777 Third Ave., Prince George, B.C. V2L 3G7. Maximum length is 750 words and writers are limited to one submission every week. We will edit letters only to ensure clarity, good taste, for legal reasons, and occasionally for length. Although we will not include your address and telephone number in the paper, we need both for verification purposes. Unsigned or handwritten letters will not be published. The Prince George Citizen is a member of the National Newsmedia Council, which is an independent organization established to deal with acceptable journalistic practices and ethical behaviour. If you have concerns about editorial content, please contact Neil Godbout (ngodbout@pgcitizen.ca or 250-960-2759). If you are not satisfied with the response and wish to file a formal complaint, visit the web site at mediacouncil.ca or call toll-free 1-844-877-1163 for additional information.
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Disney deal to cost thousands their jobs
Walt Disney Co. completed its $71 billion acquisition of 21st Century Fox Inc.’s entertainments assets, and now must get to the task of squeezing out promised cost savings, an effort that will lead to thousands of firings in the film and TV business.
With the deal, Disney takes over a portfolio that includes the 104-year-old 20th Century Fox studio, the FX and National Geographic cable networks, and an additional 30 per cent of Hulu, the online video service. To make the deal work financially and support the company’s costly efforts to compete with Netflix, CEO Bob Iger has promised $2 billion in cost savings, a commitment that all but assures epic job cuts.
In a note to employees Wednesday, Iger said management has spent the past year studying how to integrate the companies and that the process would be “an evolution,” with some businesses affected more than others.
“I wish I could tell you that the hardest part is behind us,” he wrote. “We’re committed to moving as quickly as possible to provide clarity regarding how your role may be impacted.”
The deal is one of the most dramatic in the current wave of entertainmentindustry mergers, shrinking the number of major Hollywood studios to five from six and putting the irreverent Homer Simpson and Family Guy in the same stable of cartoon characters as Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. The closing follows a nearly two-year effort that included a bidding war and regulatory compromises from Brussels to Brasilia.
Underscoring the looming human cost, Disney is taking on 15,400 Fox employees, while the smaller new Fox Corp. will keep about 7,000.
Last August, executives at Burbank, Calif.-based Disney said they’ll achieve their targeted savings over two years, with the U.S. operations bearing the brunt early on.
The Hollywood Reporter said last month that 4,000 jobs will be lost.
Already the largest entertainment company in the world, Disney emerges with more clout to negotiate everything from the fees it gets from cable TV operators to the share of ticket revenue at movie theaters.
The sale represents the end of an era for Rupert Murdoch, the 88-year-old media mogul who steered the Fox studio for nearly four decades.
Under the terms of the deal, Fox shareholders will receive $38 a share in cash or Disney stock. They also get stock in the new Fox, led by Murdoch’s older son Lachlan. That company will continue to operate Fox News, the Fox broadcast network and Fox Sports 1. It will be focused on news and sports – live programming that is seen as less vulnerable to viewer losses in a streaming age –and also plans to ramp up its production of scripted shows designed to appeal to a broad demographic.
At its heart, the merger marks a huge bet that Iger can establish a direct connection to consumers, sell them multiple monthly subscriptions to watch Disney programs and upend the traditional model in which network owners collect fees
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for their content from pay-TV operators. Last April, Disney launched ESPN+, a $5-a-month sports streaming service that has already passed 2 million subscribers. Hulu, in which Disney acquires majority control, will be focused on more adultoriented fare, such as that produced by Fox’s FX network and its Oscar-winning Fox Searchlight film studio. Later this year, the company will introduce Disney+, a family-focused streaming service that Iger has said will be the home of all of the classic Disney films, as well as original content.
Downturn crushing U.S. farmers
Citizen news service
The worst agricultural downturn since the 1980s is taking its toll on the emotional wellbeing of American farmers.
In Kentucky, Montana and Florida, operators at Farm Aid’s hotline have seen a doubling of contacts for everything from financial counseling to crisis assistance. In Wisconsin, Dale Meyer has started holding monthly forums in the basement of his Loganville church following the suicide of a fellow parishioner, a farmer who’d fallen on hard times. In Minnesota, rural counselor Ted Matthews says he’s getting more and more calls.
“Can you imagine doing your job and having your boss say ‘well you know things are bad this year, so not only are we not going to pay you, but you owe us’,” Matthews said by telephone. “That’s what’s happened with farmers.’’ Glutted grain markets have sparked a years-long price slump made worse by a trade war with top buyer China. As their revenues decline, farmers have piled on record debt – to the tune of $427 billion. The industry’s debtto-income ratio is the highest since the mid 1980s, when Willie Nelson, Neil Young and John Mellencamp organized the first Farm Aid concert.
So dire are conditions in farm country that Sen. Joni Ernst, an Iowa Republican, and Sen. Tammy Baldwin, a Wisconsin Democrat, pushed for mental-health provisions to be included in the 2018 Farm Bill. The legislation allocated $50 million over five years to address the shortfall of such services in rural areas.
Ernst said she spoke with a woman whose farmer husband died by suicide. While there’s been progress on a trade resolution, the ruckus “has been very, very hard on our farmers,” she said. “We’ve had such a depressed farm economy.”
Few agricultural states have been hit harder than Baldwin’s Wisconsin, whose state license plates proclaim it as “America’s Dairyland.” Wisconsin lost almost 1,200 dairy farms between 2016 and 2018, government data show.
Smaller operators have been the most affected, she said. The mental-health provisions in the farm bill aren’t for a “free trip to the psychiatrist,” but rather about “community looking out for each other.”
There was a similar legislative effort in 2008 during the financial crisis, but the program was never funded because prices recovered, said Jennifer Fahy, communications director for Farm Aid, which advocated for the measures.
Two-thirds of the calls to Farm Aid’s hotline originated from growers who have been farming for a decade or more. They were evenly distributed among fruit and vegetable producers, livestock, grain and oilseed and dairy, the data show.
In 2018, the number of calls rose 109 percent to 1,034, increasing in the last five months of the year. In November, crisis as-
sistance accounted for 78 percent of contacts to the hotline.
“The peak of the crisis was in 1986,” said Allen Featherstone, an agricultural economist at Kansas State University in Manhattan. “It is the worst since then by far.”
Mike Rosmann, another of the few mental health counselors in rural America, echoed the sentiments. A partially retired fourthgeneration farmer, Rosmann rents out his Iowa property and maintains land under the conservation reserve program.
During the 1980s farm crisis, the hotlines, counselling and other services that he participated in became the template for the provisions in the farm bill that Baldwin and Ernst advocated for, he said.
“The retaliatory tariffs by China have hurt soybean exports,” Rosmann said. “They’ve hurt our relations with other countries as well to a lesser extent, partly just because of the skepticism that surrounds the reliability of what the U.S. is doing.”
Still, farmers support Trump, in part due to his public support for corn-based ethanol, Rosmann said. Last week, the Environmental Protection Agency advanced a plan meant to expand the U.S. ethanol market, the first step in fulfilling a promise Trump made in Iowa last fall. About $8 billion in farmer aid has also taken some of the sting out of the trade war.
Some of that goodwill may be eroded by a 2020 budget proposal that would cut “overly generous” Department of Agriculture subsidies. The 35-day partial government shutdown earlier this year slowed implementation of the program.
Farmers have accrued so much debt because by nature they are optimistic, said Scott Marlow, senior policy specialist at the Rural Advancement Foundation International-USA in Pittsboro, North Carolina.
Their fierce independence and deep connection with the land can become an economic disadvantage, Marlow said. “They can be driven far further than most of us would be before they would call it quits, to the point of getting off-farm jobs to be able to continue farming, subsidizing the farming operation with off-farm income, driving themselves extremely hard.”
Sue Judd in Wisconsin set up a suicide prevention group for farmers and those in the rural community after her brother, a hobby farmer, killed himself, she said. Her group’s aim is to convince farmers that it’s all right to seek help and that they’re not alone.
Meyer, 71, who retired from law enforcement, was on the St. Peter’s Lutheran Church dart team with the parishioner who died by suicide. He says another parishioner who’s a farmer confided to him that he also struggled with stress. Meyer says that his aim with the groups is to “give them some hope if we can.” In the last meeting, 59 people showed up to share food, stories and hear financial advice and how to deal with stress compared with 45 in January.
Farmers’ spirits may lift if U.S. negotiators can broker a favorable deal with China soon. For now though, they’re having to cope with soybean prices of about $9 a bushel, almost half of what they were getting in the heyday of 2012. Chicago corn futures have followed a similar path to be trading at about $3.70 from a peak of $8.49 in 2012.
“If the corn price went up $3 a bushel and beans went up $5 my phone would ring a fourth as much as it is now,” Matthews said during a road trip. “Prices are really low and they’re waiting for what are they are going to do. Are they going to lift the tariffs? And so all of those things they’re constantly looking at.”
“Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.” — Mark Twain Call 250-562-2441
After a rough start to trading
lingering
concerns, the market got an afternoon boost once the U.S. central bank said it expects to only raise rates once through 2021. But the S&P/TSX composite index dipped again before closing to lose 20.54 points on the day to 16,167.56, after hitting an intraday high of 16,214.66
Most sectors fell on the day, including health care, industrials and financials.
The key energy sector gained almost two per cent after oil prices rose above $60 for the first time in more than four months on lower-than-expected U.S. oil inventories.
That helped oil producers like Canadian Natural Resources, Imperial Oil and Suncor Energy. The May crude contract was up 94 cents at US$60.23 per barrel and the April natural gas contract was down 5.4 cents at US$2.82 per mmBTU.
Materials gained 0.74 per cent led by Barrick Gold even though the April gold contract was down US$4.80 at US$1,301.70 an ounce and the May copper contract was down 0.2 of a cent at US$2.92 a pound.
“Basically resources are rallying today and that’s what’s driving the Canadian market and that is stemming from a combination of stronger oil prices but also on the materials side as well,” said Candice Bangsund, portfolio manager for Fiera Capital. She expects prices will rise to US$70 per barrel in 2019 but won’t return to triple digits because U.S. supply will temper increases.
The Canadian dollar traded at an average of 75.09 cents US compared with an average of 75.23 cents US on Tuesday.
In New York, the Dow Jones industrial average was down 141.71 points at 25,745.67. The S&P 500 index was down 8.34 points at 2,824.23, while the Nasdaq composite was up 5.02 points at 7,728.97.
Bangsund said markets got an jolt after the Federal Reserve surprised observers with a position she expects the Bank of Canada to follow.
“We didn’t really think that the Fed could get that much more dovish but they surprised and were able to basically validate that dovish stance,” she said. Bangsund said U.S. markets are now increasing the likelihood of a rate hike this year to almost 50 per cent and she’s sure the Canadian market will follow suit.
CITIZEN NEWS SERVICE PHOTO
Dale Meyer at St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in Loganville, Wis., where he’s helping farmers try to cope with stress.
CITIZEN NEWS SERVICE PHOTO
A farm near Loganville, Wis., one of the hardest hit areas of the crisis in U.S. farming.
What’s new with the Cougars? Get
Connolly skipping Capitals visit to White House
Citizen news service
The Washington Capitals will join President Donald Trump on Monday to celebrate their 2018 Stanley Cup victory at the White House, according to a team spokesman. The visit will come nearly 10 months after the team won its first championship in franchise history, and the event is expected to be more low-key than some in the past, though plans are still being finalized.
Visiting the White House has long been a tradition for many championship college and professional teams, but it has been mixed with some controversy during Trump’s presidency.
In the week after they won the Stanley Cup, most Capitals players said they would visit the White House. Russian captain Alex Ovechkin confirmed Tuesday night that he will attend.
“We just found out today, so I don’t know what to say,” he said. “I’m just excited. It’s nice.” Said Swedish center Nicklas Backstrom: “It will be fun. It’s exciting, I think, and
every time you get an invitation from the president and being at the White House, it’s going to be a great experience... I feel like it’s always up to whoever wants to go, but we got the invitation, and it’s been a tradition, I think, for many years. We’re not going to mix politics with sports. It’s because we won last year; that’s why we’re there. Yeah, it’ll be a cool experience, I think.”
Forward Devante Smith-Pelly, who is black and Canadian, previously said he would not want to be part of a White House ceremony because “the things that (Trump) spews are straight-up racist and sexist,” he said.
Smith-Pelly was waived in February and was sent down to the American Hockey League in a salary-cap-clearing move, so he is no longer with the Capitals, but all members of the 2018 team are invited and will have the option to attend or decline. Players and coaches new to the team this season will not be part of the visit.
Forward Brett Connolly joined Smith-Pelly last year in saying he would skip a White House visit, and he stood by that decision
when asked Tuesday night, referencing his support for Smith-Pelly.
“I respectfully decline,” said Connolly, who is from Prince George and brought the Stanley Cup to CN Centre last August.
“That’s all I’ll say about it. Everyone is entitled to their opinion. It’s obviously a big deal, and it gains a lot of attention. I’ve been in full support of an old teammate that I’m really good friends with who I agreed with and a guy who will be back here, I’m sure, at the end of the year. That’s all I’ll say.”
