Pipeline lawsuit could have big impact
Frank PEEBLES Citizen staff fpeebles@pgcitizen.ca
The legal action by the Lheidli T’enneh First Nation against Enbridge could change the landscape of Canadian law. It could change Canada’s physical landscape as well.
The LTFN has filed a petition in Prince George court asking for a trio of injunctions that would, if the court finds in their favour, shut off the natural gas flowing through two pipelines across the local territory, and fix the damage caused.
It would also force the company to dig them up and move them to the territory of a First Nation willing to have them. (Almost all land in northern B.C. is someone’s traditional territory.)
All this was a response to a massive explosion of an Enbridge natural gas pipeline only 500 metres from the homes of the main LTFN residential community about 15 kms northeast of Prince George.
The blast occurred on Oct. 9 and, in the First Nation’s view, exposed the company’s lack of emergency response, the company’s disregard of the First Nation as a primary point of contact for any activities (repairing the pipe, starting the gas back up, etc.) on their land, and the company’s inability to assure anyone’s public safety since the explosion.
“No matter what the ruling, the case will give further clarity by the court as to what Aboriginal title means in actual terms. The fact there is no treaty or formal occupancy agreement between the LTFN and any government asserting the right to govern (British Columbia, Canada, etc.) makes for a spirited legal argument in the making, one with Supreme Court of Canada possibilities similar to the groundbreaking William Case (aka Tsilhqot’in Case) which
A natural gas line owned by Enbridge runs over the Fraser River and through Lheidli T’enneh territory.
rendered an historic judgment in 2014.
Here is the basic anatomy of this lawsuit, in the words of LTFN Chief Dominic Frederick and their legal specialist Malcolm Macpherson of Clark Wilson LLP. Macpherson outlined the beginnings of the lawsuit, which trace back to the beginnings of human occupancy of this area.
“The Lheidli T’enneh have existed as a distinct Indigenous people with a common shared territory, and have exclusive ownership, occupancy, and use of its territory at and prior to the contact with Europeans and at the date over which sovereignty was asserted over British Columbia in
or about 1846, which is subject to Aboriginal rights and title recognized and affirmed by Section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982. The Lheidli T’enneh territory was never extinguished by way of treaty or other measure, and remains unceded,” he said. Macpherson added the lawsuit was filed “on the basis of nuisance, negligence and trespass. The pipeline, the explosion, the repairs, and the return to service of the pipeline are, and continue to be, an unreasonable interference with the use and enjoyment of the Lheidli T’enneh’s proprietary interests, and as such constitute nuisance.
“The defendants owed and
continue to owe a duty of care to the Lheidli T’enneh to exercise such reasonable care as required by the construction, the operation, and the maintenance of a natural gas pipeline across British Columbia, and on Lheidli T’enneh territory and reserves. (Those actions) greatly impacts the Aboriginal rights and title of the Lheidli T’enneh, and the defendants have failed to minimize those impacts as required by law.” Enbridge may choose to sit down with the LTFN out of court and come to an arrangement. Their two pipelines through this area deliver an estimated 80 per cent of the province’s home heating, plus many other uses of natu-
ral gas. Some is even delivered from these pipes to customers in Washington State. Shutting it off would be, at minimum, an inconvenience to millions of people. However, said Frederick and Macpherson, Enbridge and two federal agencies (the Transportation Safety Board and the National Energy Board) contend they do not know what caused the enormous explosion and intense fire. It was so violent it shook houses kilometres away, and glass shards rained from the sky as the heat glazed the dirt and spewed it through the air. The affected burn zone measured about 5.2 hectares. — see ‘IT’S NOT JUST, page 3
NRCA accuses Marriott contractor of welching on money owed
Mark NIELSEN Citizen staff
mnielsen@pgcitizen.ca
The Northern Regional Construction Association board of directors has called on its members to boycott the Marriott Courtyard Hotel, saying the general contractor hired to guide the project to completion still owes local firms some nine months after the hotel opened.
NRCA executive director Scott Bone said Friday that as of late 2018, Calgary-based UPA Construction Group Ltd. still owed about $1.8 million for work subcontractors properly completed and now wants them to accept reductions ranging from one to 30 per cent before the company will cut a cheque.
“It’s unethical, it’s unprofessional and it goes against the contract that they have,” Bone said.
He said the move to boycott Marriott is being done reluctantly, noting the dispute is primarily between UPA and the NRCA. However, he said the Marriott has a responsibility because the company manages the contract for its general contractors.
“We want to build a relationship with the Marriott, we want the local community and our members to use the facility, but
CITIZEN FILE PHOTO
Workers remove scaffolding from the Marriott Courtyard Hotel in November.
right now our board of directors and members are upset and, as you could probably appreciate, why would they go and spend money at a hotel when they haven’t even been paid for work performed?” Bone said.
“He has been beating the drum and he has been very supportive in trying to get a resolution to this,” Bone said.
Contracts at stake range from $5,000 to as much as $900,000 and over 15 contractors were affected, according to Bone.
“Now you can see why (the) NRCA, who represents these members, has taken action,” he said.
The NRCA has about 180 members and a notice has been circulated to about 1,800 construction firms in the province.
“It’s a beautiful hotel, there are a lot of people who work there, it’s a business enterprise,” he said. “But I have been talking to them about this for over a year and we have indicated to them the challenge that not getting UPA to pay would have an impact on their reputation in the community.”
UPA Construction Group Ltd. president Richard Allen declined to comment Friday afternoon, saying he is away and would get back to The Citizen on Tuesday.
“This, in our view, is a short-term solution and our goal is to focus on the challenges we’ve had with UPA Construction in not paying our members in a timely manner or requiring them to reduce their contract pricing.” Bone also stressed that local businessman Rod McLeod, who played a key role in getting the project off the ground, has been “instrumental” in voicing the NRCA’s concerns.
Built for about $30 million, the hotel opened its doors in May.
Drake relishes role in Miracle Theatre production
Frank PEEBLES Citizen staff fpeebles@pgcitizen.ca
The first time Dolores Drake performed on a Prince George stage, it was all by herself in Shirley Valentine, during the inaugural season of Theatre Northwest. That was 25 years ago.
She has been back many times since then and tonight is the start of her latest professional acting project.
Drake is part of the cast of Halfway There, Miracle Theatre’s latest charity performance, which starts tonight and runs until March 24.
“It’s great to be back,” said Drake during a break in rehearsals under director Ted Price, the director who first brought her here when he was the founding artistic director with TNW back in 1994.
“I really like working with Ted and when he retired from Theatre Northwest I just knew he wouldn’t retire from directing theatre altogether. I wondered what he’d do and now I get to take part.”
She is excited to know that in addition to performing and plying her performing arts trade, the play also raises money for charity, as all Miracle Theatre productions do.
This year, the recipient of the proceeds is the Prince George Community Foundation,
earmarked for their the Children of Prince George fund.
Drake knows audiences will enjoy this script. It is one of the first times in history that this play has been performed, but Prince George is as familiar as the rest of Canada with the work of playwright Norm Foster.
His is the pen behind The Melville Boys, The Foursome, Ethan Claymore, Here On The Flight Path and others seen in this city over the years. Halfway There is less than three years old, so P.G. is one of the first audiences to get an impression.
“Who doesn’t laugh at Norm Foster?” said Drake. “He is one of our best known playwrights in Canada, and yet also I think one of our most underrated because of how smart his scripts are, not just pulling jokes to make people laugh.”
Price is a director who pays attention to those layers and is among the best Drake has ever worked for paying attention to theatrical details. Plus, she said, he casts well.
She can’t wait to introduce audiences to Rita, the woman she portrays in this smalltown diner based in rural Atlantic Canada.
“She’s your typical smartass, so it’s a big stretch for me professionally,” she said, then doubles over with laughter. “Then you find out Rita has her own pain she doesn’t
go into with her friends, but it shows you where that smartass attitude comes from.”
Everyone in this little town’s little diner has their baggage, quirks and personality kinks, she said, so you can’t ever be sure where the play is going until it gets there.
She’s just happy to travel this play’s path with people she appreciates. There is a level of familiarity, having performed once before with Sherry Smith (who comes from a small Nova Scotia town, so the play’s setting is already in her DNA) in Prince George, no less, when they were cast together in Ivor Johnson’s Neighbours in 2010. Also, though, Drake has performed with Linda Carson more than 30 years ago in a Carousel Theatre production of Midsummer Night’s Dream and by coincidence, Carson is originally from Prince George.
It isn’t a foregone conclusion that Drake can come to Prince George to take part in the weeks of rehearsal and performance that being in live theatre entails. She has a busy screen arts career in the Lower Mainland.
She is a regular performer in the Hallmark film collection that films in B.C. She has also been in other projects like Bates Motel, Hiccups, Joe Finds Grace, she did a voice on My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, and she was in the Johnny Depp film The Professor,
plus many other credits in recent years.
In addition to the busy schedule on the sets of Hollywood North, Drake is also a busy teacher of drama to youth and adults alike (she loves meeting up with her past students on shoots she’s also involved in).
“Even if you don’t go on into the profession, the skills are transferrable to anything you do in life, and it might just make you a better audience member, which is also a reward,” she said.
Drake is also a dedicated writer of plays. Her latest title is The Distance Between Newfoundland and Toronto, based somewhat on her own experiences moving from Canada’s most easterly isle.
The miles aren’t the only thing in between those locations, as she depicts in this oneactor production. It’s a thematic companion to another fringe play she wrote entitled From Away that also talks through her Newfoundland roots.
She’s all the way back on the east coast, at least in character form, as of tonight’s opening performance of Halfway There at Art Space. Tickets to this Miracle Theatre production are already scarce.
The price for those remaining is $33 available at the Books & Company front counter or call 250-563-6637 to charge by phone.
CITIZEN PHOTO BY BRENT BRAATEN
The cast of Miracle Theatre’s production of Halfway There – Dolores Drake, Abraham Asto and Sherry Smith in the front row, and Linda Carson and Melissa Oei in the back – pose for a cast photo during a rehearsal. Halfway There debuts tonight, and runs until March 24.
Prince Rupert quietly becomes a trade powerhouse
Frank
O’BRIEN Citizen news service
A consortium led by Exxon Mobil Corp. has pulled back from a planned liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant at Prince Rupert and Ottawa is selling the expanding Ridley terminal, but the northwest B.C. city’s bustling port expects an even bigger share of gas exports.
The decision by the LNG Canada consortium to proceed with its $14 billion export terminal at Kitimat will add to the record-breaking tonnage now handled at the Prince Rupert docks, said Brian Friesen, vice-president of trade development and communications at the Port of Prince Rupert.
“The project will create natural gas liquids such as propane that will need market access, which is where it will have a positive effect on Prince Rupert.”
Friesen added that Calgary’s AltaGas and Netherlands-based tank storage company Royal Vopak are nearing completion of a new Ridley Island propane export facility that will be ready this spring as the first of its kind on Canada’s west coast. AltaGas expects the facility will offload 50 to 60 Canadian National Railway Co. railcars of propane per day to export into Asia.
The port’s Ridley Terminals Inc. operation is already undergoing a $280 million expansion as it moves to meet global demand for metallurgical coal used in steelmaking.
Last year, Ridley’s shipments of metallurgical coal increased 40 per cent to 5.6 million tonnes, while exports of thermal coal, used for electrical power generation, were up six per cent from 2017 to 2.1 million tonnes.
Thermal coal shipments have been dampened at the Fraser Surrey Docks after the Port of Vancouver cancelled a permit for a $15 million thermal coal terminal this year. The controversial project would have had the capacity for shipments of four million tonnes of U.S. coal annually to markets in Asia. The plan had drawn fire from environmentalists and municipal governments in Metro Vancouver.
Marc Dulude, president and COO of Ridley Terminals Inc., doubted the thermal coal shipments could transition north to Prince Rupert.
“We are not really equipped to serve the U.S. coal market,” he said.
A sale of Ridley Terminals, the only government-owned terminal at Prince Rupert, is in the works – and that could delay any such decisions, Dulude noted.
In November 2018, the Canada Development Investment Corp. (CDEV) announced it was calling for private bids for 90 per cent of Ridley Terminals. The remaining 10 per cent of the shares would be transferred to the Lax Kw’alaams Band and the Metlakatla First Nation at the close of the sale, according to a government release.
Dulude referred all requests for information on the potential sale to CDEV.
“I can’t really comment,” he said.
CDEV referred questions to adviser Macquarie Capital, which also refused comment.
Ridley’s expansion shares in the next phase of growth by the Port of Prince Rupert and Dubai-based DP World that will increase annual throughput capacity at Fairview, Canada’s second-largest container cargo terminal, to 1.8 million 20-foot-equivalent units (TEUs) when complete in 2022.
The expansion comes after the port had back-to-back record years in 2017 and 2018, with 26.7 million tonnes handled last year, up 10 per cent from a year earlier.
Friesen noted that container shipments through Fairview increased nine per cent year-overyear to a record of 1.03 million TEUs.
As a comparison, the Port of Vancouver now handles approximately 3.3 million TEUs annually, and the southern B.C. port has an annual tonnage throughput of around 141 million tonnes.
Still, the Port of Prince Rupert is a thriving concern in an area of B.C. that has seen other major projects stopped or stalled in the past few years.
The port generates 3,100 direct jobs and 5,000 indirect jobs in the Prince Rupert area, according to the Prince Rupert Port Authority.
Friesen said the port, which is aimed at serving Asian markets, has not yet suffered a slowdown in traffic due to the ongoing U.S.China trade war.
However, he said, “It is something we are keeping a close eye on.”
Northern Health bus schedule changing
Citizen staff
The BC Bus North service between the Robson Valley and Prince George will be reversed starting March 11. It will originate in Valemount in the morning, travel to Prince George and return to the community in the evening, running Monday to Friday.
Since the bus will be parked in McBride overnight, people will be able to travel from McBride to Valemount at 6 a.m., before the bus leaves Valemount at 7 a.m.
The switch is being made in response to customer preference, the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure said.
Here’s a closer look at the new schedule for Route 200: Robson Valley to Prince George: 6 a.m. – McBride Train Station 1st
‘It’s not just about us, it is about everybody’
— from page 1
The fireball’s light was visible from within Prince George’s city limits.
About 136 kilometres of this pipeline runs through Lheidli T’enneh territory, plus hundreds more onwards to the south. Every inch of it is a ticking time bomb, said Frederick.
“Every community down along the line is not safe,” said the chief.
“It’s about lives of Canadians and Aboriginal communities that live close to the pipeline. They’ve repaired one section of the pipeline that exploded, but it remains that the rest of the pipeline still hasn’t been securely (verified for safety). It could happen anywhere. It is unfortunate that it happened close to us and traumatized our community members. It’s about safety, and I think it is important that Canada and the rest of the Aboriginal community are listening, because they need to be safe, too. We don’t want this to happen to anybody ever again. It’s not just about us, it is about everybody.”
