Bandits cut down Spruce Kings in national final
Ted CLARKE Citizen staff
tclarke@pgcitizen.ca
BROOKS, Alta — The Brooks Bandits are national junior A hockey champions and they have the Prince George Spruce Kings to thank for showing them how to get there.
The Bandits thrilled their fans among the capacity hometown crowd of 2,515 that packed into Centennial Regional Arena Sunday afternoon when they beat the Spruce Kings 4-3 in the championship final.
Simon Boyko scored two goals, including the winner 16:13 into the second period. The Bandits led 4-1 at that point and had to withstand a determined comeback attempt from the Spruce Kings, who came close to forcing the game into overtime.
After nearly nine months of hockey, dating back to the start of training camps in late August, the Spruce Kings and Bandits, who had never played each other, developed a heated rivalry over the past three weeks which culminated in Sunday’s final. Leading into the national tournament the Bandits lost a six-game Doyle Cup series to the Spruce Kings for the Pacific region title.
“I believe losing the Doyle Cup is the only reason we won this tournament, and that’s the credit that Prince George gets,” said Bandits head coach and general manager Ryan Papaioannou. “We’re a way better team because of Prince George. They beat us four times
in nine days and we’d only lost six times in nine months before that.
“I honestly believe they’re the reason that we won. They’re the best team we’ve seen all year and
going into this weekend I was sceptical that we’d be able to beat them two times. We had to hang on at the end, it was a good thing we had a 3-0 lead.”
Bandits defenceman Brandon Scanlin said coming home to familiar surroundings in Brooks after the Doyle Cup loss and playing in front of their fans for the national trophy provided comfort to his team and brought out the best in them.
“We had a little trouble in the Doyle Cup series in Prince George but we just refocused and came back and it’s a great feeling,” said Scanlin.
“We knew we weren’t going to play there in (the national tournament). They really showed us that there’s better, faster teams and if we don’t adjust it could be a tough competition.”
The Bandits could not have asked for a better start. They scored their first of the game just 93 seconds in. Boyko skated out from behind the net with the and filed a high backhander in over Logan Neaton’s shoulder.
Six minutes later, Randy Hernandez fed a pass across to AJHL scoring champion William Lemay and he fired a laser from the point that rippled the mesh.
The Kings’ attack looked slow and disorganized with passes missing their targets and players caught out of position the Bandits made them look bad.
Shots were 9-2 in their favour through 13 minutes when they struck again.
Brooks captain Nathan Plessis scored his first of the tournament, taking advantage of a poor clearing attempt by the Kings that was picked off at the blueline.
Nick Hale let go a shot that Plessis tipped on goal and he got to the rebound and put it in. By the time the shooting stopped for the first intermission the shell-shocked Kings were down 3-0, looking for a solutions. Their power play provided that glimmer of hope, 2:22 into the second period.
Max Coyle took the shot from the point and the puck bounced off goalie Pierce Charleson right to Patrick Cozzi and he scored with a wrister from the slot. Cozzi, one of the leading scorers for the Kings, suffered a high-ankle sprain in the Kings’ 2-1 semifinal win Saturday night over the Oakville Blades and that required a tape job from trainer Rick Brown just so Cozzi could play Sunday.
After skating in quicksand much of the opening period the Kings picked up the pace considerably in the second period and matched the Bandits’ speed, resulting in plenty of offensive zone time and scoring chances.
But Boyko restored the threegoal lead late in the second period, cashing in the only quality chance the Bandits could generate in the period. He took Hale’s perfect stretch pass just over the blueline, applied the brakes in the face-off circle and snapped a high shot in behind Neaton.
If that wasn’t tough enough for the Kings to swallow, 33 seconds later they lost Ben Brar, their leading goalscorer, for the rest of the game. — see ‘IT HURTS, page 9
HOCKEY CANADA HANDOUT PHOTO BY MATTHEW MURNAGHAN
Prince George Spruce Kings captain Ben Poisson, right, battles for the puck behind the Spruce Kings’ net during the final match of the 2019 National Junior A Championship at the Centennial Regional Arena in Brooks, Alta. on Sunday. The Brooks Bandits beat Prince George 4-3.
CITIZEN STAFF PHOTO
Spruce Kings fan Nancy Turner shows her true colours while her favourite team warmed up for a game at the 2019 National Junior A hockey championship in Brooks, Alta.
CITIZEN PHOTO BY JAMES DOYLE
Green thumb
Jodi Schulz looks for the perfect addition to her garden on Sunday at UNBC during the annual David Douglas Botanical Garden Society plant sale. Schulz was first in line for event arriving at 9 a.m. to claim her spot in the line-up.
Prince George court docket
From Prince George provincial court, May 13-16, 2019:
• Martin Craig Bellwood was issued a one-year $500 recognizance after an allegation of causing fear of injury or damage.
• William Everett Inyallie (born 1973) was sentenced to one year probation for mischief. Inyallie was in custody for 27 days prior to sentencing.
• Daniel George Turcotte (born 1978) was prohibited from driving for one year and fined $2,000 for dangerous driving.
• Shayne Alexander Davis (born 1996) was sentenced to one day in jail for theft $5,000 or under and to one year probation on the count plus a count of breaching an undertaking. Davis was in custody for one day prior to sentencing.
• Perry Robert Wells Hogan (born 1990) was sentenced to seven days in jail and six months probation for breaching probation. Hogan was in custody for 50 days
prior to sentencing.
• Ronda Marleen Beaune (born 1975) was prohibited from driving for one year and fined $1,000 for failing or refusing to provide a breath sample.
• Erika Britt Mattson (born 1987) was sentenced to nine days in jail for breaching an undertaking or recognizance. Mattson was in custody for two days prior to sentencing.
• Brendan Michael Clark (born 1990) was fined $100 plus a $100 victim surcharge for possessing a controlled substance.
• Shane Danile Coulas (born 1997) was sentenced to zero days for breaching probation. Coulas was in custody for 30 days prior to sentencing.
• David Adrian Jensen (born 1990) was prohibited from driving for one year and fined $1,000 for driving with a blood-alcohol level over .08.
• Erich Philip Larden (born 1996)
was sentenced to 30 days in jail, served on an intermittent basis an prohibited from driving for two years for failing or refusing to provide a breath sample.
• Shana Diane Perry (born 1979) was prohibited from driving for one year and fined $750 plus a $112.50 victim surcharge for driving while prohibited or licence suspended under the Motor Vehicle Act.
• Jonah Savard (born 1996) was sentenced to one year probation for theft $5,000 or under, possessing a weapon for a dangerous purpose and willfully resisting or obstructing a peace officer. Savard was in custody for 52 days prior to sentencing.
• James Andrew Schooley (born 1978) was sentenced to one day in jail for breaching an undertaking or recognizance.
• Hannah Kris West (born 1968) was fined $1,000 plus a $150 victim surcharge for driving without
a driver’s licence under the Motor Vehicle Act.
• Robert Henry Erickson (born 1986) was sentenced to six days in jail and one year probation for assault. Erickson was in custody for three days prior to sentencing.
• Jennifer Sharon Innes (born 1982) was sentenced to 18 months probation and ordered to provide a DNA sample for assault with a weapon, to three days in jail for breaching an undertaking or recognizance and to zero days for two separate counts of breaching an undertaking or recognizance, all committed in Prince Rupert. Innes was in custody for 76 days prior to sentencing.
• Shannon Lee Giles (born 1970) was sentenced to 14 months in jail and three years probation, ordered to provide a DNA sample and issued a 10-year sexual offender prohibition for accessing child pornography and making or publishing child pornography.
Missing kids found
The Canadian Press COQUITLAM — After getting lost hiking and spending the night alone on steep terrain, two kids have been rescued Monday morning from Burke Mountain in Coquitlam. Search and Rescue search manager Ian MacDonald said a father who went hiking with his seven-year-old son and a six-year-old daughter – visitors from Georgia – got off course and ended up slipping down a creek bed. The father and kids were trying to get to Munro Lake to do some fishing but didn’t know the area too well, MacDonald said at a news conference Monday.
“At some point the kids took a bit of a fall and the dad thought this was a dangerous situation,” MacDonald said.
The father asked the kids to stay put while he made a difficult trek of about two kilometres over very steep rugged terrain with no trails and through dense forest until he could call for help, he said. Search and Rescue got a call around 7 p.m. Sunday evening and had 12 people from Coquitlam, North Shore and Maple Ridge searching the area overnight, he said. The team also used a helicopter, drone and police dog to aid the effort.
“It is a miracle,” MacDonald said. The father spent the night at a hospital but the children have no injuries, MacDonald said. He said over the years the team has conducted multiple rescues in the same area because it tends to funnel people down.
“It starts off quite gentle up at the top and then the lower you go, it gets into very steep terrain and waterfalls.”
MacDonald said search and rescuers followed a “trail of bread crumbs” finding a backpack and shoes that the father lost along the way. He commended the kids who stayed put where the father had left them. “Search and rescue is difficult enough without having a moving target so the kids did a great job,” he said.
German singer Jomila has deep roots in city
Frank PEEBLES Citizen staff
fpeebles@pgcitizen.ca
Singer-songwriter Jomila knows her way around Prince George uncannily well for a foreigner. She may be from Germany, but this is one of her many second homes. She has been a resident of Tel Aviv, Warsaw, travelled extensively in the Asia-Pacific region, and now she is performing for the first time in Prince George.
Performing, but not visiting. Jomila is the daughter of John Werlberger, a longtime Prince George resident who moved to Germany (now in Austria) and married Barbara. They had three children, Marie, Mark and this wanderlusting minstrel who is here on her own for this musical journey.
It’s actually not fair to say she’s on her own. Her aunt and uncle, Christina and Matt Reid, her cousins Victoria and Dean, and her grandparents Eva and John are here in P.G. helping to make this a homecoming as well as a tour stop.
“In 2010 I did a school year at D.P. Todd,” said Jomila. “I was 14 and decided it was time to go to Canada, this place that was so connected with me, and explore life a bit. I stayed with my aunt, who also went to D.P. Todd, dad went to D.P. Todd, and my cousin is graduating from D.P. Todd so I’ll get to be here for that.”
Jomila was back to P.G. in 2012 for a brief visit but hasn’t returned until now.
Since then, she has gotten her undergraduate degree and a masters in psychology. She applies her degree towards the mentality
of business, working for Deloitte in Berlin. She loved that Prince George also had a branch of that international company.
She also gets to apply her psych knowledge to songwriting, her true passion.
“So many people work their asses off and then do nothing at the end of the workday, but I might work on a song or perform a show, so I love having that balance between business and creativity,”
Northern Health part of push for fresh, local hospital food
The Canadian Press
Wild salmon with lemon dill sauce, blueberry soup and bone broth may be high-end restaurant meals but they’re also on the menu at some Canadian hospitals aiming to meet recovering patients’ nutritional and cultural needs.
The recipes are among dozens that have been developed by 26 people, including food-service managers, chefs and dieticians who were offered two-year fellowships at hospitals from British Columbia to Newfoundland and Labrador as part of a campaign called Nourish Health.
Its goal is to help create institutional policies through nourishing meals made from locally bought ingredients for patients who may have been accustomed to powdered mashed potatoes as a mainstay of “hospital food.”
Norish Health spokeswoman Hayley Lapalme said the initiative, predominately funded by the McConnell Foundation, also aims to elevate the role of food as an important part of healing, though food services are categorized with other expenditures such as laundry and parking.