Trump canceled the 2018 Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles’ visit to the White House after some players said they would skip the ceremony to protest the president and his rhetoric. When the Golden State Warriors won the 2017 NBA championship, several players, including superstar guard Stephen Curry, said they were not in favor of a visit to the White House.
They were later disinvited by Trump. The Warriors won another title last year and, rather than visit the White House during their trip to Washington in late January,
Prince George athlete wins gold at Special Olympics World Games
they met with former U.S. president Barack Obama. The Pittsburgh Penguins visited the White House after their 2016 and 2017 Stanley Cup wins. In 2012, then-Boston Bruins goaltender Tim Thomas, an American, skipped the team’s White House ceremony, citing his political and ideological differences with the Obama administration. The Capitals went down to the wire with this visit, discussing dates earlier in the season to no avail because of scheduling conflicts. Clemson, winner of the College Football Playoff, and North Dakota State, seven-time winner of the NCAA’s Football Championship Subdivision, are the most recent teams to visit the White House, and both were served fast food.
“It’s another chance to recognize the special run that we had last year,” Capitals forward Tom Wilson said Tuesday. “Any time the group gets together and gets to see the Cup and be around it, it is awesome. We’ll take it in stride and see where it goes here and look forward to celebrating that one whenever we can.”
Canada knocks off China to improve to 4-4 at women’s
SILKEBORG, Denmark — Chelsea Carey’s Canadian rink rebounded with a much-needed 8-7 win over China’s Jie Mei on Wednesday at the world women’s curling championship.
The win improved the Calgary-based team’s record to 4-4 as it aims to avoid becoming the first Canadian rink to miss the playoffs at the women’s worlds since 1999.
“It’s a bit of a relief. That was a must-win game for us,” said vice-skip Sarah Wilkes.
“We know we have our backs against the wall now, and every game we have to come out like it’s our last game and play as hard as we can. So this is a confidence-booster; that’s how we’re used to playing.”
Canada, which lost both its games Tuesday, was in a threeway tie for sixth with Scotland and the Japan after Wednesday’s draws. The top six teams in the 13-rink event make the playoffs.
“We needed a bounce-back,” Carey said. “It was a tough day yesterday because we didn’t feel like we deserved two losses, and that’s a bit hard to park and move on. So it was big for us to come out like this today. The ice was tricky, but we were very calm about it. We were in a good place and did a good job of being patient and pulled one off.” Carey scored three on a draw
worlds
in the ninth to wipe out a twopoint deficit and then held on for the win against a Chinese team that entered the draw in a tie for first.
“I actually think we played the same as we did all day yesterday. We just got a couple breaks and we were able to take advantage of them (today),” Carey said. “I had to make a really scary open hit in the fourth end, where if I roll out, they get four or five, but other than that, it was a good battle – lots of good shots from both teams.”
Stolen singles in the fifth and seventh ends gave Canada a 5-4 lead before China took its first lead of the game with an eighthend deuce on a wonderful double-takeout from last-rock thrower Rui Wang. Canada took advantage of a Wang miss in the ninth to score three and never gave China a legitimate shot at a game-tying two in the 10th.
“We got a little break in the ninth when she ticked on the guard and we got the three, and we were able to close it out after that,” Carey said. The game against China was Canada’s lone contest on Wednesday. In Wednesday’s late draw, China lost its second match of the day, falling 9-8 to Switzerland in an extra end. The Swiss counted three in the ninth end, then posted two consecutive steals of one to pull out the comeback victory.
Renner with 10 pin bowling doubles teammate Barry Green on the
Olympics 2019 Summer World Games in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.
Washington Capitals’ Brett Connolly, centre, celebrates his goal with teammates during a game against the Los Angeles Kings on Feb. 18 in Los Angeles. Connolly won’t be accepting an invitation by U.S. President Donald Trump to come to the White House to celebrate the team’s 2018 Stanley Cup win.
Horvat, Canucks down Ottawa Senators
Jim MORRIS Citizen news service
VANCOUVER — Bo Horvat scored twice and added an assist to help the Vancouver Canucks keep their playoff hopes alive with a 7-4 win over the depleted Ottawa Senators on Wednesday night.
Tanner Pearson also had two goals for Vancouver (32-32-10), while Brock Boeser, Jake Virtanen and Loui Eriksson, into an empty net, chipped in as well.
The Canucks, who won their third straight game, matched their longest winning streak of the season.
Elias Pettersson had two assists. He leads all rookies with 27 goals, 36 assists and 63 points.
The win moved Vancouver four points behind the idle Arizona Coyotes in the race for the second wild card spot in the Western Conference.
Horvat and Boeser both scored on the power play. The Canucks have scored five power-play goals in their last five games. That follows a stretch of four power-play goals in 17 games.
Canuck goaltender Jacob Markstrom stopped 21 shots.
Ottawa (25-42-6) made it interesting when Max Veronneau, Brady Tkachuk and Oscar Lindberg scored goals 4:48 apart in the third period. Anthony DuClair scored on the power play with under two minutes left with goaltender Craig Anderson on the bench.
Veronneau’s goal was in first his three NHL games since signing as a free agent after playing with Princeton University. Anderson made 33 saves for Ottawa.
The last-place Senators saw a two-game win streak snapped. Ottawa played most of the game a player short after defenceman Cody Ceci left in the first period with an upper-body injury after blocking a shot.
The Canucks’ first power-play goal came in the opening period, just 31 seconds after Ceci was called for holding. Horvat redirected an Alex Edler shot for his 26th goal of the season.
A boarding penalty by Jean-Gabriel
Pageau set up Boeser’s goal at 17:00 of the second. He took a pass from Edler and beat Anderson on a low, hard shot.
The second period was just 32 seconds old when Pearson put the Canucks up 2-0. Defenceman Alex Biega lifted a pass high into the Senators’ end. Pearson swatted the bouncing puck past Anderson. Virtanen made it 3-0 at 5:56. He took a little chip pass from Jay Beagle, skated into
the Ottawa zone and scored on a low shot to the glove side. Pearson made it 5-0 with 57 seconds gone in the first.
NOTES: Pettersson received a first-period standing ovation in recognition of breaking the Canucks’ record of 60 points in a season by a rookie with an assist in Chicago Monday night.
• Boeser has nine points on a career-high
eight-game scoring streak (three goals, six assists). The Canucks opened a stretch of seven games at Rogers Arena, their longest homestand of the season. Vancouver last won three straight games Dec. 6-11 with victories over Nashville, St. Louis and Columbus.
• Ottawa’s Thomas Chabot, who has missed the last two games with a broken toe, is expected to play Saturday in Edmonton.
Canadians pair fifth at world figure skating championships
Citizen news service
SAITAMA, Japan — Canada’s Kirsten Moore-Towers and Michael Marinaro are fifth after the pairs short program on Wednesday at the world figure skating championships.
Moore-Towers, of St. Catharines, Ont., and Marinaro, of Sarnia, Ont., notched 73.08 points. The only blip on the skate was Marinaro touching his hand down on the side-by-side triple toe.
“There were some good points but overall we are a little bit disappointed,” said Moore-Towers, sixth with her partner at last year’s worlds. “We had been training elements a lot better than we executed them
today. Still the score is solid and that’s a testament to the way we’ve been training.”
Russian skaters Evgenia Tarasova and Vladimir Morozov skated to the lead with a season-best score of 81.21 points. Wenjing Sui and Cong Han of China were second, followed by teammates Cheng Peng and Yang Jin.
Evelyn Walsh of London, Ont., and Trennt Michaud of Trenton, Ont. were 12th in their worlds debut.
In the women’s event, Olympic champion Alina Zagitova produced a seasonbest score to take the lead after the short program.
The Russian opened her routine with a triple-lutz, triple-loop combination and
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 (3) FRIDAY’S GAME Kamloops at Victoria, 7:05 p.m. (PDT) SATURDAY’S GAME Kamloops at Victoria, 7:05 p.m. (PDT)
TUESDAY, MAR. 26 Victoria at Kamloops, 7 p.m. (PDT)
WEDNESDAY, MAR. 27 Victoria at Kamloops, 7 p.m. (PDT)
SATURDAY, MAR. 30 x-Kamloops at Victoria, 7:05 p.m. (PDT)
MONDAY, APR. 1 Victoria at Kamloops, 7 p.m. (PDT)
WEDNESDAY, APR. 3 x-Kamloops at Victoria, 7:05 p.m. (PDT)
added a double axel and a triple flip for 82.08 points.
Japanese national champion Kaori Sakamoto was second with 76.86 points, while Elizabet Tursynbaeva of Kazakhstan was third with 75.96.
Two-time world champion and Olympic silver medallist Evgenia Medvedeva of Russia was fourth with 74.23.
Japanese skater Rika Kihira entered the competition with high expectations after beating Zagitova at the Grand Prix Finals but wasn’t able to execute her triple axel and finished in seventh with 70.90 points.
Gabrielle Daleman of Newmarket, Ont., skated a clean program and was 11th. She finished third at the 2017 worlds.
“It felt so great to do that program,” said Daleman, who missed the Grand Prix season this past fall. “I’ve been working extremely hard in training and coming here was so emotional for me. It gives me a lot of confidence for the free program.” Canadian champion Alaine Chartrand of Prescott, Ont., was 22nd and Aurora Cotop of Thornhill, Ont., placed 35th and miss the cut for the free skate. The top 24 advanced. “Even though I had mistakes I kept the other elements together,” said Chartrand. “The free skate is the strongest of my two programs and I look forward to performing it.”
The men’s short program and pairs free skate are on Thursday.
CP PHOTO
Vancouver Canucks Jake Virtanen and Luke Schenn celebrate Virtanen’s goal against the Ottawa Senators during a game in Vancouver on Wednesday.
Fogerty set to play Woodstock 50th anniversary show
CITIZEN FILE PHOTO
Citizen news service
Jay-Z, Dead & Company and the Killers are three of the acts that will headline one of the 50th anniversary shows commemorating the groundbreaking Woodstock festival this summer.
Woodstock co-founder Michael Lang announced Tuesday that Miley Cyrus, Santana, Imagine Dragons, Robert Plant and The Sensational Space Shifters, the Black Keys and Chance the Rapper will also perform at the Woodstock 50 Music and Arts Fair, which will take place on Aug. 16-18 in Watkins Glen, New York, which is about 185 km northwest of the original site.
The event is separate from an anniversary concert planned at the site of the original festival in 1969.
Tickets for the three-day festival pushing the message of peace, love and music go on sale April 22, which is Earth Day.
Lang said though Woodstock took place 50 years ago, today’s world and 1969 are somewhat parallel.
“It’s kind of spooky how similar things are. How some of the things that we thought we’d gone past
Angelou clip sparks elders debate
Put a handle on it.
If you don’t know what that means, you might not call elders by “Mr.,” ”Miss“ or ”Mrs.,“ insist that your children do the same or demand it for yourself. If you’ve heard the term, you’re likely familiar with the history of the politics of respectability and what that means.
Are you from a small town or big city native?
From a religious, school or immigrant community that uses elder honorifics? Perhaps you’re professor, coctor or judge.
All of the above were widely debated on social media last week, focused on an old talk-show clip of the late Maya Angelou sharply chiding a teen girl for addressing her as Maya rather than Miss Angelou before asking the poet and memoirist for her views on interracial marriage.
“I’m not ‘Maya.’ I’m 62 years old. I have lived so long and tried so hard that a young woman like you, or any other, you have no license to come up to me and call me by my first name. That’s first,” she said to claps from the audience. “Also, because at the same time, I am your mother, I am your auntie, I’m your teacher, I’m your professor. You see?” Angelou, who was black, apologized later in the show to the girl, Kim, also black.
Pierre Phipps, who tweeted the snippet dating to around 1990, has heard from all sides since then, and said opinions were varied and plentiful.
The 29-year-old Phippsvcan’t remember where he found the vintage exchange when he tweeted it out March 14 with: “I can’t wait to turn 30 so I can read one of yall for calling me by my first name like this:”
He said that he was surprised at the attention the tweet has received, especially among young people who disagreed with Angelou. She died in 2014 at age 86, and also favoured the title doctor in light of her numerous honorary doctorates.
“They think Miss Angelou’s response was very elitist. They
were really, really pissed about it,” said Phipps, who lives in Los Angeles and writes for television.
“We’re living in progressive times and a lot of people said once they turn 18, they feel like they have an even platform no matter how old you are. History is no longer playing a part in how we go about our everyday lives. History is becoming history.”
Phipps grew up in Chicago, but he has plenty of older female relatives from the South, including Mississippi and Alabama.
“It’s an unwritten rule on respect for elders in which a lot of us were born and raised to ‘put a handle on it,”’ he said. “Me personally, coming from a strong black Southern family, I didn’t see anything wrong with her response. Everyone is raised differently.”
Carrie Salow is a 55-year-old mother of two girls in Phoenix, where she moved from Grand Rapids, Michigan, when she was 15.
“I absolutely expect my teen daughters to call their friends’ parents Mr. and Mrs., and I expect the same,” said Salow, who is white. “The kids who live across the street from us are now young adults, in and out of college. They still call me Mrs. Salow and I feel it is appropriate.”