Natural gas to the homes and businesses of millions of people versus the imminent destruction of any given neighbourhood from Peace-country to America: that is the position in which the court is centred.
Also surrounding this case is the legal question: who has the right to say what happens on the land? Are 1950s-era deals between occupier governments and pipeline companies even real if they did not involve the meaningful partnership of the historic and still abiding territorial culture?
The extended implication, then, is what company at all is operating legitimately on the 4.5 million hectares over which the LTFN have historic domain? If Enbridge needs permission to set foot on local ground, wouldn’t Pembina also need the same permission to operate the region’s oil pipeline? And the natural gas operations of Fortis and BC Gas? What about Canfor, then, and Lakeland and all the other forestry companies who do the broadest forms of industrial activity on the landbase of this region?
It’s about lives of Canadians and Aboriginal communities that live close to the pipeline. They’ve repaired one section of the pipeline that exploded, but it remains that the rest of the pipeline still hasn’t been securely (verified for safety).
— Chief Dominic Frederick
authorized to be doing what they are doing on the traditional territory,” said Macpherson.
“The jurisprudence has made it clear, everyone is here to stay. The problem right now is that the Section 35 protected rights are not being respected. The community is not being respected.”
He added, “There is always, when parties speak together with respect, a solution for every problem. But at the moment – I mean, it’s been four and a half months – Enbridge has taken a business as usual position, and the chief and councillors and community say that is unacceptable.”
“Enbridge,” said Frederick, “does not seem to recognize that we are Section 35 (of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms) rights holders, not mere bystanders or stakeholders. Our Section 35 rights need to be understood. The Supreme Court of Canada gets it, but Enbridge, the National Energy Board and the Transportation Safety Board appear to be oblivious to this reality.”
Are there other companies that, in the estimation of chief and council, aren’t conducting business properly on the property of Lheidli T’enneh?
Ave.; 7 a.m. – Valemount: PetroCanada; 7:15 a.m. – Tete Jaune: Lodge Campground; 8 a.m. – McBride Train Station 1st Ave. (arrive); 8:10 a.m. – McBride Train Station 1st Ave. (depart); 10:30 a.m. – Prince George: Downtown 7th Ave. at Dominion St. Prince George to Robson Valley: 2:30 p.m. – Prince George: Downtown 7th Ave. at Dominion St.;
4:50 p.m. – McBride Train Station 1st Ave. (arrive); 5 p.m. – McBride Train Station 1st Ave. (depart); 5:40 p.m. – Tete Jaune: Lodge Campground; 6 p.m. – Valemount: Petro-Canada; 7 p.m. – McBride Train Station 1st Ave. Also, times for Route 300 (Fort St. John-Prince George) will change with the daylight savings time change March 10. Check the BC Bus North website, bcbus.ca, for current schedules.
Paid parking frees up space at hospital, spokesperson says
Citizen staff
Do away with paid parking and finding a spot at University Hospital of Northern B.C. could become even more difficult, Northern Health spokesperson Steve Raper said.
“Prior to paid parking, we had people parking for a long period of time even if they weren’t going to the hospital,” Raper said.
“So paid parking was introduced to ensure there was consistent turnover so families have parking available when they do come to visit their families.”
Visitors are charged $1 per hour to park at the hospital. Pay parking has been in place for about 10 years to free up space. Raper said Northern Health hears the occasional complaint about pay parking but even with pay parking, he said finding a spot can be a challenge at times. In all, there are 151 spots around the hospital – 31 on the Edmonton Street side, 56 rightangle along Edmonton Street, 41 at the public health unit and 23 at the emergency side. How much Northern Health generates in revenue from paid parking was not immediately available, but Raper said the bulk goes back into maintaining the parking areas. Impark patrols the lots on behalf of Northern Health. A lobby group, hospitalpayparking.ca, has been launched to push for free parking at hospitals.
But the proposed Coastal GasLink project has nothing to fear as long as it adheres to its agreements. The LTFN has signed a formal agreement with that project’s proponents, showing that they are a government willing to do business with companies willing to dialogue at their table.
“The community takes the position that they (Enbridge in specific and others in general) aren’t
“Well, we would like them to decide,” Frederick said. “We know who they are, and they know who they are. And they are operating in our territory. We’re giving notice.”
And if Enbridge refuses to engage with the Lheidli T’enneh and also refuse to take action to stop the gas or remove the pipes?
“We are going to wait for them to respond,” Frederick said, “and if they don’t respond to our satisfaction then we will move to the next step, in court.”
CITIZEN PHOTO BY BRENT BRAATEN
Part of the natural gas line infrastructure owned by Enbridge runs through Lheidli T’enneh territory.
CNC reveals new logo
Citizen staff
The College of New Caledonia unveiled a new logo Friday.
Described as the centrepiece of the school’s visual identity, the intention is to “embrace CNC’s heritage through colour and connection. “
“Our logo brings to life the transformative experience of a CNC education,” said CNC communications director Alyson Gourley-Cramer.
“While the primary logo holds a formality, the visual emphasis is on CNC. This is the affectionate name that students, alumni and employees have used for years when referring to the college.”
The logo’s bar is meant to symbolize the bridge between learners and educa-
tors, inspiring movement forward, connecting people to potential.
“You will see the bar being used creatively throughout design and campaigns, extending the life of the brand as we evolve and grow,” Gourley-Cramer said. It is the result of a 14-month exercise, launched after CNC hired Léger Marketing in November 2017 to research the school’s brand and found a disconnection between CNC’s reputation and its visual identity.
Though CNC had a reputation score within its region on par with brands such as Shoppers Drug Mart and Google – 81 per cent – only 45 per cent of respondents had a positive opinion of CNC’s current logo with only 21 per cent think-
ing it stood out among other colleges.
“Our brand is who we are,” said CNC President Henry Reiser.
“It’s what distinguishes us from others. It permeates our decisions and affects our service delivery.”
Over those 14 months, the Characterizing CNC project included interviews, collaborative workshops, feedback sessions, and steering committees with hundreds of current and prospective students, employees, instructors, alumni, donors, partners and stakeholders, according to the school.
A phased approach to incorporating the logo into signage and other assets will be carried out in advance of CNC’s 50th anniversary in September. A new CNC website will be launched in May.
Land-rich Terrace braces for LNG boom
Frank O’BRIEN Citizen news service
Kitimat has the LNG Canada plant underway, but neighbouring, land-rich Terrace is preparing to act as the staging area for the largest private resource project in Canadian history.
“We have the land,” said Danielle Myles, manager of economic development for the City of Terrace, which has a population of 13,000 and a footprint of 74 square kilometres.
A key parcel is the 1,187 acres of industrial-zoned land bought four years
ago by China-based Qinhuangdao Economic and Technological Development Zone (QETDZ) for $11.8 million. The land is in the city’s massive Skeena Industrial Development Park, which until recently was a forest.
QETDZ has cleared nearly 800 acres of land for development as part of its $100 million preparation budget.
Myles expects Terrace will be the storage and transit depot site for much of the construction work on the $14 billion LNG export facility in Kitimat, which is a half-hour drive away. It could also be a
western pivot for materials and contractors serving construction of the natural gas pipelines running into LNG Canada’s terminal from Dawson Creek and Fort St. John in the northeast.
Terrace, unlike Kitimat, has an airport and an established and extensive retail sector, fitting a city that is known as the trading centre for northwest B.C.
An idea of the momentum can be found in total building permits in Terrace, which have soared at least 300 per cent over the past two years, Myles noted.
Tourism worth $9B to provincial economy, minister says
Citizen news service
VANCOUVER — Tourism in British Columbia is outpacing provincial economic growth as a record-breaking number of tourists visit the region, the tourism minister says.
Lisa Beare told tourism operators at their annual conference Friday that the industry added $9 billion to B.C.’s gross domestic product in 2017, well above the province’s economic growth of four per cent that year, marking an increase of more than 6.7 per cent from a year earlier.
“It goes to show people really value the unique, authentic experiences you can get in B.C.,” Beare said in an interview.
Tourism revenues increased by 41 per cent between 2007 to 2017, she said, adding the numbers reveal the sector added the largest value to the provincial economy over that decade, relative to the oil and gas, mining, forestry, logging and fishing industries.
“We’re the third-largest industry,” Beare said. “We definitely anticipate increased growth here in B.C.”
Beare said the government forecasts tourism to grow by six per cent annually for the next several years. The government’s recent budget forecast the province’s economy to increase by 2.4 per cent this year and 2.3 per cent next year.
“B.C. is a destination of choice for people,” she said, adding the province’s
natural beauty attracts visitors from around the world.
Beare said the industry employs more than 137,000 people and their wages are rising by almost seven per cent annually.
She said there are more than 19,000 tourism-related businesses that include over 400 Indigenous tourism experiences.
More than six billion tourists visited B.C. in 2018, said Beare, adding that’s a record and a 6.4 per cent increase over 2017.
Beare told tourism operators at their annual conference the government will implement a plan to guide year-round tourism growth and protect the environment.
NEWS IN BRIEF
Citizen finalist for ad design award
The Citizen is a finalist in the Ma Murray Awards presented each year by the B.C. and Yukon Community Newspaper Association.
Citizen sales representative Michelle Sandu and graphic designer Grace Flack have been named one of the top three teams in B.C. and the Yukon in the category of ad design award, collaborative, over 25,000, which means that this is for newspapers that have a circulation of more than 25,000 households. They have been recognized for their fine work on the ad campaign entitled PG Clean. The annual awards gala will take place at the River Rock Casino Resort in Richmond on April 27.
— Citizen staff
Health tips offered as B.C. herring egg harvest opens
VICTORIA (CP) — Health officials are offering some food safety advice as this year’s herring egg harvest opens along a section of Vancouver Island’s east coast.
Hand-gathered herring eggs, known as spawnon-kelp, are an important traditional seafood for many First Nations, but an outbreak of a cholera strain in 2018 forced closure of the harvest between French Creek and Qualicum Bay. Island Health says in a news release that lab tests confirm a small group of people contracted the vibrio cholera bacteria last year after eating herring eggs from the affected region.
Officials say the bacteria are a “natural inhabitant” of the marine environment, are unable to produce the toxin found in more severe strains of cholera and are not from poor sanitation or sewage.
The health authority urges harvesters to use bleach or a similar sanitizer on all harvesting and egg-carrying equipment, to wash hands before handling roe and to rinse the eggs with drinkingquality water or boiled, cooled salt water to remove some bacteria.
It also recommends the roe be cooked or blanched, but “if cooking is not preferred, be aware that there is always a risk with eating raw seafood.”
Vibrio cholera is an emerging issue on the B.C. coast, the news release says, adding that First Nations, health authorities and the federal and provincial governments are working to better understand it.
Old nautical maps help B.C. researchers chart kelp beds
VICTORIA (CP) — A serendipitous meeting between a professor and a colleague last year led to a treasure trove of historical maps indicating kelp bed locations off British Columbia’s coast, helping experts understand the changes in the ocean’s rainforests.
University of Victoria geography Prof. Maycira Costa saw the squiggly lines on the yellowed, hand-drawn map in a picture frame above her colleague’s desk. The wall art was from 1903 and Costa said her coworker had found it amongst a pile of old maps in someone’s office.
“I started to look at the details and then I looked at the area that I know of kelp distribution because we are working there with the modern satellite,” she said. “And I looked at that and said, ‘this is kelp distribution.’ ”
Using those British admiralty charts from 1858 to 1956, Costa and her research team have now created the first historical digital map of B.C.’s coastal kelp forests. They’ll use the maps to further investigate the loss of the kelp beds in research supported by Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Canadian Hydrographic Service and the Pacific Salmon Foundation, she said.
“Kelp was considered a navigational hazard so the British carefully annotated all kelp forests on their charts,” Costa said. “And the historical charts increase our understanding of kelp distribution over time.”
The kelp forests are known to be an important habitat for several species along the B.C. coast. Herring use the kelp beds as a deposit for their eggs, crabs, starfish and juvenile salmon also live in the forests, she said.
Kelp also works as a physical barrier to reduce wave action and cut coastal erosion.
“Kelp are the rainforests of the ocean. And they uptake a lot of carbon from the atmosphere of the ocean,” she said.
CITIZEN PHOTO BY BRENT BRAATEN
College of New Caledonia president Henry Reiser unveils the college’s new logo at a brand launch event hosted across all six campuses on Friday.
New minister faces tough task repairing relations with veterans
MacAulay named to post vacated by Wilson-Raybould in SNC-Lavalin scandal
Lee BERTHIAUME Citizen news service
OTTAWA — When he was named Friday as Canada’s latest minister of veterans affairs, Lawrence MacAulay was given the difficult task of sweetening the Trudeau government’s relations with embittered veterans and selling the Liberals’ controversial pension plan for those injured in uniform.
MacAulay’s move to veterans affairs from the Agriculture Department, where he had been for the past three years, was part of a mini-cabinet shuffle prompted by Jody Wilson-Raybould’s sudden resignation from the portfolio after only a few weeks in the job.
The move comes at a critical time for veterans and the Liberals, who enjoyed strong support from former service members in the last election but are now facing widespread anger and frustration from the community ahead of this year’s vote.
That frustration is fed by the fact MacAulay is the fifth person to hold the veteransaffairs portfolio in less than four years under the Liberals, counting Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan’s temporary assignment after Wilson-Raybould’s resignation.
“What it has sent as a message is that the veterans portfolio hasn’t been a priority, that our veterans themselves have not been a priority to the government,” said Virginia Vaillancourt, national president of the Union of Veterans’ Affairs Employees. “And he’s going to have a lot of relationships to mend and fix due to the constant turnover that we’ve seen in the minister’s role.” MacAulay’s appointment Friday was met with some extremely cautious optimism given his past role in the 1990s as secretary of state for veterans affairs under Jean Chretien and the fact the longtime MP is from P.E.I., where Veterans Affairs Canada is headquartered.
Yet there were also questions about whether he is simply a placeholder given that the next election is only a few months away – and whether he will actually be able to address the veteran community’s numerous concerns and grievances.
In an interview with The Canadian Press before he flew to P.E.I. Friday, MacAulay said his plan is to sit down and take a close
look at “what’s there, what’s been done and what can be done better for veterans.”
Yet he also defended the Trudeau government’s record, saying “it’s kind of a shame” if veterans feel the Liberals have been ignoring them or have broken promises to the community since taking office.
“My understanding is that what we indicated we would do we are doing or in the process of doing,” MacAulay said, citing the re-opening of several Veterans Affairs offices closed by the Conservatives and the introduction of a new pension plan as examples.
“I think you’d find there’s a lot of veterans who are quite pleased with what’s taken place.”
Yet that pension plan, in particular, has been anything but well received – as MacAulay is likely to find out.