Two hospitals in Haida Gwaii have been part of the program that has allowed staff to use traditional ingredients such as wild salmon, cod and halibut in the region where half the population is Indigenous.
Shelly Crack, a dietician for Northern Health, said much of the food served at the facilities was brought in from other provinces and countries, adding to transportation and environmental costs when fish, berries and vegetables were available locally.
“A lot of our elders like the salmon served lightly seasoned with salt and pepper, with sauces served on the side,” said Crack, adding traditional foods have helped people connect to positive experiences from their early years, and that has promoted healing.
“It almost brings them right back to the land and memories of family and harvesting food. It’s that connection to culture and family, this feeling of well-being.”
Health-care policy leaders, doctors and those involved in the national fellowship met at the Food for Health Symposium in Toronto last week to showcase
sustainable recipes that could be included on hospital menus in 2030, decades after governments across the country contracted out food services at most facilities as a cost-saving measure.
Alex Munter, CEO of the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario, said the Ottawa facility became the first in Canada to introduce room service 15 years ago.
He said offerings like dim sum, butter chicken and tacos drove up patients’ satisfaction with food from 30 per cent to 98 per cent while lowering expenses because food was being eaten, not tossed in the garbage.
“We’re about healing and nourishing and not about feeding,” Munter said of the room-service model most common in the U.S.
“Since 2015, we’ve been providing local and sustainable menus for patients and families,” he said.
“If your child is here you can order off the menu as well as in the cafeteria.”
Munter said the hospital’s chef, Simon Wiseman, is among the 26 “innovators” in the Nourish initiative and created a tofu dish in a competition at the symposium.
The focus was zero waste, and even the plate was made of wheat, Munter said.
Toronto chef Joshna Maharaj said she helped create a healthy menu at the Scarborough Hospital in Ontario as part of a one-year pilot project in 2011, when she cooked food on site with staff whose cooking skills had gone to waste after years of reheating trucked-in frozen meals.
However, she said the program was not continued due to unrelated policy changes.
Maharaj said food served at most hospitals may be deemed nutritiously adequate, but it falls far short of what is healthy for sick people, as she recently learned after a day surgery that required a tube to be put down her throat.
She said a slushie or a sorbet would have been ideal but she decided ice cubes and ginger ale would suffice after “a most pitiful egg salad sandwich with dry corners” got stuck to the roof of her mouth.
“The deep insult of it was what hit me,” Maharaj said, adding she’s decided to spend her career advocating for healthy, enjoyable hospital food.
Jomila said. She said she primarily writes songs in English, even though she could make a long career out of performing exclusively in the German regions of Europe, or reaching out to the Germanic diaspora worldwide. The reason she creates in English, though, is because the songs come from such a personal internal space that she likes having a layer of protection from that
vulnerability. Here, though, is where that introspection comes to the surface, where everyone in the audience will know exactly what it all means, at least linguistically.
“I don’t know how it really happens. I just sort of feel it,” said Jomila describing the composing process.
“I’ll put my phone on, improvise for an hour, hour and a half, then later I’ll listen through it all again and start making arrangements
and adding depth to the ideas. I have songwriter friends who sit down and map out each line, formulating rhymes, making it all formal. That’s really more poetry, to me. I’m more spontaneous. If a word comes to me that doesn’t fit so well but it feels right to me, then I’ll still go with that word.”
She is 23 and of the generation of performers that doesn’t automatically design their work with the end goal of producing an album.
She hopes to one day have one, but so far her songs have circulated the globe via Spotify, YouTube, and the oldest musician’s trick in the book: live performance.
She will be doing that in Prince George tonight at Nancy O’s starting at 8 p.m. Admission is by donation.
When it happens, she said, her dad – who grew up playing drums in local bands, and, along with their singing mother, passing music on to all of his children – is going to get a big surprise.
“I can’t believe I’m sitting here with The Citizen, and you found me, I didn’t go to you. Because every week, even still, we get links sent to us from dad of all the news in The Citizen that he wants us to know about Prince George. I never know what to do with that information. I’m not telling him about this, my family is keeping it to themselves as well, because we know his daughter is suddenly going to pop up in his readings of The Citizen and I wish I could be there to see his face when it happens.”
At least in Prince George we can all be there to hear her songs when they happen in her debut local concert.
Province, Northern Health look to reduce redundant bus services
Jeremy HAINSWORTH Glacier Media
Finding efficiencies in duplicated northern bus services remains under discussion for B.C.’s Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure and Northern Health, Minister Claire Trevena says.
“We continue to talk with Northern Health to ensure we are being cost effective,” Trevena said. “We don’t want to duplicate services.”
A Glacier Media investigation published May 1 found B.C. taxpayers have paid more than $31 million since 2012 to subsidize almost-daily northern bus services by a private company on runs Greyhound ran at market costs but abandoned last year partly due to subsidized competition.
It was the Northern Health Connections (NHC) service run by the health authority since 2007 that Greyhound cited as an example of unfair, taxpayer-
subsidized competition when it abandoned its western Canadian services in 2018. Greyhound said NHC fares for routes significantly undercut its own.
Between 2012 and 2018, Diversified Transportation, a subsidiary of Calgary-based Pacific Western Transportation, which operates both BC Bus North and NHC, received $21.3 million from Northern Health, vendor payment documents show.
Greyhound said subsidies to NHC covered 80 per cent to 90 per cent of fare costs, competition Greyhound cited as unfair.
Greyhound’s final one-way fare from Prince Rupert to Vancouver was $213 compared with the $40 NHC currently charges.
NHC riders are supposed to present valid medical certificates for travel.
The province pumped $2 million into BC Bus North last June at Trevena’s direction to have an interim solution between Greyhound’s departure and the
establishment of a full service.
The provincially funded BC Bus North partially duplicates or fills gaps in the NHC service. Health authority spokesman Steve Raper said while the two services cater to different passengers, work is underway to optimize the two.
“The idea is that you’re not going to have the buses operating at the same times,” he said.
Raper explained that the health bus operates to dovetail with the health system and to get patients to appointments during office hours. He said the service tries to keep overnight medical trips to a minimum.
Raper said routing has also changed as services become available in different communities. He said it was once the case that anyone needing an MRI in the north would need to travel to Prince George. With that technology now available in Fort St. John and Terrace, travel needs have shifted.
HANDOUT PHOTO
German singer-songwriter Jomila will be performing at Nancy O’s tonight at 8 p.m. Jomila has family ties to the city, and attended D.P. Todd Secondary School.
Vaisakhi Parade
ABOVE: A chakar is spun during a Gatka demonstration at Guru Nanak Darbar Gurdwara on Saturday before the start of the Guru Nanak Darbar Sikh Society of Prince George Nagar Kirtan – Vaisakhi Parade. Starting from Guru Nanak Darbar Gurdwara on Davis Road, the parade made its way down Ospika Boulevard to CN Centre.
LEFT: The Guru Nanak Darbar Sikh Society of Prince George Nagar Kirtan – Vaisakhi Parade makes its way down Ospika Boulevard on Saturday. BELOW LEFT: Volunteers dish up food at the Guru Nanak Darbar Soccer Club booth at CN Centre on Saturday.
BELOW RIGHT: A tractor is driven in the The Guru Nanak Darbar Sikh Society of Prince George Nagar Kirtan – Vaisakhi Parade on Saturday.
BOTTOM LEFT: Martial artists spar with tulwars (curved swords) and dhals (shields) during a Gatka demonstration on Saturday before the start of The Guru Nanak Darbar Sikh Society of Prince George Nagar Kirtan – Vaisakhi Parade.
BOTTOM RIGHT: A martial artist demonstrates techniques with a khanda (straight sword) during a Gatka demonstration on Saturday.
The long weekend in pictures
ABOVE: Clam Lydia (red helmet) tries to get around blockers from the other team on Sunday at the PG Dome. The Rated PG Roller Derby team held a scrimmage that featured skaters from leagues in Prince George, Quesnel, Haida Gwaii, Smithers and Terrace.
RIGHT: Jeremey Pope of Garibaldi Highlands leads the pack around the track at Rolling Mix Supertrak BMX Park on Sunday morning during the Supertrak BMX Ride for Life.
BELOW LEFT: Blacksmith Mike Hardeman puts on a demonstration on Monday at Huble Homestead’s annual Spring on the Homestead event.
BELOW RIGHT: Under the watchful eye of Prince George firefighter Jason Geddes, Rachel Aussem takes control of the bucket of a ladder truck on Saturday afternoon at Fire Hall No. 1. Aussem is learning to work in dispatch as part of the Student in the Workplace Program which allows students to see if they want to pursue a career with the fire department.
BOTTOM LEFT: The Little Prince steam engine makes its way around Lheidli T’enneh Memorial Park on Saturday afternoon during its first day of the season.
BOTTOM RIGHT: Dick Voneugen speaks at the DutchCanadian Tulip Commemoration Ceremony on Saturday near the steps of city hall. Roughly 40 people attended the ceremony that is meant to celebrate the anniversary of the liberation of the Netherlands and to honour the 74th anniversary of the first gift of 100,000 Dutch tulip bulbs sent to Canada as a symbol of appreciation for the role Canadian soldiers played during the Second World War.
Legislature’s poor oversight exposed
Beverley McLachlin outlined the elaborate flow chart that supposedly illustrates how accountability and responsibility are handled at the B.C. legislature.
Then the former chief justice of the Supreme Court of Canada made the key observation that explains the groundwork for the spending scandal that engulfed ex-legislature clerk Craig James: “I have learned that, in reality, this structure was not always respected.”
She picked up on a subtle flaw in the legal design of the elaborate hierarchy: it looks good only on paper.
The “permanent officers” of the legislature, such as the clerk and sergeant-at-arms Gary Lenz, whom she cleared of all allegations, had little accountability. Lines were blurred and it “created a space where self-interested opportunism could trump the interests of the legislative assembly.”
The lack of organizational clarity
IN THE FAST LEYNE
LES LEYNE
made for cracks, through which all the power flowed to James.
McLachlin itemized in detail how he misused it. Some of the instances are small change in the multimillion-dollar enterprise that is the legislature. But they add up to a dismaying picture of a sense of entitlement in an individual whose wide-ranging authority became entrenched.
Her dissection of some of his unconvincing explanations is just as dismaying.
He bought a thousand-dollar suit in London and a $600 shirt and accessories, then charged them to taxpayers as “uniform” costs. Then he told McLachlin it was OK because he was revamping the uniform. She didn’t buy it. She found they were bought for his personal use and charging the
legislature for them constituted misconduct.
He bought $2,136 worth of luggage on jaunts to London and Hong Kong and said he was setting up a “luggage bank” for MLAs.
To sum up the tone of McLachlin’s conclusion: give me a break. She found he never told MLAs about their luggage bank. None of them ever used it. It was only offered as a reason after he was questioned about the expense by an uncomfortable financial officer. And the luggage wound up at his home.
She went through all the charges levelled by Speaker Darryl Plecas in his January report, dismissing some and upholding others. It’s when she got to the more expensive claims that the gravity of the case sinks in.
She said James pursued two separate and overlapping claims for life insurance and death benefits. There was no evidence he wanted a policy covering all staff – the efforts were just for himself and were outside of established policy.
YOUR LETTERS
Keep religion out of public schools
Saturday’s Citizen presented an article on the rise of public school Bible studies in the United States.
Demographically, America has a far greater slice of its population who self-identify as evangelical than does Canada.
Thirty per cent or more is the figure normally used compared with under ten per cent in Canada.
The southern states – the former Confederacy – have the highest numbers.