Valencia Bey, 49, was born and raised in Chicago and now lives in nearby Oak Park, Ill.
She spent most of her summers in Shelby, Miss., with her maternal grandparents and extended family.
“You just did not call elders by their first name,” said Bey, who
is black. “I was taught by folks who felt the way Ms. Angelou did. Addressing someone as Mr. or Miss was a sign of respect, especially those who came from the Jim Crow South, where calling a grown black person by their first name was a sign of disrespect. White people would purposely not call them Mr. or Mrs. or Miss to reinforce that they were considered inferior.”
Against the backdrop of African American history, such honorifics are heavy indeed.
“Like Angelou, our elders have lived lives some of us can only imagine, especially if they grew up in a society that was founded on white supremacy,” wrote Britni Danielle, in a piece about the tweet at Essence online.
“Often times, they weren’t given the respect they were due by the outside world, which regularly sought to humiliate and dehumanize them at every turn. Those who did dare speak up and demand their propers did so knowing the price could be steep,” she wrote.
The 55-year-old Lucy O’Donnell, with a nearly 18-year-old daughter and a 21-year-old son in Los Angeles, was raised in Arlington, Va.
“Two of my daughter’s friends initially addressed me as Mrs., and I have to say I hadn’t even given it a thought until then. I told them that they were welcome to call me by my first name but that if it was important in their households to address adults more formally that was fine, too,” said O’Donnell, who is white. “Both switched to Lucy pretty quickly. The only tradition I can’t abide is Mrs. and a husband’s first and last name.”
Danielle acknowledged young blacks responding to Phipps’ tweet who thought Angelou was out of line, writing:
“We live in a time where some people don’t really value the things and people who came before them. That’s how we get shirts declaring, ‘I’m not my ancestors,’ or people looking to cancel dead black writers like Angelou because they do not like an answer they’d given decades ago without understanding the context of the times.”
John Fogerty performs at CN Centre in July 2015. Fogerty is on the lineup of a Woodstock 50th anniuversary show this summer, 50 years after he played the legendary festival.
in the last 50 years - the racial divides, care for the environment and women’s rights - now we have Black Lives Matter and the #MeToo movement and climate deniers and another (expletive) in the White House,” Lang said. “So, it’s very similar.”
Lang made the announcement at a press conference at Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Lady Studios in New York City alongside Common and John Fogerty, who performed at the original Woodstock.
Both Fogerty and Common will perform this summer.
Fogerty, 73, recalled performing his set in 1969 after the Grateful Dead hit the stage.
He said he took the stage after midnight and half of the audience
was asleep. “I was frustrated and I said something like, ‘We hope you’re having a good time out there. We’re playing our hearts out for ya up here.’ And I don’t really see much moving. I see a light, somebody’s lighter goes on in the darkness and somebody out there says, ‘Don’t worry about it John, we’re with ya!’ So I played the whole rest of my complete Woodstock concert for that guy,” he said. More than 80 artists, including David Crosby, Janelle Monae, Brandi Carlile, Country Joe McDonald, Halsey, the Lumineers, Portugal the Man and India.Arie, are expected to perform on three main stages at Watkins Glen International racetrack in the Finger Lakes for Woodstock 50.
The original concert was held on a farm in Bethel, New York that is now run as an attraction by The Bethel Woods Center for the Arts.
The venue plans its own anniversary event Aug. 16-18.
It is with sad and loving hearts that we announce the passing of Christopher Edward Briggs. Born June 15, 1963 at Smithers BC, deceased March 16, 2019 at Prince George, BC after a lengthy and courageous battle with cancer. He is survived by his wife Jennifer, son Travis, stepdaughters Sara and Melissa, mother Myrna Jones, stepfather Henry Jones, sister Donelda Nelson (Frank), brother Andrew (Sherry) Briggs, stepbrothers John (Wendy) Jones and James Jones. Nieces Becky, Marcy, Chennille, Stephanie and other nieces and nephews. Also cousins Bronwyn Carr, Michael Carr and David Coltman. He will be greatly missed by his loving pets, Sadie, George, Squeaky, Franklin and Benjamin. Special thanks to: Doctors Mr. and Mrs. Daskarev, Dr. Hamour and all his wonderful support staff. They were more than his doctors, they were his friends. Special thanks also to the team of doctors at the Cancer Clinic who without fail were helpful and supportive. Thanks to Bronwyn Carr for remaining by his side during his final days in the hospital. Also to friends Doug and Annette Price, Judy Stone. Chris grew up in Smithers. He started work when he was 17 at Smitty’s as a bus boy and within six months he was head cook. He worked as a welder for RSF Energy manufacturing wood furnaces. He took courses at BCIT and became a valuable employee at RSF winning the bonus many months in a row for his innovative ideas to save the company money. When his son Travis was small, he decided to pursue a different career. He attended the College of New Caledonia graduating with a diploma in Criminology. He put this to good use by becoming a counsellor at the Safe house for children. Many of the young people he helped remember him with fondness. A few months ago he attended a party with some of the staff from the Safe House and was referred to as “the legend” as some of his ideas are still used today. In later years he became an avid animal lover working with Animal Advocates Society of BC, taking in some beautiful old dogs. He made the last years so happy for Nova, Ellie, Phillip and Tillie, to name a few. Long walks in the swampy forest with the dogs to check out his animal cameras produced wonderful pictures of wild animals just feet from his back door. He shared these pictures freely with so many of his friends. Chris’ courage facing his final battle was outstanding. Every time someone asked how he was feeling the answer was always “pretty good”. The person on the phone or a visitor never knew the agony he was feeling at the time. He outlived every prediction made. He loved every phone call (Auntie Grace was a favorite every Wednesday), cards, letters and get well wishes were gratefully received. He died a rich man, not in worldly goods but in family and friends who loved and cared for him. In lieu of flowers, he asked that people would donate to the Animal Advocates of BC. It was his wish that his passing could provide for one more sad, lonely and neglected dog.
AWAC
An Association Advocating for Women & Community
Please join us at our AGM and join our membership to be a part of addressing homelessness in our community April 16, 2019 12:00 Noon 1915 3rd
On Wednesday, March 13th/2019, Kenneth Charles Whitely, husband to Beverly, father to Denise & Kevin, passed away at the age of 74. Ken was born November 19, 1944 in Vancouver, BC, to Ralph and Isabel (Lyons) Whitely.
After completing his service as a Trooper in the Canadian Military, he met and married Bev, and moved to Prince George, where he worked for the Waste Water Treatment Plant from 1977-2005.
He was an avid reader and had an extensive vinyl collection, dating back to the 1950s. He was always ready with a cheeky joke or a quick witted comment.
He is survived by his wife (married 1972) as well as his two children, Denise (Kyle), Kevin, his two grandchildren, Elyse and Huxley, as well as his sister Mavis. No service will be held at the request of the departed. Love you forever, miss you always.
LUND
William Patrick (Bill) February 2, 1950March 13, 2019
We announce the peaceful passing of Bill at the Hospice House in Prince George, after a short battle with cancer, at the age of 69. He is predeceased by his parents, Lawrence and Valeria Lund and his infant sister Bernadette. Bill is survived by his daughter Helen Villeneuve (Patrick) and 2 grandchildren, Isaac and Sadie. He is also survived by 9 siblings: Faye Wiebe, Rosemary Bolton, Lorraine Stefaniuk, Audrey Weber (Charlie), Larry Lund (Sharon), Sharon Vaillancourt (Vern), Allan Lund (Luella) Valerie Lund and Ted Lund (Teresa). He leaves behind his former wife Mary Carmichael, as well as numerous nieces, nephews, and cousins. Bill was born and lived primarily in Penticton until 1976, when he moved to Prince George. He apprenticed as a bricklayer and worked through the Bricklayers/Masons Union until he retired in 2015. Since his retirement Bill enjoyed “tramping” around visiting friends, playing crib, and doing outdoor activities such as fishing and camping. His love of travel and “island life” took him to many exotic places. He enjoyed watching hockey, Star Trek and documentaries about war. He lived life to its fullest and seized every opportunity to enjoy it. He will be remembered by friends around the world. In lieu of flowers, please donate to the Prince George Hospice Society. Thank you to the staff and volunteers who cared for Bill. A celebration of Bill’s life will be held at a later date.
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A big sushi meal would have once made Josh McQuillin gravely ill, but the Prince George man can now gorge on one of his favourite foods worry-free thanks to a breakthrough clinical trial for his rare genetic disorder.
McQuillin was 12 when he was diagnosed with urea cycle disorder, a life-threatening condition that causes ammonia to build up in the body and can put a person in a coma.
He had to strictly limit how much protein he ate and took expensive medication several times a day. He could never be too far from a hospital, which made it hard to travel abroad or join friends backcountry camping.
“Now I can eat as much protein as I want. I’m eating differently, sleeping differently, exercising differently,” McQuillin, 30, said during a monitoring appointment at Calgary’s Foothills Medical Centre on Thursday.
“I’ve gained a bit of weight. I’ve never had to fight weight gain before, which is kind of funny. I’ve always been underweight my whole entire life.”
The genes needed to process ammonia were delivered to McQuillin’s liver intravenously. A virus, modified to be harmless, was used as a transmitter. It’s believed McQuillin is the first Canadian to receive gene replacement this way. Only three other people in the world have undergone similar treatment.
McQuillin said he felt the results two weeks after the one-time injection.
Aneal Khan with the University of Calgary’s Cumming School of Medicine is leading the trial. He also treated McQuillin in Ontario when he first got sick as a boy.
Khan recalled telling McQuillin’s par ents years ago that he wasn’t sure their son would survive.
“Since he’s had this therapy, his ammonia has not gone high, despite him eating whatever amount of protein he wants. It’s a massive change,” said Khan. “We’re very excited – especially for rare genetic diseases, DNA diseases – that we don’t have to tell the parents that stuff anymore.”
Khan said the treatment is being studied for other genetic diseases involving the
Alberta Health Services has set aside beds in Foothills hospital’s intensive
care unit for clinical trial patients. That’s important, because it’s often not known whether an experimental treatment will have serious adverse effects, said Christopher Doig, a medical director in intensive care for the agency’s Calgary zone.
“They can get it in a very safe way where they can be very closely watched, very closely monitored. At the same time, we’re not using resources taking away from other patients.”
McQuillin said he’s looking forward to
going on a road trip in the United Kingdom this spring without having to worry about his medication or whether the nearest hospital can treat his condition. He can also rest easier when on his forestry job, which once required painstaking meal planning for trips into the bush.
“Everything’s 100 per cent good to go for now,” he said.
“I guess my only concern or fear is they don’t know really how long it will last. But it’s definitely exciting.”
97/16 news service photo Josh McQuillin of Prince George undergoes tests at the University of Calgary’s clinical trials unit in Calgary on Thursday.
JAMES TRUE TO THE BLUES
FRANK PEEBLES
97/16 staff
There have been bigger rock stars on the red carpet, but it’s another colour that has always painted the music of Colin James: blue.
James roared into the consciousness of music fans as a hot guitar player on the pop-rock charts of the late 1980s and it kept revving through the 2000s. Songs like Voodoo Thang, Saviour, Five Long Years, Just Came Back (To Say Goodbye), Freedom, Keep On Loving Me Baby, Why’d You Lie, Real Stuff and more just kept coming like lava from a slowburn volcano.
His albums were so compacted with hit material it was hard to differentiate which songs were singles pushed by the record companies and which ones were just popular all of their own accord.
There was no mistaking what James built his rock popularity on. It was, like the Rolling Stones and Eric Clapton before him, entirely framed by the blues.
The deeper into his career he got, the more overt he became about it. The debut Colin James album and follow-ups like Sudden Stop, Bad Habits, Fuse, Rooftops & Satellites, Fifteen, etc. were all mainstream rock packages, all contained their own inherent personalities, but indubitably they were tinted with the blues.
But he veered off into pure puddles of blue light with three big band albums (four, if you also count the Christmas disc), the National Steel acoustic album, and most recently his two latest albums - Blue Highways in ‘16 and the current Miles To Go - are both packages of blues covers by artists that ignite James to keep doing what he does: be an emissary of this definitive Americana style of music that underpins so much of modern music whether it got translated into rock, country, jazz, or R&B/pop.
Ask him, as The Citizen did this past week, if he considers himself an ambassador of the blues and he starts with one answer and evolves to another.
“Not at all, because it’s a music I love and I’ve always identified with, and blues was formed out of hardship so I’ve just always felt for the music,” he said, as opposed to living his own personal hardships that compare to the suffering of the African-American inventors and their audiences early in the formation of the genre at the dawn of the 20th century.
However, blues - although it comes from a foundation of abject poverty, systemic oppression and personal pain - is also rich in shades of joy and effervescence. Sure, you can feel that deep hurt when James does his version of Atlanta Moan by Barbecue Bob Hicks, but one of the first songs that put Colin James on the national map was his peppery cover of Roy Brown’s Mighty Mighty Man “and a guy like Roy Brown, that’s not sad blues at all, that was early rock ‘n’ roll. He wrote Cadillac Baby as well,” said James,
who has never been afraid or pridebound about singing the music of other writers, especially the blues pioneers.
