In the wake of Tuesday’s natural gas pipeline explosion north of Prince George, Canfor has closed two of its nearby pulp and sawmill facilities while natural gas customers in many parts of B.C., as well as Washington state and Oregon, are being asked to conserve energy.
Northwood Pulp Mill was on the doorstep of the explosion, but, said company spokesperson Michelle Ward, “Northwood did not sustain any structural damage.”
“Both our Northwood and Prince George Pulp and Sawmill have been shut down due to the gas supply being turned off,” said Ward. “Our Intercontinental Pulp Mill is continuing to operate with the use of alternate fuels.”
Ward added that the employees of Northwood and Prince George Pulp and Sawmill were, despite the shutdown, “continuing to work. They are performing maintenance or other activities.”
The blast shut down the Enbridge natural gas pipeline about 15 kilometres northeast of Prince George. There were no reports of injuries.
Up to 700,000 natural gas customers in northern B.C., the Lower Mainland and Vancouver Island could be directly affected by a potential natural gas shortage, a spokesman for Fortis BC said in Vancouver on Wednesday.
Washington state’s Puget Sound Energy urged its 750,000 natural gas customers to lower their thermostats and limit hot water use.
Terry Teegee, Assembly of First Nations
regional chief, said he’s still shaken by what he witnessed outside his home on the Lhedli T’enneh First Nation reserve near the site of the explosion.
He said the blast sounded like a huge rumbling train or low-flying jet passing over his roof. Teegee said he saw a 60-metre fireball in the near distance and the impact showered him with dirt.
“When we were outside, I could feel the debris fall in my hair,” he said. “It was the ground or whatever that exploded. You could hear it start dropping. I thought it might have been hail, but it wasn’t. It was dirt. It was in my hair.”
Teegee, whose home is about one kilometre from the site, said he and most members of the community of about 100 people spent the night in hotels or with friends.
Enbridge spokesman Michael Barnes said in a statement Wednesday the explosion is the result of a rupture on a 91-centimetre section of the pipeline, causing natural gas being transported to be ignited.
“We can advise the fire on the pipeline has been extinguished, the line has been isolated and fully depressurized, Barnes said.
”As a precaution, an adjacent natural gas pipeline owned and operated by Enbridge has also been depressurized.“
He said Enbridge recognizes the impact the explosion could have on customers, but the company can’t speculate when the gas will start flowing again.
Teegee said area Indigenous leaders met Wednesday with Enbridge officials but left the meeting with unanswered questions about pipeline infrastructure.
— see ‘THIS IS A UNIQUE, page 3
Drunk driver faces big bill for crashing truck into arena
Mark NIELSEN Citizen staff mnielsen@pgcitizen.ca
A man who crashed his truck into the side of Rolling Mix Concrete Arena while driving drunk could find himself paying near $40,000 for the damage he caused.
Crown prosecution is seeking an order for $38,983.11 in restitution from Wyatt Stralak, 23, for the Aug. 31, 2017 incident. Prosecution is also seeking 30 days in jail and a one-year driving prohibition, the court heard during a sentencing hearing Wednesday.
Stralak was arrested shortly after RCMP responded to a call at about 1 a.m. He was found on Dominion Street about 100 metres away, unsteady on his feet and bleeding from a cut to his head.
When he saw police, he raised his hands but denied he was involved in an accident and then sat down in the middle of the road while an ambulance was called to the scene.
Police traced a trail of blood back to the truck where it was found that only the driver’s side airbag had deployed. While accompanying Stralak in the ambulance to the hospital, an officer noticed red marks along his left shoulder consistent with the colour of the vehicle. The tread on his shoes matched the tracks police found going away from the truck, the court was also told.
Police determined he had been heading northeast along Patricia Boulevard when he failed to negotiate the slight left turn. He hopped over two curbs, ran over a yield sign and along the lawn before crashing through the arena’s southwest
brick wall.
He later told police he had been driving a truck owned by his brother-in-law’s best friend and had taken it without permission. Stralak’s hometown was Kamloops at the time but he now lives in Quebec City.
Roughly three hours after his arrest, Stralak blew .200 and .180 on the breathalyzer. From that and taking into account his height and weight, police extrapolated that his blood alcohol level was in the range of .228 to .255 at the time of the crash.
Stralak eventually pleaded guilty to driving with a blood-alcohol limit over .08 under the Criminal Code and driving while prohibited under the Motor Vehicle Act. If the full amount prosecution is seeking for restitution is approved, the city will get $10,000 to cover the deductible and the insurer will get the remaining $28,983.11.
Stralak has no criminal record, but the severity of the damage combined with the high blood-alcohol reading warrants time in custody, prosecutor Siobhan Greenfield argued.
By October 2017, the city had placed some heavy-duty artwork on the lawn Stralak had driven across. Made out of carved granite and twisted steel, it depicts three balloons on a string, fallen back to the ground after floating during a celebration to symbolize the end of the Canada Winter Games and the city’s 100th anniversary. The project budget was $48,000. The sentencing hearing continues Friday at the Prince George courthouse.
CITIZEN PHOTO BY JAMES DOYLE
All city council and mayoral candidates got to chat with potential voters on Wednesday evening during the Speed Candi-dating event that was held at the Bob Harkins branch of the Prince George Public Library.
Frank PEEBLES Citizen staff fpeebles@pgcitizen.ca
With a mutual embrace, Michael Kast handed over the keys to Donna Morrison. It was the last moment he had unfettered access to the artist’s room at Studio 2880, and for her it was the beginning of a new opportunity.
Kast, along with Lynette LaFontaine, shared the creation station as the 201718 Community Arts Council artists-inresidence. For a year, they had 24/7 access to their own place to make art. Now, for the next 12 months, that space will be used by Morrison.
“My opportunity to be the artist-in-residence has allowed me to grow exponentially as an artist but also to grow within the community,” said Kast. LaFontaine was unable to attend the ceremony of thanks and welcome.
“Now in its sixth year, the artist-inresidence program has established a reputation of helping to launch and develop the careers of talented visual artists in a diverse range of media,” said Community Arts Council (CAC) executive director Sean Farrell, noting that LaFontaine’s traditional Métis art in its many forms, and Kast’s mix of painting and digital art got plenty of public notice. Both, he said, “drew attention to the artistic and cultural diversity that defines our contemporary community.”
Having two was an experiment. Farrell said each year he and the CAC board wanted to change up the experience for the organization as well as for the public. What would remain the same, though, he said, was the suite of supports that
come with the artist-in-residence title. It is so much more than a key to a private oasis.
Components of the program include:
• No-cost studio space at Studio 2880
• Administrative and mentorship support
• Website, newspaper, radio, TV and social media coverage throughout the term
• Opportunities to display and sell artwork at CAC events
• Minimum one, 30-day, Feature Gallery
Exhibit “The artist-in-residence also facilitates outreach activities such as talks, workshops and exhibitions, intended to promote interaction and professional development, and provide access to a diverse range arts practices within the community,” Farrell said. “During the term of the residency, the artist also delivers art classes for children, adults and seniors.”
The latter element is in Morrison’s strike zone. She is a veteran painter who has travelled the world depicting women’s issues, especially, in her artist’s scope. She painted five murals in Berlin, has exhibited on three continents, and has lived in a number of cultures since earning her Fine Arts Diploma at the University College of the Cariboo (now known as Two Rivers University).
Morrison, originally from the northern Okanagan, moved to Prince George in 2012 where she now operates her studio named Life Lessons Fine Arts. It is primarily a teaching studio where she has a group of children and a group of adults as students.
She had gotten away from the prolific
UNBC holding info day
Citizen staff
Those who are interested in learning more about the University of Northern British Columbia and what it has to offer are invited to attend the annual UNBC Fall Discovery Day on Oct. 20.
It’s an opportunity to learn about UNBC programs, meet university faculty and alumni, tour the Prince George campus and get acquainted with student services.
The free event is from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
“We are opening our doors to prospective students and their families,” said student recruitment interim manager Dennis Stark.
“We are excited to showcase our beautiful campus, award-winning faculty, and some success stories from our alumni, all aspects of UNBC life that have helped earn us distinction as one of the top small universities in Canada and one of the best young universities in the world.”
The day is for current high school students, recent high
school graduates, current college or university students considering a transfer, mature or adult learns, parents of prospective students, as well as high school counsellors, administrators and teachers.
Those interested in attending the event can register at https:// bit.ly/2pOu8BQ.
flow of art she used to work on, her time dominated instead by mentoring others, but the keys she took in hand on Wednesday would soon re-open her creative doors.
“I’m so thrilled, so honoured, I just feel blessed,” she said.
“I’ve been busy building my own little studio, I’m in my fifth year now, and I learn everyday. I get so much joy and inspiration from that (teaching process),” she said, but couldn’t wait to put brush to canvas herself thanks to this new space.
“I need to be mentored, too,” she explained, but admitted feeling shy about applying for the position until CAC staff encouraged her to at least put her name forward for consideration.
She recently had a painting accepted into a group exhibition in Penticton on the theme of eRacism. (Others shown in the show included famed writer George Elliot Clarke, musician and poet Kris Demeanor, Syrian multimedia artist Amr Fahed, and many others, all curated by former Prince George resident Paul Crawford.) Her confidence as an artist was rebuilding.
“It rekindled something in me,” said Morrison. “I realized, aha, it’s back. I needed to paint. I do know I have something to say through my painting.”
Part of her motivation to warm up her artistic voice again is seeing the children she teaches in the context of the recent spate of youth suicides this community has experienced. She wanted to use her art to speak up and “let them know that there is hope, that community matters, and that people matter.”
‘This
is a unique situation’
— from page 1
“To me, it’s just literally how vulnerable we are in that area,” Teegee said. “For anybody who lives near a pipeline, you realize that these infrastructure are capable of breaching.”
Premier John Horgan and Washington Gov. Jay Inslee expressed concern about the explosion and potential impact on energy customers during a joint news conference in Vancouver.
“This is a unique situation, we rarely have a horrific explosion as we’ve had north of Prince George,” Horgan said.
Doug Stout, Fortis BC vice-president of external relations, said 85 per cent of the gas his company feeds to homes and businesses is carried by the twinned pipeline that runs from northern B.C. to the United States border south of Vancouver.
“Turn down your thermostat if you are in a cold spot. Turn off your furnace if you can, if you are in Vancouver or a situation where you can do that. Minimize the use of hot water if you have a natural gas hot water tank ... so we preserve the gas we have for as long as possible,” Stout said.
Fortis currently has reserves in the pipeline south of Prince George, in its liquefied natural gas storage tanks in the Lower Mainland and on Vancouver Island, and there is some gas flowing from Alberta through a pipeline in southern B.C., he said.
The Enbridge pipeline connects to the Northwest Pipeline system that feeds Puget Sound Energy in Washington state and Northwest Natural Gas in Portland.
Puget Sound Energy asked its customers in a tweet on Wednesday to conserve natural gas.
“Our local gas system is safe and was not damaged by the pipeline failure,” it said.
Stout said Fortis expected to receive updates on the situation as Transportation Safety Board investigators and National Energy Board inspectors arrived to assess the damage and attempt to determine a cause of the blast.
Pot legalization may go smoothly Washington governor says
VANCOUVER (CP) — Washington state Gov. Jay Inslee has a message of reassurance for Canadians who may fear that legalization of recreational marijuana next week will come with a wave of negative consequences: it’s not as bad as you think.
Washington and Colorado became the first U.S. states to broadly legalize recreational marijuana in 2012 and Inslee says few of the concerns expressed at the time became a reality.
Speaking to reporters at the Cascadia Innovation Conference in Vancouver, Inslee said the state has not seen an increase in crime, adverse health impacts or significant usage by young people as a result of decriminalization. However he said there’s a need for more research on issues related to impaired driving.
UNBC to begin search for next chancellor
Citizen staff
With the term of current University of Northern British Columbia chancellor James Moore to end in eight months, a search is about to begin for a new person to fill the position.
The university will be looking for someone who can fulfill “an important ambassadorial role for the university with honour and distinction,” UNBC said in a statement issued Wednesday.
Moore has lived up to that goal in the opinion of UNBC president Daniel Weeks. “He served in his role in exemplary fashion; whether it was
UNBC chancellor James Moore speaks to media in 2016. Moore’s term ends in eight months, and the university is looking to fill the position.
Urgent primary care centre opening in Quesnel
Citizen staff
Northern B.C.’s first urgent primary care centre will soon be up and running in Quesnel.
To be housed at the G.R. Baker Hospital in the community south of Prince George, it will accept its first patients on Oct. 31, B.C. Health Minister Adrian Dix said Wednesday.
It’s among 10 such facilities the provincial government plans to open across the province over the next year.
The centres are to be staffed by a team of health professionals including doctors, a nurse practitioner and nurses and are meant to make it easier for patients to receive follow-up care and access to other services they may need – and lessen the load on the emergency department.
Quesnel’s centre will be located within the hospital at the community health services site at 543 Front St. and be open Monday to Friday, noon to 8 p.m. and on weekends and statutory holidays, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
It will provide appointments to patients including the frail elderly, people with mental-health and substance-use needs and patients unattached to a physician and will work in conjunction with community health services.
speaking with high school and prospective UNBC students, taking on a leading role in all convocation ceremonies, celebrations and related events across the North, or supporting the university’s philanthropic goals, James has helped advance the university in many ways, and I know he will continue to be a champion of UNBC,”
Weeks said.
Moore was the first UNBC alumni to be named to the position, which he has held since November 2015. His selection was not without controversy. That he was a former Tory cabinet minister did not sit well with some faculty members.
Moore earned both a bachelors and a masters degree in political science at UNBC, graduating from the university just three months prior to being elected MP in Port Moody in 2000.
As the ceremonial head of UNBC, the chancellor is a full participating voting member of the
university’s board of governors, senate and several subcommittees and confers all the degrees granted by the institution. The chancellor is a non-remunerated, volunteer position.
An “enhanced process” will be used to carry out the search.
A committee comprised of representatives from the alumni council, the senate and the board of governors will sift through the nominations and make recommendations to the alumni council, which will formally nominate a candidate for consideration by the board after consultation with the senate.
The plan is to have a successful candidate identified by early 2019 and installed at the May 2019 convocation ceremony at the Prince George campus. Nomination forms and further information on the role, and expectations of the position will be made available on the university’s website in the coming weeks.
Poet explores Undiscovered Country
Frank PEEBLES Citizen staff fpeebles@pgcitizen.ca
Al Rempel puts events together like he puts words together. There are layers of meaning, there is structural engineering to the concepts, there are creative connections that take everyday ideas and shine bioluminescence through them.
Rempel’s new book of poetry is another collection of amped up background thoughts we all have curled up in the shadows of our mind, but he has the skills to coax out into the open. He holds hands with the fears of mortality, parenthood, our connections to nature and how we can disconnect from it.
The book is called Undiscovered Country published by Mother Tongue Publishing. He unveiled it at the close of September with four readings in four days at four different venues in the Vancouver area. It culminated at the Word Vancouver Festival at the Vancouver Public Library, an event lit-ered with writing stars from Vikram Vij to Evelyn Lau to K.C. Dyer to another Prince George lumineer Gillian Wigmore.