Surveys showed a large growth in the late 20th century but are now noting a slight decline, especially amongst the young.
As an example of that difference, many American politicans openly espouse Christian doctrine as part of their political campaigns.
In Canada, Stephen Harper took pains to keep his fundamentalism out of public view.
The former Reform Party, now part of the Conservatives, had many members, such as its leader Stockwell Day who were openly fundamentalist Christians, but even they respected the boundaries between their faith and politics.
Multicultural Canada is more secular without the necessity of concluding every political
speech with ”God bless America/ Canada.”
So, with that distinction in mind, could the same happen in Canadian schools?
To some degree, it already has.
And it has been that way for decades.
In Alberta, the Catholic School system runs parallel with the public schools.
Both are publicly funded. Statistically, almost 40 per cent of Canadians are Catholic with under 30 per cent in other Christian affiliations.
Private religious schools dot the landscape in all provinces.
In the U.S., almost half are some variety of Protestant with another 23 per cent Catholic.
While both countries are almost 70 per cent self-identified Christian, the difference is remarkable.
In my opinion, the public school systems in Canada have been and should remain secular.
Any attempt to follow Kentucky would soon become a political nightmare for the school board that attempted to do so.
That difference is magnified by differences in our societies.
Canadians are quietly religious save for some communities – Ab-
botsford and the Okanagan come to mind.
In the U.S., rigorous religious affiliation is openly part of the political process – candidates for office often put their religious affiliation front and centre like George W. Bush.
While much is made of the American separation of church and state, since the fall of the Duplessis regime in Quebec and the collapse of the Social Credit party, religion seems to have only a minor impact politically in most of Canada.
I have respect for those who hold any strong religious belief even if I do not share their faith. This is true especially when they respect my right to hold a different belief.
Teaching Christianity in multicultural public schools is wrong and contrary to the American separation of church and state doctrine and our own Canadian Rights and Freedoms.
Let what Kentucky does stay in Kentucky.
Religious education is better left to private schools and families that want their children to learn their faith through teaching and example.
Willow Arune
Prince George
LETTERS WELCOME: The Prince George Citizen welcomes letters to the editor from our readers. Submissions should be sent by email to: letters@pgcitizen.ca. No attachments, please. They can also be faxed to 250-960-2766, or mailed to 201-1777 Third Ave., Prince George, B.C. V2L 3G7. Maximum length is 750 words and writers are limited to one submission every week. We will edit letters only to ensure clarity, good taste, for legal reasons, and occasionally for length. Although we will not include your address and telephone number in the paper, we need both for verification purposes. Unsigned or handwritten letters will not be published. The Prince George Citizen is a member of the National Newsmedia Council, which is an independent organization established to deal with acceptable journalistic practices and ethical behaviour. If you have concerns about editorial content, please contact Neil Godbout (ngodbout@pgcitizen. ca or 250-960-2759). If you are not satisfied with the response and wish to file a formal complaint, visit the web site at mediacouncil.ca or call toll-free 1-844-877-1163 for additional information.
Misconduct, said the retired justice. A long, complicated wrangle over a $258,000 benefit he obtained for himself based on a legislature policy from years earlier ended with a similar verdict from McLachlin. She said he got a significant personal benefit without any evidenced justification.
And a similar arrangement in which three times his salary ($900,000) would be paid to his estate if he died while still employed at the legislature was also ruled out of bounds. Even so, McLachlin said that arrangement might still be in effect.
Regarding the legislature log splitter, which became the absurd symbol of the entire bizarre saga, she said buying it didn’t constitute misconduct. But keeping it at his home and firing it up for his own use did.
She looked at his lengthy excuse and said it bordered on nonsensical.
Plecas was the whistleblower who started the process that led to James’ downfall. But McLach-
lin took a severe view of how he handled the role. She noted that he went along with some of the conduct that he later criticized. He signed off on some of the benefits that he now impugns, she said. He became increasingly concerned and developed a new perspective on the problems.
“Yet the Speaker said nothing.”
McLachlin questioned why Plecas, as the boss, didn’t take up the problems with his underlings. She said he viewed it as a police investigation and criminal proceeding, rather than promptly confronting and correcting the problems.
“He focused on an investigatory line of inquiry at the expense of his duty to ensure the affairs of the legislative assembly were properly administered.”
Nonetheless, his suspicions about the clerk appear to be confirmed.
One of McLachlin’s observations on the log splitter sums up the entire story: “It’s hard to understand what was going through Mr. James’ mind.”
Follies continue with FOI laws
Icouldn’t stifle the laughter when the defence team for Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou said it was requesting documents under the federal Access to Information Act to fight her extradition.
I can only hope for her sake that the renovation of her $10 million Shaugnessy home will be seniorfriendly.
To her team as it embarks on this long-term trek, I can only quote the modern philosopher Alice Cooper: welcome to our nightmare.
As long as there have been freedom of information laws, Canadian governments and institutions have made thwarting them a national sport.
As long as there has been an internet, the public has been on the losing team.
No Canadian government in the 35-year history of these laws vital to accountable democracy has ever led an advancement of the public’s right to know.
Not one.
Not that they don’t say adamantly that they will.
But the pretension of the scripted promise with each new administration to be more open and transparent is as hollow as the cheapest drugstore chocolate Easter egg.
Even a kid knows it’s simply crap.
The pattern of a shielding and deceiving culture is well-worn: for any meagre move to extend the law’s grasp on a wider range of government and institutional records we can request, the politicians, their aides and the bureaucracy have mounted new ways to take the information further from reach.
There are hundreds of exemptions of the records produced at our expense that cannot be seen at our request.
There are buckling fees, along with mind-numbing delays and an entire industry of impediment with tricks galore up sleeves aplenty.
The latest ironic collision between professed commitment and practised culpability is the allegation involving our province’s minister responsible for the law, Jinny Sims, accused by a former constituency worker of evading the law’s purview by steering official communication into personal and inaccessible channels.
She says her former worker, albeit willing to swear this under oath, has it all wrong.
In time we shall see, but Sims would hardly be the first or the worst offender.
To be properly rude, her government has found hundreds of sillier errands to place ahead of
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the rather simple task of fixing the law.
Premier John Horgan, like Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and so many before them, made the proverbial pledge that their government would be doing things differently and that a candid era had arrived.
True to form, once in the saddle an opposition cowboy rides the horse with the same delicate rein of the dressage equestrian; in the process, the rodeo becomes a dance.
In our newsroom alone, where we file a half-dozen or so requests each week when we cannot get straight answers, we are told our lawful requests for rather basic information within 30 days will take 90, 120 or longer.
In other words, they’ll get back to us.
And no one can compel release.
Our legislation, like others across the country, provides merely moral suasion as the weapon of the office acting on the public’s behalf.
Even a court ruling can be defied.
We incessantly face heavy processing fees that would ruin many media organizations, so we argue for a waiver under the law because disclosure is in the public interest.
Interested in where that argument leads? Into a semantic game on whether requests are a “matter” of public interest or an “issue” of public interest – that difference makes the difference between free and fee-laden disclosure or disclosure at all.
And that is only on what we know exists.
Email subterfuge has been discovered at every level of government in almost every government in this country. Heaven knows what’s out there that we will never see.
The future for historians is much more bleak because of our institutional ability to erase the pathology of policy.
Which is to wish Meng’s cadre well in their journey.
Perhaps a posse of lawyers will wring loose the to-and-fro correspondence and documentation that will help her cause.
If they do, and if they have some pro bono hours to fulfil, I have a few files on the go, and I am easy to reach.
— Kirk LaPointe is editor-inchief of Business in Vancouver and vice-president, editorial, at Glacier Media.
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KIRK LAPOINTE
B.C. museum changes policy on Indigenous artifacts
The Canadian Press
Letters to Scotland sent by a woman from the small settlement of Victoria around 1850 gave Dianne Hinkley more insight into why the bones of her ancestors may be spread around the world.
One of the letters says that “skulls were all the rage” in the new community, Hinkley said.
“It was all the fashion that you had to have a skull on your mantel piece,” Hinkley recalls the letter saying.
The woman’s letter said she found the remains on rock piles that were all over the place and that she “would try to get them a couple of skulls, so they can have them in their house for fashion as well,” Hinkley said.
Those rock piles were actually burial cairns and the pilfering is one of the many reasons why Hinkley has found Cowichan artifacts and remains from Russia to the United Kingdom and from Israel to South Africa.
That search has been helped with a repatriation grant from the Royal B.C. Museum, which recently changed its policies to no longer collect or study ancestral remains.
The museum has also announced that anything it acquired from Indigenous Peoples during the anti-potlatch years, which ran from 1885 to 1951, will be considered eligible for repatriation because it was obtained at a time of duress.
During those years, the federal government banned potlatch ceremonies, which were important social events where valuable gifts were given to show generosity and status over rivals.
The government saw the events as anti-Christian and a waste of personal property.
Lou-Ann Neel, the repatriation specialists for the Royal B.C. Museum, said by the time the ban was lifted, much Indigenous wealth had been lost.
“Our regalia was gone, our masks were gone, some of them were burnt by missionaries, some of them were just taken and confiscated. So you can’t hold a potlatch without these treasures,” said Neel, who is part of the Mamalilikulla and Kwagiulth people in Alert Bay, B.C.
Neel said the loss of their belongings started with the colonial belief that Indigenous people were endangered and dying out.
“That really sparked a collecting frenzy, that sent out people: anthropologists, military, adventurers or self-proclaimed pioneers. (They) just felt like they had permission because the general sense across Canada and the U.S. was that ‘Indians’ would soon been gone.”
Hinkley said her research shows that between 1870 and 1930 museums were popping up around the world and they needed something to display.
She said collectors from around
the world would land in the villages and buy or take anything they could.
“Their bodies, the skeletal remains and all of that was sold to museums,” she said.
“There must have been essentially very little cultural materials left in those villages. They took everything, they took cedar woven maps that hung on the walls, they took knitting needles, everything, fish hooks, you name it, they collected it.”
Hinkley said the change in the museum’s policy is “huge” because it allows Indigenous people in the province to find more information about their artifacts.
She said some museums, especially those in the United Kingdom, refuse to even speak with them about the artifacts.
The Royal B.C. Museum distributed more than $580,000 in repatriation grants last year to First Nations, helping them begin the process of finding and acquiring their ancestors’ remains and artifacts. It has also written the Indigenous Repatriation Handbook to help as a guide.
The museum has about 700 ancestral remains.
Neel said most of them were handed over to the museum through development when roads or homes were under construction and the bones were unearthed.
Because the museum is no longer a repository for remains, she said they’ll be searching through the records to determine where the bones were found and will ask First Nations what they want to do with their ancestors’ remains.
“It’s the right thing to do and the right way to do it.”
The B.C. museum has about 15,000 Indigenous artifacts, and Neel said a portion of those would have been taken during the potlatch years.
They are starting the task of looking at every object to determine how it came to the museum, she said.
Neel said Indigenous communities are excited about the prospect of having their ancestors and ancient treasures returned.
“There are obviously things in the collection that were purchased legitimately, there’s a paper trail for them and those things really do legitimately belong to the museum collection.
“What the committee did was take a close look and said really what we’re concerned about are the things that were not acquired in the best of times. Some communities were still very much under duress, even after the potlatch ban was dropped.”
For the Cowichan, Hinkley said the other challenge is they don’t have anywhere to bring their treasures home.
But she said the repatriation negotiations tend to drag and that will give them time to get their museum ready.