So, recanted, “yeah, I guess in a way I am an ambassador, just trying to bring some life to it and hopefully inspire others,” he said, when he thinks about how a younger musician like his harmonica player Steve Marriner, borrowed from the Ottawa band Monkey Junk, confessed to him that “he saw me play when he was like 15 years old at the Governor General’s place in Ottawa when he happened to be in the audience.”
He also has to consider his ambassador status when remembering that John Lee Hooker gave him an opening act opportunity when he was just 16 years old, Stevie Ray Vaughan put a big wing around him in his youth, Bonnie Raitt was a duet partner and fan by album two, Long John Baldry was an early endorser, etc.
Not bad for a kid out of Saskatchewan who grew up playing bluegrass mandolin, Metis fiddle and Irish folk music. He was befriended while still a kid by The Chieftains, he is on two of their traditional Irish albums as a special guest, but he didn’t even know he had a wall
in his mind until it got knocked down, exposing him to the ocean of the blues. It happened in one pivotal moment, when he got to see a concert by the legendary James Cotton at a folk festival.
“That was a no-looking-back moment for me. I changed my style and launched into the blues,” he said.
There are fewer James Cottons anymore. The generation is nearly gone of blues giants who took the genre from obscure Mississippi Delta chicken shacks to hole-in-the-wall Chicago nightclubs to Beale Street sidewalk sessions and got it into mainstream view.
James has an upcoming concert with Buddy Guy he’s looking forward to. He has a picture of the two of them together in 1991, the legend and the upstart, “and the nicest thing about being an ambassador is, they are going, and your hope is that people remember.”
James is living proof, and one of many, that this rural and definitive style of music is still vibrant and relevant in today’s world. He had to find out about the blues by way of record stores and magazines and talking to other, older blues fans. He is excited about the future
of the blues in the hands of today’s youth because he trusts the magnetic power of those sounds, and the communication technology that now exists to get it into the heads of new generations. They won’t have to work as hard to find it, he said, they just have to be shown some starting points.
“I still find people (great blues players of old) I had no idea about and I think ‘how did I miss that?’” James said. “The individual singers, that’s what you kinda start noticing. All the singers of that era, whether it’s Otis Rush, Albert King, Pop Staples, they had very individual sounding voices. You could pick them out. Look at John Lee Hooker. So it wasn’t just that they were playing the blues, it was that deep expression in their voices that separated Howlin’ Wolf from Muddy Waters, and you don’t hear as much of that these days - definitive voices that way. I’m so glad I got to see some of them.”
And the Prince George public can see Colin James when he plays CN Centre on Saturday along with special guests Barney Bentall and Marty O’Reilly. Tickets are on sale now via the ticketsnorth.ca website.
97/16 handout photo Colin James is set to play CN Centre Saturday night, along with special guests Barney Bentall and Marty O’Reilly.
BKREKOSKIS WORKED HARD TOGETHER
ob Krekoski, the second of four children, was born in St. Paul, Alta., in 1942. He remembers the end of the Second World War; there was rationing, no money, lots of work, lots of heartache, drought and the fact that the success of the farm hinged on the weather.
He remembers when a good barley crop was followed by the invasion of the wild ducks that would eat their grain and could clear 45 acres of a near ripe crop in less than one week. The up side of this invasion was that the six-pound grainfed ducks were delicious when they appeared on the dinner table.
When he was 17, a relative invited him to leave the farm and move to Kenora, Ont. for a job at Mando Pulp and Paper. He took the job, drove the bus between camps and cut pulp wood for one year and then moved back to the farm because he was homesick.
He moved to Prince George in 1963 for a job opportunity at Eagle Lake sawmill.
Bob said, “my move to Eagle Lake was a good move because that is where I met my wife Myrna and I have been blessed ever since. I proudly married Myrna Gustafson in 1966. Myrna (of Swedish descent) was born in Prince George in 1946. She was raised in Giscome and as a young girl she worked at Garlands Cafe. I was one of the bunk house boys who frequented the café. Her father also worked for Eagle Lake sawmills.
“I first met her through the church youth group in Giscome. After finishing Grade 10 in Giscome, she took Grade 11 in Prince George and traveled back and forth with her sister and her boyfriend. She stayed at the dormitory in Prince George while completing Grade 12.
“During this time, I knew I wanted to marry Myrna. She was 18 years old but I still asked her parents for their permission to propose to their daughter. To make a long story short, the approval process was tough but worth it. They
finally said yes after Myrna promised them that she would stay in school and finish Grade 13. Myrna was wearing my engagement ring while riding the school bus back and forth to Prince George as she finished Grade 13. Her father and I became the best of friends after he approved of our engagement. The rest is history.”
Bob worked for Eagle Lake sawmills for three years. He went to work for the B.C. Forest Service for the next five years. He had a great boss, Frank Tannock who put him in charge of cruising and then keeping the books for the aircraft.
His work took him to Valemount for two years.
He said, “when we moved to Valemount, Myrna cried because she did not want to go; two years later when we were ready to move to Prince George in 1969, she cried because she wanted to stay there.
“Valemount was exceptionally beautiful before they flooded the Canoe River in the late 60s to create the Kinbasket Lake reservoir for the Mica Dam.
“We had to take the train in and out of Valemount for two years. It was a goat trail from Valemount to McBride. When we traveled to Prince George, we used to go from Valemount to Blue River and then on to Little Fort.”
Bob always loved working in the bush. He worked for various Northwood contractors for the next five years bucking, falling trees and running skidders.
He said, “I started my own company, RMTC&L Contracting and did renovations, siding, exterior finishing, roofing and subcontracting. Myrna was the bookkeeper. Our supplier of cedar shakes was John Schwitzer; he was a good man and a perfectionist and I valued his opinions. I built our own home in 1992 and then in 2015 I retired and closed the company.”
Bob and Myrna have three children: Carrie (Eugene), Tanya (Perry) and Lisa (John). They have four wonderful grandchildren.
Myrna was a stay-at-home mom until 1990. She did the books for the family business and for her church. She stayed current by taking business and income tax courses. When the children started to graduate from high school, she worked in the office for Energy Wise Distributors
for about 18 years and retired in 2011.
Together, Bob and Myrna have always been willing to give back to their community. They were one of the founding families of the Hartland Baptist Church, they taught Sunday school, assisted with the boys and girls club and served as board members for a grand total of over 45 years; this includes their volunteer work serving at Fort George Baptist and the Evangelical Free Church.
Bob said, “we are thankful to God for His love, care and guidance through the years. Our church and our family have always been our priorities followed by my hobbies of fishing, hunting, placer mining and trapping.”
Bob was a member of the Trappers Association for two years.
Myrna enjoys many happy hours quilting, gardening and keeping fit. With a twinkle in his eye, Bob concluded by saying, “I miss the prairie sounds and smells but life in Prince George has been great. To quote author Louis L’amour when he spoke to his partner he said, ‘You’ll do to ride the river with’. Well, Myrna has been the best thing that ever happened to me and she has been my partner through it all.”
March birthdays that I know about: Caroline Nadalin, Frank Manfredi, Elaine Hughes, Lois Keim, Rita Sexsmith, Janice Arndt, Linda Meise, Frances Roch, Doreen Denicola, Kathleen Soltis, Julia Cook, Peggy Vogan, James Dow, Carol Anderson, Colin Arthurs, Eric Davidson, Rose Dorish, Gloria Sintich, Carl Wikjord, Ted Horvath, Ethel Drake, Joyce Bickford, Sandy Houston, Andrea McKenzie (Jr.), Rita Thibault, John Meyer, Esther Swanson, Jo-Ann Pickering, Betty Burbee, Lynn Kedl, Carolyn McGhee, Howard Lloyd, Mavis Bartell, Leonard Paquette, Anna Herbert, Liz Haley, Lil MacGillivray, Alzora Hick, Alice Olesen, Margaret Pearson, Reg Pointer, Betty Stock, Ernie Simpson, Robert Krekoski, Janet Dahlberg, Joan Fogarty, Ray Bouffard, Susan Hunter, Bettie Doherty, John Mcclelland, Carmand Wagner, Oj Regent, Lynda Harding, Sheila Hall, Don Hollis, Alan Dixon, Molly Eberle, Lydia Kral, Marvene Layte, Lorna Lang, Gil Rand, Hollis Wood and Sue Collison.
Anniversaries: 62 years for Robert and Evelyn DuBois, 53 years for Bob and Myrna Krekoski and 40 years for Bill and Shirley Bond.
9716 photo by Brent Braaten Myrna and Bob Krekoski in their home. The couple were married in 1966.
SUPERFOODS NOT A CURE-ALL
Wednesday was Dietitians Day in Canada, a day when dietitians across the country help to promote our profession and our roles as experts in nutrition. While dietitians believe in the potential of food to promote healing, prevent chronic disease and improve health, we also understand that food is not a cure-all.
The role of a dietitian often involves dispelling myths and clarifying misinformation. If you Google “health benefits” and any of the foods listed below, you’ll find a number of so-called proven benefits, making each and every one seem like the golden ticket to a healthy life. I’ve taken a look at the common claims associated with four trendy foods to find what’s based on evidence and what is, indeed, too good to be true:
1. COCONUT OIL
Coconut oil is advertised as having the ability to reduce cholesterol, aid in weight loss and kill viruses. Coconut oil is pushed as a healthy fat, however, there is evidence to the contrary. It has been shown to increase low density lipoprotein-C (LDL-C) levels (bad cholesterol), although not to the same extent as with butter, while also modestly increasing high density lipoprotein-C (HDL-C) levels (good cholesterol). The claims that it reduces total cholesterol have not been sufficiently proven.
When it comes to aiding in weight loss,
data from small clinical studies suggests that coconut oil supplements taken with a low calorie diet may modestly decrease waist circumference in obese adults, but there is no effect on body mass index (BMI) or fat mass. Currently, there is not enough evidence to recommend coconut oil supplements to support weight loss or reduced fat mass in obese adults.
In terms of preventing viral infections, coconut oil is unfortunately not the cure. There is extremely limited evidence to support these claims.
While the benefits of coconut oil may be overstated, that doesn’t mean it can’t be part of a healthy diet. If you enjoy the taste of coconut oil, it can be used in small amounts, once in a while. Since there is not enough evidence to prove associated health benefits, it’s best to choose mostly heart healthy oils like canola and olive oils. As more research becomes available, a clearer picture on the healthiness of coconut oil will begin to come to light.
2. TURMERIC
Turmeric is used in curry powder, some mustards and as a coloring agent to turn butter, cheese and other foods yellow. It’s marketed as a potent antioxidant that can improve bone and joint health by reducing inflammation.
Most clinical trials involving turmeric focus on the active component, curcumin, rather than on turmeric as a whole. Curcumin has been shown to interfere with pathways involved in inflammation, supporting it’s use as an anti-inflammatory agent. However, the medicinal use of curcumin is limited due to its low bioavailability when taken orally; meaning
only a small portion of curcumin is able to be utilized by the body and have an active effect.
High doses of curcumin have been associated with adverse gastrointestinal effects, so it’s best to speak with your doctor or a dietitian before taking curcumin or turmeric for the purpose of preventing inflammation.
3. SEA SALT
Sea salt is promoted as a rich source of minerals and the healthy alternative to common table salt, capable of promoting brain, muscle and nervous system function.
As advertised, sea salt contains calcium, magnesium, and potassium. While it is true these minerals play roles in brain, muscle and nervous system functioning, the amounts you would be ingesting in sea salt are so small, it’s almost not worth counting them towards your daily intake. For example, one teaspoon of sea salt contains approximately 0.5 milligrams (mg) of potassium, whereas a medium banana contains 422 mg of potassium. Considering the average adult requires approximately 4,700 mg of potassium per day, it’s safe to say that eating fresh fruits and vegetables will help you meet that requirement a lot faster than sea salt. Besides, the sodium content of any kind of salt should be the biggest health consideration when deciding whether or not to use it. A diet high in sodium can increase your risk of high blood pressure, stroke, heart disease and kidney disease. Whether it’s table, kosher, pickling or sea salt, there is no difference in how specific salts affect your health. All types of salt have the same amount of sodium
per teaspoon: 2,300 mg. Most adults don’t need more than 1,200-1,500 mg of sodium per day although the majority of us eat approximately 3,400 mg per day. Bottom line: If you prefer the taste of sea salt, then choose it for that reason. Sea salt is no healthier than table salt and should only be used in moderation for most adults.
4. ACAI
Many bloggers, Youtubers and nutrition-enthusiasts will tell you that acai is a superfood, rich in antioxidants which detoxify the body. While it is true that acai is a rich source of antioxidants, including vitamins A and C, and phytochemicals including anthocyanins and other flavonoids, which are associated with antioxidant activity, this claim is definitely overstating its benefits.