Rempel got introduced at his showcase by George McWhirter,
the first poet laureate Vancouver ever had.
Now Rempel is bringing his unveiling ways to Prince George where he is a teacher at PGSS and presents words and language and lateral thinking in waves of media. Sometimes he makes vid-poems (rock videos for poetry), sometimes he works with musician collaborators, sometimes he reads his work out loud for an audience, and some of it is just for the reader’s eye.
When he pushes Undiscovered Country out into the local public, he will do it with that blend of stimulation. There will be, in addition to his own readings, songs and drumming performed by Clayton Gauthier, a spoken word performance by groundbreaking writer K.Darcy Taylor (her Masters thesis was successfully defended this past spring as presented in spoken word form), a theatrical presentation directed by Melissa Glover will be dramatized, and local musician and leading arts advocate Sean Farrell will be master of the ceremonies.
“I always like to try something new, I like collaborating with other artists, I want it to be rich and layered for the audience,” Rempel said. Somewhere in the artistic fabric of his creative mind, he projects performance into his work. It is not a struggle, he said, to select poems for the purpose of live presentation.
“I think my writing style lends itself to hearing poems out loud. I tend to write fairly lyrically, there is a musical feel to it. It can straddle the auditory and the literary worlds, where it sounds good to the ear and looks good on the page.”
The feature poem of the new book is a work of visual art as well as a literary composition called Into The Cloud of Unknowing. The words are arranged to draw the eye from line to line, and tiptoe visually from one stanza to the next, serving a literary purpose but also engaging the visual sense across 12 pages.
Rempel said the longer poem was a challenge in the publishing process. “It’s a bit like walking around indoors with a big beam over your shoulder. You have to turn carefully, maneuver, and you have to plan your next move.”
He wrote a suite of poems for his late mother and late father. They were separate, but went together, so that served as another anchor poem for the book.
With that emerged a theme he was able to work other poems into like mortar between the foundation rocks. The theme was his examination of aging, mortality, reaching longer milestones on the journey of life.
He also noted that he started writing the new material in spring and the book unfolded around the calendar to the next spring.
“I wrote fairly chronologically, so it actually formed an arch from spring to spring.”
Now he is writing a lot about the home he and his family now live in full-time in the Buckhorn area on the outskirts of Prince George. He’s not trying to paint portraits of their rural lifestyle, but it is naturally emerging in the work. That’s a collection for another day. Right now you can discover Undiscovered Country tonight at 7:30 p.m., at the free book launch event at Theatre Northwest. This is Rempel’s fifth book of poetry following Four Neat Holes, The Picket Fence Diaries, Understories and This Isn’t The Apocalypse We Hoped For.
CITIZEN PHOTO BY BRENT BRAATEN
Intercepts show Saudi plan to lure slain journalist
Shane HARRIS Citizen news service
The crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, ordered an operation to lure Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi back to Saudi Arabia from his home in Virginia and then detain him, according to U.S. intelligence intercepts of Saudi officials discussing the plan.
The intelligence, described by U.S. officials familiar with it, is another piece of evidence implicating the Saudi regime in Khashoggi’s disappearance last week after he entered the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. Turkish officials say that a Saudi security team lay in wait for the journalist and killed him.
Khashoggi was a prominent critic of the Saudi government and Mohammed in particular. Several of Khashoggi’s friends said that over the past four months, senior Saudi officials close to the crown prince had called Khashoggi to offer him protection, and even a high-level job working for the government, if he returned to his home country. Khashoggi, however, was skeptical of the offers. He told one friend that the Saudi government would never make good on its promises not to harm him.
“He said: ‘Are you kidding? I don’t trust them one bit,’” said Khaled Saffuri, an Arab American political activist, recounting a conversation he had with Khashoggi in May, moments after Khashoggi had received a call from Saud al-Qahtani, an adviser to the royal court.
The intelligence pointing to a plan to detain Khashoggi in Saudi Arabia has fueled speculation by officials and analysts in multiple countries that what transpired at the consulate was a backup plan to capture Khashoggi that may have gone wrong.
A former U.S. intelligence official – who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter – noted that the details of the operation, which involved sending two teams totaling 15 men, in two private aircraft arriving and departing Turkey at different times, bore the hallmarks of a “rendition,” in which someone is extralegally removed from one country for interrogation in another.
But Turkish officials have concluded that whatever the intent of the operation, Khashoggi was killed inside the consulate. Investigators have not found his body, but Turkish officials have released video surveillance footage of Khashoggi entering the consulate on the afternoon of Oct. 2. There is no footage that shows him leaving, they said.
The intelligence about Saudi Arabia’s earlier plans to detain Khashoggi have raised questions about whether the Trump administration should have warned the journalist that he might be in danger.
Intelligence agencies have a “duty to warn” people who might be kidnapped, seriously injured or killed, according to a directive signed in 2015. The obligation applies regardless of whether the person is a U.S. citizen. Khashoggi was a U.S. resident.
“Duty to warn applies if harm is intended toward an individual,” said a former senior intelligence official. But that duty also depends on whether the intelligence clearly indicated Khashoggi was in danger, the former official said.
“Capturing him, which could have been interpreted as arresting him, would not have triggered a duty-to-warn obligation,” the former official said. “If something in the reported intercept indicated that violence was planned, then, yes, he should have been warned.”
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the warning process, declined to comment on whether Khashoggi had been contacted. Administration officials have not commented on the intelligence reports that showed a Saudi plan to lure Khashoggi.
“Though I cannot comment on intelligence matters, I can say definitively the United States had no advance knowledge of
Stomp banging into CN Centre in January
Frank PEEBLES Citizen staff fpeebles@pgcitizen.ca
If musical theatre had its version of a drum solo, it would be the play Stomp. It’s only partially right to call it a play, in fact. It’s better termed a show. It’s a wild ride on the back of a drum beat. It bangs on garbage cans, ricochets off of brooms, to claps into hands and exorcises the soles of your feet. If there’s a solid object in sight, the cast of Stomp will probably bang it to make music. From its beginnings as a street performance in the U.K., Stomp has grown into an international sensation over the past 20 years, having performed in more than 50 countries and in front of more than 24 million people. Now it’s Prince George’s turn. The innovative spectacle will be at CN Centre on Jan. 28.
Local fans of dance, live music, costumes and sets, stage arts of all kind will get to enjoy what audiences in major centres have seen all over the world.
Stomp has rung up the box office but it has also become part of the cultural fabric. It’s been on Sesame Street, there was an IMAX movie made, it was a big part of the Closing Ceremonies for the London Olympics. Stomp has been performed at the Vaudeville Theatre, at the Acropolis in Athens, for international sports events, in Vegas and London’s West End, for television audiences and for royalty in person.
Pre-sale tickets are on sale now via the TicketsNorth website using the password broadway but only until 10 p.m. tonight. The prices range from $69 to $99 (plus service charges). As of Friday, the full sales window opens at the CN Centre box office and online.
A debate on whether to use proportional representation to elect B.C.’s MLAs is set for this Saturday.
It will be held in the Canfor Theatre at the University of Northern B.C.
Doors open at 11:30 a.m., the debate starts at noon and ends at 1 p.m. The debaters have agreed to remain on site until 1:30 p.m. to answer additional questions from attendees.
Vancouver-Fraser MP and former B.C. Liberal cabinet minister Suzanne Anton will represent No BC Proportional Representation Society and Prince George-based columnist and activist Peter Ewart will speak on behalf of Fair Vote
B.C. UNBC political science professor Gary Wilson will moderate.
The Prince George Chamber of Commerce is co-hosting the event which will be live-streamed via the Chamber’s Facebook page.
“It is vitally important that the electorate become knowledgeable on the formats for electing political parties and MLA’s in our province,” chamber CEO Todd Corrigall said.
“Changes to our electoral system must be fully vetted and delivered in a way that provides the greatest access and accountability of elected officials.
“B.C. has twice undertaken this process. However, the current referendum will be a mail-in ballot, which traditionally yields low voter turnout.” A referendum by mail on the proposal will run from Oct. 22 to Nov. 30. Registered voters will get voting packages in the mail from Elections BC during that time.
(Khashoggi’s) disappearance,” deputy State Department spokesman Robert Palladino told reporters Wednesday. Asked whether the U.S. government would have had a duty to warn Khashoggi if it possessed information that he was in jeopardy, Palladino declined to answer what he called a “hypothetical question.”
It was not clear to officials with knowledge of the intelligence whether the Saudis discussed harming Khashoggi as part of the plan to detain him in Saudi Arabia.
But the intelligence had been disseminated throughout the U.S. government and contained in reports that are routinely available to people working on U.S. policy toward Saudi Arabia or related issues, one U.S. official said.
The intelligence poses a political problem for the Trump administration because it implicates Mohammed, who is particularly close to Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser.
On Wednesday, Kushner and national security adviser John Bolton spoke by phone with the crown prince, but White House officials said the Saudis provided little information.
Trump has grown frustrated, two of-
ficials said, after initially reacting slowly to Khashoggi’s disappearance. Earlier this week, he said he had no information about what had happened to the journalist. White House officials have begun discussing how to force Saudi Arabia to provide answers and what punishment could be meted out if the government there is found responsible.
Lawmakers on Capitol Hill have reacted harshly to the disappearance. On Wednesday, a bipartisan group of senators asked Trump to impose sanctions on anyone found responsible for Khashoggi’s disappearance, including Saudi leaders.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., perhaps the president’s closest ally in the Senate, predicated a “bipartisan tsunami” of action if the Saudis were involved and said that Khashoggi’s death could alter the nature of relations between the two countries. Kushner’s relationship with Mohammed, known within national security agencies by the initials MBS, has long been the subject of suspicion by some American intelligence officials.
Kareem Fahim, Loveday Morris, Josh Dawsey, Karoun Demirjian, Karen DeYoung and Carol Morello contributed to this report.
Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi speaks during a press conference in Manama, Bahrain in 2015. Turkish claims that Khashoggi, who wrote for The Washington Post, was slain inside a Saudi diplomatic mission in Turkey.
Waiting for overtime answers
On Tuesday night, shortly after the huge pipeline explosion not far from Shelley, the City of Prince George activated its Emergency Operations Centre. If area residents were going to be forced out of their homes for any length of time, the city was prepared to work with the Regional District of Fraser-Fort George (and likely the Lheidli T’enneh First Nation) to help affected individuals.
This is what everyone expects government to do during times of crisis, whether it’s here or on the Florida Panhandle to help victims of Hurricane Michael.
Unfortunately in Prince George, one can’t help but wonder who’s getting paid and how much to respond to these emergencies.
Unionized city employees called back to work to help with any problem – major or minor – are paid overtime under the language of their collective bargaining agreements. No one questions those payments or the need to pay them.
The issue lies with salaried, non-union city employees and particularly the directors and general managers, who work under the Exempt Employee Overtime policy.
As previous editorials showed, the city’s senior managers collected thousands of dollars of overtime each during the 2017
Cariboo wildfires evacuation. While senior management already receive an extra two weeks of holiday time per year in lieu of overtime, they are allowed to collect overtime – at double their hourly rate – during serious events that require provincial government assistance. It was the province which ultimately paid the city manager $235.72 an hour for her 70 hours of overtime in 2017 and the eight others between $178.70 and $193 per hour, based on their position.
So when the Emergency Operations Centre was activated again this year, this week for the gas pipeline explosion and this summer for wildfire evacuees to the north and west of Prince George, more than a few people cynically wondered how much overtime – and the big pay that comes with it – would be racked up by the city’s top managers.
For anyone wanting to know how much the City of Prince George billed the provincial government for this summer’s evacuation and how much city staff – and particularly senior managers – earned in overtime, the answers are months away.
“Regarding your questions, although the City’s Emergency Support Service operations relating to this summer’s efforts to accommodate wildfire evacuees are now significantly reduced in size, the City is still providing support to a few evacuees,”
wrote city spokesperson Michael Kellett in an email. “Consequently, we don’t yet have the final number you refer to in your first question. We expect that this number will be compiled and provided to the Province later this year or early next year.”
Since city council has been critical of how the city’s response to these issues has been shared with Citizen readers, here is the rest of Kellett’s email:
“As for your second question, the City plans to issue a communication to media and the general public later this year or early in the new year that will include detailed information about the financial aspects of the 2018 Emergency Operations Centre and Emergency Support Services operations including staff compensation.
“Staff need enough time to review fully and account for all the expenses incurred in such a large-scale operation. Wildfire expenses must be vetted for completion and accuracy, and it must be verified that all necessary documentation has been compiled to ensure the eligibility of the expenses.
“The Citizen’s similar information request from this summer, while time-consuming and labour-intensive for staff to compile, was in fact easier to accommodate given that much of that accounting had already been done prior to submission to the BC Government and in the preparation of the
CNC breakfast a treat
My husband and I had a chance to attend one of the CNC breakfast buffet events provided by the Professional Cook class students. One of our daughters has been attending the class since August and she loves everything about the course.
It was a great opportunity as parents to see her at school and meet her classmates while they were showcasing their progress so far from what they had learned. She has wonderful instructors who guide her well for her future career.
We could tell that all the students were enjoying themselves when they were serving people at their stations. There were so many varieties of food and they were absolutely delicious.
If you are able to attend, there is one more buffet on Friday between 7:30 and 9:30 a.m. at the CNC cafeteria.
You should check it out.
Etsuko
Rustad Prince George
More attention, please
Re: Student death at College Heights Secondary School
This is irresponsible journalism and poor editing. A student did not die at CHSS. You have created a panic among uninformed people that a student died at the school. No details due to the
sensitive nature of the death, which is proper, but adds to the sense that it could happen to their children, grandchildren etc.
Getting calls from family and friends out of town and overseas because they think your child’s school is obviously not safe is not fun.
Please be responsible and accurate in your headlines.
Thank you.
Jill Greenlees Prince George
Calling bull on ICBC
In its recent editorial, ICBC is defending its new $50 fee for unlisted driver protection by arguing that this is “common practice across North America and beyond” and that “in many other jurisdictions, insurers will likely not cover your claim if an unlisted driver crashes your vehicle.” Unfortunately, ICBC’s justification simply does not hold water. As the association representing Canada’s private insurance companies, we are compelled to inform that this is not common practice in other auto insurance markets across Canada or in the United States.
While auto insurers often request drivers to list other family members living in their homes who may use their vehicles, listing all incidental drivers like friends, neighbours, and coworkers is not. Nor is denying claims if an unlisted driver causes an accident.
Many of the upcoming ICBC changes that are designed to price auto insurance based on driver risk and to make accidents follow driver records – as opposed to their vehicles – are an effective way to incent better behavior on our roads, and mirror the way auto insurance is priced in other provinces. ICBC’s new unlisted driver protection fee does not. With British Columbians paying more for auto insurance than anyone else in Canada, this is just the latest example of why B.C. drivers deserve choice and the freedom to shop around for their auto insurance needs. If ICBC were open to competition and drivers didn’t want to purchase “unlisted driver protection” they wouldn’t have to – they could take their business elsewhere.