Audible puck game changer for blind hockey players
The Canadian Press
A team of Montreal university researchers has developed an audible hockey puck they say could revolutionize the sport for blind players.
For years, visually impaired hockey players have used a tomato juice can or a steel container filled with small balls as a puck. The improvised devices work, but players have trouble finding them on the ice when they stop moving and become silent. Three years ago, Gilles Ouellet, a blind hockey player and employee of Universite de Quebec a Montreal (UQAM), came up
Nuns leaving convent hold garage sale
The Canadian Press
The Montreal-area Sisters of SteAnne hosted a unique garage sale over the weekend as the religious organization prepares to leave its 110-year-old convent.
Sister Celine Dupuis says the mother house in the Lachine borough has hundreds of rooms and is far too big for the remaining members of the religious organization, whose average age is 87. Thousands of people attended the sale to browse through items including artwork, furniture, household goods and plants.
Dupuis said she was pleasantly surprised to see the most popular items were religious statues and crucifixes, which quickly sold out. They have decided to sell the massive building to a community organization, which will transform it into affordable and social housing.
with the idea for a puck that makes a continuous sound.
Now, he and a team of researchers have created a prototype consisting of a shockabsorbent plastic shell with a battery-powered circuit board inside.
A series of sensors analyzes puck movement and transmits the data to a buzzer, which can be adjusted to a maximum level of 120 decibels – about equivalent to a chainsaw or a thunderclap.
“It’s going to make the game faster and more interesting,” Ouellet said. “And because the puck makes noise when it’s in the air, it’ll help goalies make more saves.”
CP PHOTO/ROYAL B.C. MUSEUM
Namgis First Nation Chief Trevor Isaac wears a Chilkat Robe woven by his great grandmother, from the Tlingit people of Alaska in this undated handout image. Isaac asked to borrow the robe from the museum collection for his first potlatch. The museum has changed its policy to consider the items taken in the years during the government’s potlatch ban as repatriatable because it was a time of duress for First Nations.
Unions worry about Phoenix replacement
The Canadian Press
The federal team charged with finding a replacement for the government’s troubled Phoenix pay system will present the Liberals with options within weeks that are expected to include “multiple pilot projects,” government officials say.
The plan could pit at least two of the three potential bidders on the projects against each other in a competition to see which system works better, either independently or in tandem with one another.
“In the coming weeks, the next-generation team will present options to the government for next steps, which will likely include multiple pilot projects to test possible solutions beginning later this year,” Treasury Board spokesman Farees Nathoo told The Canadian Press in an email.
The proposal is laying bare divisions among the unions representing the roughly 300,000 federal employees who have been living under the Phoenix pay cloud for more than three years.
One of those unions, the Public Service Alliance of Canada, says the move is wrongheaded and could result in another bungled pay system.
Testing separate pay systems through individual government departments, or in groups of departments, could produce problems for federal employees similar to those being experienced under the current, flawed system, warns PSAC national president Chris Aylward.
“That is very concerning because they have no clue about the way forward,” Aylward said.
When issues began to surface shortly after the IBM-built Phoenix pay system was launched in 2016, the government initially, in part, blamed the problems on segregated, antiquated departmental human resources systems that were incapable of properly communicating with each other and the Phoenix system, he noted.
“It concerns me if they say, ‘We don’t know how many providers we are going to use, we may have to use more than one,”’ said Aylward.
“It sounds like we’re starting Phoenix
all over again... They need a system that works. One pay system that works for all 300,000 employees that currently get paid out of Phoenix.”
The Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada, which represents about 60,000 of those employees and has been working closely with the government to find a new pay solution, doesn’t share PSAC’s concerns.
“I think that, so long as those are compatible systems and they are connected through some sort of internal cloud, then there shouldn’t be a problem between systems,” said union president Debi Daviau. “But at
this point we’re just trying to determine what is going to be the best system.”
Daviau suggested a pilot project at the Canada Revenue Agency, for example, could see about 50,000 people properly paid within a year, as opposed to implementing an entirely new software product, which could take several years.
PSAC, which represents the vast majority of federal workers, recently rejected an agreement supported by 13 other unions that will see federal employees who’ve been impacted by the failures of Phoenix provided an extra five days of paid leave over four years.
It has also walked away from contract talks with Treasury Board affecting more than 100,000 workers, turning down proposed pay increases amounting to 1.5 per cent annually.
The government last week invited “qualified respondents” to submit proposals to enter a third stage for developing a new HR and payroll system to replace Phoenix, after narrowing the field of potential bidders to three companies: Ceridian, SAP and Workday.
Bob Conlin, the public services lead in Canada for Germany-based SAP, suggested the government should tread carefully if it ultimately decides to contract more than one system provider and test their programs in different departments.
SAP already provides human resources systems for the Canada Revenue Agency and the Customs and Border Services Agency.
Those departments would benefit more from combining HR and payroll services under an existing service provider, said Conlin.
“If they were to extend (HR) with payroll, it would not be a Herculean leap for them,” he said in an interview. “They would benefit in a big way from the opportunity to upgrade to modern technology.”
But Conlin cautioned that CRA, CBSA and the Department of National Defence, in particular, must be treated carefully.
“Those are some of the clients that absolutely have to get done right,” he said.
“They are also some of the more complex civil service pay environments.”
On Thursday, the Parliamentary Budget Office told the House of Commons the government could expect to pay about $57 million dollars to buy, test and implement a new pay system.
The price tag did not include annual operating costs estimated to reach almost $106 million.
The PBO also estimated it will cost taxpayers $2.6 billion to stabilize the existing pay system until a new one is fully adopted.
The former Conservative government had estimated Phoenix would save $70 million annually.
CP PHOTO
Members of the Public Service Alliance of Canada affected by the Phoenix Pay System rally on Laurier Avenue, during a protest on the three-year anniversary of the launch of the pay system, in Ottawa on Feb. 28.
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Kings reflect on a winning season
Ted CLARKE Citizen staff tclarke@pgcitizen.ca
BROOKS, Alta. — After nine months of hockey, the Prince George Spruce Kings’ season is finally over.
And what a year it was. They finished one point out of first overall in the B.C. Hockey League, then ran roughshod through the playoffs on the way to their first-ever Fred Page Cup championship.
After a 16-1 run to the title they advanced to the Doyle Cup series and took out the top-ranked team in Canada in a six-game series to claim the Pacific region title.
Their dream season ended Sunday one win shy of a third trophy and the Bandits beat them to it, winning the National Junior A Hockey Championship in Brooks, Alta., with a 4-3 victory in the final over the Spruce Kings.
“It’s been a surreal experience, something that no one involved here will forget,” said Kings defenceman Dylan Anhorn, who scored the Kings’ third goal with 45 seconds left Sunday, after nailing the crossbar minutes earlier.
“This is a team that was pretty special from top to bottom. From the beginning we had a goal here and we came one game away from that. It’s pretty frustrating that you come that close to winning a national championship but there’s nothing we can change about it now.
“We can reflect on the season we had and the impact we were able to have on the Prince George community.”
After two successful seasons in the BCHL with the Spruce Kings, Anhorn will play next season at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y.,
“Obviously we wanted a different result but at the end of the day this group won two championships this season and we went on a pretty long run last year,” Anhorn said.
“The bonds are pretty tight with this group and it’s not going to be easy moving on.”
Despite their three-goal deficit after 20 minutes Sunday, captain Ben Poisson and his teammates never lost hope.
“We thought we still had a chance at that point, three goals, we can do that in two periods and there were lots of chances we had to put it in,” said Poisson.
“We could have easily put in a few more with our chances, so we played well and gave it our all.
“When we won the league there, and that was big for us. Going 16-1 through the playoffs was awesome and I’m proud of everyone in there. Last year we came up just short and this year we wanted to make a difference.”
For Poisson, bound for the University of Maine on scholarship next season, the 2018-19 season was unique. It gave him the chance to play for the first time with his younger brother Nick, a BCHL rookie who scored a goal in all six national tournament games which only raised his stock as a college prospect.
“When he put up six goals in six games that’s quite something,” said Ben.
“I don’t know if I’ll ever get the chance again to play a year with him, so this year we made it the best we could.”
Layton Ahac was part of a beleaguered line of defence that had such a difficult time containing the Bandits in the first period Sunday. As good as the Kings were coming back on teams during the season, against an older Brooks team, the hole they dug for themselves was one goal too deep.
“They’re a great team and they came out really hot and got three goals in the first period and that hurt, but we’re a resilient group,” said Ahac.
“We stuck with it and came back and played with a lot of heart but our start’s what killed us.”
Ahac, an Ohio State recruit, is preparing for the NHL draft in late June in his hometown of Vancouver.
He’s the 66th-ranked North American skater on NHL Central Scouting’s final pre-draft list, expected to be picked in the second or third round.
“I’m not too focused on it, to be honest, but now I can put the hockey behind me and just focus on the process,” he said.
The Kings boarded the bus back to Prince George early Monday morning looking much different, much younger, having shaved off their playoff beards. That blade took years off the face of defenceman Max Coyle, who along with Dustin Manz grew the wooliest look the past two months among the Kings – a band of brothers like no other Coyle has ever been part of in his hockey career.
“I think we’re more disappointed that we’re all leaving each other than we are
that we actually lost the hockey game,” said Coyle. “We had something special and that’s going to be tough to bite the bullet and move on.
“If there was a fourth period I’m sure it would have been a different end result but there isn’t and you have to give credit where credit’s due. (The Bandits) are a good hockey team and a good program and they made a pretty good team this year.”
Patrick Cozzi, who arrived in Prince George two summers ago already armed with a hockey scholarship to Colorado College, was there for the two most successful seasons in the team’s 23-year BCHL existence.
“We accomplished so much this year, we made Spruce Kings’ history” said Cozzi, whose power-play goal 2:22 into Sunday’s final kickstarted the Kings’ comeback try.
“Even though we didn’t get the result we wanted we definitely had an amazing year,”
Cozzi and the rest of the Kings knew the Bandits almost blew a three-goal lead in their semifinal with the Ottawa Junior Senators and used that as added motivation to try to wipe the slate clean and play up to their capabilities the rest of the game.
The speedy Cozzi developed into one of the top two-way forwards in the BCHL and credits the coaching staff for bringing the defensive element out in his game.
“I’m leaving here as a much better player, Mags (head coach Adam Maglio) has taught me so much, just all the little details, so I think I’m going to college really prepared
because of it,” he said.
Coyle is off to the University of AlabamaHuntsville next season and says the returning Kings in 2019-20 will give the fans plenty to look forward to as they try to build another winner.
“We’ve got some young guys like Craig MacDonald, Sean Donaldson and Fin Williams who are going to lead the herd next year and it will be nice to watch them, they’re they impressive,” said Coyle. Anhorn also sees a bright future ahead for the team, for years to come. The Kings could return as many as 11 players next season.
“Coach Maglio is never going to have a team that won’t compete for a league title so I think there’s going to be another great season next year and I think Prince George fans won’t be let down,” he said.
The Kings were certainly not alone in Brooks. Aside from the group of parents who followed them throughout the nineday tournament, a group of about 100 Kings fans made the trip to Brooks, where the Kings went 4-2.
Their only losses were at the hands of the Bandits, who beat Prince George 3-1 in the final round-robin game.
The Kings will gather for one final sendoff Tuesday at 4 p.m. at a city reception at the Civic Centre.
“It’s going to be pretty emotional, the last time seeing all the fans, but I’ll remember this experience the rest of my life, it’s been amazing,” said Cozzi.