Antioxidants protect your body’s cells from damage, which happens naturally as you age and when you are exposed to things like pollution or cigarette smoke. Cell damage can lead to diseases like heart disease and diabetes and a diet rich in antioxidants can help lower your risk of these diseases. To get the majority of the antioxidants from acai, it’s best to consume it in powder form or whole, with the pulp and skin included. While there is evidence to support the intake of antioxidants to help prevent cell damage, I can’t say that acai, or antioxidants in particular, detoxify the body. In fact, there is a lack of evidence to prove that any food can remove toxins and cleanse your system.
Kelsey Leckovic is a registered dietitian with Northern Health working in chronic disease management.
From left to right, Trudy Wall, Linda Hlina and Bob Hlina from Edward Jones donate $4,000 to Alex Schare, manager of the SPCA. The donation was on behalf of Coralie Tolley who died of cancer in 2017. Coralie was an avid lover of animals as she supported the SPCA often throughout her life. It was one of her many passions. Through the last 10 years of her life she had or boarded about a dozen cats. Coralie was with Edward Jones 17 years.
ARTISTS SOUGHT FOR 6X6 AUCTION
FRANK PEEBLES
97/16 staff
Let’s have a small discussion about local art. Just a wee chat.
The annual “Best Damn Little Art Auction” is just a little while away, with all its little works of creativity that make such big impressions.
All these works are no larger than six inches by six inches, hence its nickname: the 6x6. The Community Arts Council holds this annual exhibition to give local artists an innovative way to market their work to the public, and to cross paths with one another.
“It’s for well established artists and very new or developing artists to mix together in one event,” said Lisa Redpath, the CAC’s program manager. “There are some great names, some really highquality artists, who take part, and there is something so charming about and exciting about new artists, students, people who haven’t felt confident enough to become a commercial artist, to nonetheless feel they have a space here to participate and show their art and market it.”
Redpath remembers last year when she wasn’t immune to the emotion of the event, getting into a bidding war over the small painting of a cat done by Kyrija Schlitt. Redpath won the consumer battle that time, and Schlitt won the professionalism battle. She was an elementary school student who made a big sale.
The CAC and the artist split the final sale price of each piece. If a piece does not sell, it is returned to the artist for their own future opportunities.
Now in its eighth year, the 6x6 auction has been diversifying. Redpath said most submissions were painting and drawings in its first few editions but as the event became better known in the arts scene, it started to change. Another six-inch dimension was added.
“The potters have certainly embraced this event,” she said. “They do tiles and sculptures. A lot can be done with clay inside a six-inch size limit. We have also seen growing participation from fibre artists, wood turners, metal artists, carvers and sculptors.”
Each artist can submit as many as three
FRIENDS HOSTING BOOK SALE
There’s no better place than the library to peruse books.
Usually the tomes at the Prince George Public Library are there for temporary lending, but on April 5 and 6 there will be a different section to delve into, for a limited time only - the Take Me Home Forever section.
Each year, the Friends Of The Prince George Public Library group holds two of the biggest book sales in the city to raise funds and draw in all the lovers of books. This is the spring edition. It doesn’t matter if you’re a poetry buff, a fiction fan, a biography nut, any kind of bibiliophile at all, there is something for everyone.
pieces to the 6x6 show. All submissions must be handed in April 16-18 at Studio 2880 between 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Each one needs the artist’s name on the back, and be ready for display.
The show is a combination exhibition and auction on May 3 from 7-9 p.m. when the bidding closes.
Tickets to attend are $10 each, available in advance at Studio 2880.
The CAC enjoys moving the event around from year to year. It started out at Groop Gallery, then went to the Bob Harkins Branch of the Public Library, Omineca Arts Centre, Direct Art and now is back this year where it began.
“We loved that we had the opportunity to come back full circle this year and have it at Groop Gallery once again,” said Redpath. “Moving it around allows us to really expand our network and keep everything fresh. Each one has its own energy.”
Please email your submission interest to Manmeet at arts@studio2880.com. Six-inch by six-inch canvases and panels are available at Ridge Side Art.
“Browse hundreds of books, DVDs, music CDs, magazines and more at this twice-annual book sale,” said a statement from the organizers.
April 5 is a members only preview but you can purchase a membership at the door for just $5 and get in for the early-bird session between 1-5 p.m. that Friday.
The public gets to mass in the next day from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
“All money raised by the Friends Of The Library supports Prince George Public Library programs and spaces,” the organizers said.
The prices for these books and other materials are deeply discounted. Most items are gently used. Treasures abound and often the best purchases are the spontaneous finds that ignite the readership fires in a sudden flash of discovery.
For more information, visit the Bob Harkins Branch downtown.
97/16 IS A WEEKLY PRODUCT OF THE PRINCE GEORGE CITIZEN
97/16 photo by Brent Braaten
97/16 STAFF
COMING EVENTS THIS WEEK
Kinky Boots - The Musical
Friday at 8 p.m. at CN Centre, 2187 Ospika Blvd., winner of six 2013 Tony awards, including best musical, Kinky Boots features a Tony award-winning score by Cyndi Lauper, a book by Tony award-winner Harvey Fierstein, and direction and choreography by Tony award-winner Jerry Mitchell. Kinky Boots tells the uplifting and heartwarming tale of Charlie Price, a young man reluctantly taking over his family’s struggling shoe factory and looking for a fresh idea. Charlie meets and finds inspiration in Lola and together they discover that it takes a good friend to make a great pair. For tickets visit www.ticketsnorth.ca.
Subtotal @ Oakroom Grill
Friday at 7 p.m. at the Oakroom Grill, 104-1023 Central St. West, Roman Kozlowski, Mike Howe and Brad Martin will provide great tunes while guests enjoy dinner. There is a cover charge. Contact: 250-277-1882 | oakroomgrill@hotmail.com
Teen Fortnite Nerf
Friday from 5:15 to 7 p.m. at the Bob Harkins Branch, Prince George Public Library, 888 Canada Games Way, dress up as your favourite Fortnite character and compete in the ultimate Nerf battle to see who will be the Victor Royale. For teens only. Call 250-563-9251 ext. 108 to register.
Colin James
Saturday from 7 to 11 p.m. at CN Centre, 2187 Ospika Blvd., Colin James, with special guests Barney Bentall, and Marty O’Reilly, presents his Miles To Go Tour. Tickets $49 and $59, plus s/c’s. GA - 19-years plus floor. All ages reserved seating in the bleachers. This is a Cariboo Rocks the North Warm Up Event where all ticket-buyers will be entered to win a pair of weekend passes to Cariboo Rocks the North 2019. Tickets are at www.ticketsnorth.ca.
Indoor Airsoft Game
Saturday from 6:30 to 10:45 p.m. at the Roll-a-Dome , 2588 Recplace Dr., indoor close quarters airsoft is a military simulation sport so expect adrenaline pumping, fast paced action. For more information contact 250-255-6637.
Roller Derby
Saturday at 7:30 p.m. at the Roll-a-Dome, 2588 Replace Dr., come cheer on the local roller derby team the Northstars as they take on the Fort St. James Killbillies. A thrilling event fun for the whole family. Doors open at 7 p.m. Tickets are $10 at the door with proceeds going to support the Roll-a-Dome. Contact: ratedpgrollergirls@hotmail.com
REAPS Annual General Meeting
Saturday from 1 to 3 p.m. Public Library , 888 Canada Games Way, REAPS annual general meeting will be held featuring guest speaker Rachael Ryder, waste diversion program leader with the Regional District of Fraser-Fort George. Everyone welcome. Contact: 250-5617327.
Scotch & Social
Saturday at 7:30 p.m. at Theatre NorthWest, 36-556 N Nechako Rd., the Scotch and Social will once again be offered. It’s a chance to gather and taste unique high end scotch’s from around the world at the lounge lobby at Theatre NorthWest. Doors are open at 7. Tickets are $75 and include five tastings of rare, single malt scotches. All proceeds go to support Theatre North West’s upcoming season. 18+ event.Tickets at tickets. theatrenorthwest.com. Contact: 250614-0039 | foh@theatrenorthwest.com
Wheelchair Basketball
Every Monday until April 15 from 7:30 to 9 p.m. at Northern Sports Centre (NSC), 3333 University Way, P.G. LumberJacks wheelchair basketball is a Rec North drop-in program at the Northern Sports Centre. No experience is necessary and all equipment including
sports wheelchairs is available. Everyone welcome. Free for NSC members and youth under 13 years or $6 drop-in rate for non-members. Call 250-613-5187.
Teen Tabletop Meet Up
Every Monday until May 27 from 4 to 5 p.m. at the Bob Harkins Branch, Prince George Public Library, 888 Canada Games Way, try your hand at a variety of tabletop games. All experience levels welcome. Bring your own decks for MtG, Pokemon or Yu-Gi-Oh. For 13 to 18 yrs. For more information call 250-563-9251 or email ask@pgpl.ca.
Conscious Dance
Tuesday from 6:15 to 8:15 p.m. at Omineca Arts Centre, 369 Victoria St., conscious dance/authentic movement for mental, physical, social, spiritual and cultural rebalancing for every body will be offered. This inclusive event is open and beneficial to every community member, including families and people with chronic disease and people who think they cannot dance. Bring a yoga mat or blanket, warm socks, water bottle, comfy clothes - whatever you like to wear and come as you are. This movement is about being non judgmental, about reconnecting with body, mind, community space through rhythm and music. Hosted by Sacredsouldance. Admission is by donation. For more information visit www.ominecaartscentre.com.
Wheelchair Rugby
Every Tuesday until May 28 from 7 to 9 p.m. at the College of New Caledonia , 3330 22 Ave., wheelchair rugby program runs weekly. No experience is necessary and all equipment including sports wheelchairs are available. Everyone welcome. BC Wheelchair Sports annual membership is $10. In this fullcontact sport, athletes play in tank-like wheelchairs and hit each others’ chairs in an attempt to carry a ball across the line. For more information call 250-649-9501 or email Northern@bcwheelchairsports. com.
Tea n’ Beads n’ Bannock
Wednesday from 7 to 10 p.m. at Omineca Arts Centre, 369 Victoria St., there is a community beading circle hosted by Lynette La Fontaine, a Metis artist who blends traditional art and teachings with contemporary flair in the form of acrylic paintings and beadwork. Learn by watching, asking and doing. This is not a class, but a place to bring beading projects and sit together to inspire, connect and learn from one another. Anyone with an interest is welcome. Admission is by donation. For more information visit www.ominecaartscentre.com.
97/16 file photo
Rated PG Northstars (white) take on MindFox (red) from Saskatoon during the final match of the 2018 Northern Exposure roller derby tournament.
AREA SINGER RELEASES HUMBOLDT TRIBUTE
The minor hockey season is coming to an end. In junior hockey, the playoffs are underway. In the NHL, the final push is on before the second season for the Stanley Cup.
Now, as the spring air is warming but the roads are still icy, and hockey is at its most meaningful across the Canadian landscape, was when Mark Perry wanted to offer his musical salute to all those young men and women, and all their families and loved ones, who travel for this sport, this cultural touchstone. And he wanted to take a knee in honour of the Humbolt Broncos.
“Like so many Canadians, I was heartbroken,” said the veteran Bulkley Valley
singer-songwriter. “Years ago I played hockey with guys from the Moosejaw Warriors, Saskatoon Blades and Humboldt Broncos, among others. I played as a kid along with my four brothers. My son played hockey. I coached a lot of teens. Everything felt really close to home. We’re all grieving for those families.”
The song is called Cold Road and came out of an emotional punch in the gut Perry felt as soon as he heard the news of the Humboldt bus crash and immediately recalled the miles of highway he once travelled in just that way, and his own family’s sports travel. Almost every Canadian could feel a bit of themselves inside that incident.
Perry said he “felt numb” and went out to the shed, his creative space behind the house in Smithers, “to deal.”
He started meandering around on the guitar and the imagined highways under the wheels of every sports team Canada has ever known.
“I have played Cold Road live in Calgary, Toronto and Montreal this year and the response has been a little emotional,” he said. “Hockey is so much a part of our fabric here in Canada. People relate to following that dream of making it to the NHL.”
The whole hockey world, from Victoria to Vladivostok, is aware of the crushing tragedy on the frozen Saskatchewan highway on April 6, 2018. It killed 16 players, coaches and team staff plus injured 13 more and traumatized untold numbers.
Perry has 12 albums to his well known troubadour name, but he did not rush to record Cold Road. Something about
the gravity of it held him back. But he received so much encouragement out of his concert performances that it became clear to him he should set it free into the wide world.
He had to get it right. Perry was already a pro at the story-song and photographic music. This song carried more weight than any he’d written in the past. To backstop the recording process he called on Yukon producer and sound artist Jordy Walker. For musical collaboration he brought in some trusted friends like Tobin Frank of Spirit of the West, Smither-Toronto rising star Mip, Mark Thibeault from the band Hungry Hill and Ian Olmstead from the Alex Cuba Band. Cold Road was released Monday. You can find it then on the Roots Music Canada website (www.rootsmusic.ca).
PERMAFROST STUDY RESULTS RELEASED
Permafrost is a word most people associate with the Arctic, but a new study by Geoscience BC acknowledges that it reaches into northern B.C. as well.