Aaron Sutherland Vice-President,
Pacific Region Insurance Bureau of Canada
SOFI report.”
The SOFI report is the Statement of Financial Information, a document local governments are required to produce annually. Among other information, the SOFI lists the names of all city employees who earn more than $75,000 in total annual income (the word they use is remuneration) and how much they received in the previous year. It was the 2017 SOFI, when compared to the previous three years, that led to the discovery of the significant raises for senior staff, which then led to the overtime pay issue.
The 2017 SOFI was dumped into an agenda package this past June during the same meeting when mayor and council were looking at a report from that recommended significant raises for the next mayor and council. It’s safe to say the SOFI was hardly at the top of their radar.
Fair enough that it will take city staff more time and potentially into 2018 to assess how much was spent, who was paid overtime and how much for this past summer’s evacuation.
But it also shouldn’t be that hard to find out if nine specific city employees – the City of Prince George’s senior management team – earned any overtime this summer dealing with evacuees. Unfortunately, the answer is not forthcoming any time soon.
— Editor-in-chief
Neil Godbout
Effectiveness of fear
Fear is an accomplished, even admired weapon of politics.
It stirs our fight-orflight instincts and moves people more swiftly than anything to support or oppose.
Much as we would like to think that reflective, dispassionate discussion on an issue is going to lead us to the right place, it is negative messages that sow worry, anger or doubt and generally turn the trick.
Look below the border, of course, at how fear has driven the recent political discourse.
And it is intriguing that, in determining how they can best communicate messages on a complex issue facing British Columbians, the B.C. Liberals have chosen as early themes those involving fear.
An electronic version of the basic brown envelope arrived last week with the party’s pending message to its faithful about the soon-toerupt campaign involving electoral reform in B.C.
There is no particular secrecy or immense surprise in the PowerPoint deck that is being shared within the party about how to approach the complex issue. It is far less about trying to explain the details of proportional representation than about triggering fears as to what they might be.
The messaging in the deck is stark: extremist and fringe groups will gain undue power, backroom party brokers will secretly constitute governments, we will be represented by people who don’t live in our ridings, minority governments are notoriously unstable and prone to short-term thinking and poor decision-making and there will be ridings the size of some European countries.
One slide in the deck is quite the push. It notes that proportional representation elected 92 members of a far-right party in Germany and that the unelected deputy prime minister in New Zealand is anti-immigration.
The presentation argues the vote has “unfair rules” created in secrecy by the BC NDP and BC Green Party to make it easy for proportional representation to pass. And because it’s a referendum seeking only 50 per cent plus one to be considered a Yes vote, it notes that the Lower Mainland could decide the electoral fate of the province.
“Why? To lock the NDP and Greens into power,” it says, and to deny Liberals a majority government ever again.
Our resident pollster at Glacier Media, Mario Canseco of Research Co., noted in recent days that the timing of the referendum on electoral reform offers challenges. We are amid another campaign at the moment for the Oct. 20 municipal elections; the electoral referendum voting starts two days later and ends Nov. 30. That means about five weeks to find focus on the issues.
Not surprisingly, the Liberals don’t believe this is time to penetrate the fog of the proposal for us; instead, it’s more effective to lob some firecrackers into the crowd.
Shrewdly, Liberals appear to be focusing their campaign on what Canseco notes is a fear of electing those with “toxic ideologies.” This is particularly effective with older residents, who are more avid and consistent voters typically, who do not celebrate turmoil in their lives, and who are more likely to be familiar in this case with a mail-in ballot than would a smartphone-savvy millennial.
The Liberal message to note how non-residents might represent ridings in the legislature is also a smart fire to stoke, because Canseco’s most recent survey concluded that the issue of identity is a key concern. Now, it’s fair to conclude that the process of electoral reform is proceeding too quickly, mainly because it is proceeding too confusingly. A move with such profound consequence deserves a campaign of greater length, of greater distance from other campaigns and of much greater clarity.
Clarity?
If someone can give me a coherent elevator pitch on the two untested options of the three proposed, I’ll try not to get off at an earlier floor.
But, much as I wish we could civilly examine the complexity of what we might face, I cannot fault the Liberals for deciding that the buttons to press are nuclear. They have assessed that the battle will not be won along rational lines, but along emotional ones. And guess which emotion, apart from love, works best?
— Kirk LaPointe is the editorin-chief of Business in Vancouver and vice-president, editorial, of Glacier Media
KIRK LAPOINTE Glacier Media
Guest Column
CP PHOTO Nobel Prize winner Donna Strickland shows the media her lab after speaking about her prestigious award in Waterloo, Ont., on Oct. 2. Strickland is among three physicists who were awarded the prize for groundbreaking inventions in the field of laser physics.
Strickland co-invented a method of generating high-intensity, ultra-short optical pulses which has a variety of applications, including corrective laser eye surgery. She is one of only three women ever to win the Nobel Prize for physics.
A light exercise to explain lasers
Last week, the Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to Arthur Ashkin for inventing optical tweezers and to Donna Strickland and Gerard Mourou for developing the shortest, most powerful laser pulses presently available.
To explain their work, we need to discuss lasers and how they work. Not surprisingly, these devices are now ubiquitous in our lives and used in everything from grocery scanners to eye surgery.
I will try to explain how they work with an analogy, so here it goes:
Imagine you are standing below a box, made of cardboard and suspended from the ceiling some distance above your head – let’s say about two metres.
The top of the box is open so you are able to throw tennis balls up and into the box if you want. Being provided with a large basket of tennis balls and with nothing better to do, that is exactly what you decide to do.
Now, if all the tennis balls were to land in the box and not return to ground level, this would be a very short game. However, someone has very kindly cut a hole in the bottom of the box just big enough for a tennis ball to fall through.
Of course, you are standing to one side so the balls don’t fall on your head and you can shoot for the top.
On average, the number of balls and speed with which you throw tennis balls into the box is the same as the rate at which the tennis balls fall out of the hole in the bottom and return to the ground. If I may indulge your patience, you have achieved what scientists refer to as a state of equilibrium. The rate of the forward reaction – the balls going into the box – exactly equals the reverse reaction – the rate they fall
out. Nothing much would change and you could keep throwing tennis balls until your arm got too tired or you got bored.
Someone, though, has attached a second box to the side of the first – a little bit lower and with two special properties. The first is a tennis ball can roll from the first box to the second but because the second is a bit lower it can’t roll back again.
The hole connecting the two boxes is exactly the same size as the tennis ball so not every ball will get trapped in the second box but some will. Let’s say it is 10 per cent or one out of every ten balls landing in the first box will find its way into the second.
If you start with 100 tennis balls, after the first pass 10 will be in the second box and you will have 90 to throw. After the second pass, you will be down to 81 and 19 will be trapped in the second box. Eventually, you will have a “population inversion” where there will be more balls trapped in the second box than you have available to throw. This will produce an unstable state.
This is where the other special feature comes in. The second box is fitted with a trap door and the only way to open it is to hit it exactly right with a tennis ball moving exactly the right speed and height.
This is not an easy task. And it distracts from trying to get balls into the first box.
So, you keep lobbing tennis balls into the first box and while most of them fall back down around you, some find their way into the second box waiting for the perfect strike by a tennis ball.
And occasionally, you take a shot at the trap door on the second box, trying to get it to dump its load of tennis balls.
All of a sudden, you get it just right, the trap door flies open and box empties releasing a large number of tennis balls.
If the tennis balls are electrons and the boxes are energy states within either an atom or a molecule, then this the process which produces laser light. LASER is an acronym for Light Amplification by the Stimulated Emission of Radiation. The one tennis ball which hits the trap door is stimulating the simultaneous release of all of the tennis balls and amplifying the effect in much the same way as a photon induces electrons to return to the ground state and amplify the light.
Because all of the photons in a laser beam have exactly the same energy, their waves are in synchronization with all of the troughs and peaks lined up.
Ashkin was able to catch atoms and small molecules in one of these troughs, holding them in place. He was then able to use a second laser beam to manipulate the atoms.
Mourou and Strickland were able to increase the power of each laser pulse while cutting the duration to attoseconds or 0.000000000000000001 seconds. By doing so, they were able to create laser pulses which could probe the structure of electrons in atoms or remove cells from a cornea without damaging the tissue. All done with lasers.
Canada’s climate targets too low, UN report says
Mia RABSON Citizen news service
OTTAWA — Canada would have to cut its emissions almost in half over the next 12 years to meet the stiffer targets dozens of international climate change experts say is required to prevent catastrophic results from global warming.
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says there will be irreversible changes and the entire loss of some ecosystems if the world doesn’t take immediate and intensive action to cut greenhouse gas emissions far more than is occurring now.
That means trying to limit the increase in the average global ground temperature to 1.5 degrees C, rather than 2 C as specified in the Paris climate change accord.
At 2 C, everything from melting sea ice to droughts, famines and floods will be significantly worse than at 1.5 C, the report says.
If people don’t act now, the report says, we will hit 1.5 C somewhere between 2030 and 2052. To prevent that, the world has to cut the amount of emissions released each year by 2030 so that they are no more than 55 per cent of what they were in 2010. For Canada, that means emissions would need to fall to a maximum of 385 million tonnes a year.
In 2016 they were almost twice that, and the Canadian government’s current aim is to only cut to about 512 million tonnes a year. Even that more modest goal is out of reach for now despite plans such as the controversial national carbon price, making buildings more energy efficient and eliminating coal as a source of electricity by 2030.
TODD WHITCOMBE
Powerful hurricane slams Florida
Jay REEVES, Brendan FARRINGTON Citizen news service
PANAMA CITY, Fla. — Powerful Hurricane Michael slammed into the Florida Panhandle with terrifying winds of 250 km/h on Wednesday, splintering homes and submerging neighbourhoods before continuing its destructive march inland across the Southeast. It was the most powerful hurricane to hit the continental U.S. in nearly 50 years and at least one death was reported during its passage.
Supercharged by abnormally warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico, the Category 4 storm crashed ashore in the early afternoon near Mexico Beach, a tourist town about midway along the Panhandle, a 320-km stretch of white-sand beach resorts, fishing towns and military bases. After it ravaged the Panhandle, Michael entered south Georgia as a Category 3 hurricane – the most powerful in recorded history for that part of the neighbouring state.
In north Florida, Michael battered the shoreline with sideways rain, powerful gusts and crashing waves, swamping streets and docks, flattening trees, stripped away leaves, shredding awnings and peeling away shingles. It also set off transformer explosions and knocked out power to more than 388,000 homes and businesses.
A Panhandle man was killed by a tree toppling on a home, Gadsden County Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman Anglie Hightower said. She said authorities got a call Wednesday evening that the man was trapped but rescue crews were hampered by downed trees and debris blocking roadways. Authorities haven’t yet confirmed the man’s name.
Damage in Panama City was extensive, with broken and uprooted trees and power lines down nearly everywhere. Roofs were peeled off and homes split open by fallen trees. Twisted street signs lay on the ground. Residents emerged in the early evening to assess damage when rains stopped, though skies were still overcast and windy.
Vance Beu, 29, was staying with his mother at her apartment, Spring Gate Apartments, a small complex of singlestorey wood frame apartment buildings. A pine tree punched a hole in their roof and he said the roar of the storm sounded like a jet engine as the winds accelerated. Their ears even popped as the barometric pressure dropped.
“It was terrifying, honestly. There was a lot of noise. We thought the windows
were going to break at any time. We had the inside windows kind of barricaded in with mattresses,” Beu said.
Kaylee O’Brien was crying as she sorted through the remains of the apartment she shared with three roommates at Whispering Pines apartments, where the smell of broken pine trees was thick in the air. Four pine trees had crashed through the roof of her apartment, nearly hitting two people. She was missing her one-year-old Siamese cat, Molly.
“We haven’t seen her since the tree hit the den. She’s my baby,” O’Brien said, her face wet with tears.
In Apalachicola, Sally Crown rode out the storm in her house. The worst damage – she thought – was in her yard. Multiple trees were down. But after the storm passed, she drove to check on the cafe she manages and saw the scope of the destruction.
“It’s absolutely horrendous. Catastrophic,” Crown said. “There’s flooding. Boats on the highway. A house on the highway. Houses that have been there forever are just shattered.”
Gov. Rick Scott announced soon after the powerful eye had swept inland that “aggressive” search and rescue efforts were just beginning and urged people to stay off debris-littered roads.
“If you and your family made it through the storm safely, the worst thing you could do now is act foolishly,” he said.
With the hurricane still pounding the state hours after it came ashore, and conditions too dangerous in places for
search-and-rescue teams to go out, there were no further reports on deaths or injuries by nightfall.
Michael was a meteorological brute that sprang quickly from a weekend tropical depression, going from a Category 2 on Tuesday to a Category 4 by the time it came ashore. It was the most powerful hurricane on record to hit the Panhandle.
More than 375,000 people up and down the Gulf Coast were urged to evacuate as Michael closed in. But the fast-moving, fast-strengthening storm didn’t give people much time to prepare, and emergency authorities lamented that many ignored the warnings and seemed to think they could ride it out.
Diane Farris, 57, and her son walked to a high school-turned-shelter near their home in Panama City to find about 1,100 people crammed into a space meant for about half as many. Neither she nor her son had any way to communicate because their lone cellphone got wet and quit working.
“I’m worried about my daughter and grandbaby. I don’t know where they are. You know, that’s hard,” she said, choking back tears.
Hurricane-force winds extended up to 75 km from Michael’s centre at the height of the storm. Forecasters said rainfall could reach up to a 30 centimetres in spots. And then there was the lifethreatening storm surge to deal with.
A water-level station in Apalachicola, close to where Michael came ashore, reported a surge of nearly 2.5 metres.
First Nation sues tug firm, B.C., Canada over fuel spill
Camille BAINS Citizen news service
VANCOUVER — A British Columbia First Nation whose fishing grounds were soiled by a diesel spill when a tug boat ran aground is suing the owner of the vessel for alleged negligence and the federal and provincial governments for what it calls an unacceptable response.
The Heiltsuk’s territory centres in the Great Bear Rainforest on B.C.’s central coast, and its lawsuit says the fuel spill decimated members’ livelihoods, its clam fishery and took a toll on first responders.
The American-owned tug the Nathan E. Stewart ran aground and sank near Bella Bella on Oct. 13., 2016, spilling 110,000 litres of diesel fuel, lubricants, heavy oils and other pollutants.
The Transportation Safety Board released a report in May saying a crew member missed a planned course change because he fell asleep while alone on watch.
Elected Chief Coun. Marilyn Slett of the Heiltsuk Tribal Council told a news conference Wednesday the legal action in B.C. Supreme Court hinges on loss: “Loss of food, loss of employment, loss of culture and loss of trust.
“I cannot overstate the importance of Gale Pass to our community,” she said, referring to the nation’s food harvesting, village and cultural site.