The federal Liberals promised during the last election to reinstate a lifelong disability pension after many veterans complained
Cullen not seeking re-election
Joan BRYDEN The Canadian Press
OTTAWA — Nathan Cullen, one of the NDP’s best known and most effective MPs, is calling it quits.
The northern British Columbia MP announced Friday that he won’t seek re-election this fall.
That makes 13 of the 44 New Democrats elected in 2015 – including five of the 14 in B.C. – who won’t be running again.
“It sounds glib, but it’s the best answer I’ve had today: it’s time. Fifteen years, five elections, a leadership race, 2.5 million miles flown, half a million kilometres in the car,” Cullen said in a phone interview from his home in Smithers. “I always wanted to do this work to my best and full ability and if I ever started to feel the hint that I wasn’t giving the place what it deserves, then I should leave, I should let somebody else do it.”
Over the last little while, Cullen said he’s found “small moments, I’m getting on another Dash-8, I’m getting on another float plane” where he wondered how much longer he could try to balance being a good MP and a good husband and father to eight-year-old twin boys.
“Increasingly, I just felt like I couldn’t make both things sustainable.”
Representing the sprawling, remote riding of Skeena-Bulkley Valley made finding work-life balance more difficult for Cullen than for many other MPs. He joked that the life of MPs from remote ridings needs to be counted in “dog years” – one year for them is like three years for an MP from Central Canada.
“My riding is bigger than Poland, it’s a third of the province of British Columbia,” he said, adding it’s more than a full-time job just travelling to every corner of the riding.
Cullen’s announcement comes days after NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh won his own seat in the House of Commons in a B.C. byelection.
the lump-sum payment and other benefits that replaced it in 2006 were far less generous.
While the pledge was widely interpreted as a promise to bring back the pre-2006 pension system, the Trudeau government instead introduced its own version that will come into effect on April 1, which many veterans have described as a betrayal.
An analysis by the parliamentary budget office last week found the Liberals’ so-called Pension for Life plan is not only less generous than the pre-2006 pension, but will provide less financial compensation to the most severely injured veterans than even the current system does.
“(MacAulay) has to do more than just verbiage. He has to come back with some specific proposals to address the inequity,” said Brian Forbes, chairman of the National Council of Veteran Associations, which represents more than 60 veteran groups across Canada.
“I truly believe that if he doesn’t do something along those lines, then the election has to be impacted at least to some extent by the fact that many veterans will either stay home or vote into another party. They’re not going to get that grandiose support they got in 2015.”
There have also been concerns about the long delays and obstacles many veterans continue to face getting services and benefits, which Royal Canadian national executive director Brad White said “has to be cleaned up.”
One of the key questions, however, is how much room – and money – MacAulay will have to manoeuvre before the writ is dropped given that the federal budget will be unveiled in less than three weeks and many of its measures have already been nailed down.
“So things are pretty well set,” White said. “I’m not going to say in stone. But I think it’s pretty well set for the rollout of the budget.”
CP PHOTO
Minister of Veterans Affairs and Associate Minister of National Defence Lawrence MacAulay speaks to reporters following a cabinet shuffle at Rideau Hall in Ottawa on Friday.
CULLEN
Bigger lesson in SNC-Lavalin mess
Political scandals often victimize the public twice – first from the scandal itself, second from the flurry of bad policy offered as the cure.
Canadian journalists enjoyed being scandalized on Wednesday by the testimony of former attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould before the justice committee of the House of Commons.
Over the course of nearly four hours, the former cabinet minister publicly confirmed for the first time that she had indeed been subjected to a “barrage” of political pressure from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to spare the powerful Quebec engineering firm SNC-Lavalin from fraud and bribery prosecution.
She claimed her subsequent firing when she wouldn’t comply triggered thoughts of President Richard Nixon’s “Saturday Night Massacre.”
Other similarly vivid snippets of testimony will doubtless loom large in the Canadian media for weeks to come.
Yet if this scandal is destined to end – as scandals often do – with showy “reforms” intended to assure the public that such things will never happen again, it’s important that we be clear about what, specifically, the public is supposed to be angry about.
One narrative would posit that the “Lavscam” episode highlights the degree Canadian prime ministers will move heaven and earth to appease Quebec corporate interests – and Quebec more broadly – even at the cost of severe political risk. Wilson-Raybould noted that Trudeau’s people repeatedly tried to guilt her over all the jobs that could be lost if Lavalin was found guilty. Here one might note that his government has not mustered similar empathy for the worsening state of the Albertan oil industry – which employs far more Canadians than Lavalin’s 8,800 – but Quebec’s unique hold on Ottawa’s imagination is nothing new. There’s no obvious policy solution to this interpretation of Lavscam. WilsonRaybould repeatedly said she believed Trudeau broke no law. If the prime minister
is a deeply unethical man whose priority is defending crooked corporations from the consequences of their crimes, then the best correction is to simply elect a government with different priorities.
The notion that Lavscam is a case study in Quebec corporate power has not been the media’s or politicians’ preferred frame for analyzing the scandal, however.
It certainly did not shape Wilson-Raybould’s testimony. Questioned as to why she believed SNC-Lavalin did not deserve a mediated settlement – what Trudeau’s people wanted – she simply deferred that the specifics of their case was “before the courts.”
Instead, the frame favoured by WilsonRaybould, her credulous audience of parliamentarians and the Canadian media has been the supposedly “very inappropriate” spectacle of Canada’s elected leader refusing to trust the judgment of the person he picked to be the country’s top lawyer.
The attorney general of Canada also holds the portfolio of “minister of justice,” and Canadians have been subjected to much lecturing in recent weeks that these jobs must be understood as completely separate.
The justice minister helps draft laws in sync with her government’s partisan agenda, but when acting as attorney general, she must ensure that laws already passed are enforced without political consideration.
What constitutes a “political” consideration can be quite subjective, however.
It was not “political,” Wilson-Raybould said, for Trudeau to raise concern about the lost Lavalin jobs but only in the “early stages” of her consideration of the case.
Pressing the point for months apparently turned Trudeau’s valid “public policy concern” (which is allowed) into a “political” demand (which is not).
Wilson-Raybould also considers it “political” when politicians bring up explicitly political things in the presence of the attorney
A tale of two testimonies
TO THE POINT
In two national capitals, two former insiders told two devastating stories under oath Wednesday that shook the foundations of their two national governments. We have not seen anything like it.
Early in the day in Washington, Donald Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, detailed the president’s directed deceits: payoffs to conceal a relationship and betray campaign finance law, concealed negotiations to build a tower in Moscow to make him even richer, the racism of the most powerful man in the world, even threats to suppress his grades in high school.
All of it in service he now regrets.
Later in Ottawa, Justin Trudeau’s former justice minister and attorney general, Jody Wilson-Raybould, detailed the prime minister and his officials’ extraordinary pressures: to violate her independence, to overturn SNC-Lavalin’s prosecution to pursue a mediated settlement and ultimately to act one way in order to keep her job.
All of it in service she regrets losing.
The testimony in Washington, it seems, we have to sadly shrug about.
The tribal nature of American politics likely means Cohen will convince no one to turn on Trump and will only embolden Trump supporters to decry and dismiss the testimony as the repentance of a liar headed for jail. This is just the appetizer of the main course served up soon by special prosecutor Robert Mueller in his investigation. There is more affirmation than new damage today to the Trump brand.
The testimony in Ottawa, though, we can shiver about.
general, such as when Trudeau mentioned that he represents a Quebec parliamentary riding in one of his meetings with her. Trudeau would presumably argue that it is in the “public interest” for a parliamentarian to fight for his constituents, but evidently not.
The conclusion one is expected to draw from this framing of the scandal is that attorneys general should be afforded enormous deference to make prosecutorial decisions with as little oversight by the elected head of government as possible. Such logic receives warm reception within the faction of the Canadian elite inclined to believe that governments work best when maximum decision-making power is held by a well-credentialed caste of “nonpartisan” technocrats.
At several points, Wilson-Raybould suggested future attorneys general might benefit from not being a member of the prime minister’s cabinet at all. Should her advice be heeded, one can imagine a future in which the head of the justice department is installed through the same sort of opaque and unaccountable bureaucratic process that now selects most Canadian judges, public prosecutors and civil servants.
A system of government built on ample deference to unelected, “apolitical” mandarins is hardly one free of bias and ideology, however – as anyone who has observed the often poor decisions of Canada’s judges, public prosecutors and civil servants can attest. “Apolitical” appointees may not be partisan, but can be just as captivated by ideology, ignorance and closed-mindedness as any politician.
In a democratic system, elected politicians such as Trudeau enjoy a mandate to direct the government. That they often use this power poorly, or even toward crooked ends, makes the case for electing better people. There is danger that the shocking magnitude of Trudeau’s misrule, however, will be cited as justification to further erode Canadians’ control over the government actors whose decisions most impact their lives.
J.J. McCullough, a political commentator and cartoonist from Vancouver.
There is considerable damage to the Trudeau brand with Wilson-Raybould’s firm, logical, evidenced and reasoned presentation. Unlike America, there is no particular Canadian political division in this controversy, unless you count the separatist Bloc Quebecois. Unlike Cohen, Wilson-Raybould has much to lose in her candor and yet risked it all. And unlike the mess in America, this was no appetizer; this was the main course, and it will feed our country as it heads toward an election.
If, as reports indicate, Trump was shaking his fist at the TV set as he sat in Vietnam to watch Cohen testify, Trudeau must have held his head in his hands or curled up under the desk in a fetal position. Nothing like this has hit him.
He popped up an hour later to reiterate that he and his team acted “appropriately and professionally” and that he had to “com-
pletely disagree” with her testimony – even though he said he hadn’t seen it and, interestingly, would not decide until he reviews her presentation if she should stay in caucus or if he will permit her to run for the Liberals in the next election.
It remains his reputation against hers, and to date he doesn’t have as many public defenders.
Wilson-Raybould, now a Vancouver-Granville MP resigned from cabinet, essentially reduced the prime minister from his frontfacing sunny persona to any other politician who will cut a deal over the niceties or even the legalities.
She cited meeting after meeting, call after call, text after text from his officials that persistently sought on his behalf reconsideration of a decision made by the Public Prosecution Service of Canada to proceed with the trial of SNC-Lavalin on allegations of a decade-long trail of corporate
misbehaviour with Libya.
Pressure is, of course, in the eyes and ears of the receiver. The prime minister, his now-departed principal secretary, his spokespeople and his surprisingly partisan clerk of the privy council can claim there was nothing undue applied. But that isn’t for them to say; it is strictly for her to reveal. And in Wilson-Raybould’s opening statement alone, the narrative of pressure was impartially palpable and believable, trapped in her version of the “Saturday night massacre” of the Richard Nixon era of firing the special prosecutor as he faced impeachment.
The many faces of what she called “consistent and sustained” pressure – 10 meetings, 10 phone calls, she recounted – included the finance minister’s chief of staff, Ben Chin, Christy Clark’s spokesman as B.C. premier and now the chief of staff for Finance Minister Bill Morneau; minister
Morneau himself; Gerald Butts, Katie Telford, Mathieu Bouchard, Amy Archer and Elder Marques in the prime minister’s office; and Michael Wernick, the clerk of the privy council.
And, of course, the prime minister, who did not like the idea that Wilson-Raybould was bowing up when he noted a provincial election was imminent, that job losses would occur, that he was a Quebec MP and that he wanted her “to find a solution.”
Her statement about the “extraordinary pressure” was insightful into the way crises are handled in this administration: entreaties from several sides, repeated attempts to get no to become yes, suggestions to get legal opinions to overturn officials, threats to get the task done that triggered “a high level of anxiety,” even offers of getting supportive opinion pieces planted in media if she would change her mind. At least once she said enough was enough, but the pressure continued.
Wilson-Raybould was limited in how extensively she could testify – only until her shuffle to the veterans affairs portfolio – but told the parliamentary committee she believed she lost her job as justice minister and attorney general because her mind would not change.
She was told Jan. 7 by Trudeau she would be moving on. She wondered aloud to him if it had to do with SNC-Lavalin, which her office had been told already would be a priority for discussion of the minister who would replace her. The prime minister denied that was the case. She later suggested to his principal secretary that the SNC-Lavalin issue sank her. Butts, who last week resigned, then asked her if she was questioning the integrity of the prime minister.
If she did not say so at the time, it seems we have that answer today.
Kirk LaPointe is the editor-inchief of Business in Vancouver and vice-president, editorial, of Glacier Media.
WILSON-RAYBOULD
Kitesurfing in Brazil
John BRILEY Citizen news service
From a distance, it probably looks like I’m having fun.
I am off the northeast coast of Brazil, kitesurfing across one of the largest river deltas in the Americas, and I’m terrified. Tenfoot swells pitch from all directions, crashing into each other like demolition derby cars. The current here, where the mighty Parnaiba River pours into the Atlantic Ocean, is swirling, further complicating the fluid physics equation that is kitesurfing. The group I set out with has dispersed. I am alone, and the sun is setting – fast.
A wave knocks my surfboard from under my feet. As I use the wind-filled kite to drag through the mountainous swells in search of the board, the rubber loop that keeps me connected to the kite pops off and the buffeting wind nearly rips the steering bar from my hands. Summoning every bit of my strength, I pull downward on the bar, reattach the loop and miraculously find my board – back in business but still far from safety. I should add that I’m here voluntarily, on a week-long, lateOctober guided trip attempting to kitesurf more than 200 kilometres, from the city of Parnaiba to the town of Atins, along a coast lifted from prehistoric times. Beach and dunes stretch infinitely in both directions, broken periodically by a river mouth or low forest and free of infrastructure save for the occasional thatch fishermen’s hut.
This isolation, along with consistent wind, tropical days and warm seas, is a big part of the appeal here: while kitesurfing has exploded in northeast Brazil, the action is centered in once-sleepy fishing villages between Fortaleza and Jericoacoara and few visitors make it to the remote delta, where the 1,700-kilometre Parnaiba dissolves in a jigsaw of jungle islets, shifting sandbars and wind-scalloped dunes.
Our outfitter, Surfin Sem Fin (Portuguese for surfing without end), runs numerous trips throughout the region during its July-to-December windy season, providing guides and a network of trucks, buggies and boats to shuttle luggage between lodges. I was drawn here after becoming enamored of kiting downwind in waves – a discipline that entails steering the kite to maintain power while surfing. When everything aligns, this is an incredible
rush like having a motor on a surfboard to outrun white water, crank through turns and transform mushy, disorganized surf into an aquatic playground.
I also saw this as an achievable challenge and a chance to improve my skills under the tutelage of our guides, former world wave-kiting champion Guilly Brandao and Andreas Lagopoulos, a Canadian expat who runs kitesurfing camps from his home in Cabarete, Dominican Republic.
Now it’s Day 1 and “achievable” is in doubt. The morning had started innocuously, with a poolside breakfast at the charming Hotel San Antonio in Parnaiba, a colonial city about 15 kilometres from the coast.
