Canfor still believes in B.C., CEO says
Mark NIELSEN Citizen staff
mnielsen@pgcitizen.ca
Canfor Corp. CEO Don Kayne said Thursday the lumber and pulp and paper producer remains committed to British Columbia despite the company signing a deal to buy a majority stake in a Swedish sawmill company.
In a teleconference with media following the announcement, Kayne said the majority of Canfor’s production continues to be in British Columbia and the company will remain headquartered in Vancouver.
Canfor has reached an agreement to buy 70 per cent of Vida Group for about $580 million. The privately-held company has nine sawmills in southern Sweden with an annual production capacity of 1.1 billion board feet.
The announcement comes about a week after Canfor said it will be buying Elliott Sawmilling Co., Inc., based in South Carolina, for US$110 million, subject to due diligence.
In late October, Canfor reported third-quarter earnings of $125.3 million, doubled from the year before despite lower lumber prices.
However, the figure was down from the second quarter when Canfor took in $169.8 million and said Nov. 1 it would be reducing production at its B.C. sawmills by about 10 per cent this quarter.
Unionized sawmill workers in northern B.C. are in a strike position and the United Steelworkers Local 2017 has accused Canfor of implementing rotating layoffs “in what looks more like a bargaining tactic than a reflection of markets.”
Despite the moves, Kayne said the company still remains committed to B.C., where he said the majority of Canfor’s production is still based.
“We still believe long term, B.C. is well positioned geographically to grow in the Asian markets for sure, let alone the U.S. market,” he said. “However, with some of the AAC (annual allowable cut) reductions that you’re all familiar with due to the mountain pine beetle, and some of the recent forest fires that we’ve all had to deal with the last couple of years, the expansion opportunities are certainly limited in B.C. “But our customers are growing and we need to keep pace with them and frankly, that’s the simple fact. And we’re dealing with, and we’re very proud of it, a very very strong customer base worldwide. see VIDA GROUP, page 2
TNW show will rock the house
Frank PEEBLES Citizen staff fpeebles@pgcitizen.ca
Prince George is getting a discount on classic rock ‘n’ roll.
Theatre NorthWest is where this musical gold is on sale. Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis comprised a secret million-dollar quartet, one night in a private musical meeting at Sun Studios. It was Dec. 4, 1956.
No poster could hold the zeroes if you tried to calculate the value of that session in today’s dollars. It was a real-life script that no writer would dare attempt, so the play Million Dollar Quartet could only ever come out of raw rock ‘n’ roll reality.
The four hall-of-famers ended up there in that Memphis studio that fateful night quite by accident.
Cash was huge at the time with I Walk The Line and its B-side smash Get Rhythm only seven months old, and his first previous chart hits Cry Cry Cry, Folsom Prison Blues and I’m So Doggone Lonesome still fresh in the public’s mind from the year before. Yet he was far from the peak of his career.
Lewis was showing signs of his powerful potential, but he still hadn’t released
Theatre NorthWest’s production of Million Dollar Quartet runs from Nov. 22 to Dec. 12. Performers in the show are,
Phillips, Montgomery Bjornson as
Perkins, Frankie Cottrell as Elvis Presley and
In back are Curtis Abriel as Brother Jay and Daniel
any of his biggest hits. Great Balls of Fire and Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On were just about to pop, but hadn’t been tracked yet. He was known then for his popular cover version of the Ray Price
as
hit Crazy Arms, and he was clearly an earth-shattering piano player. He wasn’t a household name yet, but his peers all knew he was The Killer.
— see TICKETS, page 3
Company seeks deadline extension to get bus service rolling
Mark NIELSEN Citizen staff
The owners of a fledgling bus company have asked the Passenger Transportation Board for an extension of the deadline to get a service connecting Prince George
to the Lower Mainland and Southern Interior on the road. Merritt Shuttle Bus Services Ltd. has until Nov. 21 to have everything in place under the PTB’s terms and conditions to run long-haul services across B.C.
Through an expedited process launched after Greyhound withdrew from Western Canada, MSBS won the PTB’s permission in late October to operate the service see COMPANY, page 2
KAYNE
CITIZEN PHOTO BY BRENT BRAATEN
from left, David Sklar as Sam
Jerry Lee Lewis, Edward Murphy as Carl
Kenton Klassen
Johnny Cash.
Bell as Fluke.
LOCAL IN BRIEF
Crash kills one
A 23-year-old man was killed Wednesday evening in a head-on collision on Highway 16, west of Prince George.
North District RCMP, who were called to the scene between Norman Lake and Bednesti Roads at 5:15 p.m., said the man was driving a pickup truck that crossed over the centre line and struck an SUV. He was the pickup’s lone occupant.
The two occupants of the SUV were taken to hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.
The stretch was closed for about four hours to allow investigators to gather evidence.
“While police continue to investigate, the casual factors are not yet known,” RCMP said. “It was determined that the pickup
truck had been reported stolen out of Prince George a few weeks prior to the collision.”
Anyone with information on this crash is asked to call the RCMP at 250-649-4004 or Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-8477.
Pickup driver hits girl
A teenage girl was taken to hospital with non-life-threatening injuries after she was struck by a pickup truck Thursday morning. Called to the scene at 7:10 a.m., RCMP said the driver was turning onto 15th Avenue from Carney Street when he hit the girl at a crosswalk. He immediately called 911 and was subsequently issued a ticket for failing to yield to a pedestrian.
RCMP are asking both motorists and walkers to be extra careful.
“Lack of daylight and increasing inclement weather makes visibility more difficult for all road users,” RCMP said. “Whether you
are walking or driving, everyone has an obligation to keep road users safe, including yourselves.”
Drivers are asked to slow down and keep focused on the road, particularly at intersections. Pedestrians are urged to wear bright, reflective clothing, use flashlights and make eye contact with drivers, even when walking on a green light and walk signal.
Power back on at UNBC
Power has been restored at University of Northern British Columbia following a day without classes.
“Classes scheduled for this evening will take place,” officials said at 4:15 p.m. Thursday. Other than backup power provided by a generator, the campus had been without electricity for most of the day Thursday. Classes for the day had been cancelled as a result.
Company trying to secure funding to get service on road
— from page 1
Co-owner Gene Field said Thursday he has asked the PTB to move the deadline back to Dec. 1 to give MSBS more time to secure the financing needed to buy the buses and to apply for funding from the federal government.
Federal Transportation Minister Marc Garneau said Oct. 31 that Ottawa may have money available to help private companies operate bus routes in remote communities. Garneau did not specify an amount and provided no further details. Field said he is working through his MLA and MP to get access to any available funding and will be meeting with some potential investors.
Field is the operations director and partner David Brule is the marketing director.
Despite the troubles, Field is optimistic the venture will be up and running.
“It’s been a difficult road stress wise because the magnitude of it is pretty big for people who have had no experience working in the business field at all,” he said.
“I just know that I’ve always wanted to own my own business and this is something that has happened to come along.
“But I’ve got a lot of good people in the right places that know what they’re doing, so that helps out a lot.”
The venture would be centred on Merritt but also serve Prince George, Langley, Kamloops and Kelowna at least three times a week. It would also run a service twice a day to the Highland Valley Copper Mine from Merritt and Kamloops.
MSBS has a website up and running at www.merrittshuttle.net. It has some bugs to work out but provides a schedule and rates as well as contact information.
Field said passengers will be charged $20 plus $10 for each stop they pass through. For Prince George to Merritt, it adds up to $100 one way. For those who buy a round trip, they get a 50 per cent discount for the trip back, adding up to $150 total, and each ticket will be good for two weeks, Field said.
— with files from Rob Shaw, Vancouver Sun
Vida Group purchase should be complete early in 2019
— from page 1
“Companies like Home Depot and companies like Lowe’s and there are several examples really around the world like that, they’re looking for suppliers who are going to be there for the long term, not for six months or 12 months or three years.
“They’re looking five, 10, even farther out
than that and so clearly we needed to secure additional SPF (spruce, fire, pine) and an operational platform outside of western Canada for that type of growth that’s going to be required today but also more importantly in the future as we move forward.”
The deal to purchase Vida Group is expected to close in the first quarter of next year.
Under the agreement, the current owners of Vida will retain a 30 per cent interest and continue to manage the day-to-day business.
Vida also has nine value-added facilities that include premium packaging, modular housing, industrial products and energy.
Canfor says it expects to be able to finance the acquisition with cash and liquidity on
hand, but will complete an extension and expansion of its existing operating and term loan facilities. Between its operations in B.C., Alberta, the U.S. Deep South and its impending purchase, Kayne said Canfor has “truly become an international manufacturer.” with files from The Canadian Press
CITIZEN PHOTO BY BRENT BRAATEN
Hot meets cold Crews pave in front of Fire Hall No. 1 on Seventh Avenue Thursday morning during a snow storm.
Tickets selling quickly
— from page 1
The Memphis Flash was the biggest star of the group at that time and would always be so. Elvis would one day be The King, and he was well on his way by that night, with a solid mass of traditional country and gospel tunes plus culture-quaking hits like That’s All Right, Heartbreak Hotel, Hound Dog, Don’t Be Cruel and one called Blue Suede Shoes. The other star in the room knew that song better than any. Perkins penned it, thanks to some ideas that came from Cash in a casual conversation. Perkins’ original version of the song was bigger than any single Elvis had released to that point including The King’s own cover which would eventually become the defining version. Perkins added the smash hit Boppin’ The Blues to his accomplishments that year. He was a hot commodity that winter night on Union Avenue.
Perkins was in a recording session with Lewis on piano the night Cash booked himself into Sun Studios to track some new material of his own. Elvis came through the door to have a meeting with legendary producer Sam Phillips. It was Phillips, wily star-maker that he was, who suggested the four of them drop all their plans, gather up some of the other session musicians in the place, and have some fun together. Did they know or did they not that Phillips happened to reach across the mixing board and push the Record button?
“This isn’t supposed to be so much fun,” said the play’s Prince George director Jack Grinhaus, who is also a musician with an affinity for this watershed era in music history. “For me, the storyline within the play that I feel best is Carl Perkins. I know the play is centred on Sam Phillips, the mastermind of the whole special night, but you can really sense the tension between Perkins and Elvis, and you know it’s all over Blue Suede Shoes and how it all came down to some quirks of fate that Elvis basically took over that song right at the peak of Perkins’ success.”
Grinhaus is a history buff, especially history that relates to the arts of his profession. The Beatles give full credit for their own legendary careers to Elvis and the other inventors of the rock ‘n’ roll genre, that early amalgam of country, rockabilly, jazz, blues, and attitudes.
Grinhaus is also fresh in the studio of his own theatre company, which turns 25 years old this year, before his time in Prince George. He spotted that the most popular play TNW ever produced was The Buddy Holly Story, so as a tribute to that subject matter he summoned Million Dollar Quartet from the canon of modern stage shows. Not every version of Million Dollar Quartet is the same, though. He had some production choices to make. Some versions paint on a veneer of glitz almost like going to see a Vegas show. He went a different direction.
“I wanted to bring people right into the room. That’s where the fascination lies, I think,” he said. “Can you imagine being a fly on the wall the night those four icons all sat down together and jammed? That’s what we are doing. We get to be the fly on the wall together. They weren’t glamourous that night, they were just four musicians who ended up in the same room, and ended up having a lot of fun together, despite all the egos and all the hype and all the complicated lives they were leading. This was pure music made by four of the best ever. This night predates so much of the stardom that was still to come, so let’s just be in the room together and enjoy that moment with them.”