‘It hurts, but we’re so proud of our group’
— from page 1
Brar nailed Ray Christy from behind with a hard hit into the boards and was handed a major penalty for boarding and a game misconduct. Not long into the five-minute penalty kill, Ben Poisson stripped the puck and took off on a shorthanded breakaway but missed the net.
“To be honest, killing that five-minute penalty gave us some momentum and that might have helped us get back in the game,” said Kings head coach Adam Maglio.
“Ben’s a huge loss to us and it’s his last junior game and he cares so much. It was a tough play, the guy turns at the last second and he finishes his hit and I felt awful. The guys love him in there and they got the kill and it built some momentum in there.
“That’s the story of our group all year, we’re a resilient team, they fight.
“I don’t think that’s the start you want, to put yourself behind, maybe a bit too far behind. We clawed and we fought back,
a couple bounces away maybe from tying things up.”
The Kings made it a two-goal game just past the 10-minute mark of the third period. The Poisson brothers – Ben and Nick – finished off a sustained attack in the Brooks end when Nick deflected in his older brother’s slapper from the point. It was Nick’s tournament-leading sixth goal.
Two minutes later, Anhorn hailed the crossbar with his shot from 30 feet away.
Maglio said his defencemen were tired from playing the semifinal less that a day earlier, while the Bandits rested from their afternoon playoff game and the 20-yearold Dylan Anhorn, in his last junior game before he heads to Union College, was better able to rise to the challenge in the final.
Having played a strong game, Anhorn was relentless in the final minute and that resulted in the final Prince George goal of the season with 45 seconds left when he banged in a shot from the point after defence partner Nick Bochen made a skilled
play to keep the puck in the zone.
The Kings had puck possession in the dying seconds but could not muster another shot on Pierce Charleson.
The National Junior A Cup was presented to Plessis, the Brooks captain, and that made him forget the pain of losing the 2017 national championship, when it was known as the RBC Cup, when the Bandits gave up the tying goal with two seconds left in the final and lost to the host Cobourg (Ont.) Cougars in overtime.
“It’s just jubilation,” said Plessis.
“I feel for those guys on the other side, I was in that exact spot two years ago, but I couldn’t be happier (now). I was just so excited to pick it up.”
The city will host a reception for the Kings and their fans Tuesday at 4 p.m. at the Civic Centre. By that time the sting of losing the biggest game of their lives will have subsided and the team can sit back and realize how successful they were while winning the first BCHL championship in
the team’s 23-year-history in the league.
“It hurts, but we’re so proud of our group,” said Maglio, who declined to allow his players join the post-game media scrum. “There’s a lot of guys playing with significant injuries there. They battled for each other and we had a great year. We’re not going to discredit the BCHL championship and the Doyle Cup. It’s tough to swallow right now but I think we’ll put things in perspective in a couple days.
LOOSE PUCKS: Brooks went 6-0 in the tournament, including a 3-1 victory over Prince George on Thursday in the last round-robin game, then went on to defeat the Ottawa Junior Senators 4-3 in the semifinal… The community-owned Bandits, who joined the Alberta Junior Hockey League in 2000 as an expansion team, have now won two national titles. They captured their first in 2013 in Summerside, P.E.I … Newly-elected Alberta premier Jason Kenney dropped the puck for the ceremonial opening face-off.
HOCKEY CANADA HANDOUT PHOTO BY MATTHEW MURNAGHAN
Prince George Spruce Kings winger Patrick Cozzi scores a power-play goal early in the second period Sunday at the National Junior A hockey championship in Brooks, Alta. The Brooks Bandits beat the Prince George Spruce Kings 4-3.
CP PHOTO RouynNoranda Huskies player Tyler Hinam celebrates his game-winning goal with teammate Noah Dobson at the end of a Memorial Cup game against the Prince Albert Raiders, in Halifax on Monday.
Hinam breaks deadlock, lifts Huskies over Raiders
Kyle CICERELLA The Canadian Press
HALIFAX — Tyler Hinam of Cole Harbour, N.S., picked the right time and place to score the biggest goal of his junior hockey career.
The 19-year-old Hinam had a pair of goals, including the winner, as the Rouyn-Noranda Huskies beat the Prince Albert Raiders 6-3 on Monday at the Memorial Cup.
Hinam broke a 3-3 tie with 4:32 to go in the third period before Joel Teasdale secured the win with his second of the game just 1:25 later.
“We were just praying on the bench we would get the next one and fortunately it came out to me in the slot there and I was able to bury it,” said Hinam.
“I was pretty happy there.”
Monday’s game was a matchup of the top two ranked teams in the Canadian Hockey League.
The Huskies finished the regular season No. 1 with a 59-8-1 record thanks to a 25-game win streak. The Raiders were No. 2, riding a 19-game win streak early in the season en route to a 54-10-4 record.
But both teams dropped their tournament openers and were looking for a bounce-back performance.
“It was a must-win for us with our loss in the first game. It was an important one for us,” said Huskies head coach Mario Pouliot. “We know we can be better than that, but it’ll help us be more confident with the win tonight.”
Raiders head coach Marc Habscheid believed his team played well enough to win.
“I thought we deserved better, should have won that game,” said Habscheid.
“A lot of chances a lot of posts, think five or six posts, missed three or four open nets. Just didn’t go our way.”
As the only winless team at the tournament with two straight losses, the Raiders will need a victory in their final round-robin outing against the OHL champion Guelph Storm on Tuesday or their season will be over.
“If we play the same way I think we’ll be OK,” said Habscheid.
Felix Bibeau and Noah Dobson, into an empty net, also scored for the Quebec league champion Huskies. Samuel Harvey made 30 saves.
Cole Fonstad, Brayden Pachal and Noah Gregor scored for the Western league champion Raiders while Gregor tacked on two assists for a three-point effort. Ian Scott stopped 27 shots in defeat.
The WHL champion has now lost 12 in a row at the four-team competition dating back five tournaments.
The last time the WHL champion won a contest was the 2015 semifinal, when the Kelowna Rockets beat the Quebec Remparts before falling to the Oshawa Generals in the final to start the streak of defeats.
The Regina Pats were able to win twice at last year’s event and reached the final, but that
was as the host team.
Hinam opened the scoring 4:34 into the game with his first of the tournament.
Cole Fonstad responded at 8:32, and Pachal gave Prince Albert the lead 13:47 when he snuck in from the point and one-timed a Gregor pass past Harvey.
The Raiders looked to be heading into intermission up 2-1, however Teasdale struck with a power-play goal with 1:27 to go in the period.
Bibeau buried a shot from in front of the net for a 3-2 Huskies lead at 12:59 second, but the teams went into intermission tied again as Gregor replied with 2:17 to go in the second.
“Up and down game, kind of a ping-pong match, not really our style,” said Hinam.
The back-and-forth battle continued in the third with both squads getting a chance to break the deadlock, and it was Hinam who finally did when he beat Scott glove side on a broken play at 15:28.
Rouyn-Noranda will face the host Halifax Mooseheads on Wednesday in the final preliminary-round game of the tournament, and a rematch of the QMJHL championship that the Huskies took in six games.
Prince Albert has less than 24 hours to prepare for what could be its last game of the season.
“Do or die tomorrow,” said Gregor.
“(But) I think we have the group to come back.”
Weir, Taylor book berths in U.S. Open
The Canadian Press DALLAS — Mike Weir is heading back to the U.S. Open.
The Canadian golfer earned a spot in the field for the third major of the PGA Tour calendar by finishing in a tie for fifth place at a sectional qualifying event on Monday.
Weir, the 2003 Masters winner from Brights Grove, Ont., will be competing in the U.S. Open for the first time since 2013.
Nick Taylor of Abbotsford, B.C., also earned a U.S. Open berth Monday with a firstplace tie at the same qualifier. Taylor finished 10-under 131 alongside American Brendon Todd. The 49-year-old Weir was five shots back. Taylor and Weir were two of 10 players who advanced Monday from the first of 12 sectional qualifiers.
Todd continued his resurgence with rounds of 65-66 at Northwood Club and Bent Tree to share medallist honours with Taylor. Weir opened with a 69 at Northwood and secured his spot with a 67 at Bent Tree to avoid extra holes.
The U.S. Open returns to Pebble Beach for the sixth time on June 13-16. Weir played the previous two Opens at Pebble.
The other nine sectional qualifiers in the U.S. are scheduled for June 3. The USGA had this one early because of the new, more compact PGA Tour schedule and because it was near Colonial, where the tour is playing this week.
Doherty loses jersey bet with Alberta MP
Ted CLARKE Citizen staff
tclarke@pgcitizen.ca
BROOKS, Alta. — Prince George–Cariboo MP Todd Doherty has a replica of every jersey the Prince George Spruce Kings have ever worn.
As a former Spruce Kings president/ scout/colour commentator, Doherty is one their biggest fans, but when he shows up next at the House of Commons in Ottawa he won’t be wearing that familiar crown on his chest. The Kings’ 4-3 loss to the Brooks Bandits Sunday in the 2019 National Junior A Hockey Championship means Doherty lost the bet he made with Bow River MP Martin Shields, a former Brooks mayor, and will don a Bandits jersey when the MPs are back in session.
“I had to wear (Doherty’s) jersey in the last week in the House on the way up to that one,” said Shields.
“Four other MPs had already worn my (Bandits) jersey in the House. I always was betting and wearing it.”
Sporting a freshly-waxed handlebar mustache, Shields showed up for Sunday’s final decked in a Don Cherry-worn red-checked blazer and Cherry-approved wide-collared shirt. He’s lived in Brooks the past 40 years
and served as city’s mayor when it was still small enough to be considered a town.
Now a city of about 12,000, Brooks rounded up a small army of 160 volunteers for the nine-day tournament and by all accounts the organizing committee met or exceeded expectations hosting the Hockey
Canada event. The Bandits did their part, too, becoming the fifth-straight host team to win the junior A national title.
The Hockey Fest events Brooks promoted included a rodeo, pancake breakfasts, a car show and nightly concerts.
“It’s phenomenal in the sense that the
community really got behind it,” said Shields.
“We’ve been applying to do this for years, so to get it is great. That’s what this level of hockey is about, the teams are usually in towns that will coalesce - it’s their team – it’s not like a major city. We had the Ottawa Junior Senators here. In Ottawa they didn’t even know that team existed.”
Shields was not surprised to see the Spruce Kings and Bandits meet in the final and was impressed with the action on the ice.
“They are skilled, they’re fast and this is great hockey,” he said.
“This is not what you might see in the professionals, these young guys are just out there giving it and it’s great to watch.
“I think you would find that most people here, whether they’re Brooks supporters or not, would believe these are the two best teams in the tournament. A bounce here and there and it could have gone much differently for either team.
“This is the hardest cup to win in Canada in any sport because of the number of teams – 133 teams at this (junior A) level,” he said.
“To get to it is a phenomenal achievement. Exhibition games started in August and we’re at nine months. It’s a long season.”
DOHERTY
SHIELDS
Leonard tired, but ready for Game 4, coach says
Lori EWING The Canadian Press
TORONTO — Pascal Siakam carefully stepped down off the press conference podium on Monday, resting a hand on a Raptors staff member for support.
Kyle Lowry spoke to reporters with his injured left hand stuffed in his blue compression oven mitt glove.
Kawhi Leonard wasn’t made available to the media at all.
A day after they clawed out a 118-112 victory over Milwaukee in double overtime, the Toronto Raptors were feeling every one of the 58 hard-fought minutes.