We drive a half-hour past tileroofed houses and patchy forest to Pedra do Sal, a beach at the eastern edge of the 2,000 squarekilometre Delta do Parnaiba Environmental Protection Area. As we unload next to a small thatch bar – the last oceanfront business we’ll see for five days – a 25-knot wind whips up a concussive shore break, along with my anxiety: after an injury, I’ve kited only four days over the past six months and all in far friendlier conditions. The plan is to ride for an hour here and then spend the next three to four hours surfing 24 kilometres downwind, across the river and to our next lodge.
As we pump up kites on the hot sand, I realize how peculiar we
must look to anyone who’s never witnessed this spectacle before – nine people in surf shorts, sun shirts, brimmed hats and strap-on shades, wearing child-size hydration backpacks while inflating huge arcs of brightly-hued nylon.
I have trouble from the outset, fighting the wind and waves, crashing and ripping a $1,000 loaner kite. And, once we start downwind, I find myself trapped inside the break and relentlessly beaten into shore. Andreas, the designated last man back, patiently coaxes me along and, eventually, adjusts my kite lines to quicken the steering, allowing me to – finally – zip downwind. I emerge from the white-knuckle crossing happier than a hobbit escaping Mordor. The waves, although still big, are marching uniformly toward the beach. In the dimming light, I see tiny figures around a fisherman’s hut.
We are on Ilha dos Poldros, a 3,000-acre island owned by a Spanish tanning magnate who adorned his Eden with a guesthouse of stone, local carnauba palm wood, glass and thatch, along with a swimming pool and two cabanas. As we rinse gear under a starpierced sky, the calls of frogs, birds, bugs and monkeys echo across the delta.
Sunday morning reveals fragrant tropical vegetation that tumbles to rain-fed lagoons dotted with shorebirds and egrets. To the
north, the white hyphen of the dune line, and the ocean beyond.
After breakfast, Andreas and I take an ATV down to the beach where a playful breeze ripples over a sea of tropical green as it laps harmlessly at the sand, which is immensely wide at low tide.
We spend the next hour on shore, kites aloft and not another person in sight, with Andreas directing adjustments in our technique that, he prays, will help us keep pace for the rest of the week.
After lunch, we load into a 10-by-18-foot trailer, pulled by an orange Massey Ferguson tractor, for a short ride down a sand path to a dock, where we transfer our colourful circus to a pair of small powerboats and follow a snaking tributary to the Parnaiba. We emerge from shelter of the mangroves into the forceful current, smacking over swells toward the ocean.
After beaching on a cane-shaped sandbar separating river from sea, we inflate our kites and head up the wide, milky blue river, coming ashore on a muddy bank next to Pousada Casa de Caboclo, one of a handful of riverside bars and lodges popular with ecotourists and, increasingly, kiters seeking affordable access to the delta.
Monday is stolen from a dream.
After 11 kilometres of surfing we gather on the beach and, keeping our kites high in the sky, walk 500 metres through a gap in the dunes to the Rio Feijao Bravo,
which courses between a forest and the desertlike dunescape. I’m riding a wake-style board, which has much shorter fins than a surfboard, affording me access to the glassy, inches-deep water near shore. For the first time this week I ride with unbridled confidence, laying down buttery s-turns like a skier on an endless powder run. Ten kilometres later, where a caramel mountain of sand marks the confluence of river and sea, we haul out and deflate our kites for loading into two waiting boats. The boats tie up at a restaurant called Aires where, Andreas says, local fishermen amass on Wednesdays to sell the fat, blue river crabs that proliferate in the delta. No action today – the only other patrons are three guys, one shirtless, playing pool at an outdoor table – but we honour the theme, dining on spiced minced crab, grilled fish and cold beers.
Tuesday is monstrous – nearly 65 kilometres of kiting bisected by the hardest stretch of the week, an eight-kilometre crossing that requires us to angle out to sea to make the opposite point. We pause before the inlet, eyeing an ocean that looks like a washing machine set on “destroy.”
The rest of the week washes by –a night in the town of Tutoia and, after another 55-kilometre downwind run, two nights in the luxurious wood-and-thatch bungalows of Villa Guara, where the sand streets of Atins yield to the ocean. We kite through coves dotted with wooden boats and, more than once, beach on parcels straight out of the Star Wars movies – pancake expanses, glazed with blowing sand and sun-bleached huts, missing only the stormtroopers.
Our final day ends at the biggest dunes we’ve seen. As two safari trucks rally us over the silken acreage I realize where we are – Lencois Maranhenses National Park, at 1,000 square kilometres the largest dune field in South America. Many of the rain-fed lagoons here have dried up but a few remain, and the landscape resembles a Dali rendering of a giant waffle. In the warm balm of late afternoon we race about childlike, rolling down slopes into a lagoon, howling and laughing. I leave the group to run down one dune then up another, just a speck on a ripple of golden sand, grasping a moment before it blows away in the wind.
CITIZEN NEWS SERVICE PHOTOS
Top, kitesurfers pause on sand where the Parnaiba River meets the Atlantic Ocean on the northeast coast of Brazil. Above, the beachfront deck of Rancho do Peixe, a small resort and kitesurfing school in the remote village of Prea on Brazil’s northeast coast.
SPORTS IN BRIEF
Dickson makes IBU Cup sprint final
Emily Dickson of Burns Lake was the lone Canadian woman to qualify for the IBU Cup biathlon super sprint final and finished 27th Friday at the race in Otepaeae, Estonia. Dickson, a 21-year-old Caledonia Nordic Ski Club member, qualified 11th out of 68 in the preliminary round. Only the top-30 advanced to the final. In that race, Dickson had four shooting rounds and missed six of 20 targets (2+2+1+1), finishing 2:57.6 behind gold medalist Anna Weidel of Germany, who shot clean and completed the sprint course in 14:35.3. Dunja Zdouc of Austria (0+0+1+0, +31.9) won silver and Thekla Brun-Lie of Norway (0+0+1+1, +45.1) claimed bronze. In the men’s super sprint final, Endre Stroesheim of Norway won gold (0+2+0+0) in 13:13.2, just ahead of silver medalist Danielle Cappellari of Italy (0+0+1+0, +13.8). Henrik L’abee-Lund of Norway took bronze (0+0+1+0, +24.6). Matthew Strum of High River, Alta., was the top Canadian in 19th place (1+1+1+0, +1:37.1), and Adam Runnells of Calgary placed 24th (1+1+2+1, +2:25.6). The competition wraps up today with the women’s 7.5-kilometre sprint and the men’s 10 km sprint. — Ted Clarke, Citizen staff
Blizzard hosting short track championships
Get out the radar, speed limits could get broken this weekend at Kin 1. The province’s top short track speed skaters will be trying to beat the clock and their fellow competitors for B.C. championships medals on the city’s Olympic-sized arena ice surface this weekend. The Prince George Blizzard Speed Skating Club is hosting the provincial event, which starts today at 8 a.m. The competition resumes Sunday with the ice booked until 5 p.m. — Ted Clarke, Citizen staff Bottcher back in the Brier BRANDON, Man. (CP) — Brendan Bottcher defeated John Epping 8-4 in Friday’s wild-card game to gain entry into the main draw of the Canadian men’s curling championship. Bottcher and his Edmonton team open the Tim Hortons Brier against Northern Ontario’s Brad Jacobs on Saturday. Trailing 7-4 after eight ends, Toronto’s Epping not only missed a tricky hit to score two, but gave up a steal of one to Bottcher. Bottcher ran Epping out of rocks in the 10th end. The Edmonton skip drew for two in the sixth for a 5-2 lead after stealing a point in the fourth and scoring a deuce in the third. The two highestranked teams in Curling Canada’s Canadian Team Ranking system (CTRS) that don’t win their province or territory qualify for the Brier’s wild-card game. Epping (3) and Bottcher (4) skipped their respective provinces last year in Regina, where Bottcher lost in the final to Brad Gushue and Epping fell to Bottcher in the semifinal. ovic returned to the lineup.
Spruce Kings win Game 1
Ted CLARKE Citizen staff
tclarke@pgcitizen.ca
It was gritty, not pretty, but it got the job done for the Prince George Spruce Kings. They opened the B.C. Hockey League playoffs Friday night by gutting out a 3-1 win over the visiting Coquitlam Express to take the early lead in the best-of-seven Mainland Division semifinal series Friday at Rolling Mix Concrete Arena.
Layton Ahac’s goal 5:42 into the second period gave the Spruce Kings their second lead of the night and they hung on to it the rest of the game, capping the victory with an empty-net goal from Dustin Manz in the final minute.
Much of the game was played in the neutral zone and chances at either end were tough to come by. Both teams expected a lot of physical contact and that’s what both teams delivered.
“Obviously that’s kind of what you get in a playoff game, you get a physical game, the refs let everything kind of go and let us just play hockey and we did a really good job today and everybody’s pretty happy with it,” said Kings captain Ben Poisson, who scored the series-
opening goal on a Kings’ power play, 3:38 into the first period.
“It’s not like regular season, nothing compares to it. It’s a whole different season starting now and we just have to play our way and we should be fine here. Everything’s more intense, the crowd’s more into it, the players are more into it and guys are yelling at each other and giving extra shots and doing stuff you wouldn’t do in the regular season.”
Penalties were the story of the first period and the Spruce Kings took advantage of the first one, a boarding call handed out to Express defenceman Jack Cameron.
Poisson accepted a pass from Lucas Vanroboys in the face-off circle and quickly unleashed a wristshot that got through the wickets of goalie Clay Stevenson.
The Spruce Kings drew four of the six minor penalties and a misconduct and referees Nick Panter and Matt Hicketts heard the wrath of the partisan Kings’ crowd of 1,267 as they made their way to the dressing room for the first intermission.
That penalty carryover to start the second period worked to Coquitlam’s favour. Con-
nor Gregga got to the loose puck in the crease behind Kings goalie Logan Neaton after Regan Kimens applied the initial pressure with two dangerous-looking shots from close range. The goal came 45 seconds into the period. Ahac restored the lead five minutes later. He took the puck from Poisson just inside the Express blueline and cruised down the left wing boards as he let go a high wrister that sailed in over the glove of Stevenson.
“He found me in the middle and I came into the middle and cut and got into a battle with the d-man and just kind of put it back and he drove wide and it was a really good shot on his part,” said Poisson.
“They’re a really skilled team so we don’t want to give them a whole lot, so we’re going to try to keep the puck out of our end as much as we can.”
The Express had several great chances to tie to it up but Neaton, the league’s stingiest goaltender with a 1.92 goals-against average, came up with the saves. Stevenson also looked sharp, robbing Nick Poisson with his glove late in the period.
— see ‘IT WAS A, page 11
Young makes impressive MLB debut
Ted CLARKE Citizen staff
Jared Young sent a text Monday afternoon to his mom in Prince George.
Young wanted his folks back home to know he made his Major League Baseball debut for the Chicago Cubs in a spring training game in Scottsdale, Ariz., against the San Diego Padres.
In the text, Young wrote: “Got to play in the MLB game. Got one at-bat today.”
Then he attached a video of that one at-bat. Cubs first-round draft pick Nico Hoerner recorded the moment with his phone from the stands when Young stood in the batter’s box to face Padres pitcher Ger Reyes in the seventh inning and clubbed a fly ball over the right-field fence for a two-run home run for a 6-1 lead.
First at-bat, first home run – not too shabby for a major league debut.
But Young, the 23-year-old Cubs first baseman, had much more in store in his third game with Chicago Friday afternoon in Mesa, Ariz. With the Cubs leading the Arizona Diamondbacks 6-0 in the seventh inning, Young stepped up to the plate to face Sam Lewis and with Cubs hitters Victor Caratini and Zach Short already aboard he smoked a line drive that carried over the wall and into the bleachers in left field.
The three-run shot put the Cubs ahead 9-0 and they went on to win 10-2. That raised Young’s career MLB stats to four at-bats, two home runs, five runs batted in and an astounding 2.5 OPS (the sum of on-
base percentage and slugging average).
If the six-foot-two, 185-pound Young keeps hitting like that he might soon be looking for an apartment in Chicago.
The story of the kid from Prince George who had to leave the city at 16 to chase down his baseball dreams just keeps getting better. Young proved he can hit at every level he’s played.
From Prince George he joined the B.C. Premier League’s Okanagan Athletics in Kelowna, then went on to college ball at Minot State in North Dakota, Connors State in Oklahoma and Old Dominion in Virginia, where he played one season of NCAA Division 1. He joined the Cubs organization after they drafted him in the 15th round in 2017 and started his pro career that year in the Northwest League with the Eugene Emeralds. He began last season playing second base with the Class A South Bend (Ind.) Cubs of the Midwest League and in July was promoted to the Class A-Advanced Myrtle Beach (N.C.) Pelicans of the Carolina League, where he was moved to the outfield and first base. In 120 games combined with South Bend and Myrtle Beach he put up a .300 batting average and .842 OPS with 76 runs batted in and 16 home runs.
The Cubs selected Young as their minor league player of the year for 2018.
YOUNG
CITIZEN PHOTO BY JAMES DOYLE
Prince George Spruce Kings forward Chong Mine Lee gets tied up near the boards while battling Coquitlam Express defender Drew Cooper for control of the bouncing puck on Friday night at Rolling Mix Concrete Arena. The two teams met in the first game of their best-of-seven play-off series. The Spruce Kings won 3-1.
Ottawa Senators fire head coach
Lisa WALLACE Citizen news service
OTTAWA — The Ottawa Senators capped a tumultuous week by firing head coach Guy Boucher Friday morning and naming Marc Crawford interim head coach for the remainder of the season.
Senators general manager Pierre Dorion said he had made the decision to fire Boucher following the Senators 4-2 loss to the Edmonton Oilers Thursday night, but decided to sleep on it.
“We just felt as recently as probably this morning Guy wasn’t going to be our coach moving forward,” said Dorion. “For both parties we just felt it was time to move on. Obviously we made the decision and that’s why we named Marc as interim coach until the end of the year.”
The timing of the decision is somewhat surprising. Dorion gave Boucher a vote of confidence following Monday’s trade deadline.
“I don’t think anyone will disagree with me on this one that I’ve made his job pretty difficult in the last few weeks and we’re going to support him,” Dorion said at the time.
In the four days since, Dorion had a change of heart.
“We’re fielding a team from now until the end of the year that can win games and we want to see this team win games, develop, grow and have a great culture,” Dorion said. “Play for one another, play for the coaching staff, more importantly play for our fans.
“We saw that against Calgary a few days ago, I don’t think we saw that (Thursday). At a certain point and time we felt that we had to make the decision today. It’s a decision that tries to set a foundation for this organization in this rebuild to thrive as earliest as possible.”
Dorion added the decision was made because they wanted to bring someone in with ideas on how to bring energy back to the team.