This isn’t a musical. It’s a play that’s loaded in music, but it’s not a musical. It’s a jam session, not a concert. More than 40 songs make an appearance in the play, but it’s more like a campfire than a revue.
“This is about an era as much as it is these performers,” said Grinhaus.
“All four of them had older brothers they lost to tragic death. All four came from extraordinary poverty –poverty people now could scarcely imagine. They were out in the fields as children picking cotton, sharecropping, living at the bottom of American society at the time, so who did they have surrounding them? Black people. They were all exposed almost constantly to the music of African Americans of that day, right at the source, and that had everything to do with what they brought out in their own music. And it changed the world.” Million Dollar Quartet will change Prince George from Nov. 22 to Dec. 12 at TNW. Tickets are already going quickly.
David
and Doug
co-chairs of
for Cancer, receive a plaque from Margaret Jones-Bricker of the Canadian Cancer Society. The plaque will be displayed at the Kordyban Lodge, which provides a home away from home for residents of the North while they receive cancer treatments. Climb for Cancer –which sees participants trek up the Nechako River cutbanks – has raised $107,000 for Kordyban Lodge since its inception in 2016.
Kissel bringing some country to playhouse
Frank PEEBLES Citizen staff
fpeebles@pgcitizen.ca
The boy from Flat Lake has been around the world. To get from the family farm all the way to the Grand Ole Opry required a lot of travel for Brett Kissel, but he hiked all the way to the top of the Canadian country music industry and added Nashville as a bonus. He is the repeat winner of the Male Artist of the Year at the Canadian Country Music Awards 2016 and ‘17, plus 11 other CCMA trophies and a Juno Award (plus two more nominations).
He is the reigning CCMA Interactive Artist of the Year (for the fifth year in a row) and this weekend he shows Prince George why he constantly picks up that particular award. He and his fans have a special relationship, a personal bond that goes beyond usual fandom. It is forged by that word that’s propelled his whole career: travel.
He has two shows at the P.G. Playhouse –tonight and Saturday night – at the tail end of his epic We Were That Song national tour. He, his band, his crew and his family (he and wife Cecilia have two daughters, both under the age of three) have been on their musical junket for more than nine months. In fact, their number of performance dates and width of travel must be a record.
“It is!” Kissel told The Citizen at a stop in Kamloops where he had a concert and some family to visit. “We’re at 120-some (concert dates on the one tour). From every company we’ve spoken to – SOCAN, looking at other people’s set lists, CARAS who does the Juno Awards, other artists, every agency – this is without question the most extensive tour that has ever happened in Canadian music history: the most dates and the furthest reach. We’ve been to every province and territory. So we
are awfully proud to have that statistic.”
He said his gratification and gratitude is dedicated to the band and tour crew who had to buy into the idea of setting a national record of that scope. It asked a lot of those support people, and they answered with a resounding yes.
“Everyone certainly did buy in to this concept of doing a massive tour and us making history together. I’m very thankful. And now that we’ve been able to implement it, we have had so much fun, my band and my crew and my family. This has been, without question, the most remarkable experience of our careers, of our lives, to do the ultimate Canadian road trip. It has been magical.”
The biggest tip of his stetson goes to wife Cecilia who had to juggle the many fiery batons of family and business.
The closing scene in the song’s video, he said, never literally happened (Brett weary from long days of touring, shows up at the family house ahead of schedule to surprise Cecilia while she has travelled to his hotel on the road to surprise him with an unscheduled
More slipping and sliding in forecast
Mark NIELSEN Citizen staff mnielsen@pgcitizen.ca
A witch’s brew of snow then rain struck the city on Thursday – and icy conditions are expected to follow today.
Roughly 10 centimetres of snow – much of it in the form of large, white dollops – descended on the city over the morning only to give way to rain in the afternoon as the temperature rose above freezing, creating a soupy mess.
Children’s watchdog calls for help in preventing overdoses
Things won’t get any more pleasant.
An Arctic cold front was on its way, Environment Canada meteorologist Doug Jones said Thursday afternoon, and with it a high of -5 C for today then deepening into the double digits overnight.
“And then it’s going to gradually warm up through the weekend,” he said. “The reason behind that is we’re getting a temporary blast of Arctic air that’s maybe one day long and then we get the fulcrum more of the Pacific and it’ll try and warm things up.”
By Monday, the high is forecasted to be 3 C.
VICTORIA (CP) — British Columbia’s children’s watchdog has released a report calling for comprehensive change after it says two dozen children between the ages of 10 and 18 died of drug overdoses last year.
Jennifer Charlesworth’s report, Time to Listen: Youth Voices on Substance Use, also says substance use by children was prevalent in 154 critical injury reports last year, nearly double what it was in 2016.
visit) but many smaller incidents of crossed wires established that scene in the video script.
Kissel’s gratitude for his bride spilled over onto the pages of his notebooks, as he did what so many songwriters do. He penned an ode to his love. Unlike most composers, though, he put her name right in the title, and unlike an even larger number of scribes, this peppy song has shot into the charts. According to the BDS Radio chart, Cecilia is the week’s most added song among the nation’s radio stations.
“It’s a big, big song for us. We believe it will be a career song for me,” said Kissel, who already knows that feeling well from stick-around songs like It All Started With A Song, Raise Your Glass, 3-2-1, I Didn’t Fall In Love With Your Hair, the humourous Hockey Please Come Back, and this latest album’s title track We Were That Song. All of them are tunes that have outlasted their marketing window and show signs of becoming standards of the Great Canadian Songbook in the fullness of time.
To name your spouse in your song, though, and to feature her in the hit video goes against what a lot of spotlight artists do. Many celebrities guard their privacy like junkyard dogs, but here are the Kissels openly sharing their life behind the scenes. Why?
“A lot of it has to do with the support I get from my wife Cecilia,” he said. “She is very much willing to share a lot of aspects about our personal life with our fans, and publicly.” She even has her own fans and on-the-road community, he added. When you meet as many people as they do, inevitably each person on the tour will make friends and acquaintances even if you are years between visits. Kissel was last in Prince George three years and one week ago.
Tickets are available at Central Interior Tickets while they last.
In the meantime, be careful out there. Walkers will be contending with icy sidewalks and drivers with slippery roads. Motorists should check the DriveBC website for updates before venturing onto area highways, Jones advised. The conditions led to one major incident on Thursday as a transport truck pulling a trailer went off Highway 97 about 10 kilometres north of Quesnel. The stretch was closed in both directions for part of the morning before it was gradually reopened to single-lane alternating and then, by 2:30 p.m., completely reopened.
Duck, left,
Bell, right,
Climb
KISSEL
Tough times for rural region
The last federal census confirmed what is painfully obvious for most longtime residents of the region. Prince George’s population is holding steady and even growing slightly but for hundreds of kilometres in every direction, the rural areas are emptying out, and fast.
The news this week was devastating, for Quesnel and Fraser Lake in particular.
West Fraser is permanently shutting down the third shift at its sawmills in those two communities, putting 60 employees out of work in Fraser Lake and another 75 in Quesnel.
That was the second punch in the gut in as many months for Quesnel. In October, Tolko announced it would be laying off 100 workers at its mill there.
Canfor, Conifex and Interfor are also slashing production rates, and less lumber means less workers.
This is a particularly bitter bill to swallow
for unionized workers at these companies looking to negotiate new labour contracts. The profits at all of these forest companies are strong and many of them are spending hundreds of millions of dollars in the global marketplace, buying up mills in the United States.
On Thursday, Canfor announced its plan to spend $580 million to buy 70 per cent of a Swedish lumber producer. It’s understandable for area forest workers to feel that the benefits of their labours are not coming back to them through job security and fair wage increases but are instead being used to benefit the industry in places like Mississippi, South Carolina and southern Sweden.
Yet the forest companies are simply doing what they’ve done for the past 20 years: diversifying their operations, expanding into the global marketplace, posting healthy profits to maintain investor confidence and spending heavily on technological improvements that lead to greater efficiencies,
less waste, maximum value for each ton of timber harvested and reduced expenses (fewer employees, that is) per thousand board feet.
Factor in the significantly reduced levels of available trees to harvest, a problem that won’t improve for decades thanks to the mountain pine beetle epidemic and the increasing frequency of wildfires, and it becomes easier to understand why B.C.’s forest companies are looking beyond provincial and national borders for business opportunities.
Sadly, the challenges facing the rural Central and Northern Interior of B.C. go far beyond the forest sector.
The cancelling of proposed resource development projects, from the New Prosperity mine to the Northern Gateway pipeline, comes with repercussions felt in this region, not in the cozy confines of a Starbucks on Robson Street in downtown Vancouver or in the halls of the legislature in Victoria.
Regardless of how one feels about the
ONLINE COMMENTS
Re: All major forest companies in B.C. cut production
The lumber industry has always been cyclical. I know the AAC has decreased and the B.C. forest industry has over logged and clear cut B.C. forests. Closing mills and slowdowns was going to happen sooner or later because of over cutting B.C. natural forests. Bad forest management by B.C. governments letting forest industrial mongels rape and pillage our B.C. forests and spit out the hard workers.
— Lynda Iwanik
But my old boss at the sawmill told me I was making a mistake by not sticking with the forest industry.
— D Tran
Hmm but we ship raw logs all the time.
— Howdy Dowdy
Well, sure. How else do you expect to keep sawmills in Mississippi and South Carolina running, both of which are “right to work” states with low wages, by the way. It’s rather self-serving for Gorman to claim there’s no governmental policy to address this problem when a policy tying timber to processing in the jurisdiction it’s produced in would go a long way to ensuring that these jobs would stay in B.C.
— Les_Vegas
There was for many decades “a policy tying timber to processing in the jurisdiction it’s produced in” but the provincial government of the day changed it when the Americans had so depleted their forests that they started offering high enough prices to the Canadian corporations so that they determined it was more profitable for them to ship raw
logs than it was to process them up here. Many thousand of good paying forestry jobs were lost and the logs were floated south to US mills where the wages and benefits were far lower. It’ the same old story, money talks and the politicians listen.
— WWallace Mud
I would think the hurricanes and now wildfires would help restore prices.
— Karl Schneider
Re: Making the PR pivot
“Most votes are ignored”; Governing parties have “absolute power”? You really disrespect our democracy, don’t you, despite Canada being consistently ranked among the world’s most democratic countries (Economist Intelligence Unit). These so often repeated statements about votes being wasted, not counting or ignored is fundamental misstatement of the importance of voting even when you don’t win. You recited major gains of enfranchisement (missing the very significant extension of the vote to Japanese- and ChineseCanadians in 1947/48) but don’t pause to wonder what the brave men and women who struggled over those hurdles would think of spoiled ingrates of the next century whining that their votes are wasted because their candidate didn’t win. Nellie McClung would probably have taken such PR propagandists out behind the woodshed for a good hiding for so disparaging a system that she and others fought to be part of.
— ndale27
No elected party, even the Pro Rep system, can afford to ignore the voters they didn’t get. What is brutally clear is there
is no going back, if Pro Rep is allowed in. Once we drive this one off the lot, we are stuck with it. I don’t buy anything that comes with a no return policy.