Geoscience BC funded the Cold Regions Research Centre at Wilfrid Laurier University as part of the Consortium for Permafrost Ecosystems in Transition (CPET), to examine how thawing permafrost – layers of ground just below the surface that remain frozen for more than two years –affects the hydrology and land cover of these sensitive environments.
That study traced a line from the Northwest Territories to the northeastern
“Northeastern BC is the front lines of permafrost thaw,” said William L. Quinton, director of Laurier’s Cold Regions Research Centre. “It is a place where permafrost thaw means permafrost disappears, and the ecosystems that were supported by permafrost change.”
Researchers studied landscape changes and took water measurements at 10 key subarctic boreal sites along a 200 km north-south line proposed by CPET from south of Fort Simpson to the far northeast corner of BC.
“Permafrost-induced changes to ecosystems and land-covers bring about changes
on the landscape,” said Quinton. “We have found that permafrost can impound water like a dam, so when permafrost thaws, the landscape upslope can start to drain and generate runoff which can raise the flow in streams and rivers.”
Geoscience BC executive vice-president and chief scientific officer, Carlos Salas, said, “Permafrost thaw ultimately results in drying of wetlands in this region.
in this fragile, changing landscape.”
The detailed study is available in its entirety using Geoscience BC’s online Earth Science Viewer available at their website.
Understanding the water balance in this region of BC is critical to making decisions about water management by communities and industry. This research provides unbiased earth science information to inform responsible natural resource management
The implications of permafrost thaw will become part of the conversation between various levels of government, First Nations communities, local towns and regional districts, and the various industrial stakeholders directly involved on the land where permafrost exists now but soon will not - operators like farmers, foresters, miners, oil and gas proponents, tourism operators and others that will have to calculate the cost and viability of changing as the land and water changes.
FRANK PEEBLES 97/16 staff
If you think your family is weird, you should Meet My Sister at Theatre NorthWest.
The final mainstage play of the TNW season opens March 28 and it is an allCanadian comedy about family dynamics.
It is also a world premiere.
TNW’s artistic director Jack Grinhaus described the play as a “laugh-out-loud comedy that goes right for the gut and has a surprise twist ending you’ll be laughing about for days to come.”
It was written by Bonnie Green and developed for the stage by the combined forces of TNW and their buddy organization Western Canada Theatre in Kamloops. The two companies are sharing this first showing of this new original work.
“Because we worked together, it allows regional professional theatre companies like ours to do something big like a world premier,” Grinhaus said. “I know without doubt that this play is going to become one of the standard comedies of our country, it is a Canadian classic in the making, and our audiences in Kamloops and Prince George get to see it first.”
In the story, two sisters, Stella and Blanche, one from Northern BC and the
other from Northern Ontario, try in vain to get their mother to come out of her locked home, which has been sold. She has to move into a seniors residence that day, but mom is refusing to cooperate with the two sisters.
The only characters the audience sees are the two grownup girls, but there is a third presence. Mom’s voice is sometimes heard, and Grinhaus was as excited about that disembodied voice as about the seen actors or the script itself.
“Mom is played by Martha Henry, probably the greatest female actor in the history of Stratford. She’s the grande dame of the Stratford Festival,” he said, thrilled that she would do the recordings of the lines that get said from within the disputed house. “This mellifluous voice coming from off-stage is this icon of Canadian theatre.”
Mom tosses Tim Hortons cups out the window, hilariously scolds the girls outside and leave them out in the driveway wondering how to get her out, who mom really loves best, and who the heck this person named Sly might be that mom keeps talking about all of a sudden.
Meet My Sister opens March 28 and runs to April 17. Tickets are on sale now via the Theatre NorthWest website.
PUBLIC SERVICE SHOULDN’T BE BEHIND BULLETPROOF GLASS COMEDY WRAPS UP TNW SEASON
THINKING ALOUD
TRUDY KLASSEN
Walking into a public service agency and seeing warning signs against abusive behavior and finding bulletproof glass between yourself, the client, and the service provider does not send a friendly message.
It doesn’t jive well with the message of “we are public servants” and it doesn’t square with politicians who declare that government exists to serve the people. So why the warnings and the bulletproof glass?
My guess is that they are legitimately needed and have not been put there without due consideration. What’s up? It is obvious that something has gone wrong in a “civil” society when those that deliver public services are under threat of violence from those they serve, that pay their salary.
Is the problem a disconnect between what our service agencies can provide and what the general public have been told to expect?
Have we, the general population, become so dependent on public services that we think they can and should meet our every expected need?
Have our service agencies over time forgotten their raison de’être and become little kingdoms that exist to serve their own careers or for the sake of seeking to be the best employer”and at the expense of the public they are meant to serve, so the modus operandi is to talk down to those who would dare question their decisions, which insults the intelligence of everyone who comes for assistance for anything?
Have we outstripped our ability to pay for government services but our political leaders don’t want to lose face by closing them down, so instead, they severely restrict their mandate or ability to actually provide a service to keep costs low?
Do we have no political will to streamline our services to avoid duplication and the inevitable circumlocution office experience of trying to find the correct government agency to help us?
After a meeting with a local official, I asked when I could expect a response and the room immediately got very chilly. What happened?
Apparently, I had broken a rule I didn’t know existed: don’t expect an official to actually do something.
Now, that is a problem, not just for me but for all of us. We are in this together and if that is the kind of public service we deliver, how can we expect things to improve and get rid of the protective glass?
No solutions from me today, just questions.
LOWER MAINLAND TRIP REPLACES SNOW WITH RAIN
HOME AGAIN
MEGAN KUKLIS
We are actually leaving town.
We are going on a short excursion to the Lower Mainland, Langley to be exact, to visit family and friends over an extended long weekend during spring break. It is raining in Vancouver and although I do not relish the thought of spending four days being soggy, I am looking forward to not seeing snowbanks of barely-melted dirty snow.
Bring on the puddles of dirty coastal water, instead.
The kids are getting older and are less than enthusiastic about spending the entire trip “visiting,” so we decided that
we would be proactive and actually plan outings before we are in town.
I looked up Broadway shows and to our utter disinterest, the only show that was playing was Come From Away which we have no interest in seeing and was sold out regardless. We wanted to see if we could take advantage of being in the big city and see something that we would not normally get a chance to see.
However, it is spring break in Vancouver too and nothing is going on. No symphonies, no theatre, not even a hockey game (I admit I was excited there wasn’t a hockey game).
We went to Telus Science World last time we were in town and Stanley Park and the various quays around the area. I thought that it might be a good idea to go to the Capilano Suspension Bridge as a fun thing to do. I checked online to see what the prices were like and was horrified to discover that they are charg-
ing $47 per adult and $15 a child.
For a mere $125.00 plus taxes, you and your family can walk across a sketchy bridge – in the rain.
No thank you, crazy Vancouver prices. No thank you.
We will instead go to the much more affordable (free) Lynn Canyon Suspension Bridge in the rain. If I am going to be walking in the rain, I do not want to pay for the pleasure.
A few years ago, we visited the Greater Vancouver Zoo in Aldergrove with the kids but they were young and more interested in the playground at the entrance. My husband and I enjoyed looking at the animals and displays – until we got to the North American Wilds display, or, as we like to refer to it, Megan and Will’s backyard.
Step right up, Vancouverites and pay an extraordinarily-high admission fee to our backyard of wonder. Moose, birds,
deer, the occasional stray cat and bears that eat your compost and drag your garbage up the hill into the bush where you have to clean it up in the spring.
Sometimes my brother will come over and you will be able to see a large Mastiff, drooling, in his natural habitat – standing at the patio door looking sad until someone lets him in.
For a mere $40, you can come to our backyard and look at birch trees, pine trees, some other trees that I don’t know the names of, thimbleberry bushes and wild blueberry patches.
If you really want to experience the hippie wilds, we might even be able to find some chaga for you although I don’t know why people want to drink warty tree fungus.
This might end up being quite a good racket. We are looking forward to going on a trip but it will be good to come home, too.
WOMEN STEPPING UP IN LEADERSHIP ROLES
LESSONS IN LEARNING
GERRY CHIDIAC
Angela Merkel has announced that this will be her last term as German Chancellor. This has created some concern, as many credit her with navigating her country, the European Union, and even the global community, through a plethora of stormy waters in recent years. When we look around the world,
however, we see that there is no reason to fear. Numerous politicians of tremendous integrity are stepping forward. What is striking is how many of these leaders are women.
Though Elizabeth May remains the only Green Party Member of Parliament, non-partisan Canadians tend to trust her word above all others with regard to happenings in government.
It is interesting to note as well that in 2015, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau purposely chose a significant number of women to form his cabinet. Is it a coincidence that among them are the very people who have put their own careers on the line by questioning the ethics of his administration?
The recent midterm congressional elections in the United States also unleashed the power of women of integrity in American politics. The combined number of women now serving in both houses of Congress is 127, the highest in history. Of the 116 recently elected, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been the most visible, however, she is not the only person challenging the status quo. Other new members of the legislature include the first two Muslim women ever elected to Congress, Indigenous women and representatives of other significant minority groups.
The vast majority of American citizens have watched their democratic rights diminish over the last several decades by the influence of corporatist lobbyists who pay for “their guy” to get elected, as well as by their own increasing political apathy. These new congressional representatives, however, are stepping forward and saying, “enough is enough! This is a democracy, of the people, by the people and for the people, and our government is failing us. We need to make changes.”
and seem to have come from nowhere in the last years to take their places in one of the most powerful and influential lawmaking bodies in the world.
The fact of the matter is they did not come out of nowhere and that is what is most encouraging. These women have a history of grassroots social activism and community involvement.
Ocasio-Cortez sparked tremendous hope and interest due to the uniqueness of her story. As a young bartender of limited means, she was able to not only win the Democratic nomination for her constituency in New York City, she was able to defeat Joe Crowly, one of the most powerful Democrats in the House of Representatives, in doing so. Her approach required limited financial investment and relied on a message of empowerment to previously disempowered citizens.
Of course, it is not only women who are capable of leading with integrity and it is not only the young who have the courage to stand up to corruption. Every citizen, whether elected or not, has the responsibility of holding their government accountable. It is, however, encouraging and inspiring to see women take on these roles in our legislatures.
The Year of the Woman was 2018, and it has been a year of significant change. The truth of the matter, however, is that those who put themselves on the line to be champions of integrity deserve our support, and they call on all of us as well to be active citizens and do the right thing.
At the same time, they are empowering the common person to take part in the political process.
Scott Der r.D.
What is also incredibly hopeful is the similarity in background of many of the new congressional representatives. A significant number are relatively young women from immigrant backgrounds
Gerry Chidiac is a champion for social enlightenment, inspiring others to find their greatness in making the world a better place. For more of his writings, go to www.gerrychidiac.com
Canadian comedian Sugar Sammy is trying to describe how he can move to a new country and figure out enough of the local quirks to poke fun at them.
“The French will say, ‘How do you know us so well?’” he says in an interview in Washington, D.C. “I’m like, ‘Because I’ve watched you, I have listened to you. I’ve been, I’ve been...” and he pauses.
The Montreal-born comedian performs in four languages and currently he cannot summon the English word for what he wants to express.
“That’s the only drawback of being bilingual: Sometimes you’ve got to look for the word if it comes to you in French first.”
He thinks aloud - victim? suffer? - then resorts to his iPhone before it finally comes to him: “subjected!”
“I have observed, I’ve listened and I have been subjected to you for the last two years,” he continues, “so that creates something that’s not going to go unnoticed.”
That sense of observation and lingual dexterity has allowed Sugar Sammywhose real name is Samir Khullar - to perform in far-flung places, including South Africa, India and France, where he lives part-time and serves as a judge on their version of America’s Got Talent. And after packing massive venues in Canada and getting plenty of buzz in France, he plans to tour every year in what he calls “the Mecca and the birthplace of standup”: the United States.
“My comedy comes from a place of fascination and love,” he says. “At the same time, it’s a roast. It’s a cultural roast.”
You would think going to foreign countries and making fun of the people there would be somewhat terrifying, but Khullar has long been a provocateur. Starting in 2012, he toured Quebec with You’re Gonna Rire, the province’s first large-scale bilingual comedy show, which used both English and French. In 2016, a reported 115,000 people attended the last performance, a free Just For Laughs outdoor show. The show’s popularity was a big deal for a place with deep divisions over cultural and linguistic identity. His ire is especially sharp when aimed at those in Quebec who want sovereignty. In 1995, a hotly contested referendum to proclaim sovereignty from the rest of Canada was narrowly defeated. Premier Jacques Parizeau blamed its failure on the wealthy and “the ethnic vote.” Khullar was 19 at the time and had just started to perform comedy.
“A lot of things were said, and a lot of things were put out there, and go-
AMERICA’S TURN FOR SUGAR SAMMY
ing through that, there was no way it wouldn’t colour my comedy,” he says. “It shapes my point of view.”
The comedian, with a stage name he picked up from his university days, grew up in Notre-Dame-de-Grace, a predominantly English-speaking part of Montreal. He also performs in Hindi and Punjabi, which he spoke at home with Indian immigrant parents. And he learned French in school. In Quebec, children of immigrants are required to attend French-only schools.