Asked about the health of Leonard, who scored 36 points despite noticeably limping all night, Raptors coach Nick Nurse, still hoarse from the previous night, said: “I think the consensus today is he’s tired, and he’s got two days and will be ready to go. Those are kind of the words coming out of his mouth: Little tired, but he’ll get his rest, got two days, and he’ll be ready.”
An injured Leonard, who pestered Giannis Antetokounmpo on the defensive end holding the Greek Freak to just 12 points, would be a massive blow for the Raptors. They trail the Bucks 2-1 in their best of seven Eastern Conference series. A loss in Tuesday’s Game 4 in Toronto would mean a must-win Game 5 in Milwaukee.
“It’s all about recovery right now, rest as much as your body needs it to rest,” said Lowry, who sprained his left thumb in Game 7 of the conference semifinals.
“No one at this time of the season is 100 per cent but you get to a point where you feel good and go into the next game. Your job is your job, adrenaline takes over, preparation takes over so you’ll be ready to go for (Tuesday).”
Siakam, who wore a Toronto FC jersey to Monday’s media availability – the back read “Spicy Skills” – had the opportunity to prevent overtime, but missed two free throws with 7.4 seconds left in regulation. The big man from Cameroon bristled when asked a couple of times about the misses.
“Ya’ll keep talking about free throws man,” said Siakam, who connected on two key free throws with 16 seconds left in the second overtime.
“They just went in. The other ones didn’t. I don’t know what to tell you.”
A prevailing thought at Monday’s Bucks’ availability with media was that Milwaukee’s loss was more about the Bucks playing poorly, not the Raptors playing well.
“I know we can do better, so we’ll watch film and get better,” Bucks big man Nikola Mirotic said.
The Raptors disagreed.
“That’s how they’re supposed to feel,” Danny Green said. “We didn’t play well either. We kind of survived that game with how poorly we shot the ball, but we haven’t had a good shooting game as a team the
whole series. I’m expecting we’ll shoot better in Game 4.” Green couldn’t shoot much worse. The 31-year-old, who’s introduced pre-game as “the money man from three-point land!” shot 46 per cent from deep in the regular season. Sunday night, he was 1-for-9 from the field, and 1-for-6 from three.
Fred VanVleet, who TV broadcasters often call “Steady Freddy,” has been anything but, his three-point shooting plummeting from 37.8 per cent in the regular season to 19.5 per cent this post-season. Sunday, he was a woeful 1-for-11 from the field, and made just one of his eight shots from deep. Green’s single three-pointer of the night was a key one, coming early in the first overtime period.
“We put him back in and I said to him, ‘You’ve gotta hit one here for us man,’ and he goes ‘I will,’ and I said ‘OK,’ so we drew one up for him and he knocked it down,” Nurse said.
Green said some of his shots Sunday were off-balance. Some were rushed.
“But for the most part, I just missed,” Green said. “You’ve got to keep taking those shots confidently. The next one – I told Nick to stick with me. I had one in the chamber for him at some point. Luckily it came. He called my number. For a coach to do that, to have the confidence in me, to be 0-for-8 at the time and hit the next one... It felt good. Hopefully it starts a rhythm, builds for next game.”
Lowry got more rest than he bargained for on Sunday after fouling out midway through the fourth quarter. The five-time all-star guard, who’s been at his scrappy, hustling best in these playoffs, admitted his injured left thumb is affecting his playing.
“Obviously it’s not helping because I’m fouling out. I’ve got to figure out how to use the other hand and be effective,” he said.
“You’ve got to be a little bit more cautious, it definitely is something you think about
but it really doesn’t matter. Honestly.” How’s he able to shut it out?
“I don’t know,” Lowry shrugged.
“Try not to think about it. It’s going to hurt, it’s going to be sore but you gotta push through. At this time of year, you gotta push through no matter what you’re going to go through. You have to make things happen however you can. When it hurts every time I do something, you notice it. You get hit, stuff like that.
“But, whatever, you gotta be mind over matter.”
The Raptors have never come back to win a series after starting 0-2, although they’ve twice come back to tie a series. Last season, Cleveland stumbled to an 0-2 start in the conference finals against Boston before rallying to win the series.
Sunday’s OT win was a massive lifeline for the Raptors. No NBA team has come back from being down 0-3 to win a series. Game 5 is Thursday at Fiserv Forum.
Schwartz, Tarasenko have Blues close to Cup Final
Joe HARRIS The Associated Press
ST. LOUIS — Jaden Schwartz is on a scoring run that has the St. Louis Blues dreaming big. Schwartz’s hat trick in Game 5 on Sunday helped give the Blues a 3-2 series lead against the San Jose Sharks in the Western Conference final and set the single-season franchise record for playoff wins. The Blues could advance to their first Stanley Cup Final since 1970 when they host Game 6
Tuesday night.
“It’s probably tough to put into words,” Schwartz said. “It’s something that everyone’s worked for and dreamed about. You don’t want to look too far ahead. We all know how important and how hard that last win’s going to be. It would be a dream come true.”
Schwartz and Vladimir Tarasenko have played huge roles in the Blues’ playoff success. Just not necessarily in the way that was expected. Tarasenko has come up with
more big assists than goals against the Sharks.
Meanwhile, Schwartz has found a scoring touch that eluded him during the regular season.
After scoring 11 goals in 69 regular-season games, Schwartz has 12 goals in 18 playoff games.
“He’s obviously a tenacious player, a hard-working player,” Blues coach Craig Berube said.
“I know, goal-wise, he didn’t have a good regular season, but the work ethic was there and other things besides not produc-
ing with the goals.
“He’s a 200-foot player for us and he’s around the net for us, that’s where he scores. His hard work, being relentless and staying with it is paying off.”
Schwartz’s scoring run began on a quick pass from Tyler Bozak with 15 seconds left in regulation to snap a 2-2 tie in Game 5 in the first round against Winnipeg. He followed that up with a hat trick in Game 6 to send the Blues to the second round. Schwartz is the first player to
have two hat tricks in the same playoffs since Johan Franzen did it for Detroit in 2008 and he is the first to do it for the Blues.
Not bad for a guy who went 23 games without a goal during the regular season.
“He’s obviously been kind of our engine and a guy that’s scored huge goals for us throughout every series,” Bozak said.
“Pucks weren’t going in as much as he probably wanted in the regular season, but he was still playing really good hockey...”
CP PHOTO
Toronto Raptors forward Kawhi Leonard drives to the net around Milwaukee Bucks guard Malcolm Brogdon during the second overtime period of Game 3 NBA Eastern Conference finals in Toronto on Sunday.
Canada lacks AI protection laws, experts say
The Canadian Press
The role of artificial intelligence in Netflix’s movie suggestions and Alexa’s voice commands is commonly understood, but less known is the shadowy role AI now plays in law enforcement, immigration assessment, military programs and other areas.
Despite its status as a machinelearning innovation hub, Canada has yet to develop a regulatory regime to deal with issues of discrimination and accountability to which AI systems are prone, prompting calls for regulation –including from business leaders.
“We need the government, we need the regulation in Canada,” said Mahdi Amri, who heads AI services at Deloitte Canada.
The absence of an AI-specific legal framework undermines trust in the technology and, potentially, accountability among its providers, according to a report he coauthored.
“Basically there’s this idea that the machines will make all the decisions and the humans will have nothing to say, and we’ll be ruled by some obscure black box somewhere,” Amri said.
Robot overlords remain firmly in the realm of science fiction, but AI is increasingly involved in decisions that have serious consequences for individuals.
Since 2015, police departments in Vancouver, Edmonton, Saskatoon and London, Ont. have implemented or piloted predictive policing – automated decisionmaking based on data that predicts where a crime will occur or who will commit it.
The federal immigration and refugee system relies on algorithmically-driven decisions to help determine factors such as whether a marriage is genuine or someone should be designated as a “risk”, according to a Citizen Lab study, which found the practice threatens to violate human rights law.
AI testing and deployment in Canada’s military prompted Canadian AI pioneers Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio to warn about the dangers of robotic weapons and outsourcing lethal decisions to machines, and to call for an international agreement on their deployment.
“When you’re using any type of black box system, you don’t even know the standards that are embedded in the system or the types of data that may be used by the system that could be at risk of perpetuating bias,” said Rashida Richardson, director of policy research at New York University’s AI Now Institute.
She pointed to “horror cases,” including a predictive policing strategy in Chicago where the majority of people on a list of potential perpetrators were black men
who had no arrests or shooting incidents to their name, “the same demographic that was targeted by over-policing and discriminatory police practices.”
Richardson says it’s time to move from lofty guidelines to legal reform.
A recent AI Now Institute report states federal governments should “oversee, audit and monitor” the use of AI in fields like criminal justice, health care and education, as “internal governance structures at most technology companies are failing to ensure accountability for AI systems.”
Oversight should be divided up among agencies or groups of experts instead of hoisting it all onto a single AI regulatory body, given the unique challenges and regulations specific to each industry, the report says.
In health care, AI is poised to upend the way doctors practice medicine as machine-learning systems can now analyze vast sets of anonymized patient data and images to identify health problems ranging from osteoporosis to lesions and signs of blindness.
Carolina Bessega, co-founder and chief scientific officer of
Montreal-based Stradigi AI, says the regulatory void discourages businesses from using AI, holding back innovation and efficiency –particularly in hospitals and clinics, where the implications can be life or death.
“Right now it’s like a grey area, and everybody’s afraid making the decision of, ‘Okay, let’s use artificial intelligence to improve diagnosis, or let’s use artificial intelligence to help recommend a treatment for a patient,”’ Bessega said.
She is calling for “very strong” regulations around treatment and diagnosis and for a professional to bear responsibility for any final decisions, not a software program.
Critics say Canada lags behind the U.S. and the EU on exploring AI regulation. None has implemented a comprehensive legal framework, but Congress and the EU Commission have produced extensive reports on the issue.
“Critically, there is no legal framework in Canada to guide the use of these technologies or their intersection with foundational rights related to due process, administrative fairness, human rights, and justice system transpar-
ency,” states a March briefing by Citizen Lab, the Law Commission of Ontario and other bodies.
Divergent international standards, trade secrecy and algorithms’ constant “fluidity” pose obstacles to smooth regulation, says Miriam Buiten, junior professor of law and economics at the University of Mannheim.
Canada was among the first states to develop an official AI research plan, unveiling a $125-million strategy in 2017. But its focus was largely scientific and commercial.
In December, Prime Minister Trudeau and French President Emmanuel Macron announced a joint task force to guide AI policy development with an eye to human rights.
Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development Navdeep Bains told The Canadian Press in April a report was forthcoming “in the coming months.”
Asked whether the government is open to legislation around AI transparency and accountability, he said: “I think we need to take a step back to determine what are the core guiding principles.
“We’ll be coming forward with
those principles to establish our ability to move forward with regards to programming, with regards to legislative changes - and it’s not only going to be simply my department, it’s a whole government approach.”
The Treasury Board of Canada has already laid out a 119-word set of principles on responsible AI use that stress transparency and proper training. The Department of Innovation, Science and Economic Development highlighted the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, privacy legislation that applies broadly to commercial activities and allows a privacy commissioner to probe complaints.
“While AI may present some novel elements, it and other disruptive technologies are subject to existing laws and regulations that cover competition, intellectual property, privacy and security,” a department spokesperson said in an email.
As of April 1, 2020, government departments seeking to deploy an automated decision system must first conduct an “algorithmic impact assessment” and post the results online.