— NDPhack Pardon? No going back? You must have missed the part about revisiting the question in two election cycles. That is an eightyear trial and we can go back to FPTP if we decide to.
— Cathy Fortin
Yes, more politicians, boundaries have to be changed and redrawn, this will cost the taxpayer more money. It never ends. Will the service improve? Not really. Instead of dealing with only one MLA, probably will have to deal with a number of people instead. Then, here we go, pass the buck to another , and to another. Yes, let’s make the political system more complex. Real dumb. Keep the old system and one MLA per area.
— jointeffort PR does not change governing with less than 50 per cent of the vote, it just makes fringe parties hold more power as they make deals to govern with 50 per cent of the MLA votes.
— canucks_rule
A process that moderates all voices is more representative of the population. That’s what proportional representation means. Get it? In B.C., you’ll have to have five per cent or more of the popular vote to be represented in the legislature at all. That means you’ll have to garner north of 100,000 votes just to show up on the radar. Sounds easy, but it’s not. There is no basis for your fear. It’s all based in ignorance.
— Elliot Gibson
political beliefs of John Horgan and the B.C. NDP, the fact that they only have four seats – two in the Kootenays and two representing the Central and North Coast – outside of the heavily populated southwestern corner of the province should be an additional worry for the region’s residents. Their Liberal MLAs can sound the alarm but it would be naive to expect the Horgan government to appreciate the plight of rural Interior communities, never mind spend significant time and money to alleviate the problems.
Put another way, approving construction of a new hospital for Fort St. James is great but it’s not going to provide income for the community’s unemployed mill workers.
These are difficult days for Prince George’s neighbours in the outlying rural areas and there doesn’t appear to be much relief coming in the months and years ahead.
— Editor-in-chief Neil Godbout
PR rationale: just trust us
Victoria NDP MP Murray Rankin has some comforting advice for anyone puzzling over that complex second question on the referendum ballot.
Don’t worry about it. Rely on people of good faith to work out the details.
He’s encouraging people to vote yes on the first question, about changing to proportional representation. But the second one – a multiple-choice ballot of three options to be filled out preferentially – needn’t require hours of studying esoteric differences in voting systems.
In an interview Tuesday during an appearance with federal NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, Rankin said: “It’s a cop-out to say: ‘I don’t have time to understand this issue.’”
“It is not that complicated.” He cited a similar argument made by B.C. Green Leader Andrew Weaver, whose party, along with the provincial NDP, is campaigning hard for a yes vote. The advice is partly a strategic response to the widespread – and completely accurate – perception that proportional representation is a much more complicated system than the current first-past-the-post system.
Complications or confusion could lead to two results. A voter might vote no on the first question to avoid dealing with the second question, or simply not vote at all.
So the Yes camp is keen to minimize the complexity.
Rankin said: “We don’t have to go into the intricacies of the second question. We can simply say we think it’s time to make a change and go to some sort of proportional representation system and let others, frankly, determine the best one to meet B.C.’s unique needs.”
“I’ve been encouraging people to certainly look hard at the first question, the existential either-or question, and to frankly not worry so much about which model is chosen.
“We don’t have all the facts on that, nor do we need all the facts on that to make a decision.”
He said it’s not a problem to have some things left unresolved, to let experts and other non-partisan people of good faith figure out what’s best for B.C.
Singh also urged a yes vote on the first question, based on the federal experience two years ago, when Prime Minister Justin
Trudeau abandoned his campaign promise to pursue electoral reform.
Trudeau promised countless times that the 2015 election would be the last conducted under firstpast-the-post. His government struck a committee to review the issue, but in February 2017, he ditched the idea.
“A clear preference for a new electoral system, let alone a consensus, has not emerged. Furthermore, without a clear preference or a clear question, a referendum would not be in Canada’s interest.”
Singh said Trudeau simply calculated “it’s not in my interest anymore,” so he called it off.
B.C. could be arriving at a similar conflicted place with the vote now underway, although it’s hard to imagine Premier John Horgan doing what Trudeau did.
Since most No voters likely won’t proceed to the second question about their preference, the turnout response to the second question will be much lower than the first. And a relatively even split among the three options could mean no clear consensus.
Elections B.C. has received 175,000 ballots (5.3 per cent) back as of Tuesday morning, with 18 days left before the vote is closed. It’s too soon to pass judgment on the turnout. But the return count needs to average about 81,000 ballots a day from now until Nov. 30 to get a 50 per cent turnout.
Rankin said it’s an open question at what point the turnout subtracts from the mandate the referendum is supposed to deliver.
But he said it’s ironic that the same question about illegitimacy crops up under the current system, when politicians such as Trudeau and Stephen Harper become prime minister with just 39 per cent of the vote.
B.C. Liberal Leader Andrew Wilkinson dwelled on the complexity issue during last week’s debate, and Horgan insisted: “The question is quite simple.”
Two months ago, Horgan urged Union of B.C. Municipalities delegates to join him and “take a leap of faith on change that works.”
That’s pretty much what Rankin is advising anyone who asks, as well.
LETTERS WELCOME: The Prince George Citizen welcomes letters to the editor from our readers. Submissions should be sent by email to: letters@pgcitizen.ca. No attachments, please. They can also be faxed to 250-960-2766, or mailed to 201-1777 Third Ave., Prince George, B.C. V2L 3G7. Maximum length is 750 words and writers are limited to one submission every week. We will edit letters only to ensure clarity, good taste, for legal reasons, and occasionally for length. Although we will not include your address and telephone number in the paper, we need both for verification purposes. Unsigned or handwritten letters will not be published. The Prince George Citizen is a member of the National Newsmedia Council, which is an independent organization established to deal with acceptable journalistic practices and ethical behaviour. If you have concerns about editorial content, please contact Neil Godbout (ngodbout@pgcitizen.ca or 250-960-2759). If you are not satisfied with the response and wish to file a formal complaint, visit the web site at mediacouncil.ca or call toll-free 1-844-877-1163 for additional information.
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LES LEYNE
In the Fast Leyne
Wildfires test people’s resolve
John HEUBUSCH
Special to The Citizen
hen Califor-
Wnians see the tragic weather events that interrupt the lives of so many year round in other parts of the country, we grimace. Most of us have friends or relatives back East who have been caught in a storm of one kind or another.
But, to be honest, it’s often hard to relate to those stories when the weather here is so friendly all year. Sunny and mild most all of the time. No hurricanes. No such thing as a tornado. Our blizzards stay in the mountain ski resorts where they belong. We rarely hear of floods because our constant droughts dictate that we seem to never, ever see a drop of rain. There’s just no weather here.
That is, until the fires arrive.
Santa Ana winds that come roaring out of the Western desert about this time each year arrived last Thursday. They were not a welcome guest.
This time, they’ve brought with them massive fires and a world turned upside down. No one knows just yet how the fires got their start. Flames erupted nearly simultaneously in several canyons that stretch like fingers into the San Fernando Valley.
A quarter-million people living just north of Los Angeles had to evacuate.
Many managed the escape the California way. There we sat, stalled in traffic for hours, as famous freeways such as the Pacific Coast Highway along the ocean were closed north and south to make way for the firetrucks. They moved fast, but for many, unfortunately, not fast enough. Large swaths of comfortable neighborhoods; Paramount Ranch, the site for countless Western movies; idyllic outdoor restaurants; mansions, horse ranches and vineyards were ravaged as flames jumped the 10 lanes of Highway 101 intent on making their way to Malibu, 25 kilometres west. Make it, they did. Ninety km/h
gusts of wind might not sound like much to the hurricane hardened.
But when they are pushing a 12-metre wall of fire down suburban streets, you know it’s trouble.
Two people have died in Los Angeles and Ventura counties. Our neighbours to the north, victims of the “Camp Fire,” have fared far worse. There, at least three dozen have perished in the most destructive firestorm in California history, many of them trapped in their cars as they attempted to outrun the flames. More than 200 people are missing.
The entire town of Paradise in the Sierra Nevada foothills is gone. Some 6,700 structures, most of them homes, vanished in just a few hours.
As I type this on my iPhone, I am standing in the middle of the street a hundred yards from our home where, by some miracle, there is still some cell coverage. Scores of neighbourhoods around me lie quiet, without power, many guarded by police to prevent looting or the return of owners trying to find if their houses still
stand. Hundreds of homes and countless memories lie in ashes. I am told satellite views from space show much of southern California shrouded in smoke. I believe it. Most everyone you meet smells like a campfire. A haze fills the air, and it’s not safe to breathe. Children cough. Eyes burn. The skies have looked like a war zone for three days. I stood perched on our rooftop two days ago, garden hose in hand, trying to soak our wood shingles before a burning ember might descend,
taking our home with it (don’t do this). I watched as helicopters and prop planes, laden with water, took turns diving behind the hillsides nearby to drop their loads. All at once, a huge DC-10 seemed to emerge from heaven. Flying low, it dropped bright orange retardant on a fire climbing a hill just a few streets away. I felt I could reach out and touch it. It just as quickly turned and arced out of our neighbourhood, having saved the day.
Brave pilots have been attacking
the fires around the clock as the winds swirl and flames flare up, die down and then flare up again from one deep canyon to the next. God bless them all. They, along with the firefighters on the ground and the police, are the heroes here. Farther north, 200 inmates, part of a volunteer force, joined the professional firefighters there. Our home was saved. Our best friends who introduced us to southern California and helped us find our cherished neighbourhood were not so lucky. They live in Malibu Canyon nearby and lost everything.
You find that these moments are tests.
What do you reach for in the dark when the power is out and you have just minutes to pack only what you can carry? It turns out, not much. Things to get by. Some clothes. A toothbrush. A comfortable pair of shoes. And, of course, the things with meaning. The things impossible to replace or that help keep you alive. Wedding photos. Keepsakes. Passports. Prescriptions.
Everyone is tired, running on adrenaline.
When you are forced from normalcy so quickly, it’s difficult to sleep. But there are benefits, too. It’s been heartening to see people in our neighbourhood come together to help one another like never before. We’ve met new and wonderful people. Hugs are shared. The fires have found a way to forge us together like nothing before.
John Heubusch is a novelist and the executive director of the Reagan Foundation and Library in Simi Valley, California.
Man trapped in truck recovering in hospital
Amy SMART Citizen news service
CAMPBELL RIVER — A 23-year-old Vancouver Island man is recovering in a Victoria hospital after his truck went off a cliff and he was pinned in the vehicle with a broken femur for several days.
Duncan Moffat’s uncle, Bill Macnab, said his nephew survived on a bottle of Gatorade and a bag of apples that he had picked from his dad’s yard, which thankfully rolled within reach.
“The car was driver-side tilted down. He couldn’t undo his seatbelt because the weight of his body was on it and he had a broken shoulder, ribs, he had a partially collapsed lung as well, and he had the broken leg,” Macnab said from his home in Campbell River. “He said he found the Gatorade on the third day and just saw God when he saw that. He was just so happy to have this drink.” Macnab said Moffat had been out of touch with the family for almost 10 days, but he told his father, Glen Moffat, that he believes he was stuck in the truck for five days, after he was rescued Tuesday afternoon.
Since the family was already worried about Moffat, Macnab said that when an ambulance zipped past his father’s house in Sayward, he had a hunch it might be heading for Moffat and followed it. There were no obvious signs of the accident from the road
like broken trees, but a hunter had spotted the truck by chance and called 911, he said.