Following the end of last season, Dorion told reporters he wanted to see a greater implementation of the younger players and less days off. While younger players were in the lineup this season, the distribution of ice time was often questioned.
“I think in this rebuild playing the kids is crucial,” Dorion said.
“The development of our young players is essential for this team to have success moving forward.”
Dorion met with players to advise them of the change, but also sent a message that the status quo was not good enough.
“I want to see a compete level that is unmatched,” Dorion said.
“I want to see a team culture that will transfer to next year and we’re giving a chance to a lot of players that haven’t been given the role that they’re given now and we want to see them thrive.”
Boucher, a 47-year-old native of Notre-Dame-du-Lac, Que., was previously head coach of the Tampa Bay Lightning from 2010-13. He then took a job in Switzerland before landing with the Senators.
He wraps up his career in Ottawa with a 72-71-21 record through 164 games.
Players admitted the timing of Boucher’s firing was somewhat surprising with just 18 games remaining in the regular season, but at the same time don’t want to just be going through the motions in the final five weeks and that change might not be a bad thing.
“It’s one of those things if you keep doing the same thing and the results aren’t there then it’s tough to keep players engaged,” said Mark Borowiecki. “I’m not here to sling mud or anything like that.
I’m just trying to be as objective and honest as I can in the situation. There needs to be a way to keep players engaged to show that there’s maybe a change to be
had or a change to be made that’s going to help us progress forward and when it doesn’t happen personnel change will happen.”
Borowiecki admitted Boucher is not the only one who needs to be held accountable for the team’s performance this season.
“The onus is on everyone here,” Borowiecki said. “I’ve said it numerous times and I’ll say it again this is a results driven, results based business and we’re not getting results and we haven’t been getting results for a long time. The players felt the brunt of that. We
lost some guys in here who were important to us and in turn you lose a coach as well so I think that goes to show there’s blame to go around.”
The Senators have gone through six different head coaches since Bryan Murray stepped away from the bench following the team’s 2007 Stanley Cup run.
Dorion said the organization will do an extensive search for a new head coach following the season. Some of the criteria they will be looking for is a communicator, someone who listens, a teacher, someone who has structure and someone who can expedite the rebuild as quickly as possible.
Crawford, 58, is in his third season as a Senators assistant coach and will be considered for the position.
He has served as an NHL head coach for 1,151 games, guiding the Quebec Nordiques, Colorado, the Vancouver Canucks, Los Angeles Kings and Dallas Stars.
The Belleville, Ont., native won the Stanley Cup in 1996 with Colorado.
Crawford believes this group is better than a last place team and will use the final weeks to build on the foundation that has been set.
“They’re a group that emotion-
ally is as good as any Stanley Cup team that I’ve been around,” Crawford said. “The measure of the personality in that room is extraordinary. These are young guys, really young, and they are in a situation that is very, very difficult. This is nobody’s fault, but this is a business where you’re judged all the time.”
Crawford announced that Chris Kelly, a former member of the Senators who won a Stanley Cup with Boston, would be joining the coaching staff. Crawford’s first game as interim coach will be Saturday on the road against Tampa Bay.
The firing culminates a tumultuous eight-day stretch for the Senators.
The team traded its three top scorers for younger players and draft picks before Monday’s trade deadline after the Senators couldn’t come to terms with pending free agents Mark Stone, Matt Duchene and Ryan Dzingel on new deals.
On Wednesday, a plan for a new downtown arena for the Senators was killed after the National Capital Commission announced mediation had failed in an effort to resolve a dispute between Melnyk and project partners.
Sanchez back in form with Blue Jays in spring
Citizen news service
DUNEDIN, Fla. — Aaron Sanchez pitched two no-hit innings as a Toronto Blue Jays split squad battled to a 1-1 tie with a Pittsburgh Pirates split squad in preseason baseball action Friday. Sanchez had one strikeout and one walk over his two innings of work.
While a small sample size, Sanchez’s outing is reason for optimism following two injuryplagued seasons.
The 26-year-old had surgery on his right middle finger in September, ending a disappointing season that included a lengthy stint on the disabled list after he got his finger stuck in his suitcase in June.
He has also struggled with blisters and nail-related issues on his throwing hand for the last couple seasons. Sanchez had a breakout season in 2016, when he played in the all-
training
star game and had an AmericanLeague best 3.00 ERA and 161 strikeouts over 192 innings.
Toronto’s Logan Warmoth tied the game against Pittsburgh with a solo home run in the bottom of the eighth. The Pirates had taken the lead in the top of the sixth when Patrick Kivlehan scored on a throwing error. Meanwhile, in Kissimmee, Fla., another Jays split squad fell 4-3 to Atlanta when Sean Kazmar scored on a Hector Perez wild pitch in the bottom of the ninth.
Jonathan Davis and Lourdes Gurriel Jr., hit solo home runs in the top of the first to put the Jays up 2-0.
A Kendrys Morales RBI single put Toronto up 3-2 in the top of the fifth, but Ryan LaMarre scored on Andres Blanco’s ground out into a double play in the bottom of the inning to tie the game. Perez took the loss for Toronto, while Wes Parsons picked up the win.
Toronto Blue Jays pitcher Aaron Sanchez pitches during spring training in Dunedin, Fla., on Friday.
Ottawa Senators head coach Guy Boucher, top right, talk to players during a game against the Nashville Predators on Dec. 11, 2018, in Nashville, Tenn. The Senators fired Boucher on Friday, and named Marc Crawford interim head coach.
CRAWFORD
‘It
was a tight game’
— from page 9
Stevenson kicked out his leg to foil Manz, the Kings’ leading scorer with 70 regular-season points, on a breakaway chance four minutes into the third period. Manz got to the rebound but ran out of room and could only manage a weak shot the Express goalie easily turned aside.
Manz scored his empty-netter with a high backhander from just outside the blueline.
“We’re both strong teams but we have to play physical to compete with them,” said Express defenceman Troy Robillard.
“It was a tight game, a lot of backand-forth and not much pinning in the zones. I thought both defences played well, got pucks out pretty quick so it was
a big neutral-zone game. The refs can’t call everything, they’re going to let some things slide, so it’s going to be a tough game and hard both ways.
“We have to finish, we’ve got to get down on them hard and we’re just going to keep moving pucks forward.”
Kings winger Nolan Welsh played a strong game providing energy on an effective line with Vanroboys and Corey Cunningham.
Welsh missed five weeks in January and February with a concussion and just returned to the lineup Feb. 22. He said the Kings appreciated the loud reception they got from the crowd when Poisson scored.
“The crowd was definitely into it and for sure that helped, so it was good to get
the first (goal),” said Welsh. Game 2 is set for tonight at 7 at RMCA. The series switches to Coquitlam for Game 3 and 4 Monday and Tuesday. If Game 5 is needed that would be played Thursday in Prince George, with Game 6 scheduled for Saturday in Coquitlam and Game 7, if needed, in Prince George on the following Monday.
LOOSE PUCKS: The Langley Rivermen came from behind and scored two unanswered goals in the third period to beat the Chilliwack Chiefs 5-4 Friday in the opener of the other Mainland Division series in Chilliwack.
On Thursday, the Cowichan Valley Capitals upset the Penticton Vees 4-1 in that Interior Division series opener in Penticton.
Hayes help Jets to win over Predators
Darrin BAUMING Citizen news service
WINNIPEG — Newly acquired forward
Kevin Hayes admits his first goal with the Winnipeg Jets wasn’t the prettiest he’s ever scored.
Hayes had an empty-net goal and added two assists to help Winnipeg erase a two-goal deficit and beat the Nashville Predators 5-3 on Friday night.
“It wasn’t the nicest goal, but I’ll take it,” said Hayes. “We’re in that final stretch here where we need to figure out what kind of team we’re going to be going into the playoffs. And going down 2-0 and battling back, I thought we (dealt with) some pretty good adversity there.”
Hayes went pointless in his Jets debut on Tuesday against Minnesota. He was acquired at Monday’s trade deadline from the New York Rangers in exchange for a 2019 first-round pick, forward
Brendan Lemieux, and a conditional 2022 draft pick.
Hayes said the positivity around his new team is contagious.
“We go down two and everyone’s still positive on the bench,” he said. “It shows you the type of team these guys are.”
Jets captain Blake Wheeler said Hayes is the type of individual who makes players around him better even though he’s still getting used to a new team.
“I think you could see today, he was talking a little bit more, feeling a bit more comfortable,” Wheeler said. “So it was great to see him have a good night.”
Wheeler and Mark Schiefele also had a goal and tacked on two helpers apiece for the Jets (38-22-4). Kyle Connor and Tyler Myers had the other goals for Winnipeg.
The Jets moved ahead of Nashville (37-25-5) and atop the Central Division standings with the victory.
FRIDAY, MAR. 8 Chilliwack at Langley, 7:15 p.m.
SUNDAY, MAR. 10 Langley at Chilliwack, 7 p.m. Prince George (2) vs. Coquitlam (3)
FRIDAY’S GAME Coquitlam at Prince George, 7 p.m.
SATURDAY’S GAME Coquitlam at Prince George, 7 p.m.
MONDAY, MAR. 4 Prince George at Coquitlam, 7:15 p.m.
TUESDAY, MAR 5 Prince George at Coquitlam, 7:15 p.m.
THURSDAY, MAR. 7 Coquitlam at Prince George, 7 p.m.
SATURDAY, MAR. 9 Prince George at Coquitlam, 3 p.m.
MONDAY, MAR. 11 Coquitlam at Prince George, 7 p.m. INTERIOR DIVISION Penticton (1) vs. Cowichan Valley (WC) (Cowichan Valley leads series 1-0)
THURSDAY’S RESULT Cowichan Valley 4 Penticton 1 SATURDAY’S GAME Cowichan Valley at Penticton, 6 p.m.
TUESDAY, MAR 5 Penticton at Cowichan Valley, 7 p.m.
WEDNESDAY, MAR. 6 Penticton at Cowichan Valley, 7 p.m.
SATURDAY, MAR. 9 x-Cowichan Valley at Penticton, 6 p.m.
MONDAY, MAR. 11 x-Penticton at Cowichan Valley, 7 p.m.
MONDAY, MAR. 11
x-Cowichan Valley at Penticton, 7 p.m.
Merritt (2) vs. Trail (7)
FRIDAY’S GAME Trail at Merritt, 7 p.m.
SATURDAY’S GAME Trail at Merritt, 7 p.m.
TUESDAY, MAR. 5 Merritt at Trail, 7 p.m.
WEDNESDAY, MAR. 6 Merritt at Trail, 7 p.m.
FRIDAY, MAR. 8 Trail at Merritt, 7 p.m.
SATURDAY, MAR. 9
Merritt at Trail, 7 p.m.
MONDAY, MAR. 11 Trail at Merritt, 12 p.m. Wenatchee (3) vs. West Kelowna (6)
SATURDAY’S GAME West Kelowna at Wenatchee, 7:05 p.m. SUNDAY’S GAME West Kelowna at Wenatchee, 6 p.m. TUESDAY, MAR. 5 Wenatchee at West Kelowna, 7 p.m.
WEDNESDAY, MAR. 6 Wenatchee at
at Wenatchee, 7:05 p.m.
Vernon (4) vs. Salmon Arm (5)
FRIDAY’S GAME Salmon Arm at Vernon, 7 p.m.
SATURDAY’S GAME Salmon Arm at Vernon, 6 p.m.
MONDAY, MAR. 4 Vernon at Salmon Arm, 7 p.m.
McDonald, Royals down Cougars
Ted CLARKE Citizen staff tclarke@pgcitizen.ca
Kody McDonald picked up right where he left off as the villain in the Prince George Cougars’ universe.
For the second time in two weeks, the 20-yearold Victoria Royals winger was the primary punisher against his former team. McDonald scored two goals and had an assist Friday and the Royals hung on to a 4-3 win over the visiting Cougars.
The Lethbridge native, picked by the Cougars in the second round of the 2013 WHL bantam draft, was traded to Prince Albert in January 2018. The Raiders, who lead the WHL overall standings this season, shipped him to Victoria just before the Jan. 10 trade deadline.
A poor start sunk the Cougars. McDonald opened the scoring 3:37 into Friday’s game with his 19th of the season.
He drew an assist on Phillip Schultz’s goal, 6:16 into the first, which made it 2-0.
The Cougars cut the lead a few minutes later with a power-play goal from Josh Maser, his teamleading 27th of the season, but Victoria answered at the 16:30 mark with a power-play goal from Tarun Fizer. The Royals outshot the Cats 16-7 in the opening period.
Back on Feb. 16 at CN Centre, McDonald scored two third-period goals and had the winner in the shootout for a 5-4 victory over the Cats.
McDonald made it a 4-1 game 4:26 into the second period, wiring a shot from the circle in over the glove of Gauthier, who was yanked out of the game at that point after allowing four goals in 18 shots.
His replacement, Isaiah DiLaura blocked all five shots he faced in the middle frame and was flawless the rest of the game, stopping all five shots he faced in the third period.
Matej Toman, the Cougars Czech import, cut the gap to 4-2 early in the third period when he tipped in a point shot from Jack Sander. The Cougars made it a one-goal game with the extra attacker in the final minute when Reid Perepeluk went fivehole on goalie Griffen Outhouse.
The Cougars outshot the Royals 19-5 in the third period and 35-28 in the game.
The win for Victoria (35-22-2-2) improved the Royals’ stake on second place in the B.C. Division. The Cougars (17-38-5-3) remain last in the Western Conference. They’ve won just one of their last 22 games and have five games left in the season, including the rematch with the Royals tonight.
Viktor Arvidsson, P.K. Subban, and Mattias Ekholm scored for the Predators while Ryan Ellis recorded two assists.
“We went down and took a punch and missed, and they came back and put it in the net,” said Predators head coach Peter Laviolette.
Laurent Brossoit stopped 34-of-37 shots, improving his record to 11-4-2 this season. Pekka Rinne made 27 saves in defeat.
Brossoit started in place of Jets No. 1 Connor Hellebuyck who came down with the flu.
“These games especially are the ones you really want to get up for,” said Brossoit. “You never want to see a teammate sick, but it gave me an opportunity and it was just really nice to get back into the win column. I thought everyone came to play tonight.”
With the win, the Jets avoided losing three consecutive games in regulation.
WEDNESDAY, MAR. 6 Vernon at Salmon Arm, 7 p.m. FRIDAY, MAR. 8 Salmon Arm at Vernon, 7 p.m.
SATURDAY, MAR. 9 Vernon at Salmon Arm, 7 p.m.
MONDAY, MAR. 11 Salmon Arm at Vernon, 7 p.m. x - played only if necessary.