CP PHOTO
Carolina Bessega, co-founder and chief scientific officer of Stradigi AI, a Montreal-based software development company, says fields such as national defence and health care require laws to protect against bias and fatal errors stemming from artificial intelligence.
Seniors
Coffin clubs take sting out of aging, death No ordinary box
The Washington Post
HASTINGS, New Zealand – As she painted her husband’s coffin, Judith Aitken was in an excellent mood.
“He’s a Scottish lad,” she said, pointing out the logo of the Heart of Midlothian soccer club adorning the head end. Near it she’d added a fighter plane used in the pivotal Battle of Britain in the Second World War.
“He loves his Spitfires,” she explained.
Someday, Aitken said, her husband will be buried in that coffin, surrounded by painted reminders of his earthly enthusiasms – although not anytime soon, she hopes. The two are still in their 50s, in a country with an average life expectancy of nearly 82.
Aitken’s cheerful approach to death hardly makes her an oddball in New Zealand.
Across the country of almost five million, five major groups like the one Aitken joined in the North Island city of Hastings have sprung up in recent years for people wanting to build and customize their caskets.
They’re called coffin clubs, and members have a range of motivations, from thumbing a nose at death to warding off loneliness to cutting funeral costs. Or all of the above.
“Why spend $5,000 on a coffin and go out ordinary, when you can spend $500 and go out fabulous?”
Aitken, an administrative assistant for an insurance broker, said to a reporter visiting the Hastings club recently.
The clubs usually charge a fee to join.
Members can then choose from among various coffin designs and sizes, with prices ranging from about $250 to more than $500.
After a former palliative care nurse launched the first club in Rotorua in 2010, the “Makers of Fine, Affordable Underground Furniture,” as they describe themselves, have inspired thousands.
The movement has generated spinoffs in other countries, including Australia and the United States, but nowhere else has it gone so mainstream.
In Hastings, a former gang member worked on a coffin a few yards from Aitken as she added two black kittens to her husband’s “final bedroom,” as members call it.
Andre Tipi-Rangi William Waikato-Skudder, now 50, spent more than two decades in prison for gang violence and rape.
He denies the rape charge, despite his conviction.
Now, though, a broad smile split his full-face traditional indigenous tattoo when he spoke about his newfound passion: building and decorating coffins for others.
“I think I’ll be painting coffins for the rest of my life,” he said. “I love it, bro.”
He lifted up a finished coffin with images of bird feathers and a New Zealand mountain.
He’d rushed to complete it for a local indigenous elder who was on his death bed but suddenly “has come back to life.”
“So we’ve parked this up now,” Waikato-Skudder said, standing next to a whiteboard reminding members in red letters about “Urgent Coffins.”
Hundreds of coffins have been produced by clubs like this over the past nine years.
Life may have limits, but creativity doesn’t, it appears: from a go-kart to a red mini-tram, there’s nothing that can’t inspire a coffin in New Zealand.
For those short of ideas, a poster
clubs
New
are
to
the world as people, some of them still in their
of partners or other
in the club’s meeting room presented some of the latest design trends.
A popcorn-box-shaped coffin.
A coffin transformed into a bright red London phone box.
And in an option unlikely to find many takers in New Zealand, a coffin painted as a giant U.S. flag.
Waikato-Skudder said he and Aitken were far from the only ones to feel revived by being part of the club community, noting that older members, especially former artists or craftspeople, seem to have found new purpose in what is probably the last chapter of their lives.
“I think these people are very mature in the way they’re facing the inevitable,” he said. For some, the club could even
prolong that last chapter.
“It’s keeping them alive,” said Aitken, who praised the “great feeling of belonging” the club brings.
Like many Western countries, New Zealand has a rapidly aging population and a raft of related social problems, including the negative effects of living alone on health, well-being and mortality.
A 2017 study by the University of Otago found that about one-fifth of all frail, elderly New Zealanders self-identified as feeling lonely, based on a large-scale government assessment of 72,000 people.
Early last year, the British government sought to address the same problem, which Prime Minister Theresa May called “the sad reality of modern life,” by appoint-
ing a minister for loneliness.
But Britain’s stretched health services say that community-led initiatives, such as multigenerational co-living spaces, are more promising, given the scale of the challenge.
New Zealand’s coffin clubs represent another hopeful example of that approach.
Besides providing elderly people with companionship, the clubs also offer comfort and support to parents dealing with a stillbirth or the death of an infant.
The Hastings club is particularly committed to this work, with many members volunteering their time to make miniature coffins, complete with teddy bears and a pillow or blanket.
The local hospitals’ midwives and nurses have asked the club
“not ever to stop making our little baby coffins,” said Helen Bromley, 72, another member. The sober process happens in a separate room, removed from the lighthearted production of the adult equivalents.
Outside the club building, Aitken said she was almost done for the day with work on her husband’s coffin.
Hers was already finished, she said.
On it she had painted a panoramic view of a fictional city that includes landmarks from places she has visited, including Big Ben in London, the Colosseum in Rome and the Eiffel Tower in Paris. She’d left a “little gap,” though, Aitken said with a smile, because who knows what might still happen?
Coffin
have sprung up around
Zealand and
starting
spread around
50s, decide to make a personal statement in the box that will hold their remains or perhaps the remains
loved ones, from paying an homage to Elvis Presley, above, or one last journey on a favourite trolley, below.
Seniors
Canada, U.S. split on sugar substitutes
Christy BRISSETTE
Special to The Washington Post
As a Canadian dietitian who works and lives in the United States, I like to keep up with health policy in both countries. So I was quite interested to see that Health Canada, the governmental agency responsible for public health, is charting a new course when it comes to dietary advice, particularly in the area of sugar substitutes. It’s a track that sharply diverges from that of the United States.
In a significant departure from the past as well as from the U.S. approach, Canada’s new food and dietary guidelines, released this year, say zero-calorie or low-calorie sugar substitutes are neither necessary nor helpful.
“Sugar substitutes do not need to be consumed to reduce the intake of free sugars,” the guidelines say, adding, that because “there are no well-established health benefits associated with the intake of sweeteners, nutritious foods and beverages that are unsweetened should be promoted instead.”
In contrast, the 2015-2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGAs), issued by the U.S. Agriculture and Health and Human Services departments, suggest sugar substitutes may have a place in helping people consume fewer calories, at least in the short term, though “questions remain about their effectiveness as a long-term weight management strategy.”
The guidelines neither encourage nor discourage their usage.
The differences may seem subtle, but dietary guidelines in each country are used to shape what is served at public institutions such as schools and are what many health-care professionals base their recommendations on. Language matters.
But before we try to explain the difference in advice, let’s have a quick primer on sugar substitutes.
Sugar substitutes include many categories, such as high-intensity sweeteners that are at least 100 times as sweet as sugar. They can be “artificial,” such as aspartame and saccharin, or “natural,” such as stevia and monk fruit. They can contain a negligible number of calories or be classified as low-calorie sweeteners, such as sugar alcohols.
Canada and the U.S. have recently split on the merits of sugar substitutes. While Health Canada’s new food and dietary guidelines state sugar substitutes aren’t necessary or helpful while similar American guidelines they may have a place in helping people consume fewer calories.
In much of the research and in most policy documents, sugar substitutes are often discussed as a single category rather than a heterogenous group of compounds. This makes it challenging to know whether certain types are preferable.
Most concern seems to focus on artificial sweeteners. Six are approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as ingredients in foods and drinks and as table sweeteners people can add themselves.
The most ubiquitous is aspartame (sold as brand names NutraSweet or Equal), which is found in more than 6,000 food products, followed by sucralose (Splenda), acesulfame K (Sweet One or Sunett) and saccharin (Sweet’N Low or Sugar Twin), and the lesserknown neotame and advantame.
You’ll find artificial sweeteners in a range of foods and drinks, including light yogurt, diet sodas, protein bars and chewing gum as
well as baked goods and frozen desserts.
Carbonated drinks are the top source of artificial sweeteners in the American diet.
Research suggests that stevia and monk fruit, the natural sugar substitutes, are safe for human consumption, though it’s not clear that they lead to weight loss. There has been conflicting research, however, about the safety of artificial sweeteners. Some studies have suggested that artificial sweeteners could increase the risk of Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease and cancer, and may have a negative influence on the microbiome and mental health.
For example, research based on data from 37,716 men from the Health Professional’s Follow-up study and 80,647 women from the Nurses’ Health study published in Circulation last month found that consuming artificially sweetened beverages is associated with a
greater risk of death as well as death from heart disease. The risk was found specifically for women consuming four or more servings of artificially sweetened beverages a day.
The authors say this finding needs to be confirmed by future research, but it does raise questions about whether artificial sweeteners are necessary – or should be recommended at all.
As for the U.S. contention that sugar substitutes might help people cut back on calories and sugar to improve their health or lose weight – that seems doubtful.
A review by the nonprofit research foundation Cochrane, conducted for the World Health Organization, examined 56 studies into the effects of sugar substitutes on health. It found that there is no evidence sugar substitutes provide any benefit – and may even have some risks.
An analysis of U.S. dietary
intake from 2003 to 2004 shows that people tend to add artificial sweeteners to their diets rather than replacing sugary foods and beverages with them.
The same seems to be true for children. This month, research published in the Pediatric Obesity journal revealed that in U.S. children, drinking artificially sweetened beverages is associated with consuming more calories and sugar.
U.S. and Canadian health officials are looking at the same research and have populations with similar health issues. So why the difference in guidelines regarding sugar substitutes?
The new Canadian approach seems to be that if a food or beverage doesn’t have a demonstrated health benefit, it doesn’t belong in your diet. Their 2019 guidelines suggest that people’s taste buds will adapt to less-sweet tastes when they reduce their consumption of sweetened foods and beverages – and using high-intensity sweeteners delays that process.
This is a marked change from Canada’s last dietary guidelines, released in 2007, which advised the general population to consume sugar substitutes in moderation and to cut back on them if they noticed any digestive symptoms such as gas and bloating.
The new Canadian recommendations may seem tougher, but I see them as being clearer and something for people to aspire to. (Canada’s latest Food Guide takes a stand on several other divisive nutrition issues. For example, it promotes whole grains as the only grains to put on your plate, while the U.S. guideline is that at least half of your grains be whole grains.) The U.S. view seems to be focused on encouraging health behaviors that are thought to be more achievable.
A 2018 advisory from the American Heart Association also takes a more middle-ground approach to sugar substitutes than Canada’s, stating that they can play a role in helping people to reduce the amount of sugar-sweetened beverages they’re drinking.
The advisory also says beverages containing low-calorie sweeteners could be especially useful for people who are used to sweetness and find water unappealing at first.
Try exercise to help prevent dementia
The Associated Press
If you want to save your brain, focus on keeping the rest of your body well with exercise and healthy habits rather than popping vitamin pills, new guidelines for preventing dementia advise.
About 50 million people currently have dementia, and Alzheimer’s disease is the most common type. Each year brings 10 million new cases, says the report released by the World Health Organization.
Although age is the top risk factor, “dementia is not a natural or inevitable consequence of aging,” it says.
Much of the WHO’s advice is common sense. That includes getting enough exercise; treating other health conditions such as diabetes, high blood pressure and high cholesterol; having an active social
life, and avoiding or curbing harmful habits such as smoking, overeating and drinking too much alcohol. Evidence is weak that some of these help preserve thinking skills, but they’re known to aid general health, the WHO says.
Eating well, and possibly following a Mediterranean-style diet, may help prevent dementia, the guidelines say. But they take a firm stance against vitamin B or E pills, fish oil or multi-complex supplements that are promoted for brain health because there’s strong research showing they don’t work.