When Glen Moffat arrived at the “notorious” curve in the highway south of the village of Sayward where his son went off the road, he saw his own pickup truck, which his son had taken.
“You can imagine the thoughts that went through his mind originally, seeing his truck, his son had been gone for days, and now he finds him over the edge,” Macnab said.
Sayward RCMP said in a statement that weather conditions and slippery terrain made
it difficult for emergency crews to reach the truck on the 12-metre embankment.
When police spoke with the male driver, they said he was confused and in need of medical attention. He told them he was unsure how long he’d been trapped and police believe it was for more than 12 hours and up to “a few days.”
The harrowing rescue took several hours, as rescuers needed to cut away the driver’s side of the vehicle, Macnab said. Glen Moffat phoned family members from the scene and reported his son had survived.
“Everyone was just elated and beyond themselves,” Macnab said.
Moffat has undergone surgery on his broken femur and is recovering in stable condition from his other injuries, which include bruised vertebrae in his back and a lacerated spleen and liver.
The family is grateful for the hunter, rescuers and doctors who helped save Moffat’s life, Macnab said.
“The whole system kicks in, in these situations, and it isn’t until you’re involved directly in it that you have an extreme, profound thankfulness to these guys who go out there and do this kind of stuff,” he said.
Moffat’s grandfather, Alex Moffat, said his grandson is a “very, very lucky boy” and described the hunter’s discovery of the wreckage as “one chance in a million.”
New contract offers won’t end walkouts
Citizen news service
OTTAWA — Canada Post’s latest contract offers to its workers contain positives but not enough to put an end to rotating walkouts, the head of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers said Thursday.
And CUPW national president Mike Palecek won’t say whether tentative deals can be reached before a Saturday deadline set by Canada Post.
The walkouts are causing mail and parcel delivery delays across the country and holiday shopping is expected to worsen the situation by the day.
“After a year at the bargaining table, it looks like Canada Post is ready to start negotiating,” Palecek said in an interview. “That being said, these offers don’t address our core issues.”
The union wants concrete proposals for dealing with an escalating number of work injuries at Canada Post – and not processes designed to punt worker safety concerns down the road, said Palecek.
“We have an injury crisis on our hands. (Canada Post) finally acknowledged that,” he said. “But they can’t just kick these problems off to a committee and pretend they’re going to do something about it.”
The union has cited Labour Canada reports, which have placed postal employees ahead of longshore, transportation and mining workers in reporting disabling workplace injuries – at a rate more than five times that in other federally regulated work.
Canada Post, in its latest offers to both urban and rural and suburban employees, has proposed a $10-million fund to pay for “jointly identified initiatives” to speed up improvements to the Crown agency’s safety record and to reduce workplace injuries.
The money was included in what Canada Post calls “time-limited” offers tabled Wednesday, aimed at ending rotating strikes that have created a historic backlog of undelivered parcels.
Agency spokesman Jon Hamilton said the fund is “not a committee” but a way for the company and union to work together to identify ways to make the workplace safer. Canada Post has also offered to fast-track a review of workloads to reduce overburdening of carriers who have seen a rapid increase in the number of parcels they have to deliver while letter volumes have declined.
The rotating walkouts continued Thursday at processing plants in Montreal and Winnipeg, as well as at smaller locations in Ontario, British Columbia, New Brunswick and Newfoundland and Labrador.
Canada Post said recent major shutdowns of parcel processing in Toronto and Vancouver have created a backlog of nearly 500 tractor-trailer loads of parcels and packages that need to be sorted – 375 trailers in Toronto and 120 as of Thursday morning in Vancouver.
Evacuation plan questioned in Paradise fire’s aftermath
MAGALIA, Calif. (AP) — Ten years ago, as two wildfires advanced on Paradise, residents jumped into their vehicles to flee and got stuck in gridlock. That led authorities to devise a staggered evacuation plan – one that they used when fire came again last week.
But Paradise’s carefully laid plans quickly devolved into a panicked exodus on Nov. 8. Some survivors said by the time they got warnings, the flames were already extremely close, and they barely escaped with their lives. Others said they received no warnings at all. Now, with at least 56 people dead and perhaps 300 unaccounted for in the United States’ deadliest wildfire in a century, authorities are facing questions of whether they took the right approach. In the aftermath of the disaster, survivors said authorities need to devise a plan to reach residents who can’t get a cellphone signal in the hilly terrain or don’t have cellphones at all.
In his defence, Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea said evacuation orders were issued through 5,227 emails, 25,643 phone calls and 5,445 texts, in addition to social media and the use of loudspeakers. As cell service went down, he said authorities went into neighbourhoods with bullhorns to tell people to leave, and that saved some lives.
Honea said he was too busy with the emergency and the recovery of human remains to analyze how the evacuation went. But he said it was a big, chaotic, fast-moving situation, and there weren’t enough law enforcement officers to go out and warn everyone.
Duncan Moffat, 23, is shown in an undated photo.
Managing editor Neil Godbout puts the news in perspective every day, only in The Citizen
Jalbert aiming for national gold
Ted CLARKE Citizen staff tclarke@pgcitizen.ca
Asnowstorm that brought winds gusting to 120 kilometres per hour hit St. John’s, Nfld., Thursday, and that forced organizers of the Canadian boccia championships to cancel today’s team and pairs events.
The good news for two-time Paralympian Paul Jalbert of Prince George is the singles event will go ahead as scheduled Saturday and Sunday.
The 55-year-old Jalbert was picked as the captain of Team B.C. and with the team events now scuttled he won’t have a chance to try to improve on the silver-medal team finish he helped his home province reel in at the most recent nationals in 2016 in Montreal.
But don’t be surprised if Jalbert wins some individual hardware at the Canadian Cerebral Palsy Sports Association-sponsored event.
“I have a good chance of winning the whole thing,” he said. “If I play my game a lot of them will have a tough time beating me. The last one I went to I won the training camp and I was one game away from making it through the round robin and I blew it (and finished second). I couldn’t hit anything in the last game.
“Two of the main competitors in my category retired about two months ago, so now it’s wideopen. Quebec has a two really good players and Newfoundland has one really good player who beats everybody but when it comes to playing me, he hasn’t beaten me.”
Jalbert was born with cerebral palsy, a movement disorder which affects muscle tone and co-ordination. Boccia players are classed based their levels of disability.
Jalbert uses a chair to assist with his balance when he releases the ball. He’s able to throw with his hand unaided and competes in the BC2 class. Players in the more disabled classes are allowed to use their hands or feet. They can have an assistant to stabilize them while throwing, or can use a ramp to aim and release the ball.
Boccia is similar to lawn bowling and is played individually, or on teams of two or three, with each player throwing six leather-covered balls in a four-end game. The
game starts with one player throwing a white ball known as a jack, and with the next shot that same player tries to place one of their coloured balls as close to the jack as possible. The opposing player then shoots until one of their balls ends up closest to the jack. Then it’s the other side’s turn to try and get closer or knock the opponent’s ball out of the way. When all balls have been thrown, the referee awards a point for each ball that’s closer to the jack than that of the opponent.
Jalbert has a long history as a competitive athlete. He’d been a swim racer for four years in his 20s when he branched off to road cycling full-time in 1989. That began an illustrious career which led him to the Paralympic Games in 1992 in Barcelona and 2004 in Athens. He represented Canada several times at the World Cerebral Palsy Games. His athleticism and dedication to training strengthened his muscles and improved his coordination enough to allow him to
Boys-only ringette gathering steam
Ted CLARKE Citizen staff
Nine-year-old Quinten Vangeloven couldn’t wait to step onto the Kin Centre ice Sunday afternoon to play the first-ever boys-only ringette game.
He likes the idea of playing his favourite sport just with the boys and predicted it would lead to more peace and harmony, and even a few more laughs, when they finally got down to playing the game.
“It’s just going to be guys on the ice, not any girls, so there won’t be that many arguments,” he said. “We just disagree on stuff.
“The guys make funnier jokes on the bench and the reffing might be a little bit better. The guys are pretty fun to play with. I think boys can teach girls how to show a bit more rough play in the sport. I don’t do that much rough stuff but I get away sometimes with bodychecks.”
The Prince George Ringette Association (PGRA) is spearheading the experiment to try to get more boys involved and organized the game for a group of 20 boys under the age of 10 as part of the Joy Hoffman Memorial tournament. For the exhibition game Quinten was among 20 boys (15 from Prince George, five from Terrace, Houston of Quesnel) making a bit of history playing what is predominantly a female-dominated sport.
The idea is to attract enough boys to build a competitive division province-wide which would compete apart from a competitive girls-only division. By separating boys from girls at the highest levels that takes into account the physical size difference as boys mature into teens. In the house leagues, boys and girls would continue to play together, as they do now.
“Because there are so many more coming
into ringette we’d like to eventually have three types of ringette – all-boys, all-girls and co-ed, very much like hockey,” said PGRA president Hugo McLeod. “We’ve never had the numbers, up until now.”
McLeod says most of the ice times for practices are during weekday evenings, not early in the morning or on weekends, and that’s helped attract more boys. Registration in the PGRA has steadily grown the past few years. Of the nearly 200 players now playing ringette in the city, about 30 are boys. Sunday’s boys-only game went over well and McLeod said he’s looking forward to more games being scheduled for boys at other tournaments this season to keep the momentum going.
“In Richmond, the Lower Mainland ringette league has had quite an influx of boys as well so we’re going to try to bring these boys teams down to have some exhibition games with them as well,” said McLeod.
“This is just to get the numbers up, we don’t want just boys and just girls. We want to have the co-ed house league just for fun. But when you get into the competitive streams, the physical characteristics of the boys are quite different.
“Right now in double-A (the highest level played by Prince George-based teams) you can only have girls. The only way boys can play at an elite level is in the house leagues. So if we promote more boys coming in at the bottom levels when the skill levels are very equal. Then, hopefully, we’ll have that base if they want to go to the competitive stream to make a team from all the associations.”
Now in his fifth season, Quinten plays as a forward with the Prince George Red mixed gender under-10 team. He saw his older
sister Cadance playing and decided when he was five he’d give it a try.
“My dad asked me if I wanted to try ringette and I really liked it,” Quinten said. “I like that you cooperate (with teammates) and it’s faster than hockey.”
Ringette players are not allowed to carry the ring across the bluelines. It has to be passed to a teammate. The player receiving the pass can cross the blueline before the ring and that leads to quick transitions and more breakaways, fueling the argument
race a two-wheeled bike through much of his cycling career. His balance issues and the challenges of racing on two wheels eventually led to a switch to three-wheeled trike, which he used in the Athens Games.
In 2005, he was the flag-bearer for Canada at the World CP Games in Connecticut and he wrapped up his 20-year racing career with a silver medal in the road race. He first started playing boccia in 2010 and that year won his first SportAbility provincial championship.
Jalbert works part-time at CN Centre as a maintenance worker and he and his wife Heather have a six-year-old daughter, Audrey. For the past two years he’s trained at the Northern Sport Centre gym at UNBC with coach François Loignon of Engage Sport North.
In August, Jalbert developed a blood clot in his chest and that left him with just five weeks of practice time to prepare for nationals.
“It’s taken a lot to get back, my energy isn’t what it used to be,” he said. “It’s harder when you’re older to do stuff. I’m not young anymore.”