Slett said two years after the spill, the provincial and federal governments as well as Houstonbased tug boat owner Kirby Offshore Marine have declined to do a meaningful environmental impact assessment to determine the extent of contamination on the surrounding land, sea and marine life.
“Though we have made several requests, Canada and B.C. have refused to acknowledge their duty to consult with us on the framework guiding the environmental impact of the spill,” she said, adding the First Nation is hoping the legal action sets a precedent for oil spill response for the province and the country to prevent the type of “chaos” that resulted after its experience.
“There’s a value that has been passed down by generations, that says, ‘When the tide goes out the table is set.’ It is fundamental to our way of life. We harvest foods that are vital to our way of life, like clams and seaweed.”
The allegations have not been proven in court and no statements of defence have been filed on behalf of the governments or Kirby Offshore Marine. The Attorney General of Canada did not respond to a request for comment.
British Columbia’s Environment Ministry said in a statement it is committed to working with the federal government and to “engage with Heiltsuk as appropriate for a federally led initiative.”
Matt Woodruff, spokesman for the Kirby Corporation, said in a statement that the company’s lawyers “will take the appropriate actions to defend our interests in court.”
The Heiltsuk also incurred costs associated with environmental testing and its own investigation in the millions of dollars, Slett said.
PEDRO PORTAL/MIAMI HERALD PHOTO VIA AP
Haley Nelson inspects damages to her property in the Panama City, Fla., area after Hurricane Michael made landfall in Florida’s Panhandle on Wednesday.
CAPITALS DOWN GOLDEN KNIGHTS IN STANLEY CUP REMATCH
Page 10
T-wolves have eyes on playoff spot
Ted CLARKE Citizen staff tclarke@pgcitizen.ca
They might rank last in the Canada West Pacific Division standings.
As far as the UNBC Timberwolves are concerned, that’s a deceptive lie. Because they’re not playing like a last-place team.
Not with Paige Payne hovering within striking range.
The third-year midfielder from Kitimat booted her way into the conference lead for goals in a season last weekend when she scored three times, accounting for her team’s entire output in a pair of losses on home turf to the MacEwan Griffins.
UNBC lost the opener 3-2, then suffered a 2-1 defeat in the rematch on Saturday against the Pacific Division third-place Griffins, who improved to 7-2-1.
Payne has been a royal pain in the side of the T-wolves’ U Sports Canada West women’s soccer opponents and now has eight goals in 10 games. That’s just one fewer goal than UNBC’s entire season output in 2017.
The difference this year is the youthful T-wolves haven’t been quite so stingy on defence. With four games left in the season they’ve allowed 27 goals, six more than they did last year in a 14game regular season. Consequently, the T-wolves (16-3) find themselves in danger of missing the playoffs. They’re not far behind, just two points back of the UBC Okanagan Heat (2-6-2) for the sixth and final spot. But with four games left, the T-wolves can’t afford to lose more than they win down the stretch.
They have a tall order on their hands Friday when they hit the field in Calgary trying to upstage the Prairie Division-leading Dinos (9-0-1). The Dinos have won nine straight after opening with a onegoal loss to Alberta.
Saturday in Lethbridge the T-wolves will take on the Lethbridge Pronghorns (1-8-1 through 10 games). UNBC wraps up the
schedule next weekend at Masich
Place Stadium, facing Thompson Rivers University of Kamloops and UBC Okanagan.
If they win two of those games and tie one the T-wolves will match their 2017 season record.
That 3-7-4 mark put them into the Canada West playoffs for the first time since joining the league in 2012. Head coach Neil Sedgwick knows the odds for another postseason berth for his team are not great, but certainly not impossible.
“Playoffs are there for us when we look at the teams we play against and where we are sitting,” said Sedgwick. “Essentially, 13 points the last few years gets you into the playoffs and that’s within reach.
“We hope we’ve prepared well
for this, what they call the sharp end of the season. This is where we’ll see what kind of growth we’ve had and hopefully things come together for us.”
Four of UNBC’s six losses have been by one-goal margins.
“The team just wants to keep playing and they want success so they can show people they’re doing positive things, but it’s hard to say, ‘hey we’re playing really well,’ when you’re losing games by a goal, and in soccer that’s the only measure people see,” said Sedgwick.
“But the team is playing exceptionally well. We recognize it, the players recognize it, the opposition teams recognize. So it’s just a matter of those pieces coming together.”
The T-wolves and Dinos last met in the quarterfinal playoffs last year, a 3-0 Calgary win.
“It’s always difficult when a young team plays a top team and we saw growth within that 90 minutes when we played them in the playoffs and we hope we can take that into Saturday’s game,” said Sedgwick.
Two of the three goals the Griffins scored in the first game of the doubleheader came off corner kicks and Sedgwick said his team addressed its vulnerability in set pieces between games. The Griffins had eight corners Saturday and failed to score on any of them.
“We stuck to the way we wanted to play the game and we had success in doing it against a very
Powell River coach has ties to Maglio
Ted CLARKE Citizen staff
The game beyond the game tonight at Rolling Mix Concrete Arena will be the one going on behind the benches.
Adam Maglio, the second-year head coach of the Prince George Spruce Kings, will be coaching against his longtime friend and former coach, Tyler Kuntz, who took over this season as head coach of the Powell River Kings. Kuntz, 39, was coaching the UBC Thunderbirds when he first got to know Maglio, who played two seasons for the T-birds as a forward/defenceman from 2010-12. Maglio wanted to continue his hockey career when Kuntz connected him to a job in China and Maglio ended up with the Hong Kong Tycoons as a player/coach, taking over the following season as head coach of an academy program.
“We formed a pretty good bond as a playercoach and his first call when he needed an assistant coach when he took over was to me, and I think that stemmed from the relationship we built when I was playing for him,” said the 32-year-old Maglio.
“Tyler’s been a big part of my hockey and
We’re both pretty competitive guys and neither of us want to lose this one.
— Adam Maglio
coaching career, to be honest, and we keep in touch pretty regularly. So it will be a different game – it’s going to be strange looking across the bench. We’re both pretty competitive guys and neither of us want to lose this one. I have a ton of respect for what he’s doing in Powell River. I know they’re a disciplined, structured team and it’s another tough task for us.”
Kuntz worked in the Korean pro league last season as an assistant to Kevin Constantine with the Daemyung Killer Whales. Prior to that, Kuntz served two seasons as an assistant coach with the Vancouver Giants. He was hired at UBC in 2006 and was named head coach in 2014-15, the year Maglio returned to the T-birds.
After two seasons as a Spruce Kings assistant, Maglio took over from Chad van Diemen in 2017 and was a coach-of-the year candidate last season, guiding the team to its first BCHL final.
Included in that playoff run was a five-game series win over Powell River in the Coastal Conference final.
Kuntz offered to help the Spruce Kings last spring just before the playoffs and flew up to Prince George to teach a power-play session, the day after he returned with his family from Seoul.
“I’ve known Adam for a long time,” said Kuntz. “They had a good year. Any time people who have worked with you go on to do well somewhere else, that bodes well for everybody. But (tonight) it’s going to be 20 players versus 20 players.
“Both teams will be extremely prepared and detailed and work hard and may the best players win, but you never know. They’re teenagers and you never know who’s going to show up the night of the game. You just hope more of them do than not.” — see VISITORS, page 10
tough team that had already beaten some of the top teams in Canada West,” said Sedgwick. Payne has been finding the back of the net with regularity, a product of the T-wolves being more creative this season generating offence throughout the lineup.
“Paige has been finishing a bunch but a lot of that stuff comes from a good team functioning together,” said Sedgwick.
The UNBC men will be in action Saturday and Sunday afternoon (both at 2 p.m.) against UBC Okanagan. The final two regularseason home games will be the last chance for UNBC veterans Francesco Bartolilllo, Conrad Rowlands and Gordon Hall to play in front of a Prince George audience.
Trucking company owner involved in Humboldt bus crash facing charges
Citizen news service
EDMONTON — The owner of an Alberta trucking company involved in the fatal Humboldt Broncos bus crash has been charged.
Alberta Transportation Minister Brian Mason said Wednesday that Sukhmander Singh of Adesh Deol Trucking faces charges of non-compliance with various federal and provincial safety regulations.
“The charges follow an investigation that was completed by Alberta Transportation into the collision,” Mason said. “The investigation found multiple instances of non-compliance of various transportation regulatory requirements in a six-month period.”
Sixteen people were killed and 13 were injured in rural Saskatchewan six months ago when their bus was involved in a crash with a semi-truck owned by the Calgary-based company.
Jaskirat Singh Sidhu, who was driving the semi unit, was charged earlier this year with dangerous driving causing death and dangerous driving causing bodily harm.
Officials with Alberta Transportation said eight charges have now been laid against the trucking company owner. They include seven federal charges: two counts of failing to maintain logs for drivers hours of service, three counts of failing to monitor the compliance of a driver under safety regulations, and two counts of having more than one daily log for any day. The eighth charge under provincial regulations alleges failure to have or follow a written safety program. When reached in Calgary, Singh said he didn’t have any comment. Singh’s first court appearance is Nov. 9 in Calgary.
CITIZEN PHOTO BY JAMES DOYLE
Madison Emmond of UNBC brings the ball up the field against the MacEwan Griffins on Saturday night at Masich Place Stadium.
Ethan de Jong of the 2017-18 Prince George Spruce Kings powers past Carmine Buono of the Powell River Kings during last season’s Coastal Conference final playoff series. The teams clash again tonight at Rolling Mix Concrete Arena.
Kuznetsov sparks victory against Vegas
Citizen news service
Evgeny Kuznetsov continued his dominance against the Vegas Golden Knights, scoring a goal and assisting on three more as part of a 5-2 Washington Capitals victory Wednesday night in a rematch of last season’s Stanley Cup final.
Kuznetsov assisted on two goals by Alex Ovechkin and one by Nicklas Backstrom and scored his own on the power play. The leading scorer in the Cup final with eight points in five games, Kuznetsov has seven points through the defending champions’ first three games of the regular season. Coming off a 49-goal season and a Conn Smythe Trophy as playoff MVP, Ovechkin has four goals in three games. The 610th and 611th goals of his career put him in sole possession of 17th on the NHL’s career list, passing Bobby Hull.
Braden Holtby, who made “the save” with his stick in Game 2 of the Final, stopped 29 of 31 shots and bailed out his teammates during an especially sloppy second period.
Holtby allowed goals to Cody Eakin in the second period and Reilly Smith in the third.
Vegas goaltender Marc-Andre Fleury, who wanted to start this game instead of facing his former team in Pittsburgh on Thursday night, allowed four goals on 28 shots. His teammates hit the post a handful of times and went 0-for-3 on the power play and are 0-for-11 so far this season.
Visitors
— from page 9
The Golden Knights fell to 1-3-0 at the beginning of their second season. They didn’t lose their third game in their
inaugural season until Halloween when they started 8-3-0.
NOTES: T.J. Oshie sealed the Capitals’
boast depth in forward lines
Nearly half the Powell River roster has returned and Kuntz is counting on those players being doubly inspired from last year’s playoff defeat to dig deep for the win tonight.
The Spruce Kings are coming off a pair of solid efforts last week on home ice against the Wenatchee Wild and the Victoria Grizzlies. They outshot and outplayed the Wild through most of last Thursday’s game and were rewarded with a 3-2 victory. They came right back Friday with a similar onesided effort against the Grizzlies but left the rink without a point, losing 4-3 despite outshooting them 58-22. The Spruce Kings (7-3-0-1, third in Mainland Division) spent the week in practice focused on trying to buff up their finish around the net.
“You’ve got to give their goalie (Kurtis Chapman) credit and their top line credit –
Alex Newhook is a special player – certainly we outchanced them and outshot them and it just comes down to a bit more intensity in those hard areas for us,” said Maglio.
“We liked our game against Wenatchee, we liked our game against Vic, and most nights if you play that way you’re going to end up on top. But at the same time it’s kind of a good lesson learned that you need to bear down and capitalize on chances.”
The defending BCHL Coastal Division champions fought off a 3-0 deficit and scored three goals in the second period to get back on even terms with the Grizzlies Friday.
“We knew we had a good first (period), we knew we made some mental errors, but overall we needed to stick to our game and we did that,” said Maglio. “We learned we are a resilient group, similar to what we
were last year.
“We need to bring a little bit of swagger coming in (tonight), a chip on our shoulder. We don’t like losing at home. Regardless of how it happened, we need to be better.”
Brock Sawyer, who took over as interim head coach in Powell River in late-January, is back as an assistant coach, along with Kyle Bodie.
Powell River (6-4-0-0), second in Island Division) is the least-penalized team in the 17-team BCHL, with just 85 penalty minutes in 11 games. The Spruce Kings are next on the list, with just 98 minutes in the box in 11 games.
Powell River has four solid forward lines and four forwards who are scoring at a point-per-game pace or better, including Ben Berard (9-5-14), Ryan Brushett (5-9-14), Matt Fawcett (3-7-10) and Neal Samanski (2-8-10). Mitch Adamyk has
victory with an empty-net goal with 1:55 remaining, sparking chants of “back-to-back.” ... Washington D Brooks Orpik returned early in the second period after taking a big hit from William Carrier and landing awkwardly in the first. ... Vegas C Paul Stastny will miss at least the next two games with a lower-body injury. Coach Gerard Gallant said Stastny will be re-evaluated when the team returns home over the weekend after this road trip. ... Washington D Michal Kempny made his season debut after missing the first two games with a suspected concussion. ... F Dmitrij Jaskin made his Capitals debut after they claimed him off waivers from St. Louis.
Flyers 7 Senators 4
OTTAWA (AP) — Jakub Voracek and Scott Laughton scored two goals apiece, and Philadelphia rebounded from an embarrassing loss to beat Ottawa. Sean Couturier, Robert Hagg and Claude Giroux also scored for the Flyers, who were coming off an 8-2 loss to the San Jose Sharks in their home opener a night earlier. Calvin Pickard stopped 31 shots. Brady Tkachuk scored his first NHL goal and finished with two goals and an assist for Ottawa. Maxime Lajoie also had two goals and an assist for the Senators, who were playing the first of a five-game homestand.
Craig Anderson made 38 saves, but the Flyers victimized him with four goals through two periods before they pulled away in the third.
played eight of the 10 games and has a 5-30-0 record with a 2.63 goals against average and .903 save percentage.
“I think our goaltending is a strength of the team but I think it could be better, but I also think our team could play better in front of him as well,” said Kuntz.
“The honeymoon period was probably the first month – we played five games in the month and then we played the next five in eight days and that was something new to a lot of our players,” added Kuntz. “Now it’s harder, so the relentless coaching hasn’t stopped and so it’s will players be adapting to that and the coaches adapting to the needs of the players and knowing when to back off.”
The Spruce Kings will be without F Spencer Chapman (lower body), C Michael Conlin (concussion) and D Brennan Malgunas (sick).