FRIDAY’S RESULTS EXPRESS 1 AT SPRUCE KINGS 3 (Spruce Kings lead best–of-seven series 1-0)
First Period 1. Prince George, B.Poisson 1 (Vanroboys, Coyle) 3:45 (pp) Penalties – Cameron Coq (boarding) 2:44, WatsonBrawn PG (high-sticking) 5:17, Walton Coq (boarding) 5:45, Watson-Brawn PG (check to the head, misconduct) 12:48, Brar PG (slashing) 15:37, Manz PG (kneeing) 19:34. Second Period 2. Coquitlam, Gregga 1 (Kimens) 0:45 (pp) 3. Prince George, Ahac 1 (B.Poisson) 5:42 Penalties – Cameron Coq (roughing) 7:50. Third Period 4. Prince George, Manz 1 (Brar) 19:11 (en) Penalties – PG bench (too many men, served
Big crowds expected at Iditarod
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — Big crowds are expected to converge on Alaska’s largest city today as hundreds of dogs and their humans kickoff the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog race with a short ceremonial run along snow-heaped streets. The fan-friendly event in Anchorage brings spectators up close to the 52 musher-dog teams gearing up for the 47th running of the famed 1,609-kilometre race. Mushers are generally more relaxed here than they will be for the real thing.
The serious, competitive portion of the wilderness trek starts Sunday in the small community of Willow, north of Anchorage. From there, the teams will cross two mountain ranges, the frozen Yukon River and dangerous sea ice along the Bering Sea Coast. Village checkpoints are staged across the trail before the teams reach the finish line in the old Gold Rush town of Nome.
The Prince George Spruce Kings celebrate after scoring the opening goal of the game against the Coquitlam Express on Friday night at Rolling Mix Concrete Arena.
Who’s the Boss? actress Katherine Helmond dies at 89
Andrew DALTON
LOS ANGELES — Actress
Katherine Helmond, an Emmynominated and Golden Globewinning actress who played two very different matriarchs on the ABC sitcoms Who’s the Boss? and Soap, has died, her talent agency said Friday. She was 89.
Helmond died of complications from Alzheimer’s disease last Saturday at her home in Los Angeles, talent agency APA said in a statement.
A native of Galveston, Texas, Helmond’s credits date back to the 1950s and she worked steadily in small roles through the decades.
But her real fame, and all seven of her Emmy nominations, didn’t start arriving until she was nearly 50.
She was probably best known for playing Mona Robinson, Judith Light’s mother on Who’s the Boss?, which also starred Tony Danza and a young Alyssa Milano. She won a best supporting Golden Globe for her work in 1989.
“My beautiful, kind, funny, gracious, compassionate, rock,” Milano mourned on Twitter. “You were an instrumental part of my life. You taught me to hold my head above the marsh! You taught me to do anything for a laugh!
What an example you were!”
On the show, Light was an uptight single mother who hired the 1980s heartthrob Danza to be her live-in housekeeper, and Helmond was her foil, a lover of nightlife, pursuer of men and flaunter of sexuality who would have been at home on The Golden Girls, which ran during the same years.
“Katherine Helmond was a remarkable human being and an extraordinary artist; generous, gracious, charming and profoundly funny,” Light said in a statement.
“She taught me so much about life and inspired me indelibly by watching her work. Katherine was a gift to our business and to the world.”
Danza tweeted, “We all lost a national treasure today. No words can measure my love.”
An only child, raised by her mother and grandmother, who began acting while a girl in Catholic school, Helmond began her professional career in theatre and returned to it often, earning a Tony Award nomination in 1973 for her Broadway role in Eugene O’Neill’s The Great God Brown.
She was a favourite of director Terry Gilliam, who put her in his films Brazil, Time Bandits, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
In Brazil, a dystopian comedy from 1985, she played a surgery-
addicted woman whose elastic face became one of the most memorable images from the cult film.
Her major break came with Soap, a parody of soap operas that aired from 1977 to 1981.
She played wealthy matriarch
Jessica Tate, one of two main characters on the show, which co-starred Robert Guillaume and was also a breakthrough for Billy Crystal, who played her nephew.
She was nominated for Emmys for all four seasons of the show and won a best actress in a comedy Golden Globe in 1981.
Helmond kept working into her 80s doing mostly voice work, most notably as the Model T Lizzie in the Pixar Cars films.
She had a recurring role on Everybody Loves Raymond from 1996 to 2004 as the title character’s mother-in-law.
“Katherine Helmond was such a class act and incredibly down to earth,” tweeted actress Patricia Heaton, who co-starred with Ray Romano on the show. “She was terrific as my mother on ‘verybody Loves Raymond and I looked up to her as a role model.”
She is survived by her husband of 57 years, David Christian, her half-sister, Alice Parry, and many nieces and nephews, her agency’s statement said. A memorial is being planned.
Day of Action brought to Flint, Michigan
Mike HOUSEHOLDER Citizen news service
FLINT, Mich. — Yo-Yo Ma brought both music and a call for social change to Flint, Michigan, on Thursday.
The famed cellist performed for more than 100 fans inside a gymnasium at Berston Field House during his visit to the city that is still feeling the effects of a leadcontaminated water crisis.
But Ma said he found a city that is about much more than “water problems.”
“That’s not Flint. That’s one aspect of it. There’s a huge part of Flint that has that knowledge base
and the willpower and the history and the looking forward to what’s new, what’s coming down the pike,” he told The Associated Press in an interview.
The visit to Flint, as well as one a day earlier in Ann Arbor, was hosted by the University Musical Society, which is affiliated with the University of Michigan. It is all part of an effort by the 63-year-old musician to demonstrate culture’s power to create moments of shared understanding and spur a conversation about culture and society.
“I’m interested in conversations because the music is there for people,” Ma said. “And the music helps me go through life. It helps certain people go through life. But there are lots of people that are helping others go through life.”
The event at Berston, a nearly 100-year-old complex that offers athletics, arts, education and social services, was free and open to the public. It featured speakers and musical performances, including by Ma, who wowed the crowd by playing a piece by Johann Sebastian Bach. Ma also did an impromptu number with a member of an African drum company, posed for pictures with dozens of fans and gave out just as many high-fives and hugs.
Earlier in the Day of Action, as the Flint stop was called, Ma convened a meeting of dozens of local community leaders who discussed how cultural collaboration might bring about social change in the city of 100,000.
As for a takeaway from his visit, Ma said it will be “an awesome respect for the people here and for the dignity that they have and for the inner resources that they have.”
CITIZEN NEWS SERVICE FILE PHOTO
Katherine Helmond seen here in 2006 arrives for the premiere of the Disney/Pixar animated film Cars at Lowe’s Motor Speedway in Concord, N.C. Helmond died last week at 89 years old.
The relevance of Norman Rockwell paintings from 1943
WASHINGTON — In his January 1941 address to Congress, as the Second World War World loomed, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued a streamlined statement of American principles, defined as “four freedoms”: freedom of speech; freedom of religion; freedom from want; and freedom from fear.
By the time the war ended, those national aspirations were probably best known from a series of four paintings by magazine illustrator Norman Rockwell that is the centerpiece of an exhibition at the George Washington University Museum and the Textile Museum.
The show’s title, Enduring Ideals: Rockwell, Roosevelt and the Four Freedoms, suggests a collaboration between the president and the painter.
In fact, the two men met only once, for about 10 minutes.
That parley happened after the popular appeal of Rockwell’s artwork had already been well established. Initially, some government policymakers were unimpressed with Rockwell’s 1943 paintings. But the Four Freedoms went on to help sell millions of war bonds to people who were rewarded with prints of the paintings, or, in some cases, with a chance to gaze at the originals.
The vision of American life that Rockwell exalted in his four canvasses was drawn from the small-town New England the painter revered.
A native New Yorker, Rockwell moved in 1938 to Vermont, where he painted the famous foursome, and lived the rest of his life there or in Massachusetts. He wasn’t the only storyteller of that period to present the United States as a kind of idealized Vermont. Such Hollywood filmmakers as Frank Capra also tended to situate their version of authentic America in New England and upstate New York.
While Capra never actually lived in the region, Rockwell was literally at home there. In Freedom of Speech, the painter depicts himself among the listeners at a Vermont town meeting.
The farmer who holds the crowd’s attention was a real person whom Rockwell painted more than once.
The artist’s first version of the scene, which has a less dramatic composition, is included in this show.
Several such outtakes are on display here, along with the jacket that the subject of the painting wore in the scene, and other artifacts. “Enduring Ideals” also includes other paintings executed by Rockwell in the same period, most notably a series of illustrations of a young G.I. dubbed Willie Gillis – an everyman thrust into war. Also on display are two variations of a home front scene in which several older men follow news of the war.
These paintings were made for the Saturday Evening Post, a magazine that was extremely popular at the time but not known for its daring. Enduring Ideals supplements the Post’s timid coverage of the era with edgier illustrations and photographs.
There are photos that reveal the effects of the Great Depression and strong anti-Nazi magazine covers from Time and Life. One depicts a pile of corpses, an image the Post wouldn’t have touched.
In 1963, Rockwell left the Post and began contributing to Look magazine. There, he turned toward more controversial subjects, including the civil rights movement. In 1963’s The Problem We All Live With, grade-schooler Ruby Bridges is shown walking to the New Orleans school where she was the only AfricanAmerican student, escorted by four federal marshals. Unlike Willie Gillis, Bridges is not a composite character. Her story is specific and real.
So, too, 1965’s Murder in Mississippi imagines an actual event: the 1964 killing of civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner. The crime is rendered in a brownish near-monochrome – as if to substitute for photographic documentation that doesn’t exist – and heightened by a touch of blood red.
These later paintings lead to a gallery of contemporary works by other artists that raise issues Rockwell never did.
Sarah Fukami reminds us of the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second Worls War –a war the United States fought for freedom. Jonathan Monaghan, who works in digital imagery, updates Freedom from Fear to encompass electronic surveillance.
Maurice Pops Petersen addresses the same theme, with a largely faithful likeness of Rockwell’s painting. What’s the main difference between it and Rockwell’s painting of a family tucking their children into bed? In Petersen’s version, the family is now AfricanAmerican. The artist also slaps a new headline on the newspaper clutched by the concerned dad: I Can’t Breathe. Seventy-six years after the paint dried on Rockwell’s pictures, freedom from fear remains an unrealized ideal.
Mark JENKINS Citizen news service
CITIZEN NEWS SERVICE HANDOUT IMAGE
Featured at the Norman Rockwell museum is artwork like the one above Freedom of Speech.
Masked Singer finale revealed Gladys Knight in third place
Emily YAHR Citizen news service
Well, America, we have reached the end of the strangest reality show of our time – no longer will you accidentally flip through channels and assume you are hallucinating because a terrifying-looking pineapple is belting out I Will Survive.
That’s right, The Masked Singer has come to an end. But don’t worry, that’s just Season 1. Obviously, given that the show has become a hit for Fox, the network excitedly renewed it for a second season. So that will haunt your dreams next year.
In the meantime, Wednesday’s two-hour finale not only revealed the winner, but showcased one of the most deeply strange and beautiful moments we’ve seen on reality TV in a while. T-Pain, the rapper most famous for smashes such as Buy U a Drank and Flo Rida collaboration Low, was crowned Masked Singer champion. Dressed as a monster, he was thrilled to claim the victory and prove that in addition to knowing his way around Auto-Tune, he has a fantastic voice.
But the most moving moment of the finale belonged to Gladys Knight.
In the middle of the episode, host Nick Cannon announced that the final three singers would all be unmasked, starting with the third place finisher. Only the monster, the peacock (Donny Osmond, if you’re wondering) and the bee were left. And he announced that third place went to... the bee.
As usual, Cannon made all the judges – Ken Jeong, Robin Thicke, Nicole Scherzinger, Jenny McCarthy and special guest Kenan Thompson – guess who was underneath the bee mask. Sometimes, throughout the season, the judges had no idea. (In fact, McCarthy would later guess T-Pain was Michael Vick.) This time, that iconic voice was too obvious.
“With a voice like that, it’s pretty hard not to hear who it is,” McCarthy said.
“Yeah, it’s a voice from God,” Thicke added.
“When I heard you sing, I knew within a half of a second who you were,” Thompson added.
Cannon made them all guess at once: “Gladys Knight!” they said. (Except Jeong, who insisted it could be Anita Baker.) So the bee started to undo the mask.
“Take it off! Take it off! Take it off!” the audience and judges yelled, although it took a little while, because the bee had trouble with the mask. “Somebody needs to help her, it’s Gladys Knight!” Scherzinger fretted. Eventually the costume came undone and it was ... exactly who they thought.
“The legendary Gladys Knight,” Cannon roared. Knight beamed toward the screaming crowd. The judges’s awed expressions were highly entertaining, as the whole panel started chanting her name.
“Wow. It is such an honour, such a pleasure,” Cannon gushed. “You may not remember this, you are the first entertainer celebrity superstar that I ever met. I was a kid in North Carolina. You took the time out to tell me how special I was and that I could make it. And to be standing next to you right here is insane. I love you so much.”
“I remember you,” Knight insisted.
Cannon followed up with the million-dollar question: “We all have to know... why would you do a show like this?”
Indeed, Gladys: Why? “Because we should always strive to do different kinds of things because they elevate us eventually,” she answered confidently. Cannon asked what she learned being inside the bee costume, and she confessed it’s a lot more difficult to sing when you can’t see the audience. “The eyes are so important. You know, just seeing you guys here... That’s what gives me courage.”
Thompson took his turn. “Well, as the resident black judge,” he said, and briefly paused for the crowd’s laughter before continuing, “You know good and well how heavy you are in the culture, you know? Because that voice has graced my life, my parents’ life, and, like, every single family member I’ve ever had. And I think it’s an unbelievable feeling to be able to have witnessed this. I can’t thank you guys enough for having me on the show. It’s been incredible.”
With that, Knight sang one more time, as she launched into Bonnie Raitt’s I Can’t Make You Love Me. All of the judges got choked up, as the camera panned on Thompson looking emotional, as Scherzinger started weeping and Thicke wiped his eyes.
“We’ll be back to see who takes home the golden mask, the peacock or the monster.” Cannon eventually interrupted. Yet it didn’t take away from the bizarre magic of the moment. Sure, this show was ridiculous. And kind of frightening if you stared at the costumes for too long. But in the end, millions of viewers were treated to one of the greatest artists of all time singing a beautiful song. And even though she was dressed in a bee costume, it still made everyone cry.
CITIZEN NEWS SERVICE PHOTO BY MICHAEL BECKER
Gladys Knight during the Masked Singer finale.
Training starts early for service dogs
Diane Daniel Citizen news service
Puppies! Well, hello there, little fellas! You’re so cute!
“I just want to get everyone’s attention for a minute,” said Alex Young, who might as well have been tossing out $100 bills while trying to rein in our group of nine visitors.
I felt bad for ignoring Young, our tour guide at Southeastern Guide Dogs, a nonprofit breeding, raising and training facility in Palmetto, Florida, but not enough to listen to what she was saying. Because, puppies!