The WHO also did not endorse games and other activities aimed at boosting thinking skills. These can be considered for people with normal capacities or mild impairment, but there’s low to very low evidence of benefit.
I’m 62 and I run – quitting isn’t an option
HYMAN
Mark
Special To The Washington Post
Patrick McCarthy retired last year after a decade touching the lives of at-risk youth as president and chief executive of the Annie E. Casey Foundation in Baltimore.
In December, Patrick’s co-workers threw a farewell party for their boss at the downtown headquarters. Colleagues offered testimonials. The mayor spoke.
Among the guests were a dozen of Patrick’s “running” pals from the Baltimore Pacemakers – a ragtag group of semi-athletes who regularly pound out the miles on Baltimore’s city streets. Most seemed only vaguely aware that the gathering marked an end to something. To our group, it felt like a beginning.
Patrick beat the odds in 2018.
At age 68, after three years on the sidelines, he started running again. First, a few miles punctuated by walking. Next, six- to eight-mile jaunts. Last I checked on Patrick, his training runs were 14 miles and up. He was entertaining the idea of a marathon this year.
Running and aging don’t go together well. As we age, fitness slips and pace slows. PRs (personal records) fade into memory. Injuries mount. Recovery drags for weeks and then months.
At 62, I’m still running three times a week, sometimes four.
To a startling degree, my life is still organized around running.
During the school year – I am a professor in the business school at George Washington University – if I haven’t gotten in a run before or after class, I feel like I’ve cheated. My Saturdays are diminished if I haven’t joined the Pacemakers for a group run, usually eight to 10 miles at a pokey pace.
To satisfy me, even our family vacations incorporate some running adventure. (Case in point: next January’s Caribbean running cruise hosted by Bjorn Grass, the world record holder for marathons run completely at sea).
The hold that running has on me is common among Pacemakers, especially of a certain age. We feel lucky beyond belief. To be running at this stage of the game
with much younger friends is a gift that we do not take lightly. We’re beating the odds and know it. Sure, our ranks are thinning. That focuses us on our good fortune even more. Every couple of months, we lose a friend to a joint replacement or another health issue. Other friends just drift away, lured inexplicably by stamp-collecting and mah-jongg.
For the rest of us, quitting isn’t an option. Not yet.
Ex-baseball pitcher Jim Bouton wrote in Ball Four, his classic sports memoir, that “you spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.” That’s as true of aging runners as washed-up knuckleballers. Mostly, we’re hooked on the community that is running – the people you meet and the bonds that are formed.
For Patrick and me, the Pacemakers are home base. Started 20 years ago by Bob Hilson, a former Baltimore Sun reporter, and several colleagues in the newsroom, the group launched over lunch hour. The newbie runners ran the street behind the newspaper building for two miles before turning around. Over the years, the group has grown steadily. Now, close to 300 runners receive Hilson’s weekly emails.
The Pacemakers have a Facebook page. We have an unofficial leisure wear line – caps, shirts and sweatshirts with the club’s watchface logo. We don’t have dues.
Any barrier, financial or otherwise, to running would be highly un-Pacemaker-like. On Saturdays at 7 a.m., 75 or more of us gather for the run and the socializing that follows, usually at a locally-owned restaurant.
You never know who’ll you’ll see. In the last year, I’ve run with a high school science teacher, the host of a Baltimore radio show, a renowned expert on child sexual abuse and a candidate for Maryland lieutenant governor. And most surprisingly, with Patrick McCarthy.
Patrick had been running for decades before he joined our group. He started at age 30 and ran his first marathon at 54. When we met him a few years later, he impressed us all. He had a runner’s build – lean and rangy. And he was great company – funny and fun to talk to. Starting in 2014, we saw less of Patrick on the road. Over two years, he was beset with health issues: two detached retinas and broken bones in both feet. Each injury was followed by lengthy recuperation. Patrick’s attitude was positive. But he couldn’t stay healthy.
Finally, in 2015, while lying on an examining table with an achy knee, Patrick’s orthopedic surgeon weighed in. His injuries – past and present – had been compounding for several years. If he continued running, they would probably worsen. In the doctor’s view, it was time to stop running.
“I was pretty upset,” Patrick recalls. “It wasn’t real until I got home and had to tell my wife. Then I knew this would be a major life change.”
I spoke with orthopedic surgeon Andrew Cosgarea of Johns Hopkins Hospital. Cosgarea was the Baltimore Orioles team physician from 2000 to 2010 and cares for the 24 intercollegiate sports teams at Johns Hopkins University. His practice also includes hundreds of weekend warriors – of which a growing percentage is older runners.
I asked Cosgarea about speaking with this demographic. “The conversations can be hard. It’s difficult to accept limitations for all human beings,” he says. “It’s never a matter of you can never run again.” It’s a free country. It’s not against the law. It’s informing the patient how much damage may occur if you ignore what your body is telling you. Do you want to use up all the tread in your tires?”
Cosgarea says he encourages older runners to vary their routines. Modify running workouts to include softer surfaces or water jogging in the deep-end of a pool. Swim a few times a week.
Amby Burfoot, the 1968 Boston Marathon champ and longtime editor at Runner’s World, is Exhibit A. Burfoot has never stopped running. Last year, on the 50th anniversary of his Boston win, he completed the marathon again at age 72. In his books, including Run
Forever: Your Complete Guide to Healthy Lifetime Running, Burfoot dispenses advice on subjects including nutrition, warm-ups, sleep, training, even tips on buying a running shoe after 60. Some of the longevity tips are out of Burfoot’s own playbook. He has set up a recumbent bike in his home-office in Connecticut and pedals while he reads for up to an hour most mornings. His pace and weekly mileage aren’t what they used to be, but he has no plans to stop.
“I’ve thought: what if I fell at home or had some terrible accident that put me in a wheelchair? I would hope I would adjust,” he told me. “I have no idea.”
During his break from running, Patrick focused on biking and swimming.
Though he wasn’t able to run, he maintained contact with friends in the Pacemakers.
When we finished our Saturday runs and met at the neighborhood coffee shop, he was waiting inside at a corner table. Some of us steered conversations with Patrick away from upcoming races and PRs, not wanting to make matters worse. But last year, Bob Hilson asked: “How many doctors told you not to run?”
That question led to a second opinion and, within weeks, a comeback. It was as if our running community had laid hands on Patrick and healed him.
That hadn’t happened, of course. But that’s our story.
Iceland canyon too popular – thanks to Bieber
The Associated Press
A large sign warns motorists that Iceland’s Fjadrargljufur canyon is closed to visitors but drivers keep on coming down the narrow gravel road. A ranger at a roadblock has to explain why no one can pass: the vulnerable landscape cannot sustain more visitors.
Blame Justin Bieber, the Canadian pop star with a worldwide reach.
Bieber’s magical music video I’ll Show You was filmed at the canyon and seen by millions, creating overwhelming demand for the once-pristine spot. For a chance to follow in Bieber’s footsteps, his fans are not letting a few fences, signs or park rangers keep them away.
Eager visitors try to sweet-talk ranger Hanna Johannsdottir into opening the gate. Some offer bribes. They should know in advance it’s not going to work.
“Food from people’s home country is the most common bribery,” said Johannsdottir, who recently turned down a free trip to Dubai in exchange for looking the other way at trespassers.
The Bieber-inspired influx is one part of a larger challenge for Iceland – the North Atlantic island nation may be too spectacular and too popular for its own good.
Last year 2.3 million tourists visited Iceland, compared with just 600,000 eight years ago. The 20 per cent annual uptick in visitors has been out of proportion with infrastructure that is needed to protect Iceland’s volcanic landscape, where soil forms slowly and erodes quickly.
Environment Minister Gudmundur Ingi Gudbrandsson said it is “a bit too simplistic to blame the entire situation on Justin Bieber” but urged famous, influential visitors to consider the consequences of their actions.
“Rash behaviour by one famous person can dramatically impact an entire area if the mass follows,” he told The Associated Press. In the viral video – watched over 440 million times on YouTube since 2015 – Bieber
stomped on mossy vegetation, dangled his feet over a cliff and bathed in the freezing river underneath the sheer walls of the canyon.
“In Justin Bieber’s defence, the canyon did not, at the time he visited, have rope fences and designated paths to show what was allowed and what not,” Gudbrandsson said.
Over one million people have visited the area since the release of the video, the Environment Agency of Iceland estimates,
leaving deep scars on its vegetation. After remaining closed for all but five weeks this year, it is expected to reopen again this summer only if weather conditions are dry.
Icelanders are reluctant to fault the pop star, who enjoys enormous support on the island. About 12 per cent of Iceland’s entire population – 38,000 people – attended his two concerts in Reykjavik, the capital, a year after the video was released.
Locals underestimated the canyon’s potential as a major attraction because it’s relatively small compared to those formed by the country’s powerful glacier rivers. But unlike others, it is easily accessed and requires less than a kilometre of trekking. The selfies and drone images have stopped – for now – but more exposure is coming. The latest season of Game of Thrones features scenes filmed at the canyon. The nearby Skogar waterfall and the Svinafells glacier are also backdrops in the fictional Thrones world of warriors and dragons.
Inga Palsdottir, director of the national tourism agency Visit Iceland, said a single film shot or a viral photograph has often put overlooked places on the map.
The most extreme example, she said, is the Douglas DC-3 U.S. Navy plane that crashed on the black sand beach at Solheimasandur in 1973. The seven Americans on board all survived but the plane wreck was never removed.
“Then someone decided to dance on it and now it’s one of the most popular places in the country,” said Palsdottir.
“Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.”
Nova Scotia coast featured in new horror movie
The Canadian Press Nova Scotia’s unforgiving coast has a starring role – alongside Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson – in a new fantasy-horror film that screened to strong reviews at the Cannes Film Festival in France this weekend.
The Lighthouse, the follow-up to director Robert Eggers’ critically acclaimed 2015 feature The Witch, features DaFoe and Pattinson as two lighthouse keepers stranded together in late 19thcentury Maine. The filmmakers went to Cape Forchu on the western tip of Nova Scotia, a short drive from Yarmouth, to build the titular lighthouse in a setting that fit the barren landscape and isolated mood of the movie.
Co-producer Mike Volpe kept mum on the story’s details but said “the ocean is a character” in the black-and-white thriller where the untouched, intimidating views were key to establishing the characters’ world.
The cast and crew were battered by the area’s tough winter weather while building the set and filming last year, spending more than $6.8 million over the four-month filming period.
Construction on the set started in February 2018, and was hit with snow, strong winds and rain, with some scenes filmed on a soundstage in Dartmouth.
Volpe said watching the “hearty” Nova Scotia crew of 150 band together was a memorable experience, and while the extreme weather was challenging it became an essential part of the movie’s feel.
“At that time of year it’s freezing, it’s winter, you’re on the tip of the ocean so there’s absolutely no escape from the wind,” Volpe said, calling it a “massive undertaking” to build a set at the ocean’s edge.
“It was so cold and challenging, but I think it really added to the visceral feel of the film.”
Dafoe and Pattinson suffered along with the rest of the team, Volpe said, giving an authentic edge to their performances.
The two actors have been the focus of early positive reviews coming out of Cannes after the film’s first screenings were held on Sunday.
AP PHOTO
Russian tourist Nadia Kazachenok poses for a photograph taken by Mikhail Samarin at Fjadrargljufur canyon. The canyon is closed, with roadblocks and rope fences, but tourists are quick to pass when the park ranger is off-duty.