Tough task for Lions
Citizen news service
The B.C. Lions’ playoff quest faces a stiff test this weekend. B.C. (7-7) visits the Calgary Stampeders (12-2) on Saturday night. The Lions enter action tied with the Edmonton Eskimos for fourth in the West Division standings while the Stamps are first with the CFL’s best record. But that’s not all. Calgary is a perfect 7-0 this season at McMahon Stadium while the Lions are a dismal 1-6 on the road. Calgary has already clinched a home playoff game. But the defending West Division champion is looking to cement top spot and punch its ticket to the conference final once again.
B.C. has climbed back into playoff contention, winning four of its last five games, and is coming off a 26-23 home victory over the Toronto Argonauts. But the Lions will have a different quarterback under centre as veteran Travis Lulay returns to the starting lineup. Lulay, 35, suffered a left shoulder injury in the Lions’ 32-14 home win over the Montreal Alouettes on Sept. 14. The Lions went 2-1 with backup Jonathon Jennings. Jennings was just 14-of-24 passing for 199 yards and a TD versus Toronto but also added 47 yards rushing on three carries. Jeremiah Johnson was the Lions’ offensive stalwart, running for 118 yards on 19 carries while adding three catches for 22 yards. But the Lions still needed six field goals from Ty Long to fend off a spirited comeback attempt from Argos backup James Franklin. Branden Burks, replacing the injured James Wilder Jr., ran for 92 yards on eight carries (11.5-yard average) also.
B.C.’s defence allowed 402 offensive yards and registered just one sack. But the unit also had four interceptions, including two by Davon Coleman. Stout defence led Calgary to a 12-6 road win in Montreal last weekend as quarterback Bo Levi Mitchell earned his first victory at Molson Stadium. Mitchell finished 20-of-34 passing for 199 yards with three interceptions.
AP PHOTO
Vegas Golden Knights forward Tomas Nosek hammers T.J. Oshie of the Washington Capitals into the boards during the second period of Wednesday night’s game in Washington.
Raptors sink Nets in Montreal
Kelsey PATTERSON Citizen news service
MONTREAL — Danny Green had 22 points and three rebounds and Kyle Lowry was ejected for a pair of technical fouls as the Toronto Raptors beat the Brooklyn Nets 11891 in NBA pre-season action Wednesday.
Serge Ibaka chipped in 13 points and five rebounds for Toronto (3-1). Kawhi Leonard, making his third appearance in tune-up play, had 11 points, seven assists and five rebounds.
Lowry was ejected halfway through the third quarter when he got two technicals on the same play, arguing a call by referee Karl Lane on teammate Pascal Siakam. Lowry had complained to match officials several times in the first half, unhappy with fouls called against him.
Jarrett Allen led Brooklyn (1-2) with 26 points and six rebounds. D’Angelo Russell added 18 points and five rebounds while Caris LeVert had 14 points and five rebounds.
The game was played at Montreal’s Bell Centre as part of the NBA Canada series, which is in its sixth year. Toronto is 8-2 all time in the Canada series and 5-0 when playing an exhibition match in Montreal.
The Raptors trailed by as many as eight points in the second quarter, but a couple of key three-pointers by C.J. Miles and Fred
Van Vleet cut Brooklyn’s lead to 41-39.
The Raptors led 63-62 in the third quarter before they started pulling away. Shortly after Lowry’s ejection, the Raptors went on a 16-2 run to end the third with a 91-70 lead.
Montreal native Chris Boucher entered the game to a standing ovation with seven minutes to play in the fourth quarter. He finished with six points and a block.
Toronto outscored Brooklyn 27-21 in the fourth.
Among the packed crowd at the Bell Centre were NBA legend Gary Payton, UFC star Georges St-Pierre and Montreal Canadiens players Brendan Gallagher and Max Domi.
The Raptors play their final pre-season match tonight in New Orleans. Their regular season begins Oct. 17 at home against the Cleveland Cavaliers.
NOTES: On Wednesday, a group of Quebec investors said they want to bring an NBA franchise to Montreal, even though the league has no immediate plans for expansion.
CP PHOTO
Kyle Lowry of the Toronto Raptors drives to the basket against D’Angelo Russell of the Brooklyn Nets in an NBA exhibition game on Wednesday night in Montreal. Lowry was later tossed from the contest.
Pioneering basketball coach dies at 96
Citizen news service
MANHATTAN, Kan. — Tex Winter, the innovative Triangle Offense pioneer who assisted Phil Jackson on NBA championship teams with the Chicago Bulls and Los Angeles Lakers, has died. He was 96. Winter’s family said he died Wednesday in Manhattan, where he began his coaching career at Kansas State in 1947 and led the Wildcats to two Final Fours and eight Big Seven/Eight titles as head coach from 1954-68.
“I learned so much from Coach Winter. He was a pioneer and a true student of the game,” Michael Jordan said in a state-
ment emailed to the Chicago Tribune. “His triangle offence was a huge part of our six championships with the Bulls. He was a tireless worker. Tex was always focused on details and preparation and a great teacher. I was lucky to play for him. My condolences to his family.” Winter published The Triple-Post Offense in 1962 and teamed with Jackson to use the system to great success with Jordan and Kobe Bryant. Winter assisted Jackson on championship teams with the Bulls in 1991, 1992, 1993, 1996, 1997 and 1998, and the Lakers in 2000, 2001, 2002. He was a consultant with Los Angeles’ 2009 title team, and the Lakers also won in 2010.
“Tex Winter was a basketball legend and perhaps the finest fundamental teacher in the history of our game,” said Bulls president John Paxson, a former player under Winter. “He was an innovator who had high standards for how basketball should be played and approached every day.
“Those of us who were lucky enough to play for him will always respect his devotion to the game of basketball. His contributions to the Bulls organization will always be remembered.”
Inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2011, Winter spent more than six decades in coaching.
“On behalf of the entire Lakers organi-
zation, I’d like to express our sadness at the passing of Tex Winter,” Lakers owner Jeanie Buss said in a statement. “Tex helped lead the team to four NBA championships and was a mentor to many of our coaches and players. In addition to his numerous contributions to the game of basketball, Tex was a wonderful man and he will be dearly missed. Our thoughts and prayers go out to the Winter family.”
Winter was 451-336 as a college head coach, also directing Marquette (1951-53), Washington (1969-72), Northwestern (1975-78) and Long Beach State (197883). He coached the NBA’s Houston Rockets in 1972-74, going 51-78.
Moustakas brings pivotal playoff experience to Brewers
Citizen news service
MILWAUKEE — It sounds, at first, like a long, drawn out “Booooo!”
But look at the name on the scoreboard and it becomes apparent what fans at Miller Park are really chanting.
“Mooooose!”
Mike Moustakas has been a hit with fans and teammates with the Milwaukee Brewers since being acquired from the Kansas City Royals two-plus months ago. They appreciate his solid third base defence, and his left-handed power stroke was key in getting Milwaukee through the NL Division Series. In the clubhouse, his focused demeanour and extensive postseason experience have made him
a source of steadiness for a club playing in the post-season for the first time since 2011.
“Amazing, amazing. He’s a great teammate,” said utility man Hernan Perez, who has a locker near Moustakas. “He’s been in this situation.”
Moustakas and current Brewers centre fielder Lorenzo Cain helped Kansas City reach the World Series twice, including their championship run in 2015. Moustakas is one step away from a Series return with Milwaukee. Game 1 of the NL Championship Series against the Los Angeles Dodgers is Friday night at Miller Park.
Moustakas hit .364 in a threegame sweep of the Colorado Rockies in the NLDS with two RBIs. He had a game-ending, twoout RBI single in the 10th inning
Moustakas and current Brewers centre fielder Lorenzo Cain helped Kansas City reach the World Series twice, including their championship run in 2015.
in Game 1 and an RBI single in eighth inning of Game 2 to help break open what had been a 1-0 game. A cool hand in tense moments. Exactly what Milwaukee had in
mind for its midseason acquisition.
“The more experience that you can gain, the better off you’re going to be,” Moustakas said before a team workout on Wednesday.
Overall, Moustakas is hitting .234 with six homers and 17 RBIs in 34 games over eight post-season series.
“But his experience, it’s important. It really is,” manager Craig Counsell said last week. “Making sure we don’t put the result ahead of the process in our at-bats, and I think Moose is doing a heck of a job of that.”
His good friend Cain helped ease the transition to Milwaukee, but the Brewers also had to get creative to add Moustakas to the lineup, with Travis Shaw already on the team as the regular third baseman.
Someone had to move. Shaw accepted a switch to second base, a new position and potentially awkward fit for the 230-pound slugger. The rationale was that the Brewers employ so many infield shifts, lining up at second wouldn’t be a hard transition. Moustakas also volunteered to move over. Shaw stuck at second and has played fairly well, allowing the Brewers to have three lefty bats in the lineup to go with MVP frontrunner Christian Yelich.
“It says volumes of the kind of player that he is and the kind of person he is,” Moustakas said about Shaw. “I think the unselfishness of him and this team is why I’m a good fit, because they let me come in here, play third. Just be myself and that’s huge.”
A&E IN BRIEF
Troyer death ruled suicide by alcohol
LOS ANGELES (AP) — The Los Angeles County coroner says actor Verne Troyer, who was best known for his Austin Powers role of Mini-Me, died last April of suicide by alcohol intoxication.
The coroner’s office released its findings Wednesday following an autopsy and investigation into Troyer’s April 21 death. His representatives said at the time he was struggling with depression.
The coroner’s office certified that the manner of death was a suicide.
Troyer, 49, was best known as Mike Myers’ sidekick Mini-Me in 1999’s Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me and 2002’s Austin Powers in Goldmember. He also played banker-goblin Griphook in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and appeared in dozens of TV shows and videos.
Troyer, who stood two-footeight, was born with achondroplasia, a genetic condition that limited his height.
Skynyrd film gets nod from court
NEW YORK (AP) — A New York federal appeals court says a new Lynyrd Skynyrd film can be released despite a dispute over the band’s intentions.
The case involves a movie called Street Survivors: The True Story
of the Lynyrd Skynyrd Plane Crash. A lower court judge decided previously the film violated a “blood oath” made by band members not to exploit the group’s name after a 1977 plane crash that killed its lead singer and songwriter, Ronnie Van Zant. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that decision Wednesday, letting the movie be distributed. A lawyer for the movie’s makers called the ruling “a victory for filmmakers, artists, journalists, readers, viewers and the marketplace of ideas.”
The lawsuit was brought by Van Zant’s widow and others, including founding band member Allen Collins.
Cirque getting Messi
MONTREAL (CP) — The Cirque du Soleil announced Wednesday that it will launch a new show next year inspired by “the incredible talent and accomplishments” of soccer star Lionel Messi. Details of where the show will be performed were not immediately available.
Downie’s final year captured in CBC documentary
Victoria AHEARN Citizen news service
TORONTO — Once Gord Down-
ie set his mind to the Secret Path, virtually nothing else mattered.
One year after his death, the new CBC documentary Finding the Secret Path shows just how fiercely determined the Tragically Hip frontman was during his brain cancer battle to raise awareness about Canada’s dark history of residential schools through the story of Chanie Wenjack.
The plight of the 12-year-old Anishinaabe boy, who died of hunger and exposure after escaping a northern Ontario residential school in 1966, inspired Downie’s the Secret Path multimedia project and the Gord Downie & Chanie Wenjack Fund that have moved fans and led to various initiatives across the country.
“If you know Gord and you know even physically what a strong constitution he had, he was a real bear,” said Patrick Downie, adding that his brother “scoffed” when doctors told him his illness would hamper his physical ability to perform.
“He was like, ‘I think I will be (able to perform). I’m different from everybody else.’ And he was.
“If he wasn’t a singer, he probably would have been some kind of a professional athlete or something. He just had that fortitude and the physical ability to do it.”
Premiering Friday on CBC, the CBC TV streaming app and cbc. ca/watch, Finding the Secret Path marks the first anniversary of Downie’s death from brain cancer on Oct. 17, and the 52nd anniversary of Wenjack’s death on Oct. 22.
If I have any pull or any push at all, this is what I want to do. Nothing else really matters to me.
— Gord Downie in Finding the Secret Path
“This was a very trying, challenging time for our family, this time last year and the weeks that followed,” said Patrick Downie, who co-executive produced the doc along with Mike Downie and Gord Downie.
The family is planning a “quiet, reflective day” to mark the oneyear anniversary with a small, private gathering, he added. On Oct. 27, they’ll also mark the three-year anniversary of their father’s death.
“It’s been a long, hard year, a very sorrowful year, where a lot of good things have happened,” said Patrick Downie, “and we’ve heard from a lot of people that feel very moved by Gord and miss his presence and music and art.”
Through never-before-seen footage and various interviews, the doc shows the final year of Downie’s life, as he fights through fatigue and self-consciousness about his fading memory to rehearse and perform The Secret Path onstage.
“If I have any pull or any push at all, this is what I want to do. Nothing else really matters to me,” he says in the film.
Cameras also capture Downie as he flies with a group to the remote
village of Ogoki Post, Ont., to meet with members of the Wenjack family and get their blessing on The Secret Path graphic novel, album and animated film. Travelling there was risky, considering Downie had just undergone two brain surgeries and cancer treatment, but he felt it was important.
“That meeting and then the subsequent meetings cemented a really beautiful and long-lasting relationship between the two families,” said Patrick Downie.
As the doc explains, The Secret Path has not only raised awareness about the treatment of Indigenous people in Canada, it’s also donated proceeds to the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation and the Gord Downie & Chanie Wenjack Fund. It’s also led to a school educational program and a hockey program that brings together kids from west Toronto and Attawapiskat First Nation in Ontario.
The brothers hope the new doc will encourage even more Downie fans to join the conversation about developing “a more complex culture where Indigenous people have a greater say.”
“We’re not speaking for any Indigenous people whatsoever,” said Mike Downie, who wrote, directed and co-produced the doc.
“We’re talking to Gord’s army and we want them to participate, we want them to get involved, we want them to see what their kids are doing in school and we want them to encourage their friends to learn a little bit more.
“If it starts with awareness, then the next stage has got to be education and then the next stage is action – but you need to go through those in order for it to make any sense.”
Brickell’s return a triumph
Scott BAUER Citizen news service
Edie Brickell and New Bohemians, Rocket (Verve Forecast)
Edie Brickell’s first new record since 2006 with her original band New Bohemians is a triumphant return for an artist who never really left.
Rocket reunites Brickell with the band that broke onto the scene in 1988 with the Top 10 hit What I Am but released only three records in the 30 years since then. Brickell went on to a solo career, married Paul Simon and more recently collaborated with Steve Martin on a pair of bluegrass records and the Broadway musical Bright Star.
The New Bohemians remained close, playing one-off shows over the years, eyeing the right time to record again. Brickell promises Rocket is the start of a renewed commitment to the band, with more records to come. That’s great news.
Their joy in recording together again is clear on Rocket, a record that touches on a variety of musical styles with ease.
Brickell’s effervescent vocals never sounded better than with the New Bohemians backing her. How fun is it to hear Brickell singing “Superman, Spider-Man, Batman, you’re the man” on Superhero? It’s a stand-
out track with an infectious, freight-train chugging guitar riff from Kenny Withrow.