We’d spotted the five 7-weekold yellow Labrador retrievers behind a window, two snoozing in a spoon position and the rest competing for space on a ledge to greet us, their tiny tails moving like mini-wipers on high speed. In return, we oohed and cooed, speaking in baby talk.
Young finally tore us away, and started the tour with an introductory video narrated by Southeastern CEO Titus Herman.
“I know you’re not here to see me,” he began. “You’re here to see puppies.”
Indeed, the folks here know what they’re up against. They hope visitors will learn a few
things about this training ground for service dogs while intermittently taking us to work areas that might contain puppies!
Since Southeastern started business in 1982, it has bred, raised and trained thousands of dogs – Labrador retrievers, golden retrievers and a mix of the two called goldadors, all working toward the mission of transforming the lives of people in need. Its programs take dogs from birth to puppy preschool and kindergarten to volunteer “puppy-raiser” homes off campus, then back for advanced training and ultimately placement with the two main categories of people they serve. Guide dogs go to visually impaired people and service dogs are for veterans with disabilities and Gold Star families.
The organization, housed on a 33-acre campus between St. Petersburg and Sarasota, employs some of the most innovative scientists and trainers in the working-dog industry and says it operates the most advanced training facilities of any service dog organization in the world.
Southeastern matches about 100 guide and service dog teams yearly and estimates a price tag of $50,000 per dog to breed, raise,
train and match the canines. All services, including training and lifetime follow-up, are free to recipients, and the organization is fully funded through donations.
The public tours, held several times a week, take visitors through six buildings to view whatever happens to be going on at the time. There’s also a multimedia show available for those who prefer to skip the walking tour.
Our first stop after the introductory video was to peer through windows at an eight-week-old yellow lab being assessed to deduce its natural strengths and weaknesses. A sign on the door – “Quiet please: puppy testing in progress” – compelled us to keep our squeals to a minimum as we watched the adorable fluff ball confront various obstacles, including a fake owl, a set of plastic stairs and a woman coming at the dog with a broom. Instead of running from it, the dog playfully went after it. Confident ones make the best guide and service dogs, Young said, and this one seemed on its way.
Next up was puppy preschool, where we watched a volunteer playing with a four-week-old black lab with the goal of exposing the dog to both people and a host of “distractions.” She tossed it toys, had it walk on mats of various surfaces, opened an umbrella nearby and held different scents under its nose. Young explained that the bib the pup wore was to start getting it used to the feel of a guide harness or service vest. Before we left, the volunteer held the little one up to
the window so we could feverishly wave like five-year-olds at a parade and exclaim, “Hello, puppy!”
The whelping, or delivery, area is off-limits, but we could watch the mothers and their litters on a wall of video feeds. Some 275 puppies are born at the facility each year, which has a six-person genetics and reproduction staff. About 40 to 50 females are mated with 15 males – breeders live at homes of volunteer breeder hosts, which must be no more than 75 minutes from campus “for reproductive urgency,” Young said.
Young said the dogs born here usually grow to 45 or 50 pounds, which is relatively small for the breed. The focus, she said, is on health and temperament.
At about 12 weeks, the dogs go to trained volunteer puppy raisers – there are about 300 spread across seven southeastern states. Their job is to socialize the dog and give it many opportunities to be out in public. The dogs are returned to the center for “university” at about 15 months.
“The most-asked question on the tours is how the puppy raisers are able to give the dogs back,” Young said. “What they tell us is, ‘I love this puppy, but someone else needs it.’ “As for the puppy’s reaction, “they’re really great at bonding to the next person,” she said.
As we walked across campus to the veterinary center, we saw a couple of people walking adult dogs, but most canines in training were out and about on different tasks, including walking city streets and going to shopping areas all over the greater Tampa Bay area, Young said.
At the veterinary centre, where some 700 puppies and dogs are cared for each year, we watched another short video that explained the center’s use of advanced medicine as well as holistic approaches. The center will soon add a conditioning aquatic center and hydrotherapy tanks.
“I have something exciting for you,” Young told us as an attendant trotted up with the energetic Papa Bear, a nearly two-yearold yellow lab who had nearly
completed university. We all but lunged at him, taking turns giving and receiving hugs and kisses. As I brushed his hair off my clothes, I asked Young if the stellar scientists here have done anything to eliminate shedding. Sadly, the answer was no.
Next on the stop was the new indoor training centre, where we learned that before the guide dogs graduate, they’ll learn more than 40 commands, while service dogs will learn up to 20. The guide dogs also learn “intelligent disobedience” in case they’ve outsmarted their humans. Throughout the training program, only positive reinforcement is used, initially with the aid of treats but later solely through verbal praise and petting. Young said the matching of dogs to humans, done when the dogs are around two years old, is an art and a science, with trainers considering personalities, and an individual’s lifestyle, pace, and activity level. The dogs typically work until they’re 11 years old, the mandated retirement age. (Dogs that appear not suited for guide or service work go into different “careers,” including public service, such as drug detection, and private adoption.)
Each year, several classes are held to teach the handlers, people receiving the dogs, how to work with them. They stay for two to three weeks and are housed in private rooms with en suite bathrooms – indoors for the human and out back for the canine.
A highlight during the course is “Puppy Raiser Day,” when the puppy raisers come to see their grown pup and the person matched to the dog.
“The dog is surrounded by the three people it loves the most and the people who love the dog the most: the handler, the raiser and the trainer,” Young said. “There are a lot of tears.”
At the tail end of our tour, we happened upon a trio of cavorting labs in an outdoors fenced-in area. They’d just finished lunch and their trainers were giving them a break before their next lesson. For our group, it was the final treat: Puppies!
CITIZEN NEWS SERVICE PHOTO
Southeastern Guide Dogs staffer Bryan Greenbaum helps a yellow Labrador retriever puppy get accustomed to new surfaces and strange objects before he goes off to live with his volunteer puppy raiser for a year.
Eggs the Spanish way
Spinach leaves with sherry vinegar and poached eggs
Servings: 4
INGREDIENTS
1 1/2 pounds fresh baby spinach leaves
Salt 2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
3 cloves garlic
1 slice baguette or small piece crustless country bread, day-old or toasted, about 1/2 ounce
1 teaspoon sweet/mild Spanish smoked paprika (pimentón)
Sherry vinegar (may substitute another wine vinegar)
4 large eggs
Freshly ground black pepper (optional)
STEPS
Place the spinach in a bowl; wash/rinse in a couple of changes of water, then drain.
Bring a large pot of water to a boil over high heat. Add 2 generous pinches of salt, then add the spinach; cook for about 3 minutes, just until it begins to wilt but is still vivid green. Reserve about 1/2 cup of the cooking liquid, then strain the spinach into a colander set in the sink.
Heat the oil in a large skillet or saute pan over medium heat. Once the oil shimmers, add the garlic and bread; cook for 1 to 2 minutes, until golden. Transfer the garlic and bread to a mortar and pestle. Remove the pan from the heat.
Add the Spanish smoked paprika and 2 or 3 tablespoons of the reserved spinach cooking liquid to the garlic and bread; pound the mixture into a paste. (Alternatively, you can use a mini food processor, pulsing to form a paste.)
Spoon the paste into the pan, then add about 1/4 cup of spinach cooking liquid. Cook over medium-low heat, stirring to form a loose sauce. Return the spinach to the pan along with a dash of vinegar; cook for 2 minutes, turning the leaves to blend well, or until the flavors are combined. Divide the spinach among wide, shallow bowls, smoothing the spinach into a bed. Cover to keep warm.
Bring a wide saucepan of water to a low boil over medium heat. Slip in the eggs, one at a time, and poach until the whites are just set but the yolks still runny.
Use a slotted spoon to place one egg atop each bowl of spinach. Generously season with pepper, if desired, and serve right away.
Scrambled eggs with mushrooms and jamon
Servings: 2 INGREDIENTS
4 large eggs
Salt 1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil, plus more for drizzling
6 ounces mixed fresh mushrooms, cleaned and cut into quarters or sliced
1 clove garlic, minced
1 ounce dry-cured Spanish jamon, finely chopped (may substitute prosciutto)
Freshly ground black pepper
1 tablespoon minced fresh flatleaf parsley STEPS
Beat the eggs thoroughly in a mixing bowl. Season them lightly with salt. Heat the oil over high heat. Add the mushrooms; cook for about 5 minutes, until their moisture has evaporated and their edges begin to brown. Reduce the heat to medium; add the garlic and jamon. Cook for about 30 seconds, stirring continually, until the garlic is fragrant. Pour the eggs into the pan. Cook, undisturbed, for 10 seconds, and then stir in six or eight large, generous sweeps around the pan with a wooden spoon, turning the eggs over, until the eggs are done but still quite moist, 30 seconds to 1 minute.
Zucchini tortilla
Servings: 2
CITIZEN
Top, zucchini egg tortilla. Second from top, spinach leaves with sherry vinegar and poached eggs. Third from top, Rosa’s spinach and egg tortilla with pine nuts and raisins. Above, eggs scrambled with mushrooms and jamón.
gently pushing it down into the eggs. Heat the remaining 1 tablespoon of oil in the same skillet, over high heat. Pour in the egg-zucchini mixture. Immediately reduce the heat to low and swirl the pan for a few seconds to keep the eggs from sticking. Cook for about 3 minutes, until the bottom is golden and the tortilla is set. Firmly grasp handle of the pan in one hand; protectively drape a dish towel across the forearm and wrist of the other (or wear an oven mitt). Place a plate over the pan that’s large enough to cover it, then firmly press it to the pan so that nothing will spill out. Carefully and quickly invert the tortilla onto the plate, and then immediately slide the tortilla off the plate and back into the pan. Swirl the pan in a circular motion to settle the tortilla and keep it from sticking. Use a spatula to tuck any edges down. Cook for an additional 2 minutes or so, until firm yet still moist in the center. Invert the tortilla onto a clean plate. Dab off any excess oil with a paper towel. Let it cool for a bit before cutting into fat wedges.
Rosa’s spinach egg tortilla with pine nuts and raisins
Servings: 2 INGREDIENTS
1/4 cup seedless golden raisins
1/4 cup pine nuts
8 ounces fresh baby spinach leaves
3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
2 cloves garlic
3 large eggs
Salt STEPS
Soak the raisins in a small bowl of warm water for 10 minutes, then drain. Meanwhile, toast the pine nuts in a small, dry skillet over medium-low heat for several minutes, until fragrant and lightly browned. Cool completely.
Place the spinach in a bowl; wash/rinse in a couple of changes of water, then drain.
Heat 2 tablespoons of the oil in a 8- to 10-inch skillet over medium heat. Once the oil shimmers, add the garlic; cook for about 1 minute, until fragrant, then add the spinach and cook for about 5 minutes, stirring frequently until it has wilted. Transfer to a bowl, discarding the garlic.
Beat the eggs thoroughly in a mixing bowl. Season them lightly with salt.
Pour off any moisture from the spinach. Add the spinach to the eggs, along with the reserved raisins and pine nuts.
Heat the remaining tablespoon of oil in the same skillet, over high heat. Pour in the egg mixture. Immediately reduce the heat to low, swirling the pan for a few seconds to keep the eggs from sticking. Cook for about 3 minutes, or until the bottom is golden and the tortilla is set.
Firmly grasp the handle of the pan in one hand; protectively drape a dish towel across the forearm and wrist of the other (or wear an oven mitt).
Place a plate over the pan that’s large enough to cover it, then firmly press it to the pan so that nothing will spill out. Carefully and quickly invert the tortilla onto the plate, and then immediately slide the tortilla off the plate and back into the pan.
Divide between plates, lightly drizzle with oil, generously season with pepper and garnish with the parsley. Serve right away.
2 cloves garlic 2 zucchini (about 1 1/4 pounds total), rinsed and cut crosswise into thin rounds 4 large eggs
Salt
1 tablespoon minced fresh flatleaf parsley (optional) STEPS
INGREDIENTS 3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
Heat 2 tablespoons of the oil in an 8- to 10-inch skillet over me-
dium heat. Once the oil shimmers, add the garlic; cook for about 1 minute, until fragrant, then discard the garlic. Add the zucchini; cook for about 8 minutes, or until tender. Transfer to a bowl. Beat the eggs thoroughly in a mixing bowl. Season them lightly with salt and add the parsley, if using. Add the cooked zucchini,
Swirl the pan in a circular motion to settle the tortilla and keep it from sticking. Use a spatula to tuck any edges down. Cook for an additional 2 minutes or so, until firm yet still moist in the centre. Invert the tortilla onto a clean plate. Dab off any excess oil with a paper towel. Let it cool for a bit before cutting into fat wedges.
It
NORMAN
Sunday, February 17th, 2019 at 4:30am Vernon Harvey Norbraten stepped up to the tee in the sky!
Vern was born August 17th, 1932 in Southey, SK. After a number of years later his family moved to Nipawin, SK where his family farmed. In the fall of 1949 Vern came to PG to work in the logging industry with his 2 brothers. The next spring he returned home to Nipawin to help his father farm. It was in 1951 when he met the love of his life, Marlene. They were married in 1954 and moved to Prince George, BC. Vern and his brothers worked in the logging industry and soon decided to build a portable sawmill and “Norbraten Brothers Lumber LTD” was created. They were successful because of their hard work over many years. In 1959 Vern had a new home built and moved his family into town. By then they had three children and a fourth on the way. In the early 1960’s Vern had purchased some land with 2 other men. It wasn’t long before he was the sole owner. “What to do with it?” He decided to build a Golf Course for the average golfer to enjoy! His brothers had bought him out of the mill and he went right to work clearing the 105 acres of solid Aspen trees. Vern kept busy in the winters with jobs and coached Minor Hockey for many years. He was so proud of his teams! Many of his hockey teams spent numerous hours picking roots on what would soon be open fairways. Finally in 1971 Vern opened his 9 hole course, Aspen Grove Golf Course. Some may say a bit to early... as it was in pretty bad shape. The family knew nothing about the golf business but he learned in a hurry! Vern and his sons struggled to build the 2nd 9 holes and in 1986 Aspen Grove became 18 holes. Vern was forever grateful for the encouragement and help from his friend George as well as all our loyal golfers. The years went on and Aspen was open. Over those years Vern’s family joined him working at the course. You could find Vern either golfing, working, walking with Josie or napping on the course somewhere! He always had a great hiding spot! Vern looked forward to his golfing trips with 15 other buddies and always looking for the next “Hole in 1” - 3 wasn’t enough!
Vern was a Family man and was loved and respected by many. His laugh and sense of humor had been missed for a long time. Vern is survived by his wife of 64 years Marlene, Father to Lyn (John), Greg, Gary (Cheryl) and Ken (Amie). Papa to Jennifer (Neal), Jesse, Cordell, Kyle (Olivia), Kirk (Jen), Jennifer (Matt) and Laura. Great Papa to Kaylyn, Nicholas, Dyllan, Audrey, Emma and Lachlan. Uncle to Judy (Jim) and Vern and Great Uncle to many more.