Boccia has been a Paralympic sport since 1984. Jalbert knows more athletes are involved in boccia than there were when he was at the peak of his cycling career and the odds of making it to another Paralympics do not favour him. “When I competed in cycling I never got any carding (national team funding), which made it hard to continue and I’m starting to see the same thing with boccia,” he said. “If I do really well at this one they shouldn’t have a problem picking me for the national team. But the only thing, for travel to get the competition, it’s all back east. I hardly have any competition in B.C. or Alberta and it’s hard to stick around if nobody’s going to challenge you. “I think this one will tell if I’m capable of continuing.”
that ringette is a faster game than hockey. Cadance, 13, plays for the Northern Lights U-14 double-A team and she likes the concept of a boys-only ringette division.
“I think it might inspire the boys to come up and play ringette more because it’s kind of known as a girls’ game but it is a boy and girl game,” said Cadance. “Boys are quite a bit rougher. Sometimes they’re aggressive, it depends on what their coaches say to them about how to play.” Cadance would like to see her brother continue playing ringette into his teens and supports the idea of a competitive league for boys. She says he has all the right attributes.
“He’s a pretty good player, he’s got a nice shot and he skates hard and he puts his all into it,” she said.
Quinten has watched enough of Cadance’s games to know he can learn a thing or two from her.
“She’s a strong defenceman, she doesn’t stand around like a pylon in front of the net and she’s really strong,” he said.
• Prince George has been selected to host the provincial A and B championships, March 8-10. The three-day tournament will bring together the four regional champions (Vancouver Island, Lower Mainland, Thompson-Okanagan, Northern) in each division. The event will determine the B.C. champions in four age groups (under-14, under-16, under-19 and 18 and older) in A and B divisions. It will be the first time Prince George has hosted A-B provincials for all age groups.
As many as 80 teams could be coming for the event.
The winners advance to the Western Canadian championships in St. Albert, Alta., March 28-31.
CITIZEN PHOTO BY BRENT BRAATEN
Paul Jalbert practices throwing boccia balls at the Northern Sport Centre. Jalbert is captain of Team B.C. for the Canadian Cerebral Palsy Sports Association national championships in St. John’s, Nfld.
CADANCE AND QUINTEN VANGELOVEN
Island trip will test
Spruce Kings’ mettle
Ted CLARKE Citizen staff
tclarke@pgcitizen.ca
After 16 1/2 hours and 951 kilometres on the road and several ferry crossings the Prince George Spruce Kings bus finally arrived Thursday afternoon in Powell River. And as soon as they unloaded their gear at Hap Parker Arena the Spruce Kings got dressed for practice. It’s a formula that worked well for them last season in the playoffs when they beat Powell River in a five-game Coastal Conference championship series that sent the Spruce Kings into the B.C. Hockey League final and coach Adam Maglio wasn’t going to mess with it. Not with another threegames-in-less-than-three days road trip to deal with this weekend. His team will play the Powell River Kings tonight, then tackle the Allberni Valley Bulldogs Saturday night, followed by a Sunday afternoon encounter with the Nanaimo Clippers.
“We’re familiar with the Powell River trip from last year’s playoff series and I think having that familiarity with the travel schedule and ferry schedule we’re a bit battle-tested there, for the guys who were with us last year,” said Maglio. “Powell River’s always a tough place to play so we need to be ready. We want to win and get the weekend off to a good start and build some momentum for Saturday. It’s a 2 p.m. start Sunday and you just have empty the tank and play a real simple Sunday game.
“We’re more worried about our game this weekend than we are our opponents and we’re not going to use travel as an excuse.”
The Spruce Kings (15-7-0-1, second in the Mainland Division) start the weekend virtually tied with the Coquitlam Express (15-7-1-0, third in Mainland). Both teams are five points behind the league-leading Chilliwack Chiefs (18-7-0-0), having played two fewer games than the Chiefs.
Russia wins junior series
Winning all three over their Island Division opponents this weekend could help close that gap for Prince George but that’s a tall order. No Spruce Kings team has ever run the table and come back with three wins from a weekend Island swing. Powell River (13-10-0-0, second in the Island Division) could provide the toughest test of the three games. On Oct. 11 in Prince George, the other Kings of the BCHL rode the hot goaltending of Mitch Adamyk and beat the Spruce Kings 5-2. But Powell River has struggled in November, winning just two of its last six games. The Kings are coming off a split at home with the Langley Rivermen last weekend that started with an 8-1 win, followed by a 2-1 loss.
Maglio has tried to emphasize in practice the importance of better collective exits out of the defensive zone and more coordinated offensive-zone forays with the defencemen joining the rush.
“On Saturday night we certainly had more than enough chances, and that makes me feel a lot better,” he said. “It’s just getting pucks out a little cleaner and getting more off the attack rather than trying to get it from O-zone play. We have three D (Nick Bochen, Layton Ahac and Dylan Anhorn) in the top 15 or 20 in scoring (among BCHL defencemen). Our D are always engaged and you have to pick your spots, but we always want one up in the rush and they’ve done a fine job with that. We’ve seen lots of 2-on-2s or 2-on3s, just because the exits haven’t been that clean.”
The Bulldogs (8-15-1-0, fourth in Island) and Clippers (9-13-0-0, third in Island) each have losing records and the trick for the Spruce Kings will be trying to conserve enough energy to get through the weekend. With the exception of winger Cory Cunningham (concussion) the Spruce Kings are healthy. Maglio named Logan Neaton as his starting goalie tonight.
DRUMMONDVILLE, Que. (CP)
— For the first time in four years, Russia has come out on top of the Canada Russia Series. Dmitry Zavgorodniy scored with 15 seconds left in the third period to tie the game and Saveliy Olshansky found the back of the net in overtime as Rus-
sia rallied for a 3-2 victory over Team QMJHL in Game 6 and won the series 12-7 in points on Thursday. The CHL finished with a 2-4-0 record in the six-game series after the WHL team split the first two games in B.C., the OHL split its two games in Ontario and the QMJHL was swept.
Battle of the undefeated
UNBC back on home court tonight to face Trinity Western Spartans
Ted CLARKE Citizen staff
If the UNBC Timberwoves are looking for a measuring stick to gauge how far they’ve progressed in the U Sports Canada West conference women’s basketball pecking order, the Trinity Western Spartans are about to provide it.
The Spartans are 6-0 to begin the season and they’ll try keep that perfect streak intact this weekend when they take on the alsounbeaten T-wolves (4-0) in a two-game test tonight and Saturday at the Northern Sport Centre.
Coming off a bye weekend the T-wolves are off to the best start in seven seasons as a university team. They started with a weekend sweep of Mount Royal University in Calgary, then won both at home against Winnipeg.
TWU opened at home with a pair of wins against UBC Okanagan, hit the road for two more wins in Regina, then ran the table at home last weekend against MRU.
The T-wolves have had two weeks to watch game film of the Spartans in action and UNBC guard Alina Shakirova knows why they’ve been so successful.
“Trinity is a very aggressive team,” Shakirova told UNBC sports information officer Rich Abney. “They run fast breaks, and they rebound hard. They know how to play good defence, and they always try their best. We definitely need to stick to our plan, listen to coach (Sergey Shchepotkin), and need to give our best. We will need to be aggressive on rebounds, stop their shooters, and stop their post (Tessa Ratzlaff) from getting the points she usually does.”
The UNBC women are in the top-five in four Canada West individual offensive statistics. Maria Mongomo and Vasiliki Louka rank 1-2 in points per game. Mongomo has averaged 23.5 points while Louka has set a 22.5-point pace. Louka also leads the
league in rebounds per game (14.5), with Mongomo fifth (9.8). Madison Landry’s 56.3 per cent field goal percentage is tops in Canada West, with Louka fifth (55.5 per cent). UNBC point guard Emily Holmes has hit 4-for-8 from the beyond the three-point line (50 per cent), third-best in the league.
The Spartans lean heavily of two-time Canada West all-star forward Ratzlaff, whose 105 points through six games (17.5 per game) is fifth-best in the conference. She also leads her team in rebounding (7.8 per game).
The women’s game (6 p.m. start) will be followed by the men (8 p.m.) and that matchup is a much different story. The UNBC men (3-1) are also in uncharted territory, off to their best-ever start, facing a winless (0-6) Spartans team. UNBC is coming off a 96-81 loss to Winnipeg, Nov. 3, after three straight wins.
“We are happy, but we are never satisfied,” said T-wolves forward Anthony Hokanson. “We look at our record and we think we could be even better than we are. Every weekend matters in Canada West. You slip up once, and that could be the difference between a playoff spot or not.
“We had a really tough, close game against them last year. The key this weekend is going to be getting on the glass. Trinity has some big boys, so we need to negate their size.”
UNBC post Vaggelis Loukas is closing in on Billy Cheng’s all-time steals record of 87 and is just one behind Cheng. He could also lay claim this weekend to the T-wolves career rebounds record. He’s now just 10 behind Dennis Stark, who totaled 461 in his career. Vartan Tanielian leads the Spartans with 107 points and is ninth in Canada West scoring, an average 17.8 per game. TWU guard Josiah Meppelik has averaged five assists per game.
Lakers preparing to play without Rondo
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Rajon Rondo had
surgery Thursday on his broken right hand, and the Los Angeles Lakers plan to use a variety of strategies to replace the veteran point guard while he heals.
Los Angeles will be without Rondo for four to five weeks after he was injured in the fourth quarter of the Lakers’ fourth straight win, 126-117 over Portland on Wednesday night. Rondo apparently hurt his hand while making a steal, but he kept playing for several more minutes before coming out of the game.
Coach Luke Walton praised Rondo’s leadership and two-way contributions after the Lakers’ final practice before heading out on a three-game road trip. Although he has played only 11 games for LA, Rondo is already a key
Betts,
component of the revamped club.
“Obviously we can’t replace what Rondo does for our team and how important he is to our team, but we’re not going to make excuses,” Walton said. “That’s not who we are as a group. We’re going to step up, and guys are going to pick up the slack and add to their responsibility.”
Rondo is averaging 8.5 points, 6.5 assists, 4.5 rebounds and 1.2 steals in his first season with the Lakers. He has been the leader of Los Angeles’ second unit while also serving as a valuable coach on the floor with his younger, less-familiar teammates, according to Walton. The injury comes at an inopportune time for the Lakers (8-6), who are off to their best 14-game start since 2011-12.
Yelich win MVP awards
Ronald BLUM Citizen news service
NEW YORK — Boston’s Mookie Betts and Milwaukee’s Christian Yelich were runaway winners of the Most Valuable Player awards after the 26-year-old outfielders each led their teams to first-place finishes with dominant seasons that included batting titles.
Betts received 28 first-place votes and 410 points from the Baseball Writers’ Association of America in balloting announced Thursday.
Los Angeles Angels outfielder Mike Trout, a two-time MVP, followed with one firstplace vote and 265 points. Trout tied the record of four second-place finishes shared by Stan Musial, Ted Williams and Albert Pujols. Trout won in 2014 and 2016; was second in ’12, ’13 and ’15; and was fourth in 2017.
Cleveland third baseman Jose Ramirez was third with 208 points, and Red Sox designated hitter J.D. Martinez was next with one first and 198 points.