The answer to the question posed by the first single, What Makes You Happy, is clear for Brickell and the New Bohemians. You can hear it, too, by listening to Rocket.
Gord Downie performs during Secret Path at the National Arts Centre on Oct. 18, 2016 in Ottawa.
WestJet battling Air Canada in international skies
Christopher REYNOLDS Citizen news service
WestJet Airlines Ltd. plans to launch non-stop service from Calgary to Dublin, Paris and London’s Gatwick Airport using its first three new Boeing 787 Dreamliner aircraft, challenging Air Canada with transatlantic flights that target business passengers and the jet set.
“It’s really important for us to be able to attract what I would call bucket-list travellers, premium leisure travellers and, indeed, a share of business corporate travellers,” WestJet chief executive Ed Sims said in an phone interview from Calgary.
The airline aims to invest roughly $4 billion in new airplanes over the next six or seven years, including 10 Dreamliners, Sims said.
The new routes reflect not just a grab for more would-be Air Canada passengers, but also an attempt to entice new travellers.
“We think the markets here are being very underserved, so I think there’s an opportunity to attract a new generation of travellers,” Sims said.
“But of course, for outbound Canadians it now gives them a choice,” he added.
The wide-body 320-seat Dreamliners include 16 lie-flat seats in a business cabin as well as 24 premium economy seats, as WestJet continues to recast itself as a large intercontinental carrier.
“It’s a real evolution from WestJet being a clone of Southwest (Airlines) to becoming more and more similar in some ways to Air Canada – but trying to differentiate themselves,” said Karl Moore, an aviation expert at McGill University’s Desautels Faculty of Management.
WestJet is battling with Air Canada on a number of fronts.
Brick
WIts Encore regional service goes up against Air Canada Express and its ultra-low-cost Swoop airline recently launched flights to the U.S. and the Caribbean, in competition with Air Canada’s six-year-old Rouge unit.
On top of a long-range fleet that still dwarfs WestJet’s, Air Canada’s recent deal at the head of a consortium buying the Aeroplan reward program from Aimia Inc. represents another potential advantage WestJet aims to reduce.
The Calgary-based company announced Wednesday it will top up its WestJet Rewards program with a new platinum tier later this year.
“Flying to Europe is not going to be all that dissimilar to Air Canada,” Moore said.
“You’re going to have points,
you’re going to have a business class, you’re flying long-haul in brand new planes.”
WestJet remains outside the constellation of major airline alliances, however, which comprise Star Alliance – of which Air Canada is a member – SkyTeam and Oneworld.
“I’ve absolutely changed my behaviour because I can get points flying on non-Air Canada partner airlines,” Moore said. “I don’t think WestJet is as powerful to the global traveller as Air Canada with the Star Alliance.”
Robert Kokonis, president of Toronto-based consulting firm AirTrav Inc., said snatching up brand new, long-range jetliners complete with “a lot of bells and whistles” are “really big” moves,
but not enough to lure thousands of high-flying passengers away from Air Canada without an alliance network to top it off.
“I want to be able to earn and redeem points at other airlines. I want that access to a businessclass lounge in the Warsaw airport,” Kokonis said.
WestJet’s three new routes from Calgary are slated to start in the spring, with sales kicking off Wednesday.
The Dreamliner will fly daily between Calgary and Gatwick, four times a week to and from Paris and three times a week to and from Dublin.
Additional routes will be announced next year for the next three planes and the following year for the remaining four.
and mortar banks still have a place
hen I landed my first career job in a large Vancouver RBC branch after graduating university, they showed me into a furnished office of my very own. I was dumbfounded that they would give me such a luxurious space, and I immediately closed the door and phoned my wife, whispering my good fortune excitedly: “They gave me an office with a desk, a phone and a stapler!” She bordered on disbelief.
Although my branch was a regional centre, with some 40 staff, there was just one computer in the entire building, located centrally on the main floor, but few even knew how to turn it on. The crusty old commercial bankers spoke their work into small dictaphones, then gave their mini cassettes to one of several typists who transcribed buckets of them all day long. It was a freakishly inefficient system, but we were told we were too expensive to pay to type. The truth was the old dudes could about as easily regrow their hair as type a paragraph. These extinguished bankers came from an era that seems both quaint and remarkable in retrospect. Some curious policies they lived with included:
• In order to marry, an employee (male or female) had to obtain their branch manager’s approval.
• There was a special category
of bank loan for “spinsters,” who presumably had to rely on a male relative to legitimize their request.
• Men’s hockey fees were covered by the bank at sufficiently senior management levels.
In their heyday, our branch managers kept two curious tools of the trade at their desk – a bank-issued pistol and a bottle of whisky. Both were used when occasion called for it, though generally not at the same time.
One Bank of Montreal circular in 1964 suggested the number of guns which should be kept at a branch, based on its size. Two revolvers for a staff of up to six; five revolvers for a staff of 40; and for the really big branches, 20 or more guns. On any given Friday a curious quirk in the Canadian psyche triggers a sweaty panic to touch cash before the weekend sets in.
Back before the Beatles broke up, bank lineups used to meander right out the door on these days.
One leathery Vancouver branch manager told me that on a busy Friday afternoon, he was just about to pour himself a drink when his branch was hit by a
drugged-out armed robber, who quickly escalated the situation into a hostage-taking. Instead of pulling his bottle out of his desk, he grabbed his pistol and… I won’t get in to the details, but there was blood involved and the good guys won.
By my arrival in 1990, the former gun-slinging managers were approaching retirement, and their pistols were long gone, (if not their hard liquor) and we were unequivocally taught to never challenge a robber.
Before I had even been an employee six months, an enterprise-wide meeting was called by our president and CEO. Set for a predetermined time, information package not to be opened before, he told us in a recorded message on a VHS tape, that the bank was about to undergo a massive transition, wherein the next few years would see us evolve more than we had in our entire history before. He was right. Aside from huge staff restructuring, there are no more guys with guns. Instead we have geeks with degrees, managing our cyber security with the utmost attention to protecting our clients’ personal information.
That first year we were invited to a downtown Vancouver convention centre to hear a futurist.
He said the time was coming when we would all carry a pocket-sized device (he envisioned a bank card) which could do all our banking, hail a cab, order dinner,
and determine what breed of puppy was the least likely to chew on your favourite shoes. He was right. Well, mostly. It wasn’t a bank card, it was a smart phone.
Which means, our competitors are less and less other banks, but more and more, big data firms like Google, Amazon, and Apple. These monolithic mega corporations still somehow come across as boutique cottage industries, even while having annual revenues rivalling some Western democracies.
But, despite massive systemic changes, and competition floating in the clouds (literally) bank branches are still integral. Physical locations are still one of our primary sales channels.
“Even in digitally-advanced European nations,” according to McKinsey research, “between 30 and 60 per cent of customers prefer doing at least some of their banking at branches.”
And, trust and security are still key to our value statement, and always will be.
Mark Ryan is an investment advisor with RBC Dominion Securities Inc. (Member–Canadian Investor Protection Fund), and these are Ryan’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. Ryan can be reached at mark.ryan@rbc.com
All asset classes except gold and safe haven currencies were firmly lower as risk aversion was the underlying tone on the day, says Candice Bangsund, portfolio manager for Fiera Capital. “I think equity markets are getting a little spooked that the rise in interest rates is going to impact valuations and erode, potentially, corporate profits and this is obviously coming at a time when equity valuations have been so lofty,” she said in an interview. The Toronto Stock Exchange was lower for a fourth-straight day. The S&P/TSX composite index closed down 336.65 points to 15,517.40, marking the biggest daily decline since September 2015. The decrease wiped out all gains since the end of April. The market hit a low of 15,511.84 on 339.3 million shares traded. Gold stocks rose by more than two per cent on a higher price of gold. The December gold contract was up $1.90 at US$1,193.40 an ounce.
Health care was down only slightly as losses were offset by a 15.1 per cent increase at Aphria Inc. on reports that Marlboro cigarette maker Altria Group Inc. is in talks with the Canadian pot grower. Industrials led on the downside, declining by 4.9 per cent as SNC-Lavalin’s shares hit a multiyear low after it announced that federal prosecutors won’t agree to negotiate a deal that would set aside unproven fraud and corruption charges. The losing sector was followed by information technology, energy and base metals.
In New York, the Dow Jones industrial average lost 831.83 points to 25,598.74 as all stocks were in the red. It was the biggest daily selloff since February. The S&P 500 index was down 94.66 points to 2,785.68, while the Nasdaq composite was down 315.97 points to 7,422.05.
Bangsund said the selling indicates that many nervous investors were unwinding positions despite strong earnings expectations. She said the global economy remains in great shape even though the International Monetary Fund on Tuesday downgraded its outlook for growth of the world economy to 3.7 per cent, citing rising interest rates and growing tensions over trade.
The
MARK RYAN It’s Only Money
WestJet president and CEO Ed Sims addresses the airline’s annual meeting in Calgary in May 8.
Liberals eyed rules for cannabis use by workers, drug testing
Jordan PRESS Citizen news service
OTTAWA — Federal officials have quietly probed possible new workplace rules for employees who show up to work high after cannabis is legalized next week, newly released documents show.
The documents obtained by The Canadian Press under the access-to-information law show Labour Minister Patty Hajdu was given options to deal with cannabis impairment in the workplace in early June as officials ironed out the details of any new policy.
Federal departments were wrestling at the time with their own response to workers who may smoke or vape pot, but were also quietly told Hajdu was considering changes to the Canada Labour Code – including whether and how to allow for mandatory drug testing for employees.
Officials said Wednesday that no new rules will be rolled out over the next week. Instead, companies are only being told to set up their own substance use policies that clearly lay out what is allowed and the consequences if someone is impaired.
“Federally regulated employers do not tolerate impairment on the jobthat does not change on October 17th,” Hajdu said in a statement.
She said her officials were going to work with employer and labour groups to better gauge the effects of cannabis legalization on workplace health and
Jeff GREEN, Craig GIAMMONA Citizen news service
Mainstream executives want in on the cannabis craze.
That’s not surprising, with the value of some Canadian pot businesses topping $10 billion and Coca-Cola Co. and Molson Coors Brewing Co. eyeing marijuana as the next trendy ingredient. But the burgeoning industry faces a unique hurdle: pot is still illegal at the national level in the U.S. – the world’s biggest consumer market.
As Canada prepares to legalize weed next week, and regulations loosen in some U.S. states, there’s growing demand for experienced executives to take leadership roles and help startup companies create the next generation of pot products. Yet, the federal ban in the U.S. has created a legal minefield for headhunters trying to find enough bodies to meet demand.
“Getting started in cannabis is probably a lot like when Prohibition ended in the 1930s,” said Catherine Van Alstine, who recruits executives for the industry as a partner in Vancouver for search company Boyden.
“Everybody thought the world was going to end because alcohol was going to become available and legitimate. That’s the way to think about cannabis.”
The latest flashpoint for recruiters: threats from U.S. Customs officials of potential lifetime bans for Canadians employed in the pot business trying to enter the U.S. That’s forced some executives in Canada to reconsider taking board seats or executive roles at weed companies. And search firms are fielding questions from U.S. business leaders as well, who are concerned about the implications of being tied to corporate cannabis. The tension is complicating
safety. The government will take “an evidence-based approach to prevent and respond to impairment in the workplace,” she added.
There are currently no federal labour rules about drug and alcohol testing outside the military and successive governments from the late 1980s have stayed away from the issue.
A federally struck committee of companies and workers debated the idea for two years, but ended up being split between labour groups who argued the current labour rules were enough in the absence of any credible data, and employer groups who believed the status quo wasn’t an option.
A Justice Department presentation to the committee noted that the Liberal government has approved saliva tests for roadside drug tests, which “could be considered sufficiently reliable for detecting drug use among employees.”
The test only proves the presence of THC, the main psychoactive ingredient in cannabis, “and does not prove impairment.”
Federal officials briefing reporters Wednesday on a not-for-attribution basis wouldn’t say what advice they have provided companies whose employees can be subjected to drug tests.
Derrick Hynes, president of FETCO, an association of federally-regulated employers, said his members want rules around drug testing for specific jobs where there is a risk to the public.
“We’ve never argued that the sky is
hiring for Gabriella’s Kitchen, a packaged-food company that’s adding a line with cannabis-infused products for sale in California, said CEO Margot Micallef. The Calgary-based company retained three search firms, including Boyden, to help it fill posts such as chief operating officer and vice president of development and will soon seek a chief financial officer, she said. Most of its sales are in the U.S., and the company has a manufacturing facility in Santa Rosa, Calif., she said.
“The roles that we are hiring for are all U.S. positions,” Micallef said, partly because of the border risk and lack of support from Canada’s government. “The result of that might be that Canadians don’t get offered positions that they might otherwise have been qualified for.”
Even without Canadians, Mi-
falling,” Hynes said.
“What we’re looking for here are preventative mechanisms that can change behaviour to ensure that those few instances where this might happen don’t slip through the cracks.”
The labour code applies to all federally regulated workplaces, which employ about one-tenth of all workers in the country. It requires companies to eliminate any hazards, while employees are expected to work safely. Labour groups say those rules should suffice unless there is ample evidence that workers are showing up high and creating a safety risk.
“Nobody has put forward evidence of any kind that we have a major crisis on our hands,” said Hassan Yussuff, president of the Canadian Labour Congress.
“People are going to try it. We just have to make sure that doesn’t affect them when they come to work.”
The government is involved in a first-of-its-kind study in Canada to get a clearer picture of cannabis use in workplaces both before and after legalization. Early results from the survey of more than 2,000 workers should be available later this year.
“This is certainly something that is already happening in workplaces today and employers are already dealing with it,” said lead researcher Nancy Carnide from the Institute for Work & Health.
“The more evidence we have to inform policies, practices, programs is so important, rather than knee-jerk responses.”
callef said there’s been no shortage of people reaching out to show interest in the positions.
Ahead of Canadian legalization, the value of the industry there has surged to about $60 billion in the stock market, with shares spiking on any mention of cannabis. Canada’s government has estimated annual legal pot sales of roughly $3.1 billion. The market is already larger in the U.S., where a handful of states have legalized adult use. Total U.S. sales of legal pot are expected to reach $11 billion this year, according to a report by Arcview Market Research and BDS Analytics.
Better to be rich than talented, study shows
Andrew VAN DAM Citizen news service
A revolution in genomics is creeping into economics. It allows us to say something we might have suspected, but could never confirm: money trumps genes. Using one new, genome-based measure, economists found genetic endowments are distributed almost equally among children in low-income and high-income families. Success is not.
The least-gifted children of high-income parents graduate from college at higher rates than the most-gifted children of low-income parents.
First, consider the people whose genome scores in the top quarter on a genetic index the researchers associated with educational achievement. Only about 24 per cent of people born to low-income fathers in that high-potential group graduate from college. That’s dwarfed by the 63 per cent college graduation rate of people with similar genetic scores who are lucky enough to be born to high-income fathers.