He started out performing mostly in English. But then he decided to do French-only shows, as Paul Ronca, a Just For Laughs director who owned a comedy club when he met Khullar, recalled to Canada’s W5.
“When Sammy approached me and was like, ‘I want to do it in French,’ I said, ‘Wait a minute: you’re an Anglo-Indian guy from NDG. There’s no way you’re going to pull this off,’” Ronca said. “I’ve seen so many who speak French have a hard time doing this.”
Ronca added: “I think he’s more fear-
less than most.”
Khullar saw an opportunity to do something other comics weren’t doing: perform a thoroughly bilingual set. He and many others in Montreal live in both worlds and have a sense of “dual” citizenship, he says, despite the separate English and French entertainment industries. “If I look around me, in my neighborhood and in the city, there are a lot of people like me, but we didn’t see that representation on television or in pop culture,” he says. His approach touched off provincewide debates, such as after his 2014 ad campaign with English-only billboards promoting shows. They read, “For Christmas, I’d like a complaint from the Office de la langue française,” referring to the entity that enforces Quebec’s strict rules for upholding French as the dominant language, including French requirements for signs. The text was later blacked out, and replaced with French text that read, “For Christmas, I got a complaint from the Office de la langue française.”
Some political commentators have accused Khullar of desecrating the French
language. His critiques also provoked a death threat before a 2014 show from someone who called the comic a “federal clown.”
For the most part, Khullar says, his audiences can take the jokes aimed at their way of life because he’s always been viewed as an outsider, even in Canada. He was an outsider entering the French Quebec circuit, and in the rest of the country, “it’s like, ‘Oh it’s that guy from Quebec.’”
He touches on race, relationships and politics, with a penchant for crowd-work that he weaves throughout his act. He takes a make-fun-of-everyone approach, calling out people in the crowd to cheer if they belong to an identity he’s joking about, whether its white people, Arabs or fellow Indo-Canadians.
In France, he joked, “I love France. You guys are my favorite Arab country.”
In Quebec, he asked the Quebecois to cheer and told them: “you guys got your own little section over there. Are you happy with where you’re sitting or do you want to separate?”
After conquering Quebec, Canada and France, comedian Sugar Sammy has taken his cultural observations south of the border.
NEW RESEARCH
FUELS DEBATE OVER EGGS
97/16 WIRE SERVICE
The latest U.S. research on eggs won’t go over easy for those who can’t eat breakfast without them.
Adults who ate about one-and-a-half eggs daily had a slightly higher risk of heart disease than those who ate no eggs. The study showed the more eggs, the greater the risk. The chances of dying early were also elevated.
The researchers say the culprit is cholesterol, found in egg yolks and other foods, including shellfish, dairy products and red meat. The study focused on eggs because they’re among the most commonly eaten cholesterol-rich foods. They can still be part of a healthy diet, but in smaller quantities than many people have gotten used to, the researchers say. Dietary guidelines that eased limits on cholesterol have helped eggs make a comeback.
The study has limitations and contradicts recent research, but is likely to rekindle the long-standing debate about eggs.
The new results were published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Researchers at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine and elsewhere pooled results from six previous studies, analyzing data on almost 30,000 U.S. adults who self-reported daily food intake. Participants were followed for roughly 17 years, on average.
The researchers calculated that those who ate 300 milligrams of cholesterol daily - about one-and-a-half eggs - were 17 per cent more likely to develop heart disease than whose who didn’t eat eggs.
The researchers based their conclusions on what participants said they ate at the start of each study. They took into account high blood pressure, smoking, obesity and other traits that could contribute to heart problems. Risks were found with eggs and cholesterol in general; a separate analysis was not done for every cholesterol-rich food.
Dr. Bruce Lee of Johns Hopkins Universit, said nutrition studies are often weak because they rely on people remembering what they ate.
“We know that dietary recall can be terrible,” said Lee. The new study offers only observational data but doesn’t show that eggs and cholesterol caused heart disease and deaths, said Lee, who wasn’t involved in the research.
Senior author Norrina Allen, a preventive medicine specialist, noted that the
study lacks information on whether participants ate eggs hard-boiled, poached, fried, or scrambled in butter, which she said could affect health risks.
Some people think ‘“I can eat as many eggs as I want”’ but the results suggest moderation is a better approach, she said.
Eggs are a leading source of dietary cholesterol, which once was thought to be strongly related to blood cholesterol levels and heart disease. Older studies suggesting that link led to nutrition guidelines almost a decade ago that recommended consuming no more than 300 milligrams of cholesterol daily; one egg contains about 186 milligrams.
Newer research questioned that relationship, finding that saturated fats contribute more to unhealthy levels of blood cholesterol that can lead to heart problems.
The latest American nutrition guidelines, from 2015, removed the strict daily cholesterol limit. While eating as little cholesterol as possible is still advised, the recommendations say eggs can still be part of a healthy diet, as a good source of protein, along with lean meat, poultry, beans and nuts. Nutrition experts say the new study is unlikely to change that advice.
Dr. Frank Hu of Harvard University noted that most previous studies have shown that eating a few eggs weekly is not linked with risks for heart disease in generally healthy people.
“I don’t think that this study would change general healthy eating guidelines” that emphasize fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts and beans and limiting processed meats and sugar, Hu said. Eggs, a breakfast staple for many, can be included but other options should also be considered, “like whole grain toast with nut butter, fresh fruits and yogurt,” Hu said.
Dr. Rosalind Coleman, a professor of nutrition and pediatrics at the University of North Carolina, offered broader advice.
“The main message for the public is not to select a single type of food as ‘bad’ or ‘good’ but to evaluate your total diet in terms of variety and amount.
“I’m sorry if it seems like a boring recommendation,” she added, but for most people, the most important diet advice “should be to maintain a healthy weight, to exercise, and to get an adequate amount of sleep.”
MAKING IT RIGHT
The contact number for Deborah Miller, the facilitator of the support group in Prince George for the ALS Society of B.C., is 250-280-4742. An incorrect phone number was provided in last week’s 97/16.
STUDENTS STUDYING STAND-UP
Jesse Huang took a deep breath, holding his hands over his eyes. Then, too nervous to sit still, he jumped up and danced through a row of auditorium seats. Within the hour, hundreds of Johns Hopkins University students would be crowding in, filling all the seats, sitting in the aisles and leaning against the walls to watch him and his classmates take a shot at stand-up comedy.
Isaac Bernstein sat with his head down and his ear buds in, trying to stave off panic. A computer-science major was practicing his routine by talking into a Snapple bottle as though it were a mic, reciting poetry with a thick Irish brogue. A pre-med student paced at the front of the room, gesturing and muttering jokes about his dad who never learned to swim in India. You’re not drowning. The water’s only three feet deep. Stand up!
This is the 15th year Adam Ruben has brought stand-up comedy to campus. It’s the quintessential winter-session class at Johns Hopkins: for three weeks, students step away from the intensity of their academic majors, forget about their grade-point averages and take a class for the sheer joy of it.
The stakes are incredibly low - the grading is pass-fail and most of the class time is spent listening to jokes. And yet for some, this class will present by far the most daunting challenge of their academic career. At the end of three weeks, each student will take the spotlight in front of hundreds, perhaps 1,000 people, grab the microphone and try to make the crowd laugh.
“This is scary,” said Charlie Linton, a
senior.
The very real possibility of absolute failure in the show swiftly forged a closeness inthe class as they practiced.
“We’re a bunch of Hopkins nerds who want to do well in this show,” he said.
They’re incredibly different from one another, with such a range of ethnicities, interests, personalities and reasons for being there that, yes, they suggest the setup for a joke, if they all were to walk into a bar.
Maybe because of that range, the class strikes deeply at some of the most difficult issues on college campuses today. While some professional comedians have said colleges can be too politically correct for stand-up shows, these students didn’t shy away from incendiary issues. Many of their jokes homed in on the kinds of identity issues that are both defining and polarizing. They took on religion, culture, sexuality, race.
Akshat Gupta, a student from India, talked about bumbling through American idioms, unsure of what people were really saying. A bipolar student made jokes about his diagnosis, a public-health major from New Mexico laughed about her overly demanding Asian mother, a senior revealed he had just changed his name and his gender.
The students have little in common except the intellect and work ethic that got them into Hopkins. Most say their friends would not describe them as funny.
“They say I’m very serious,” Bernstein said. “Too serious, sometimes.”
They had three weeks to prepare. Four minutes to be funny.
Ruben started the stand-up comedy
class - teaching this perhaps unteachable thing, how to be funny - when he was a graduate student studying molecular biology at Hopkins.
“I think it’s essential,” he said of comedy. Even as a child, he found humour a particularly effective and memorable way to communicate ideas. Instead of writing book reports in elementary school, he made up videos or game shows to present in class. It was easier than talking to other kids at lunch.
Now, he’s on TV and writes books and a regular humor column for the journal Science. He does stand-up - when he’s not at work, most recently helping develop a vaccine for malaria. (Seriously.)
In class, Ruben shows clips of professional comedians and talks about the structure and mechanics of a successful routine. They analyze flops. Students answer questions designed to prompt thinking about possible material.
Then, they have to test their jokes.
“You show up and there’s a microphone in the middle of the room,” said Luke Sand, a former student who upended his academic major and his career pathwhich has included working for Saturday Night Live and writing for a TV seriesafter taking the class.
“To make 13 people laugh who are nervous about presenting their own work - it’s basically impossible,” Sand said.
The idea of doing terribly in class is just about everyone’s worst nightmare at the school. But to do stand-up well requires the will to withstand an unresponsive crowd, the self-awareness to recognize when jokes aren’t working.
“An opportunity to fail,” Sand said, “is the most important thing.”
In the final week before the performance, Ruben told his students in his classroom, “there are 72 hours before the show.”
When some cried out in alarm, he pretended to be reassuring. “Well, 72 hours and 20 minutes.”
Most people tried to avoid Ruben’s gaze when he asked for volunteers to deliver their routines to their classmates.
Bernstein - who first signed up for the class as a freshman because one of his goals in college was to be less socially awkward - asked to go early, before stage fright destroyed him.
Many of his classmates’ hands were shaking as they reached for the mic. Ruben had told them all to be support-
ive, and kind, to one another, but that the feedback should be 90 per cent criticism and 10 per cent praise. It’s the criticism, he said, that will help you improve.
“I think you’ve got about 75 per cent of two different jokes, and you need to finish them,” Ruben told an economics major. He checked the stopwatch on his phone after another routine and told the student it had taken five minutes and 30 seconds.
“I think you can cut everything you have down to two minutes. Be ruthless.”
He noted that white people and premeds were themes for jokes this year. He encouraged a student to amplify her chipmunk noises when she was describing a particularly large gathering of chipmunks. He doesn’t tell them to avoid sensitive topics or language, just lets them know the risks - offending people, distracting attention from the joke.
Most of all, he repeated the advice he gave to Linton: “a lot of these jokes, bring it down to one line. Be brutal.”
The last student reluctantly crept to the front of the room, put his black Moleskine notebook on the table, pulled the mic off the stand. It was Huang, a freshman biophysics major from Chicago.
“Being Asian is weird, regardless of what type you are,” he said.
Sixty-eight hours to go.
On Friday night - THE Friday night - as his class was melting down in the final minutes before the show, Ruben reminded them to hold the mic close, to look at the audience, to stay near the front.
“Have fun,” he told them, then said it into the mic in an amplified, stand-upcomedian voice that made them laugh: “Have fun.”
Four classmates hugged. Huang hopped up and down. A sophomore from Texas changed from sneakers into strappy heels. A few minutes after 8 p.m., the lights dimmed in the packed auditorium. Ruben introduced the show with some jokes, making fun of the school’s intimidating mascot, a blue jay: watch out, we might tip our heads to the side and chirp pleasantly.
Bernstein, who found the class so valuable as a freshman that he returned this year as a teaching assistant, took on fraternity parties at Hopkins, where people are even competitive about beer pong. He pretended to quickly scrawl, on the blackboard behind him, a formula for the optimal parabolic trajectory of the ball.
Continued on page 15
97/16 news service photo
Johns Hopkins student Collete Chang performs her stand-up set on Jan. 25, part of the comedy class’s publicly staged final project.
FACING FEARS IN FRONT OF A CROWD
Continued from page 14
Linton told the crowd he was a senior, transgender and had just fully come out over winter break. He described people on the liberal campus apologizing excessively when they assumed he was a woman and said people are so supportive that if he complained about waiting in line in the bagel shop by calling it transphobic, at least one person would nervously agree with him.
The crowd was applauding loudly, laughing, as he stepped out of the light with a flushed face. His classmates stretched out hands to give him highfives.
There were jokes that didn’t landespecially some that were graphic.
There were cringes.
There were moments when the crowd went quiet. Oppressively quiet.
But more often, the audience seemed delighted to laugh at things they don’t usually laugh at.
Like Jared Dallas’ intro. He strode onto the stage area and yelled, “Hi! I am an Orthodox Jew!” He pumped his arms in the air. “Yeah!”
When a math major acted out a manic episode, with the voice in his head pumping him up to go to another city… on foot… the audience laughed and applauded loudly.