Betts hit a major league-leading .346 with 32 homers, 80 RBIs and 30 stolen bases as the leadoff hitter for the Red Sox, who won a team-record 108 games and their fourth World Series title in 15 seasons. Votes were submitted before the post-season.
Both batting champions won MVP awards for the first time since San Francisco’s Buster
Posey and Detroit’s Miguel Cabrera in 2012. Yelich got 29 first-place votes and 415 points, and the other first-place vote went to New York Mets pitcher Jacob deGrom, the NL Cy Young Award winner, who finished fifth. Chicago Cubs infielder Javier Baez was second with 250 points, followed by Colorado third baseman Nolan Arenado with 203.
Acquired from the payroll-paring Miami Marlins about a month before spring training, the 26-year-old Yelich won the first batting title in Brewers history with a .326 average. He set career highs with 36 homers and 110 RBIs and had a 1.000 OPS. Yelich nearly became the NL’s first Triple Crown winner since Joe Medwick in 1937, finishing two homers shy of Arenado and one RBI back of Baez. Yelich was especially impressive in the second half, hitting .367 with 25 homers and 67 RBIs – including 11 homers in August and 10 in September. Milwaukee reached the playoffs for the first time in seven years, swept Colorado in the Division Series then lost to the Los Angeles Dodgers in a seven-game League Championship Series, falling one win short of its first World Series appearance since 2002. Yelich gets a $100,000 bonus for winning, and the price of the 2022 team option in his contract increases by $1 million to $16 million.
CITIZEN PHOTO BY JAMES DOYLE
Maria Mongomo of the UNBC Timberwolves fights for a shot while being checked by University of Winnipeg Wemen defender Paige van Hastings on Nov. 3 at the Northern Sport Centre.
Minnesota manhandles Canucks
Citizen news service
ST. PAUL, Minn. — A date with road-weary Vancouver came at the right time for the Minnesota Wild. Mikko Koivu had a goal and two assists, and the Wild rebounded from a recent hiccup by beating the Canucks 6-2 on Thursday night.
Eric Staal and Matt Dumba had a goal and an assist, and Charlie Coyle, Nino Niederreiter and Jason Zucker also scored for the Wild, who had a season high in goals. Ryan Suter had two assists, and Devan Dubnyk made 25 saves. Minnesota has won four of five and 11 of 14.
Minnesota, which ended sevengame trip Sunday with five wins, was not sharp Tuesday in a 5-2 loss to Washington.
“We want to be great at home. Obviously, the way the Caps beat us was definitely not fun. We made sure we came out strong and prove ourselves and go right back on track,” Niederreiter said.
Minnesota is 6-1-2 at Xcel Energy Center this season. It is 22-3-8 on home ice since Dec. 27, 2017.
“I didn’t think we were at the top of our game, but I think they looked very tired like they were wanting to get home,” said Wild coach Bruce Boudreau.
The Canucks were at the end of their second six-game trip of the season and started a netminder who hadn’t played in the NHL in more than 19 months.
Bo Horvat and Markus Granlund scored for Vancouver, which has lost three straight in regulation. The Canucks have played a league-high 14 road games, double their number of home contests.
Koivu, who assisted on Minnesota’s opening goal, scored one of the easiest goals of his 14-year career on the power play to make it 2-0 less than eight minutes into the game. Canucks goalie Richard Bachman passed from behind his net directly to Koivu feet from an empty net.
“It happens sometimes, and
mistakes are a part of the game,” said Koivu, who has 10 points, including two goals, in his last six games. “I’m sure he’d like to get that one back.”
“I just fanned on it,” Bachman said. “Most times I’ll get those up, out and down the ice. ... Maybe I was overthinking just a little because it had been awhile.”
Bachman, who played last season and the start of this season with AHL Utica, was in goal for Vancouver for the first time since April 9, 2017. He made 23 saves.
Jacob Markstrom started the nine previous games, Anders Nils-
son remains out with a fractured finger and top prospect Thatcher Demko is out with post-concussion symptoms. Nilsson took some shots during morning skate but has not been medically cleared to play.
With Vancouver’s spotty defence, Bachman was forced to make sprawling saves, and a couple other pucks trickled just wide, especially late in the first.
“It was the players in front of him who let him down tonight,” said defenceman Michael Del Zotto.
On the power play, Niederreiter redirected Koivu’s pass 1:46 into
the second for a 3-0 lead.
Horvat got the Canucks within 3-1 with a power-play goal later in the period, but Staal scored on a wraparound 36 seconds later to restore the three-goal lead.
Dumba’s shot from the blue line beat a screened Bachman late in the period. It was his seventh goal of the season, one behind Toronto’s Morgan Rielly for the league high by a defenceman.
“I’ve got a couple greasy ones and guys are just doing a good job of getting to the net kind of like tonight. From the parking lot, and it still found a way it,” he said.
Wilson carries Seahawks past Green Bay
Citizen news service
SEATTLE — After a shaky beginning, Russell Wilson got hot in the fourth quarter and kept the Seattle Seahawks in the middle of the NFC playoff race.
Wilson threw for 225 yards and his 15-yard touchdown pass to Ed Dickson with 5:08 left was the difference in the Seahawks’ 27-24 victory over the Green Bay Packers on Thursday night. In a key matchup in the battle for the two NFC wild-card spots, Seattle (5-5) snapped a two-game losing streak by overcoming an early 14-3 deficit. Wilson was shaky at times early game, but was outstanding in the fourth quarter, capping the winning drive by recognizing a blitz and hitting Dickson quickly for his second TD pass of the night. Seattle still has not lost three straight games since the middle of the 2011 season.
Aaron Rodgers had a huge first half for Green Bay (4-5-1) and threw for 332 yards, but the Packers had just one scoring drive in the
second half, helped by a 57-yard strike from Rodgers to Davante Adams. Rodgers threw a pair of touchdown passes in the first half, but never got the ball back after Green Bay punted with 4:20 left.
Seattle ran out the clock thanks to a pair of runs from Mike Davis.
Chris Carson rushed for 83 yards and a touchdown, overcoming the mistake of fumbling on the first play of the game and setting up Green Bay’s opening score. Tyler Lockett had two key receptions late in the fourth quarter and Doug Baldwin had his first TD catch of the season for Seattle.
Rodgers was 21-of-30 passing with 10 of those going to Adams for 166 yards receiving.
Backup tight end Robert Tonyan had the first catch of his career go for a 54-yard touchdown to give Green Bay an early 14-3 lead. The Packers led 21-17 at halftime after Jones caught a 24-yard TD pass from Rodgers in the final minute of the half, but Green Bay’s offence was stymied in the second half.
The Packers gained just 114 yards in the second half, half coming on the one throw from Rodgers to Adams. That pass set up Mason Crosby’s 36-yard field goal with 8:23 left, but Wilson had one more answer.
Wilson hit Lockett on consecutive plays for 18 yards – to convert a third-down – and 34 yards to the Green Bay 16. Two plays later, facing another third-and-long, Wilson recognized the blitz and hit Dickson quickly over the middle to put Seattle in front.
That proved to be enough. On Green Bay’s next drive, Rodgers short-hopped a pass on third-and-2. Rather than going for it on fourthdown, Mike McCarthy opted to punt despite having just one time out. Seattle never gave the ball back.
Green Bay was down four starters with CB Kevin King, S Kentrell Brice, LB Nick Perry and WR Randall Cobb all out due to injuries. They lost two more in the first half when Bashaud Breeland aggravated a groin injury and Jimmy Graham injured his thumb.
SPORTS IN BRIEF
Morrissey fined, not suspended
NEW YORK (AP) — Winnipeg Jets defenceman Josh Morrissey has been fined $8,468 but not suspended for unsportsmanlike conduct against Washington Capitals forward T.J. Oshie.
The NHL’s department of player safety announced the punishment Thursday after a disciplinary hearing with Morrissey. The fine is the maximum allowable under the collective bargaining agreement. Morrissey threw Oshie to the ice late in the Jets’ victory over the Capitals on Wednesday night. The Capitals did not provide an immediate update on Oshie’s condition.
The play was similar to when Florida’s Mike Matheson threw Vancouver’s Elias Petterson to the ice in October, but wasn’t punished to the same degree. Matheson was suspended two games for interference and unsportsmanlike conduct.
NLL cancels first two weeks
PHILADELPHIA (AP) — The National Lacrosse League has cancelled the first two weekends of the 2018-19 season as a labour dispute continues between the league and the Professional Lacrosse Players’ Association. The NLL said in a statement that it is rejecting a counter-proposal for a new collective bargaining agreement submitted Wednesday by the PLPA. The announcement means games scheduled for Dec. 1 and Dec. 8 will no longer be played.
“We believe those terms would have both short and long term negative consequences on our member clubs and the league which we are not willing to accept,” the NLL said in a statement without elaborating on which terms the league found unacceptable.
Labour uncertainty began in January when the PLPA exercised a five-year opt-out clause in the seven-year collective bargaining agreement between the union and the league signed in 2013.
The NLL had suspended a Wednesday deadline for players to accept its latest CBA offer when the union provided a counter-proposal. The two sides have been unable to hammer out a new agreement over the months that followed. “We are sorry the league chose not to accept either of our two proposals,” the PLPA said in a statement. “Our one-year deal has never come off the table, instead they chose to inconvenience themselves by cancelling games.”
Minnesota Wild forward Jason Zucker and Vancouver Canucks defenceman Chris Tanev chase a loose puck during Thursday’s game in St. Paul, Minn. The Wild won 6-2.
Hee Haw legend Clark mourned
Citizen news service
Country star Roy Clark, the guitar virtuoso and singer who headlined the cornpone TV show Hee Haw for nearly a quarter century and was known for such hits as Yesterday When I was Young and Honeymoon Feeling, has died. He was 85.
Publicist Jeremy Westby said Clark died Thursday due to complications from pneumonia at home in Tulsa, Okla.
Clark was Hee Haw host or co-host for its entire 24-year run, with Buck Owens his best known co-host. Started in 1969, the show featured the top stars in country music, including Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, Charley Pride, Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, Dolly Parton, as well as other musical greats including Ray Charles, Chet Atkins and Boots Randolph. The country music and comedy show’s last episode aired in 1993, though reruns continued for a few years thereafter.
“Hee Haw won’t go away. It brings a smile to too many faces,” he said in 2004, when the show was distributed on VHS and DVD for the first time.
“I’ve known him for 60 years and he was a fine musician and entertainer,” Charlie Daniels tweeted on Thursday. “Rest In peace Buddy, you will be remembered.” Keith Urban, who won entertainer of the year Wednesday night from the Country Music Association, also honoured Clark on Thursday.
“My first CMA memory is sitting on my living room floor watching Roy Clark tear it up,” Urban tweeted. “Sending all my love
and respect to him and his family for all he did.” Clark played the guitar, banjo, fiddle, mandolin, harmonica and other instruments. His skills brought him gigs as guest performer with many top orchestras,
including the Boston Pops. In 1976 he headlined a tour of the Soviet Union, breaking boundaries that were usually closed to Americans.
And of course, he also was a member of the Grand Ole Opry.
His hits included The Tips of My Fingers (1963), Yesterday When I Was Young (1969), Come Live With Me (1973) and Honeymoon Feeling (1974). He was also known for his instrumental versions of Malaguena, on 12-string guitar, and Ghost Riders in the Sky.