Contrast that with a finding from the other end of the genetic scoring scale: about 27 per cent of those who score at the bottom quarter of the genetic index, but are born to high-income fathers, graduate from college. That means they’re at least as likely to graduate from college as the highest-scoring low-income students.
The application of genetics to economics is in its infancy. Limitations abound. Most notably, researchers are forced to focus on white people. The world’s genomic data comes overwhelmingly from people of European descent, and genetic comparisons across races can produce bizarre results.
But it can already begin to expose truths about the economy. The figures above come from a new, genome-based study of economic data which aims straight at the heart of the popular conception of America as a meritocracy.
“It goes against the narrative that there are substantial genetic differences between people who are born into wealthy households and those born into poverty,” said Kevin Thom, a New York University economist and author of a related working paper released recently by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
“If you don’t have the family resources, even the bright kids – the kids who are naturally gifted – are going to have to face uphill battles,” Thom said.
“Their potential is being wasted. And that’s not good for them, but that’s also not good for the economy,” his collaborator, Johns Hopkins economist Nicholas Papageorge said.
Thom and Papageorge’s analysis builds on the findings of one of the biggest genome-wide studies yet conducted. Published by a separate team of a dozen authors in Nature Genetics in July, it’s the latest result of a lengthy, ongoing effort to bring genetic analysis to the social sciences.
The Nature Genetics team scanned millions of individual base pairs across 1,131,881 individual genomes for evidence of correlations between genes and years of schooling completed.
now.
PHOTO
An employee monitors young marijuana plants in a grow room during a tour of the Sundial Growers Inc. marijuana cultivation facility in Olds, Alta., on Wednesday.
Doctor depression a concern, report says
Sheryl UBELACKER
Citizen news service
TORONTO
— A majority of the country’s doctors report having good mental health overall, but a significant proportion report experiencing burnout, depression and even thoughts of suicide, a survey by the Canadian Medical Association suggests.
Results of the national online survey completed by 2,547 physicians and 400 medical residents found reported rates of burnout and depression were higher among residents than practising physicians and more prevalent among female doctors than their male counterparts.
“Poor physician health not only affects physicians individually, but
studies have shown it can have an impact on patient care,” said CMA president Dr. Gigi Osler, a Winnipeg ear, nose and throat surgeon.
While 82 per cent of physicians and residents indicated they had high resilience, more than one in four reported elevated levels of burnout and one in three screened positive for depression, the report released Wednesday found.
Medical residents were 48 per cent more likely to report burnout and 95 per cent more likely to screen positive for depression than all other physician groups, the survey showed. Doctors in practice for 31 years or longer reported the highest sense of emotional, social and psychological well-being.
Female physicians were more likely to report burnout and screen positive for depression, compared
to their male colleagues. But women doctors also reported having higher emotional and psychological well-being than men in the profession.
“For years we have been focusing on the individual physicians,” Osler said in an interview Wednesday. “Eat well. Exercise. Sleep well. Do some mindfulness training. You’ve got to make yourself more resilient.
“And they have been doing that, but we’re still seeing these high levels of burnout. So I think that means the issues and the drivers are deeper than just individuals.”
Dr. Murray Erlich, a retired Toronto psychiatrist who now works with doctors and others as a life coach, said he was alarmed to learn that 19 per cent of respondents had experienced thoughts
of suicide at some point in their lives.
The survey found that while 81 per cent of respondents reported being aware of the availability of physician health services, only 15 per cent reported accessing them in the previous five years.
Among the most cited reasons for not seeking such services were beliefs that their situation wasn’t severe enough and being ashamed to ask for help.
“Stigma exists,” said Erlich. “And I think there’s fear of embarrassment and shame,” he said, adding that there also can be professional repercussions from having a mental health issue, including potential actions by a provincial College of Physicians and Surgeons that could affect a doctor’s ability to practice.
Lindsey BEVER Citizen news service
There have been stories about passengers flying with cats and dogs and miniature horses.
The list also includes a peacock, a hamster, a duck wearing a diaper – and a defecating pig.
Now comes news of a flying squirrel.
A passenger was removed from a Frontier Airlines flight late Tuesday when she attempted to fly with her “emotional support” squirrel, then refused to get off the plane when she was told no, according to the airline.
A Frontier spokesman said in a statement that the passenger had alerted the airline that she would be bringing an emotional-support animal on the flight. But she did not mention it would be so bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.
“Rodents, including squirrels, are not allowed on Frontier flights,” the statement read. “The passenger was advised of the policy and asked to deplane.”
When the passenger declined, others aboard Flight 1612, which was traveling from Orlando to Cleveland, were forced to deplane so that authorities could remove the woman from the aircraft.
Fun fact: Frontier Airlines features a variety of animals on the tails of its planes, among them Foxy the Red Fox, Rudy the Raccoon, Jim Bob the Badger and even Sammy the Squirrel. Sammy is featured on an Airbus A320-214; Flight 1612 was an Airbus A321 and thus would have lacked a squirrel tail.
The incident occurred Tuesday night at Orlando International Airport.
The Orlando Police Department said that the squirrel’s owner had boarded the plane, but that when airline personnel noticed she had a cage containing the little critter, they asked her to deplane. When she refused, authorities were called to escort her from the plane.
Authorities said that the passenger vacated the plane when officers arrived and that they “did not have to take any action.”
A video posted on Twitter shows a crowd gathered at Gate 15. The post read: “I just want everyone to know that all passengers had to deplane my flight to cleveland because a woman brought a SQUIRREL ON THE PLANE.”
A subsequent video showed a woman being escorted through the airport in a wheelchair as others clapped and cheered. Earlier this month, Frontier announced a new policy on emotional-support and trained service animals that is set to go into effect Nov. 1. It allows cats and dogs as emotional-support animals and restricts trained service animals to cats, dogs and miniature horses.
Emotional-support animals, or “comfort animals,” are not the same thing as service animals or therapy animals, which are typically trained to assist people with emotional and physical disabilities.
As The Washington Post has reported, emotional-support animals are not covered under the Americans With Disabilities Act, meaning businesses are not required to accommodate them. Federal regulations permit them on airplanes but give the airlines permission to turn away unusual animals.
According to The Post’s Karin Brulliard:
“Though the Americans With Disabilities Act defines service animals as trained dogs or miniature horses, airlines are bound by the more liberal Air Carrier Access Act of 1986, which allows free travel for ‘any animal’ that is trained to assist a person with a disability or that provides emotional support. Airlines can require passengers with creatures in the second category to produce a letter from a physician or mental health professional, but the documents are easily forged or obtained from websites that provide cursory, questionnairestyle ‘exams.’
“The result, airline officials complain, has been a surge in poorly trained animals that has turned some flights into airborne menageries, with dogs blocking beverage carts, cats urinating on seats and ducks wandering the aisles.
BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY
Arnold Edward Ballum
November 30, 1935October 5, 2018
Arnold was born in Mount Pleasant, PEI. He attended school in Mt. Pleasant until they moved to Bedeque, PEI where his folks purchased a beautiful farm. He was than 10 yrs old. When done with school, Arnold joined the R.C.N. and served for 5 years. Part of that service was during the Korean War. Upon leaving the R.C.N. in 1958, Arnold worked as a machine operator and in 1963 came to Prince George, BC., where he worked on construction through out BC but making his home in Prince George. He later became a heavy duty mechanic. “A man who gave an honest days work” He retired in 1998 from Terretech Equipment Co. where he was affectionately known as “Arnie”. He is survived by his wife, Shirley; daughter, Barb; sons, Chris and Jason (Jeong Hwa); grandchildren, Kenzie, Lexi, Hana, Everett; sisters, Eddy, Wilna, Eleanor; brother, Eric (Joyce); sister in law, Sandra and numerous nieces and nephews. His daily fun was meeting at Pine Centre for coffee with his old buddies, mechanics and machine operators. A service will be held a later date.
Established Franchise Photography Business Serving Northern B.C for over 35 years
Gross Revenues of $150.000 plus annually from seasonal work
Lots of opportunity to expand the business.
Transition support available to the right buyer
Serious Enquiries Only
Office 250-596-9199 Cell 250-981-1472
BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY
Established Franchise Tax Preparation BusinessMackenzieservicing and McLeod Lake area for over 30 years.
Gross Revenues of $85,000 to $90,000 Annually and Potential to expand revenues in a growing economy. Transition support available for the right buyer. Serious Inquires Only Office (250)997-9003 Home (250)997-5538 Cell (250)990-0152
It is with great sadness that we mark the passing of Dana John Chrobak on October 5th, 2018. Dana was predeceased by his father (Joseph), mother (Leona), step-mother Anne, brother Joe, and sisters Donna and Debbie. He is survived by his son Chad, brother Jim (Lorraine), and sister Janice (Purcell). Also left to mourn his passing are niece (Ashlee) and nephews (Jason, Darren, and Casey), aunt (Pat) and uncle (Dick), brother-in-law (Larry) and stepsiblings Roy, Holly, Patsy, Evan, Tara, and Tracy. Dana fought a courageous battle with Huntington’s Disease for many years. The family would like to extend their sincere thanks to Dr. Gary Knoll and the nurses and health professionals at Parkside for their care and compassion. Dana’s life will be celebrated during a graveside service for family and close friends at noon on Saturday, October 13, 2018. A reception at Parkside Care Home will follow. Donations in memory of Dana may be made to Parkside Care Home (recreational fund), or St. Vincent De Paul Society (drop in centre).
Mack D Usipuik
November 22nd, 1929October 3rd, 2018
Passed away at UHNBC Hospital on October 3rd, 2018 at the age of 88 years. Mack is lovingly remembered by his wife Dorothy; his three children Kathy (Donnie Gee), Shane (Janice), and David (Kim); his grandchildren Ashley (Jared Brann), Megan, Kirstin, and Daniel; his great-grandchild Aela; and his beloved companion Annie. Mack was predeceased by his parents William and Helena Usipuik, sisters Annie, Katie, and Mary, and his sister-in-law Bernice. He was survived by his brothers Joe, John, and Steve, and his sister Lena. He will always be remembered for his storytelling, his green thumb and love of fishing, and his pride in his family.
His Celebration of Life will be held on Saturday, October 13th, 2018 at the Fore Bistro and Patio (at the Prince George Golf Course) from 1:00pm to 5:00pm. There will be an open mic available at his service for anyone who would like to share stories and memories. Please join us in celebrating his life.
It’s full circle for one couple living in the Millar
Dave Croft was born in Luscar, Alta., in 1941. His father William (Bill) John Croft, a steam fitter from Alberta married Mary Julie Meilke who was born in Quebec.
His father worked in the Luscar coal mines in a small town in western Alberta in an area once known as the Alberta Coal Branch at the end of the CN Railway line and 30 miles south of Hinton. The original underground mine at Luscar opened in 1921 and produced steam coal primarily for railroad markets; nothing remains of the town today.
His older brother Billy was born in 1939 but drowned in a slag pool at the tender age of 22 months.
Dave’s parents moved to Vancouver in the early 40s where his mother started a boarding house while his dad worked in the shipyards in North Vancouver. His brother Ken was born in Vancouver in 1948. Ken is a retired teacher and he and his wife Liza are enjoying their retirement in Campbell River.
Dave attended school up to Grade 4 in Vancouver. In 1951 the family moved to Prince George and his father got his start in the hotel business.
The trip to Prince George is still quite memorable for Dave and he said, “My father moved us and our belongings to Prince George by first taking a steamship from Vancouver to Squamish, then the Pacific Great Eastern (PGE) rail line from Squamish to Quesnel and finally a bus from Quesnel to Prince George.
“The roads were really bad back then and I can remember that our first trip back to Vancouver took two days.
“My father partnered with John Bailey and Dave Thomas and together they built the original McDonald Hotel. Years later he partnered with Don Gillis and Dave Thomas in the National Hotel. The present owner of the National Hotel, which is now the Alibis Show Lounge, is my son-in-law Peter Wise.”
The Croft family moved back to Vancouver and one year later they returned to Prince George. Dave’s father purchased the Corning Hotel and changed the name to the Croft Hotel.
Dave grew up and attended Grades 4 to 7 at the Sacred Heart Catholic School and then on to Baron Byng high school and Duchess Park.
He was working three nights a week tending bar at the Croft Hotel when he decided to enlist in the navy. Dave said, “I served from 1959-1961. The military training back then was excellent and I feel that my years in service were the start of a good life.
“I played the tuba in the Naden Band of the Royal Canadian Navy (RCN). We jokingly called my tuba a plumber’s nightmare.”
Dave returned from the navy and worked for Andy Stettner as a furniture mover for Handlen Transfer and eventually bought the company. He met and mar-
ried Faye Herrington in 1965. Faye was born in Tisdale, Sask. in 1946. She was the second youngest of 12 children. Her family moved to Willow River in 1954; three years later they moved to Kelowna.
Faye laughed and said, “I moved back to Prince George in 1964 looking for a job because the word was out that the pulp mills were hiring and I found Dave instead. I was living out on Giscome Road with my brother when I found a job at the A&B Answering Service working for Ethel Bliss in the basement of a building at 300 Brunswick St. We took messages for many companies and one of them was Handlen Transfer.
“I moved into town and rented a place in the Millar Addition on Gorse Street. It wasn’t long and I found out that Dave lived nearby on Elm Street. We courted, got married and as they say the rest is history.
“Our first home together was on Carney Street. Seven years later we moved to Voyageur Drive and less than a year ago we moved back to the Millar Addition into Magnolia Gardens. I find it interesting that in these past 53 years we went full circle and ended up where we both lived before we got married.”
Handlin Transfer grew to a fleet of nine trucks. Dave had a postal contract and delivered parcels all over town. In 1982 he gave up the contracts and became a letter carrier until he retired in 2002.
Over the years Faye worked as an office manager for Northern Lights Wood Working; a division of AIMHI that made the smaller wooden products for IKEA. The company, which is
now closed, used to be located on Nicholson Street where T&S Communications is now located.
In 1986, she started working in the office for the Prince George Art Gallery which is now the Two Rivers Gallery.
In 1992, Faye started her own business and called it the Image in White Wedding Gallery.
She also provided limousine service; Dave drove the limo for all the new brides until Faye retired in 2010. Faye’s daughter Kimberley took over the store and in fact opened a second branch office in Langley.
Dave and Faye had two children. Their son David and his wife Maria live in Calgary and Kimberley and her husband Peter live in Aldergrove. They have five grandchildren, all girls and they adore them all.
Faye explained, “When we retired we used to go south in the winter. We looked at other cities and found no reason to move away from Prince George.
“I enjoy my volunteer work with Pat Kinsley helping her answer all the letters from the children at Christmas who send letters to Santa Claus.
“As a veteran Dave continues to help sell poppies for the Legion during their annual Remembrance Day Poppy Sales event even though he is now confined to a walker.
“He was diagnosed in 2008 with a rare condition called Cerebellar ataxia, neuropathy and vestibular areflexia Syndrome (CANVAS).
“The doctors are still trying to find out more about this condition that leaves Dave with no feelings in his legs. When he is in the dark he doesn’t know where his legs are and without
Addition
his walker he tends to fall. This condition continues to be a mystery because it has not been caused by a bacterium or an infection.”