Usman Enam, a molecular biology major from Pakistan, said, “I’m brown.” Pause. “I’m Muslim.” Pause. “I culturally identify as a terrorist.” The crowd cracked up.
Morgan Ome made fun of her first trip to the counseling centre, with its emoji pillows, to ask about handling stress, and her anxious fumbling for the Hopkins-perfect answer when the
counselor asked, “which parts of your identity would you like to bring forward today?”
When Akshat Gupta described what it’s like to come here from India and try to communicate with Americans,
the crowd was laughing so hard that by the time he asked if they’d been to Walmart, they burst into expectant applause.
Comedy is an abstract art form, Bernstein said, driven by whatever the audience at the moment happens to find funny. That could be some mix of culture, personality, the vibe in the room, the news cycle, who knows. “Like dark humor,” he said. “One person will laugh. Another will slap you.” But few art forms offer such a direct connection with the audience. A ballerina can land a perfect grand jeté without hearing more than the soft thump of toe shoes on the stage, but a comedian will face pure delight - or hostility.
At the end of the show, Ruben summoned his students back to the spotlight, and they held one another close, beaming, as the crowd cheered.
“We did it!” Huang said, with disbelief.
Gupta - who is here to pursue graduate studies in physics and had never heard of stand-up comedy until two years ago - was euphoric: he has found a way to bypass the idioms, the customs, the differences, an entirely new way to communicate ideas. It was - yes - ridiculous. And, for a moment at least, everyone was laughing
97/16 news service photo Johns Hopkins student Amani Nelson performs during the class’s final presentation on Jan. 25. The students had three weeks to prepare.
MEET THE YOUNG, FEMALE ANTI-TRUMP
Believe it or not, there are other members of Congress besides Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
You wouldn’t know that by how the freshman Democrat from New York has become a media fixation like no other politician since President Donald Trump. She’s been a cover subject in both New York tabloids, a punchline on Saturday Night Live, the target of a Washington Post investigation and depicted as a hamburglar at a conservative conference – and that’s only this month so far.
Earlier this month, she was featured at the trendy South by Southwest conference, where science guy Bill Nye offered a surprise endorsement of her environmental plans.
Boldness, youth and an embrace of social media have made AOC - the shorthand is already widely known - a hero to the left, a villain to the right and irresistible to journalists.
“She is the political mirror image of Donald Trump,” said Frank Sesno, director of the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University and a former CNN Washington bureau chief. “He’s old, she’s young. He’s far right, she’s far left. What they share is a takeno-prisoners, no-holds-barred approach to politics, and their rhetoric is the brash, sometimes profane rhetoric of our socialmedia-driven times.”
Moving into a presidential primary campaign where a defining issue will be how far left the Democrats want to move, AOC has become a symbol for the party’s progressive wing even though, at 29, she’s too young to run herself.
interactions on Pelosi articles. No other Democrats came closer.
With such metrics, news stories are certain to follow. There have been many, ranging from the Washington Post’s look at whether questionable financial practices of Ocasio-Cortez’s congressional chief of staff clash with his boss’ view on money in politics, to a Daily Mail reporter tracking down her mother and discovering - surprise! - she’d like to see her daughter get married.
AOC frequently uses social media to counter stories. When a dance video she made with friends in college circulated, she combined video of a brief twirl outside her office with the message: “If Republicans thought women dancing in college is scandalous, wait ‘til they find out women dance in Congress, too.”
Sesno said. The GOP is increasingly dominated by older, white men, and here’s an outspoken, young Latina woman from the heathen environs of New York City.
“This idea of making her the face of the Democratic party hits a lot of boxes for them,” said Nicole Hemmer, author of Messengers of the Right, about the conservative media’s impact on politics. “She is young, a symbol of the party moving to the left, and she isn’t afraid of the word socialism.”
In January, Fox News Channel’s primetime hosts Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham did 27 segments focusing on the freshman Democrat. There were none on McConnell, according to the liberal watchdog Media Matters.
“It’s not a mystery,” said Tim Graham of the conservative Media Research Center.
Her status is evident on social media. During the second half of February, the hashtag #AOC was mentioned 3.64 million times on Twitter. That was more than the hashtags for the two congressional leaders, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (1.22 million) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (696,000) combined.
Since she took office, stories about AOC have averaged about 2,200 likes, shares or comments on Facebook, according to the social media analytics company NewsWhip. That’s more than double the typical
After the New York Post suggested AOC, chief proponent of “Green New Deal” legislation, might be hypocritical for riding in gas-guzzling cars, she noted that she also uses airplanes and air conditioners. “Living in the world as it is isn’t an argument against working toward a better future,” she tweeted.
“She understood how to use social media in a way that is incredibly effective, both to speak to constituents and other people in power with a truly authentic voice,” said veteran news executive Kate O’Brian.
AOC’s defeat of powerful Rep. Joseph Crowley in a primary led many young Democrats to embrace her as an underdog. That’s also perfect for Republicans who like to portray more extreme elements as typical of the Democratic party,
“AOC is a machine of silly things she says, gaffes and extreme statements, and the impression she gives is amateurism. The same thing that is her appeal is also her downside. She was a bartender.”
Her opponents have also been guilty of overreach, such as when a quickly disproven photo was spread online purporting to be a nudie selfie. Conservative activist Sebastian Gorka claimed of AOC’s environmental legislation, “they want to take away your hamburgers.”
Ocasio-Cortez told The New Yorker magazine that the “ravenous hysteria” about her is getting out of control.
“It feels like an extra job,” she said. “I’ve got a full-time job in Congress and then I moonlight as America’s greatest villain, or as the new hope. And it’s pretty tiring. I’m just a normal person.”
Replace the missing words.
An Ancient Game
Long, long ago, around 1400 B.C., the __________ of Mexico played a game in which they moved a ball down a long narrow court and with the goal of getting it _____________ a stone hoop. Only players didn’t pass the ball with their ___________, they sometimes used their hips!
Metal Hoops
the correct order. How many basketballs can you nd on this page in two minutes? Now have a friend try. Who found more?
Are you an eagle-eyed reader? Read the articles below and correct the eight spelling errors you find. The first one is done for you.
The First Harlem Globetrotter’s Game
In 1927, a group of African American athletes in Harlem met to play basketball each week at a local ballroom. Back then, African Americans were not alowed to play on pro basketball teems.
Why is basketball called basketball?
Because the modern game was started in 1891 by James Naismith, a P.E. ____________ in Springfield, Massachusetts with a _________ and a couple of peach baskets. He was looking for a __________ his students could play indoors on cold winter days. When he couldn’t find a game that was active enough, he _____________ one.
Snowy Day Game Peach Basket Game
Naismith hung a peach basket from each end of the gymnasium and had students ___________ a soccer ball up and down the _______ and try to shoot it into the peach baskets.
In 1893, metal hoops with net bags replaced the peach baskets. Officials pulled a cord attached to the net to ______ the bottom of the net to release the ball. In 1894, the first backboard appeared. Baskets with nets open at the bottom were introduced around 1913.
Cool New Shot
Joe Fulks played for the Philadelphia Warriors from 1946 to 1954. To shoot, he _________ up and released the ball at the peak of his jump. This became known as the jump shot, still used by most players to this day.
The team traveled around the country to play exhibition games. The Globetrotters bekame so good that no one would play against them!
How many silly things can you nd in this basketball scene?
How many di erences can you spot between these two players? Who wears short shorts?
Basketball shorts were very short until 1984, when a future superstar began wearing longer length shorts. Circle every other letter to reveal his name.
Page Action!
Sports writers use lots of action verbs to recreate the excitement of a game. Look through today’s newspaper and circle 10 or more action verbs.
Players started to add funnie stunts such as hiding a ball under their jerseys or dribbleng it into the stands. Before long they became famous for their comedy.
Unscramble the basketball words. Then write each numbered letter in the correct box to reveal the answer to the basketball question.
Find the words in the puzzle. How many of them can you find on this page?
Today, the Harlem Globetrotters entertain peeple all over the world with both male and female players. The first woman to join the team was Lynette Woodard in 1985. Today, there are five active womin with the
Globetrotters: Hoops Green, Swish Young, Torch
George, TNT Lister, and Mighty Mortimer. These ladies kan really hoop!
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WINTER IS COMING
Five episodes you need to watch again before the final season
Continued from page X
READER ALERT: This story contains more spoilers than a Lannister has debts. If you’re not fully caught up, stop reading now.
WINTER IS COMING (SEASON ONE, EPISODE ONE)
Sure, it might seem a little obvious to start from the beginning, but cliches are cliche for a reason. As with any series, the first episode introduces the audience to an entirely new world - namely, Westeros. We meet the most important houses: the Starks, Lannisters, Targaryens and Baratheons. We also get our first glimpse of vital elements such as the Night’s Watch (and thus the Wall), and we see the White Walkers in action (specifically, killing two members of the Night’s Watch).
Perhaps most importantly, the show makes it very clear how subversive it plans to be. In a deeply uncomfortable scene, Viserys Targaryen (remember him?) thoroughly examines his sister Daenerys’s naked body, as he prepares to essentially sell her into marriage to Khal Drogo, the leader of the Dothraki. Then we’re introduced to the incestuous relationship between Jaime and Cersei. The latter leads Jaime to throw Bran from a tower, paralyzing the boy from the waist down - which becomes a major plot point. We also meet the direwolves when they’re cute, lil’ pups!
There’s perhaps more packed into the pilot than any other episode, so it’s sure to jog any long dormant memories as quickly as winter awakens the dead.
THE RAINS
OF CASTAMERE (SEASON THREE, EPISODE NINE)
The thematic backbone of Game of Thrones can best be described as taking a fairy tale and turning it on its head. We become aware of that fact the second Ned Stark’s head hits the ground while his body remains upright in the first season. By The Rains of Castamere, we’re also aware that each season’s penultimate episode packs a punch, to say the least. Still, that knowledge prepared no one for this episode, more colloquially known as The Red Wedding. The series, to this point, seems to be about Robb Stark (i.e., Prince Charming) and his mother, Catelyn, leading an army to avenge the death of his father/her husband. Instead, as even non-watchers may know, Robb, much of his army and his pregnant wife, Talisa, are massacred by the Freys and the Boltons. It’s one of the most shocking moments in modern television, good enough to earn Benioff and Weiss an Emmy
nomination for writing and good enough to cement Game of Thrones’ status as one of the most important series of all time.
THE CHILDREN (SEASON FIVE, EPISODE 10)
Of all the episodes on this list, The Children is the one you’ve probably thought least about. It’s not as flashy as the great battles or shocking deaths, nor is it a particularly raunch-filled romp.
But it’s the perfect apéritif for the great meal that’s to come in the final three seasons. It’s here that Bran first encounters the Three-Eyed Raven in real life, that Daenerys realizes not all slaves want to be freed (leading her to chain up her dragons in the catacombs of Meereen) and that Tyrion seals his own fate by murdering his father, Tywin, before teaming up with Varys to sail to Essos, where he’ll eventually meet Daenerys.
Aside from Tywin’s death, these might feel like small moments. So much of Game of Thrones has been about moving chess pieces around in service of plot. Tyrion needs to go to Essos, for example, to bring Daenerys back to Westeros.
That’s what makes this episode so keyit puts all those chess pieces in motion.
THE BATTLE OF THE BASTARDS (SEASON 6, EPISODE 9)
Hope comes in limited supply in GoT, and it often pops up in the most unexpected places. This time, it appears in the show’s bloodiest battle - based on the actual Battle of Cannae. The episode, which centres on a battle fit for the silver screen, proves to be one of the most beautifully horrific things ever shown on television. As Jon Snow and Sansa Stark retake Winterfell from Ramsay Bolton, bodies pile up until they’re unrecognizable.
Uh, so what’s hopeful about this? Well, Bolton was like the most evil dude on the show, and he gets eaten by his own dogs - and it’s also the moment where we see that Sansa has grown up from a child who naively wanted to be a princess to a self-sufficient woman, hardened by the cruel realities of this world. Plus, Daenerys reunites with her dragons!
THE DRAGON AND THE WOLF (SEASON SEVEN, EPISODE SEVEN)
The sheer volume of characters and enormity of its world is both one of the show’s greatest assets and one of its greatest deficits. It takes seven seasons for two of the show’s main characters, Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen, to even meet. When they do, though, woo-eee.
Most viewers had two takeaways from this episode: (a) Bran and Sam finally meet and explicitly confirm “R+L=J,” which refers to the fact that Jon Snow is the secret offspring of Rhaegar Targaryen
of Game of Thrones
Tyrion Lannister and Jon Snow meet at Dragonstone in the penultimate season of Game of Thrones.
and Lyanna Stark, making him an heir to the Iron Throne and, (b) this news doesn’t reach Jon and Daenerys, who end up having sex - even though she’s his aunt.
But so much more happens. Jaime basically disowns Cersei. Little Arya Stark, now a face-changing assassin,
kills Littlefinger (again, finally). She also partners up with her sister Sansa, whom she had spent most of the series apart from.
Most importantly, the Night King and thousands of his followers reach the wall, beginning the Great War. Winter is here.