He was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2009, and emotionally told the crowd how moving it was “just to be associated yourself with the members of the Country Music Hall of Fame and imagine that your name will be said right along with all the list.”
Clark won a Grammy Award for best country instrumental performance for the song Alabama Jubilee and earned seven Country Music Association awards including entertainer of the year and comedian of the year. In his 1994 autobiography, My Life in Spite of Myself, he said Yesterday, When I Was Young had “opened a lot of people’s eyes not only to what I could do but to the whole fertile and still largely untapped field of country music, from the Glen Campbells and the Kenny Rogerses, right on through to the Garth Brookses and Vince Gills.” Clark was guest host on The Tonight Show several times in the 1960s and 1970s when it was rare for a country performer to land such a role. His fans included not just musicians, but baseball great Mickey Mantle. The Yankees outfielder was moved to tears by Yesterday When I Was Young and for years made Clark promise to sing it at his memorial – a request granted after Mantle died in 1995.
Douglas, Arkin shine in Netflix series
Without a screenwriter in sight,
Michael Douglas and Alan Arkin are trading wisecracks just like the kibitzing longtime pals they play in The Kominsky Method.
Arkin got the ball rolling when the pair was asked if they knew each other before making the Netflix series, a dramedy about the longtime friendship of an actor and his agent and the indignities of aging.
“No. A few weeks before we started the show, I insisted on having lunch with him. He refused about 55 times. He finally agreed,” a deadpan Arkin said.
“I like to keep it fresh,” replied Douglas, smiling. So what did Arkin think of his co-star?
“I expected you were going to be more rigid,” he told Douglas, sitting with him in a hotel restaurant booth. “But working with him from day one, I just found him incredibly flexible and a little shy, interestingly.”
Douglas replies in kind. “I was a little in awe of him as an actor,” he said, then was interrupted.
“Get the hell out of here,” Arkin said.
Douglas smoothly carried on. He lauded his co-star’s “great sense” of comedy, which earned him an Oscar for Little Miss Sunshine, and the chance to study his impeccable timing.
Their series debuts today on the streaming service.
Exercising his comedy muscles was one reason Douglas signed on for his first small-screen series since The Streets of San Francisco police drama made him a TV star in the 1970s. He went on to become an Oscar-winning movie actor (Wall Street) and producer (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest).
That sitcom hitmaker Chuck Lorre (The Big Bang Theory, Mom) was stretching creatively with The Kominsky Method was another draw for Douglas.
Creator-producer Lorre took full advantage of being freed from network commercial breaks and a rigid half-hour format, Douglas said, and he upped the ante on heartbreak.
“It was a freedom for him at this point in his extremely successful career that he really enjoyed,” Douglas said.
Douglas plays Sandy Kominsky, who had a middling career as an actor but is lionized as a coach by young students at his modest school. Arkin is his gruff but patient (to a point) agent and friend, Norman Newlander.
Norman is married to cancerstricken Eileen (Susan Sullivan), Sandy is divorced and not averse to taking up with an age-appropriate student (Nancy Travis) – but only after he announces to the class, in proper #MeToo fashion, that she asked him out.
Sandy has a daughter, Mindy (charming standout Sarah Baker) who’s supportive despite his past failings as a parent, while Norman’s relationship with his offspring, Phoebe (Lisa Edelstein), is difficult.
Guest stars in the eight-episode series will include Danny DeVito, Ann-Margret, Jay Leno and Patti LaBelle.
The jokes skew generational, sparing neither young or old.
Sandy targets fledgling actors dedicated to fame and oversharing, while he and Norman commiserate about aging and its toll, such as the fallout from an enlarged prostate.
“I urinate in Morse code – dots and dashes,” Norman says.
Lorre’s “magic” is to make getting older funny, in contrast to its usual depiction as depressing or something to be caricatured, said Douglas.
Identifying the worst part of aging is easy, said Lorre, 66. “Your body’s falling apart. It simply doesn’t care that there’s things to do and places to be, and you’re caught inside this meat costume,” he said. “You catch a glimpse in the mirror and go, ‘Sweet Jesus,’ who is that old guy?”’ His resume allows him to find laughs in such “cognitive dissonance,” Lorre said, but he wanted to go deeper in Kominsky. Thus the poignant elements such as Norman and Eileen’s enduring affection, “the kind of a love affair which you don’t necessarily see in Hollywood” very often, he said.
To observe Douglas, 74, and Arkin, 84, grab hold of the material was both an “education and its own form of entertainment,” Lorre said. “You’re sitting there watching actors of this calibre take your words and make them far better than you could possibly imagined.”
While both actors work steadily, Douglas said it’s impossible to ignore how age affects the nature of that work.
“There’s a reason all of a sudden you are getting cast for these parts, whatever image you have of yourself. When you’re looking in the mirror, yes, you look pretty good for your age, yeah, yeah - but...” he said. “I’m just so happy that we’re in an occupation that allows us at our respective ages to continue on at something we love.”
“I wouldn’t know about retirement,” Douglas said.
“This is wonderful, wonderful work.”
CITIZEN NEWS SERVICE PHOTO
In this April 13, 2012 photo, Roy Clark smirks after joking around during his 79th birthday show at The Joint in the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Catoosa, Okla.
Citizen news service
CITIZEN NEWS SERVICE PHOTO
Alan Arkin, left, and Michael Douglas pose for a portrait in Beverly Hills, Calif., on Nov. 7.
Ludwig,PeggyJ. October31,2018-November8,2018 Itiswithgreatsorrowthatweshareinthepassingof PeggyJoannLudwig.Shewaslovinglytreasuredby herfamilyandfriends.Wewillmissherinfectious laughandcaringheart.Peggyissurvivedbyher lovinghusbandPaul,childrenEddie(Mimi),Kimi (Dwayne)andKerri(Dan). HeradoringgrandchildrenAlex,Blake,Paige,Noah (fianceTaylor),Trinitee,Eden,Angelika,Felicity (Dallas),Noelle(Kevin),JessicaandJesse. Shewaspre-deceasedbyherparentsAl&Jean Marshall,brotherDavidMarshall,sisterLynnie MarshallandnieceChelseyFiddler. TheCelebrationofLifewillbeatGatewayChurch November17,2018at11am.Donationscanbemade totheCanadianLungAssociationinlieuofflowers.
HOFF,GarryK.
April18,1948-November05,2018
Itiswithsadheartsthatweannouncethepassingof GarryKentHoff.Garrywillbedearlymissedby Linda;theloveofhislife,hisbestfriendandwifeof 46yearsandbyhisdaughtersJennifer(Doug) Walker,CindyLoewen,Rhonda(Jeff)Hunter.Garry wasproudofhisfamilyandespeciallylovedhis7 grandchildrenJulia,Emmet,Wyatt,Derek,Liam, ZacharyandGracie.Garryispredeceasedbyhis motherChristinaandbrotherGordonandissurvived bysisterDianneBeladoandbrothersBill(Trudy), Jim(Eileen),Greg(Maureen).Garryhadalarge extendedfamilyandmanyfriendsthatenjoyedhis companyduringhislifetimeandwhowerewonderful comfortduringhisbattlewithcancer.Garrywasborn inPrinceGeorge,livingandworkingheremostofhis life,hewaswellknownandrespectedinthelogging community.Helovedtheoutdoorsespecially hunting,boating,fishingandsnowmobiling.A celebrationoflifewillbeheldtohonourGarryat WestsideFamilyFellowshiponDecember1,2018at 1pm.Inlieuofflowers,wesuggestyoucallyour familyandfriendstoshootthebreeze,thatiswhat Garrywoulddo.AspecialthankyoutoMartyHofffor hiscountlesshourshelpingMomandDad.Youwere veryspecialtohim.
DISTRICTOFMACKENZIE LIFEGUARDINSTRUCTOR (FULL-TIME)
TheDistrictofMackenzieiscurrentlyaccepting applicationsforqualifiedFull-timeLifeguard Instructorstojoinouraquaticsteam.Thesepositions areresponsibleforensuringthesafetyand enjoymentofouraquaticcustomers.
LocatedinthescenicNorthernRockyMountains Trench185kmnorthofPrinceGeorge,Mackenzie offerssuperbfourseasonoutdoorrecreation opportunitiesandanexceptionalqualityoflife. Housingcostsareamongthemostaffordableinthe province.Residentsareinvolvedincommunitylife withnumerousserviceorganizations,community clubsandgroupscateringtoavarietyofinterest.The localRecreationCentrewitharena,swimmingpool, fitnesscentre,communityhallandlibraryisviewed asthehubofthecommunity.Alltheseamenities withthesafetyaffordedbysmalltownlivingmakes Mackenzieidealforyoungworkingfamilies.
SuccessfulcandidatesmustholdacurrentNational LifeguardService(NLS)(PoolOption)certificate,be acertifiedRedCrossWaterSafetyInstructor,and haveStandardFirstAid/CPR-C-AED.
BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY
Established Franchise Photography Business
Serving Northern B.C for over 35 years
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BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY
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ORMAL EUGENE WITTE passed on peacefully in Prince George on November 3 2018 at the age of 91 years. Ormal was a longtime rancher in Hixon, B.C. and is survived by his sons; Steven (Linda), Craig (Cathie) and Marc (Vicki), 10 grandchildren and 2.5 great grandchildren. A Memorial Celebration of his life will be held on Saturday November 17th at 3:00pm at Assman’s Funeral Chapel.
MANHAS Passed away on November 10, 2018 at the age of 85. Survived by his loving wife Surjit Kaur Manhas, 2 daughters: Kulbinder (Ranbir) of Toronto, ON and Beljit (Jagdip) of Toronto, On, 3 sons: Harj (Sudha) of Williams Lake, BC, Harminder (Manjit) or Prince George, BC, Bhopinder (Reeta) of Prince George, BC, 10 grandchildren: Sobhnik, Jasneek, Semerick, Jeneva, Nick, Kanisha, Sonny, Anjali, Domnick and Hema.
Funeral Services will be held November 17, 2018 at 10:00am from the Lutheran Church on Dufferin and Ospika at 10:00am.
It is with great sadness that the family of Erna Schien announces her passing on Tuesday, October 9th, 2018 at the age of 89. From Bohemia, Sudetenland, she was born in 1929 in Hennersdorf, Czechoslovakia. Erna moved to Wells, BC in 1956. She will be lovingly remembered by her husband Walter, and by her children, Christina (Richard), Norman (Lynn) and Evelyn (David) and 11 grandchildren. Erna is predeceased by her parents Emil & Marie Hofmann, and sister Rosel. Erna was an avid gardener and cook. Her kindness & wonderful smile would light up a room. She loved socializing with anyone that crossed her path, and adored her grandchildren. Her many favorite sayings will be fondly remembered, “shoot you to the moon” and yes, we all promise to go “langsam um die Ecken rum”.
Celebration of life to be held at 11am, Saturday November 17th, 2018 at the Croatian Hall, 8790 Old Cariboo Highway, Prince George, BC.
Thesuccessfulcandidatesmustbeabletointeract withthepublicinaprofessional,tactfulandpositive manner.Thispositionwillappealtoindividualswho areavailabletoworkeveningsandweekends.The successfulapplicantswillbesubjecttoaPolice InformationCheck.
ThisisaunionizedpositionwithintheCUPE3706 BargainingUnit,offeringanhourlywageof$24.49to $27.27dependingonlevelsofcertification.