A Celebration of Vern’s life will be held at Aspen Grove Golf Course at a later date. Our family would like to give very special thanks to the amazing staff at Simon Fraser Lodge. Vern was so well cared for over the last 5 years. He has joined his brothers Orville and Glenn once again.
Currencies
These are indicative wholesale rates for
provided by the Bank of
on Friday. Quotations in Canadian funds.
The markets today
Canada’s main stock index posted its 10th straight week of gains as it was bolstered Friday by a broad-based rally.
The S&P/TSX composite index closed up 69.24 points to 16,068.25 after hitting a fivemonth high.
The tone for the day was set early with strong data out of China, and wasn’t shaken later by data from Canada for the last three months of 2018 that showed the weakest quarterly economic performance since the middle of 2016, says Scott Guitard, vicepresident and portfolio manager at Fiduciary Trust Canada.
“I think overall, investors are looking for reasons for markets to go up, so sentiment overwhelmed everything else,” he said in an interview.
The softer GDP number showing the economy grew by an annualized pace of just 0.4 per cent was shrugged off to some extent because it reinforced the belief that the Bank of Canada will sit on its hands about raising interest rates, Guitard said.
The TSX was helped by gains in nine of the 11 major sectors led by technology, consumer discretionary and energy stocks.
The key energy sector was up 0.84 per cent despite a 2.5 per cent drop in the price of crude oil.
The April crude contract was down $1.42 at US$55.80 per barrel and the April natural gas contract was up 4.7 cents at US$2.86 per mmBTU.
A broad array of Canadian energy producers, including Canadian Natural Resources, Enbridge Inc. and TransCanada Corp., saw their stocks rise a day after the Alberta government raised its quota for producers by 25,000 barrels per day for April, the second easing since it imposed quotas designed to keep 325,000 bpd off the market starting Jan. 1.
“Canadian oil prices still look good relative to where they’ve been and now with the ease of the curtailments it’s a positive for the energy sector in Canada,” said Guitard.
The Canadian dollar traded at an average of 75.41 cents compared with an average of 75.94 cents US on Thursday. It lost ground in response to the weak GDP numbers.
The April gold contract was down US$16.90 at US$1,299.20 an ounce and the May copper contract was down 1.6 cents at US$2.93 a pound.
In New York, the Dow Jones industrial average was up 110.32 points at 26,026.32. The S&P 500 index was up 19.20 points at 2,803.69, while the Nasdaq composite was up 62.82 points at 7,595.35.
Brits hunkering down for Brexit
Citizen news service
For almost as long as Britain and the European Union have been wrangling over Brexit, Melvin Burton has been preparing for a bumpy landing.
He’s growing vegetables, drying fruit and buying in bulk. He reels off the cornucopia of cans filling his shed and the cupboard under his stairs: “Tomato sauce, chopped tomatoes, corned beef, tuna, honey, baked beans, tins of ham. Cat food, of course, because I don’t want them to go hungry.”
“I started buying stuff about a year and a half ago,” said the 45-year-old, who lives with his wife and eight-year-old son in a village near Cambridge in eastern England. “No one seemed to be accepting that there was a real problem.”
Plenty of people think there is a problem now.
Britain is scheduled to leave the EU in less than a month, on March 29, but its departure terms are still unknown. A U.K.-EU deal designed to ensure a smooth departure has been rejected by Britain’s Parliament, and lawmakers are due to vote in mid-March on three starkly differing options: leave with a deal, leave without a deal or postpone Brexit. Quitting the bloc without a deal would, overnight, bring tariffs, customs checks and other barriers between Britain and the EU, and could lead to gridlock to British ports.
U.K. officials and companies have been bracing for potential trade disruption by stockpiling everything from ice cream and chocolate cookies to medicines and body bags. But the government still warned this week that British people and businesses are unprepared for the shock of a “no-deal” exit.
Britain imports almost a third of its food from the EU – even more during the early spring “hunger gap,” when domestic crops have yet to be harvested and retailers rely on fresh produce from Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands and further afield.
Supermarket chief executives have warned the government that Britain’s available storage space is full, and “even if there were more space it is impossible to stockpile fresh produce, such as salad leaves and fresh fruit.”
The government says there will be severe disruption to freight across the English Channel and “reduced availability and choice of products,” especially fresh fruit and vegetables, if Britain leaves the EU on March 29 without a divorce deal. And it has warned that “there is a risk that consumer behaviour could exacerbate, or create, shortages in this scenario.”
Some people, like Burton, are taking no chances. He’s a member of a Facebook group titled “48 Percent Preppers,” with more than 10,000 members. The name refers to the 48 per cent of electors who voted to remain in the
“Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.”
— Mark Twain Call 250-562-2441
EU in Britain’s 2016 referendum. “Remain” voters make up the bulk of Brexit hoarders; “leave” supporters are apt to dismiss warnings of food and medicine shortages as “Project Fear.”
Members of the group and several similar online forums swap tips on what to buy and how to store it, whether to stock up on fuel and how to knit their own clothes. Others have seen a commercial opportunity. One company in northern England sells “Brexit boxes” containing freeze-dried food, a water filter and a fire-starter for almost 300 pounds ($400).
In London, seed importer Paolo Arrigo put together 12 months’ worth of easy-togrow seed packets – carrots, beans, lettuce, pumpkin, tomatoes – and labelled it a Brexit Vegetable Growing Survival Kit. He has sold hundreds in a few weeks.
“By sowing something each month, you can harvest something each month,” said Arrigo, who runs his family’s business, Seeds of Italy. “And that means that you’ve got a supply of fresh vegetables to feed your family in case there’s any interruption in supplies.”
Arrigo’s business is relatively Brexit-proof, because “seeds sell better in a crisis.” But he thinks leaving the EU is a big mistake, and understands why people are worried.
“I had never heard the word ‘preppers’ before a month ago, and I kind of assumed it was Americans who were buying guns and ammo
and tinned food and water,” Arrigo said. “Now I belong to four Brexit preppers websites. Whether you agree with it or not, it is a thing. People are stockpiling, and that is because of the uncertainty.
“That’s where we are as a country: digging for Brexit,” he said, echoing a Second World War campaign urging Britons to grow vegetables and “dig for victory.”
Many Britons think the Brexit preppers are overreacting, and they remain a minority. Bank of England Governor Mark Carney said this week that “we’re not picking up evidence of household stockpiling in any material sense.”
Some skeptics compare Brexit hoarding to the Y2K millennium bug: a catastrophe that never came to pass.
But Burton, who tests software for a living, says internet meltdown was avoided at the turn of the millennium because “we spent vast quantities of people and money and man hours making sure it didn’t happen.”
He’s not confident Britain is that well prepared for Brexit – though he hopes he’s wrong.
“I would be very, very happy if it turns out that none of this is going to be necessary,” Burton said.
“This is a pain in the neck. I’d rather not be doing all this. I would rather be coming home, worrying about what I’m going to watch on Netflix and then ordering an Indian takeaway.”
Top, Melvin Burton holds up stored provisions in his garden shed in Littleport, Cambridgeshire, England, on Friday. Above, Paolo Arrigo of Seeds of Italy fills up a Brexit Vegetable Growing Survival kit bag, at his company store in London.
LGBT vote divides Methodists
Citizen news service
Dumbarton United Methodist Church is the oldest United Methodist congregation in Washington, District of Columbia, dating back almost 200 years before the United Methodist denomination was created –even back before the United States was created.
On Wednesday, when the church’s minister, the Rev. Mary Kay Totty, traveled back to Washington from a groundbreaking meeting in St. Louis where the denomination decided to uphold its opposition to same-sex marriage and LGBT clergy, she thought that centuries-old history might be at a breaking point.
“To think of not being Methodist,” she said, then stopped, unable to complete the sentence. Dumbarton voted to affirm gay worshipers more than 30 years ago, and the church has performed 20 same-sex marriages since 2010, breaking the rules of the denomination every time. Now such actions will be met with much harsher penalties. “I will not comply with unjust rules,” Totty said. “At this point, all possibilities are on the table for consideration, whether that’s affiliating with another denomination, starting a new Methodist denomination, or remaining in this denomination and continuing to work for justice.”
The meeting in St. Louis, which concluded on Tuesday evening with 53 per cent of the clergy and lay leaders from around the world voting in favor of the “traditional plan” to keep banning same-sex marriages and non-celibate gay clergy, was meant to settle once and for all this question that has divided Methodists for years.
Instead, LGBT advocates and scores of American pastors left the meeting vowing that the fight was far from finished. Many pledged to continue disobeying the church’s rules, or to attempt to vote on the question again at the denomination’s meeting in 2020. And some spoke tentatively of splitting from the United Methodist Church altogether.
“We’ve had the schism. We just don’t know what’s next,” said Andrew Ponder Williams, a candidate for ministry in the church who is in a same-sex marriage, and who previously chaired a denominational committee on LGBT issues. “Yesterday ended us as we’ve been.”
To avert such a break, many bishops of the church, and many LGBT advocates, had backed the “one church plan,” which would have allowed every pastor to decide individually whether to perform gay marriages and ordain gay clergy. On the floor of the stadium where the former St. Louis Rams once played, the delegates voted down that plan.
Instead, the plan approved by the delegates hardens the denomination’s approach to rulebreakers. It closes loopholes that conservatives believed had allowed some LGBT people to be ordained as clergy and some bishops to avoid enforcing the rules. It enacts new across-the-board standards for punishing ministers who perform same-sex weddings: a minimum one-year suspension without pay for the first wedding, and permanent removal from ministry for the second.
At the same time, the delegates voted in a plan to allow churches to leave the denomination more smoothly over the question of sexuality, opening a window for local churches to leave by the end of 2023 and to retain their property, including church buildings. The question of building ownership when a church leaves has led to lawsuits and bitter infighting in other denominations, a prospect the Methodists wanted to avoid.
With more than six million members, the United Methodist Church is the United States’s third-largest faith group. While most evangelical denominations condemn same-sex relationships as sinful, Methodists stand almost alone among mainline denominations in not performing gay marriages, in contrast to the Episcopal Church, the Presbyterian Church (USA), the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the United Church of Christ and more.
Most of those denominations saw conservative churches leave the body when they opted for gay marriage, often provoking fights over ownership of church property. Now, the United Methodist Church faces the opposite prospect: saying no to gay marriage, and seeing liberal churches leave. Unlike the other denominations which
are largely American, less than 60 per cent of United Methodist churches are in the United States. Much of the rest of the voting power rests with African churches, which tend to be far more conservative on questions of sexuality.
In the United States as well, Methodists are more conservative than other mainline Protestants. Pew Research Center found in 2014 that 54 per cent lean Republican and 35 per cent lean Democrat, a significantly more Republican tilt than other mainline denominations. Just 15 per cent of Methodists describe themselves as “liberal,” compared to 22 per cent of mainline Presbyterians, 24 per cent of mainline Lutherans and 29 per cent of Episcopalians.
Opinions on sexuality are deeply split among American Methodists, though trending toward acceptance – Pew found that 51 per cent said homosexuality should be accepted in 2007, and 60 per cent said so in 2014.
The church is geographically distributed across the United States, from coastal cities to rural regions. And the church is aging –almost one-third of members are over age 65 and another third are 50 to 64, while just nine per cent of members are 18 to 29, Pew found in 2014.
The demographic trends point away from ever approving gay marriage in the church, argued John Lomperis, a Methodist who works for the conservative group Institute on Religion and Democracy. “This clearly was a historic turning point,” he said. “If they couldn’t win now, how are they going to win in the future, when there will be fewer delegates from more liberal areas of the States and more delegates from Africa?”
While Methodist churches in Africa are growing, membership in the U.S. has been shrinking. The United Methodist Church, the third-largest U.S. faith group after
Catholics and Southern Baptists, represents 3.6 per cent of Americans by the most recent count, down from 5.1 per cent in 2007, according to Pew.
Methodist leaders who fought for unity a day ago were mulling some sort of division after the meeting ended. The Rev. James Howell, an author who leads a 5,300-member church in Charlotte with a diversity of political views in its pews, was one of the leaders pushing the one-church plan that failed. “Periodically, people would say, ‘Let’s talk about a new denomination. Let’s talk about where to go.’ We the leaders really pushed back. Our goal is unity,” he said. On Wednesday, he was reconsidering. “At this point, there’s a lot of feeling from centrists and from moderates, much less progressives, that the kind of far right conservatives – the Russians, the Africans –they don’t want to be with us. They want to be rid of us. That grieves me, but I think it’s just a reality.”
As he headed back to Charlotte, he sent a mass text to all his church members, and watched his phone blow up with their reactions – many heartbroken, others pleased. “We’re going to have dissolutions and departures, and those institutions (like hospitals and schools) are going to break down,” he said, noting that one-church proponents had prepared “no plan” in advance to start a new denomination.
Adam Hamilton, who leads the nation’s largest United Methodist church, in Kansas, was one of the most high-profile proponents of the failed one-church plan. Some members of his congregation have said they plan to leave, but most churchgoers care about their individual pastor and community, not the denomination, he said.
“I don’t want to leave,” he said. “But I don’t want to stay long-term if we are going to continue to treat gays and lesbians as
second class in our churches.” He plans to gather Methodist leaders from around the country at his church to discuss options in May.
The Rev. Donna Claycomb Sokol, who leads Mount Vernon Place United Methodist Church in the District, said her phone started ringing early in the morning as congregants at her LGBT-welcoming church voiced their hurt at the decision. She said she’d like to stay in the denomination, and she predicts that few churches will leave. Her members, however, have already told her they will be hesitant to donate to the church, knowing some of their money will go to the denomination.
“I would not want to be a denominational official right now trying to gauge how much money’s not going to come in,” she said. “It was almost flabbergasting for people to not see the financial implications of a decision like this.”
And for gay clergy, and those who ordain gay clergy and marry gay believers, the question is the opposite: not just whether they will leave the church, but whether the church will force them to leave it.
The Rev. Angela Flanagan, a bisexual pastor at Silver Spring United Methodist Church in Maryland, said she won’t leave on her own accord. “We’re severely disappointed and hurt, but we remain undeterred,” she said. “Part of our role in the UMC is to hold it to account.”
Ponder Williams, the married gay man pursuing ordination to the clergy, struggled to put the feeling into words. “We love our church so much, and we believe in its purpose so much, that we are willing to be leaders and participants and active members in an institution in which more than half of its members – more than half – believe that we should be in jail,” he said. “There’s no Hallmark card for that.”
CITIZEN NEWS SERVICE PHOTOS
Top, J.J. Warren of New York embraces Julie Arms Meeks of Atlanta during protests outside the United Methodist Church’s 2019 Special Session of the General Conference in St. Louis. Above, the Rev. K Karen, left, of St. Paul & St. Andrew United Methodist Church in New York joins other protesters in song and prayer.