Ifyoufeelyouarequalifiedforthispositionyouare invitedtosubmityourresumewithacoverletter indicatingFull-timeLifeguardInstructorCompetition. Pleaseprovidedetailsconcerningworkexperience, education,qualificationsandemploymentreferences to: DistrictofMackenzie Bag340-1MackenzieBlvd. Mackenzie,BC,V0J2C0 Attn:DianeSmith,DirectorofCorporateServices Email:diane@districtofmackenzie.ca
TheDistrictthanksallinterestedapplicantsin advance,howeveronlythoseshort-listedwillbe contacted.
HARKISHAN SINGH
MONEY IN BRIEF
Currencies
These are indicative wholesale rates for foreign currency provided by the Bank of Canada on Thursday. Quotations in Canadian funds.
Be smart picking your team
This week I am picking my basketball team for the year. This is not a sports fantasy football or hockey team we are talking about, this is a high school basketball team with 12 real people. The stakes are high for me. While I will be playing to win, I may or may not pick what seem to be the most talented players, because team dynamics are of far greater importance than individual performance. If I pick the wrong players, I could have five months of headaches and dysfunction. Even if we win, with the wrong players, the stress and drama of leading the team would not be worth the effort.
So how does this relate to business? Each and every day worldwide, business leaders like you and I are picking our teams. We are hiring and firing people. Others are leaving our organizations, retiring and moving on and we need to fill the positions. The stakes are high. Who we bring onto our team can change the dynamics. These new hires can bring drama, dysfunction and distress, or if we hire properly, they can help take our company to another level of success.
The markets today
North American stocks rallied during a volatile session Thursday with health care and technology rebounding and oil closing higher for a second-straight day. It was a very choppy session, especially in the United States, where markets swung by more two per cent from losses to gains. In Canada, the difference was more muted at 0.7 per cent, said Giles Marshall, vice-president and portfolio manager at Fiduciary Trust Canada. With no major macroeconomic reports, the markets reacted to earnings reports and the constant backdrop of trade tensions, he said. The S&P/TSX composite index closed up 11.76 points to 15,144.88. The health care sector gained about two per cent as a rebound by Canopy Growth a day after it released results that missed expectations spread to other cannabis producers. Technology rose as Shopify Inc. gained almost five per cent to $197.87. The key materials and financial sectors also gained ground, while consumer discretionary led on the downside. In New York, the Dow Jones industrial average rose 208.77 points to 25,289.27. The S&P 500 index was up 28.62 points at 2,730.20, while the Nasdaq composite was up 122.64 points to 7,259.03. Apple partially rebounded from share price losses by closing up 2.5 per cent. Walmart shares fell two per cent even though the world’s largest retailer beat expectations in its quarterly results and boosted its 2019 outlook. In the backdrop were seemingly positive signs in trade talks between China and the U.S., with the U.S. trade representative Robert Lighthizer reportedly telling some executives that a planned escalation in January of U.S. tariffs on imported goods from China are now on hold.
The Canadian dollar traded at an average of 75.75 cents US compared with an average of 75.56 cents US on Wednesday. West Canadian Select prices remained weak but West Texas Intermediate increased after an unprecedented 12-day decline.
Crude prices are being buoyed by Saudi Arabia’s oil minister last weekend saying that the country plans to cut crude production while OPEC is also considering cuts to shore up prices.
The January crude oil contract was up 24 cents at US$56.68 per barrel and the December natural gas contract was down 80 cents at US$4.04 per mmBTU.
The December gold contract was up US$4.90 at US$1,215 an ounce and the December copper contract was up 3.65 cents at US$2.75 a pound.
Business
Coach
quoted as saying that his bad hires have cost him over $100 million.
Every time we bring a new person onto our work team, there is a productivity loss. Not only does it take months or even a year to get a new person up to speed in their job, the time and energy spent on recruiting, hiring, training and onboarding a new employee is substantial. A three-year study by LeadershipIQ of over 300 companies hiring over 20,000 employees, found that 46 per cent of employees don’t work out.
You probably think that many companies hire people who don’t have the right skillset and as a result they have to fire them. However, the truth is that this only accounts for 11 per cent of the failures. The reasons why so many people don’t work out are as follows:
CITIZEN
PGSS Polars player Julia Kreitz drives hard past Brook Dowswell of the Nechako Valley Viqueens in the junior A girls zone basketball championships in February. Whether its basketball or business, there’s no path to success without the right team.
have this understanding and have defined how much we can afford to pay, we need to advertise it in such a way that we create interest for our ideal employee.
So what is the actual cost of making a poor hire? According to a survey by Careerbuilder.com 75 per cent of employers said that they have hired the wrong person at one time or another. Employers surveyed pegged the actual cost of a bad hire at $17,000 on average. Other estimates suggest that the actual cost of any new hire is 60 per cent of the first-year wages. This is no small amount for a small business owner. However, depending on the position, even for small businesses, hiring the wrong person can often add up to much more. I know over the years that I have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars because I made mistakes hiring, or kept unsuitable people on too long. Tony Hseish, the founder of Zappos, is
• 26 per cent of new hires fail because they aren’t coachable, think they have all the answers and aren’t ready to look at things from the company perspective.
• 23 per cent fail because they can’t properly manage their emotions or deal with others on the team.
• 17 per cent don’t work out because they aren’t motivated.
• 15 per cent are unsuccessful because they have the wrong temperament for the job.
So what do we have to do to get the right team?
1. Have clarity on what the position is. Often we create jobs without having a clear understanding of what that position entails and the value we need the position to generate. Having an empty position in our company is a great time to reconsider how the business is working and what type of person we need. Once we
2. Go with your gut. Unless you have a track record of picking the wrong people, you will have a good feeling whether someone is right or not. I remember one time we were hiring a new employee for our business and I was doing interviews with our manager Kathy. We had a number of people come through that day, some who were very qualified on paper, but nobody struck us as perfect, however one fellow came across as downright dangerous. Our last interview of the day was a fellow named Ramir, and he came in and nailed the interview. When he left, we knew instinctively that he was the right person for the job. He had some technical qualifications, but more importantly he had a great attitude. After we checked out his references, we hired him and he was fabulous.
3. Have criteria to measure them against. Often when my clients are asking me how to hire people for their companies, I take them back to their core values. What are the things that are really important to your company? For example, the core values of one
company might be things like honesty, community, integrity, fun, drive. values. If those are important, bring them into the interview and pick the right person based on how they fit with those values.
4. Use your probation period properly. Usually when we hire employees, we set a probation period in which we can evaluate the employee and ensure that they are a good fit. Many companies fail to use this time to ensure that they have made a good decision. Onboarding, training and reviewing the employee to confirm our choice are essential. Often our new employees don’t work out because we fail to support them and ensure they settle in and fit into the culture.
So, I will pick my team carefully this week and so should you. The stakes are high and I will be looking for attitude and aptitude as you should. I am looking forward to an exciting basketball season filled with enthusiasm, learning and laughter. If I can get my team to be committed to each other and to the pursuit of the game, the winning will come naturally. Dave Fuller, MBA, is an awardwinning professional business coach and the author of the book Profit Yourself Healthy. Email dave@ profityourselfhealthy.com.
Beware simple solutions and their sellers
Thinking I was shouldering up to my good friend, a high school English teacher, I mentioned how I had really enjoyed working with youth and thought I might consider taking a job as a teacher.
This was much earlier in my finance career, and I was having second thoughts about it. My teaching friends were receiving regular annual raises and the bank that year didn’t dish one out. The firm had made some poor decisions and suffered a temporary setback.
“I think I would be good at teaching,” I told him, “And I think I might really enjoy it. Whadaya think?”
“I hear that a lot,” he responded.
“It’s curious how people think they can do my job with no training. I have three university degrees and years of experience. Why do they think they can just saunter in and do my job? Was my schooling a waste of my time?”
Good point. I was dead wrong, and the inclination that I could roll in and be an amazing teacher was obnoxious of me. Aside from my lack of training and experience, I lacked sufficient curiosity to even examine the thing closer and that would have been a hard lesson. To my friend’s credit, he had a healthy inquisitiveness for my point of view when it came to the stuff I studied across campus from him.
I know a very successful real estate developer with proper-
“Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.”
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ties all over the province. He has lived through several painful ups and downs but was just coming off a very strong decade when at a coffee shop one afternoon he wondered whether or not to put more capital at risk toward the next phase of his project. Real estate development is lumpy like that. He heard a few teachers sitting nearby and plotting a real estate project not far from one he had just sold out.
“I took that as my cue,” he told me. “If those guys thought it was time to buy in, I figured it was time to step back.”
And with that he paused his development business for a few years. His timing was perfect and he more or less sat out the last recession.
This is not an indictment of the teachers at all – good for them for having a dream – but it says something about the savvy veteran compared to the rookie.
When they say: “It’s the economy, stupid,” they really mean: “Ignoring its complexities is gonna hurt.” And the experience of building a business from the ground up is an MBA in its own right.
Beware of would-be leaders, advisors or policy-makers who’ve never taken more than mail-order
training in commerce, never studied economics, never run a business, never had to scramble to make payroll and never balanced a budget, who were born to money, never left school or both. Social media rants are taken by some as deep wisdom – and implant ideas at the belief level. Around six-and-a-half years ago, a young girl from Southern Ontario spoke at a Rotary club decrying Canadian banks. Her viral video said the banks “… are defrauding and robbing the people of Canada,” referring to banks’ position in the Canadian economy as “criminal,” and the government as “complicit.” Her solution more or less, was to nationalize the banking system. Problem solved. She was celebrated as brilliant. An insightful 12-year-old economist. Nobel material.
At a national and international level, properly functioning capital markets are a convoluted mystery to the uninitiated, but an absolutely crucial cog in the wheel of our society. Let’s say we need $50 billion to upgrade our national defence system and we don’t want to have to pay out of pocket (meaning a huge tax increase that year). Instead, we have a well-developed capital market system – and a very efficient one, with bidders from the world over to consider lending us money to make the project fly. And some outstanding private banks to act as intermediaries. Yes, they’ll probably make a profit at it, but as noted above, if they make a mistake, it comes out of
their pocket, not the people’s. And that’s good.
To suggest that the government can be trusted to take over and do a better job is the stuff of Orwellian intrigue, or worse, just lazy thinking. It’s natural to be suspicious of things we don’t understand. It’s another thing to label that mysterious thing with sweeping conclusions tied more to emotion than fact. And it’s still another form of goofy to celebrate those sweeping conclusions as a viable platform for policy. The room got quiet when I stepped in and all eyes were on me. That hush that falls when they were talking about you just as you step in.
To break the ice, one of them blurted out: “we were just badmouthing banks.”
Coffee talk for Canadians, I suppose, but a conversation I had heard several times before from this crew.
Knowing their situation well, I responded. “No problem. If you think banks are useless, next time you have a venture in mind, try getting along without one.” Quiet went to quieter.
Mark Ryan is an investment advisor with RBC Dominion Securities Inc. (Member–Canadian Investor Protection Fund), and these are Mark’s views, and not those of RBC Dominion Securities. This article is for information purposes only. Please consult with a professional advisor before taking any action based on information in this article. See Mark’s website at: http://dir. rbcinvestments.com/mark.ryan.
MARK RYAN
DAVE FULLER