Dave concluded by saying, “I just want to mention that it was my father William (Bill) Croft who purchased and planted all the elm trees on Elm Street in 1967. He did it on his own simply because he wanted to celebrate the yearlong Canadian Centennial celebration held in 1967 when Canada celebrated the 100th anniversary of the Canadian Confederation.
“It was a project that was near to his heart. The elm trees were only six feet high when he planted them.”
*** The Spruce Capital Senior’s Recreation Centre at 3701 Rainbow Dr. will be holding a crib tournament on Saturday.
The tournament registration starts at 10 a.m. and play starts at 11 a.m. Lunch will be available for $6 and coffee all day is a loonie.
President Dorothy Kempster said, “If you are coming to our senior centre please don’t confuse us with the other portion of the building on Liard Drive. Use the lower floor or basement entrance below the old Legion wing building.
“The entrance is directly across the road from the bleachers at the ball park and next to our new sign.
“We welcome all new members and in fact we need more new members. If you are not a crib player then please feel free to check us out at our Pancake Breakfast on Oct. 27 from 9 to 11 a.m.
“Any questions just phone us at 250-563-6450.”
Kathy NadaliN
Seniors’ Scene
Citizen photo by JAMeS DoyLe
dave and faye Croft have spent a great deal of their lives in Prince George growing their family and businesses.
Standing loud and proud
Iam late to the online shopping game.
For most of my twenties, my credit card was in a sorry state of affairs and I did not have the opportunity (or the wisdom) to have credit available to me to shop online.
As such, I did not see the appeal of buying things I likely did not need from the comfort of my own home. I usually waited until the last possible minute, or if there was an event that I needed to attend and my wardrobe was embarrassing, I would run to the nearest store and grab three things, try them on and buy one of them. Clothes shopping, I do not love thee.
Online grocery shopping however, I can get behind that. From the comfort of my home, in my pajamas and drinking coffee, I have completed my grocery shopping for the week. I have bought nothing frivolous and stayed within budget. I will pick up my groceries tomorrow not even having to get out of my car. Convenient and inexpensive.
Quite frankly, I do not enjoy shopping.
Friends of mine can spend hours going from store to store (like actually driving from store to store rather than just hitting the mall and praying for the best) and they enjoy browsing through the racks and looking at stuff. This feels like torture to me.
Even while grocery shopping, my shoulders tense and I start to get irritated the second I walk into the store. Perhaps my shopping aversion is a byproduct of trying to shop as fast as humanly possible when carting around two cranky children. Or perhaps I am becoming an agoraphobic crone, avoiding people and crowds, getting angry at “those damn kids.”
More likely, is that I am busy and I would rather be at home.
I saw an interesting thing a few months ago when I was out and about looking for something specific for our trip. It was an early Sunday morning and I was wandering the aisles in a local pharmacy
Megan kuklIs
store and I walked past a young man stocking shelves. He was stocking the product as fast as he could and he looked physically uncomfortable; he was restocking the feminine hygiene products and he was doing a valiant job of trying to ignore the items that he was touching.
I am impressed at his professionalism, even more so because there were two young women, early teens if I had to guess, browsing for the same products standing right beside him. They were debating which product to get, and what brand they preferred.
This scene has stood out in my mind for two reasons: 1) the young women did not care at all that a young man was beside them and they were taking their time browsing and 2) they were not embarrassed at all. I was stunned.
Never in my teenage years would I have been caught dead buying my own feminine hygiene products – that is what a mom is for. Ingrained shame would have had me paralyzed and mortified standing anywhere near that aisle where a cute boy was working.
I am happy that the young women knew that there is nothing to be ashamed of when you are purchasing necessary products. Normalizing the process will help body image and self-esteem issues for the next generations and I hope that this trend continues. In the meantime, there is always shopping online.
For the times that I am shopping in person, at the store, I will be loud and proud and throwing pads, tampons and toilet paper into my cart without a care in the world.
Embarrassment fades with age.
Couple built business, grew family in Prince George
Bob and Marvina Nikkel moved from Vancouver to Prince George in 1965 and established NR Motors Ltd. in 1967.
NR Motors is now Prince George’s oldest recreational vehicle dealer serving the recreational needs of Prince George and the surrounding region for the past 52 years.
Here is their story in a nutshell.
Bob was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba in 1932. His father worked seven days a week and 10 hours a day in a foundry in Winnipeg during the war years.
Bob said, “It was a time during the war when you could not quit a job even if you wanted to. There was no ventilation in the building where my father worked and he suffered many stomach ailments due to the acid released by the flux that they used at the time in his daily work.
“Eventually his health condition deteriorated to the point that our family doctor wrote an official note ordering him to leave the province and seek better working conditions.
“We moved to Chilliwack and my father landed a job running a dairy farm of 100 milk cows; the farm was owned by a dentist.
“I was only 10 years old when we moved but I remember that first winter in Chilliwack. We
had the biggest snow storm ever; no one was able to get out of their properties and the roads were closed. We had to continue to milk those cows and since we could not ship the milk we had to dump it.
“I went to school until I was 14 and at the age of 15 I went to sea for the next six years. I worked on the SS Catala; a Canadian coastal passenger and cargo steamship built for service with the Union Steamship Company of British Columbia.
“The ship was licensed to carry 267 passengers and carried 300 tons of cargo. I worked as a steward serving in the officer’s mess at a private table for one year until I was bumped off the job.
“I joined their union and from 1949-1953 I was dispatched on a deep-sea freighter and several other deep-sea ships on the fleet of the Western Canada Steamship Company.
“In 1953 I went looking for a job and got hired through a machinist union as a millwright helper and eventually became a journeyman millwright. Over the next six years I worked at the Waneta Dam in Trail and the Kemano Phase I project near
Kitimat. I worked on hydroelectric turbines and other various projects too numerous to mention. That was the beginning of my machinery and millwright work experience.
“In 1958 I went to work for Kenworth building trucks in Burnaby until 1964. I was what they called a swing-man and I was able to cover every aspect of the job which was very interesting work.”
Bob met Marvina Senft in 1953 through people connected with his relatives at their church in Chilliwack. They started out with a long-distance relationship and married in 1955.
Marvina was born in Hodgeville, Sask. in 1933 and was raised on a farm.
Her mother suffered from hay fever so the family left the farm and moved to Vancouver in 1946 where her father found work in a sawmill. Eventually they moved to Chilliwack and bought a dairy farm.
After high school Marvina moved back to Vancouver and worked in retail stores for both Woolworth and Sears.
The young couple moved to Prince George in 1965. Bob was hired as a millwright and worked on the construction of the Northwood Pulp mill. He said, “I worked 12 hours a day and seven days a week for nine months during the construction of the pulp mill.
“When we finished the project, I got laid off. Our family was
growing and I wanted a good future for them so I worked for Kenworth at Parker Pacific that winter and in the spring we started our own business.
“We came to Prince George with the intention of staying for the long term and ended up going into business for ourselves.
“We took over the old Pacific 66 Truck stop at 1877 First Ave. complete with the restaurant and started NR Motors. We operated there for the next 13 years right across the road from where the old Kelly Douglas Warehouse used to be. We operated a service shop and did fleet contract service work for big companies with BC Hydro being our main contract.
“In 1986 we moved to our current location which used to be the old highways department building situated on four acres at 805 First Ave.
“Over the years we added the recreational vehicle and marine divisions, Suzuki motorcycles and ATVs, John Deere products and the sport and ski shop and made all around recreation as our business.
“We deal in dreams and sold everything that people did not need. In this part of B.C. where there’s no shortage of lakes and provincial parks; camping, boating and related activities are number one on many customer’s lists. We changed to a total recreational facility and a full service and parts department to support their dreams and we
can look after most recreational needs.
“We worked hard over the years and we owe the success of our company to good management, great customers and our loyal staff.”
Bob and Marvina have a family of three chosen children; Alan (Mary Lou) a chaplin with the army in Ontario, Greg (Sharon) manager of NR Motors and Donna Hansen the parts department manager at NR Motors. They have seven grandchildren.
Marvina concluded by saying, “Our company NR Motors is pretty much a family concern with Bob, our daughter Donna and our son Greg all actively involved in the daily operation of the business. At the age of 86 Bob is still involved in the business and has no intention of retiring.
“I worked for the company right from the start and raised our family at the same time. I recently had to retire due to health issues. I wish I could still be at the office because I loved the work and the interaction with the staff and the customers. We met many great people through our business and they became good friends. It has been tough over these past 52 years to see many of them grow old and pass away. We had many years of great history with these people and it has been sad to see them go.
“All in all, the Lord has been good to us.”
Citizen photo by brent braaten
Bob and Marvina Nikkel, local business owners, have lived in Prince George since 1965.
Kathy NadaliN
Seniors’ Scene
Dancer bringing interactive performance home
Frank PEEBLES Citizen staff fpeebles@pgcitizen.ca
When Prince George produces a national-level dancer, it almost always requires that they move away and do their best work somewhere else. Natalie LeFebvre is getting a rare opportunity to come back to her hometown and share the work she’s doing.
The award-winning, classically trained dancer has performed with such luminous companies as Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal, Coleman Lemieux & Co. and MACHiNENOiSY. Ten years ago she and her dancerchoreographer husband James Gnam co-founded Plastic Orchid Factory in Vancouver, a modern dance and mediaarts company that transformed the cultural expressions of the Lower Mainland, and it caught on across the country and has even gone international.
LeFebvre and Gnam were nominated by the late, great Lola MacLaughlin for the 2010 City of Vancouver’s Mayor’s Arts Award for Dance for their groundbreaking efforts in the field of dance.
The work done by Plastic Orchid Factory is often so big it uses a full theatre or performance hall, and performances often last a full evening.
With their latest production Digital Folk, however, they are out on tour. This show is portable and fits inside rooms of almost any size. It’s flexible in almost every sense.
That is how LeFebvre is able to program Prince George into the Digital Folk hard-drive.
“It’s been a really long time trying to arrange things so I could do something in P.G.,” said LeFebvre, who has been back many times for family reasons, since she turned pro in the early 1990s. Many of her loved ones live in Prince George, and she has constantly felt a pull to perform here.
“When I grew up there, there was so much dance going on throughout the community all the time. Judy (Russell of Enchainement Dance Centre) and Bonnie (Leach of Excalibur Theatre Arts) do a great job of covering some of that off, but there was a lot more, I remember, and I wanted to be part of that and bring P.G. something different. This finally was the perfect piece to bring.”
Digital Folk is an interactive performance that explores the connective abilities and the isolation realities of video games and other technology used by youth. It isn’t new to this era, it goes back to the first Atari and ColecoVision home gaming systems back in the 1980s.
Through choreography, music, costumes, light, and the participation of the audience, Digital Folk tells a story of those tech forces that have now grown into the subculture of youth.
So effective is this physical storytelling showpiece that it earned the funding support of both the BC Arts Council and the Canada Council For The Arts, as well as other sponsors who helped get it off the ground and into Canada. It has already been seen in Labrador, Ontario, here in B.C., and it is scheduled for Edmonton and Calgary in the coming weeks, but Prince George is the next blip on the Digital Folk motherboard.
It will be performed at the Omineca Arts Centre on 3rd Avenue and Victoria Street. The local arts venue, led by volunteer and artist Jennifer Pighin, lobbied LeFebvre to bring the show as a way to get families and young people downtown in the evening.
“Jen is dynamic and it’s great to know there’s someone like that in P.G. right now, pretty rad, and she wanted us to bring all our people, she’d add some of her people, Bonnie (Leach) will add some of her people, so it’s a real collaboration,” LeFebvre said. “It felt so good to set it up the arrangements because it was a long time coming for me and my family.”
It is an all-ages and family-focused show. It will run in a series, the show
looping three times over the course of the evening.
“Digital Folk turns into a rock concert at one point. We want people to have fun and enjoy the thinking they might do about what the show is saying,” LeFebvre said.
Excalibur Theatre Arts hosts Plastic Orchid Factory for some workshops on Oct. 29 that have some content connection to the show, then the Digital Folk performance happens Oct. 30 starting at 7 p.m. repeating at 8 p.m. and again at 9 p.m. Tickets to each show are $15-20 available online at the Universe Tickets website or in person at the Excalibur Theatre Arts front desk.
Sellouts are expected so audiences are encouraged to buy well in advance.
natalie Lefebvre, who grew up in prince george and is now co-owner of modern dance and mediarts company, plastic Orchid Factory in Vancouver, brings the Digital Folk show to the local stage Oct. 30 at the Omineca arts centre.
Leadership program returns to P.G.
Frank PEEBLES Citizen staff fpeebles@pgcitizen.ca
The Minerva Foundation is coming back to Prince George.
The social development agency was founded in B.C. in 1999. Its purpose, as stated in 2003 when a chapter was launched in Prince George, is to “raise funds to provide opportunities for women.”
Minerva North was launched in September 2003 by Deborah Poff from UNBC along with CNC and several women leaders in northern B.C.
The chapter went quiet over the years but local contributions to Minerva initiatives have been ongoing and that was reinforced to a whole new level last week at a luncheon featuring
special guest speakers Shirley Bond, MLA for Prince GeorgeValemount; Teara Fraser, CEO of the Raven Institute and Tina Strehlke, CEO of Minerva B.C.
It was announced that Prince George would be the first city outside of Vancouver to host Minerva’s key program called Learn To Lead.
“According to a Public Health Agency of Canada study, only 36 per cent of girls in Grade 6 describe feeling self-confident. By Grade 10, the number drops even further to 14 per cent,” said Strehlke, explaining the goals of the program. “Minerva B.C. works to reverse this trend by inviting 50 Grade 11 girls from across the province to a weekend of community and confidence building. The
expansion to Prince George will double the number of participants accepted to Learning To Lead each year.
“The Prince George School District is home to eight secondary schools, and is strategically positioned to offer a second base for the Learning To Lead, targeting girls from schools in nearby regions.”
Minerva B.C. operates on the belief that the inclusion of women’s voices will make a positive impact on B.C. business and communities.
They bolster this belief by establishing new or supporting existing leadership programs, education awards, and also culturally relevant programming developed in partnership with Indigenous women.
“Minerva B.C. removes barriers for women and girls to realize their leadership potential,” said Strehlke, and a bottleneck was spotted that the Prince George expansion will serve to reduce.
“Over the past two years, we’ve turned away as many young women as we’ve accepted to this high-impact girlsleadership program,” she said.
“The opportunity to expand our capacity by hosting the program at UNBC is one that we are excited to pursue.”
A number of Prince George’s women in leadership were involved in renewing the Minerva B.C. presence in Prince George. Bond was involved in both the Minerva North establishment in 2003 and in the establishment
of the Learn To Lead satellite program now. Another key organizer, said Minerva personnel, was former Prince George resident Rowena Veylan, Minerva BC’s Director of Partnerships & Engagement, who succeeded in getting RBC to provide the leverage for the program expansion into the north.
For more information on Minerva B.C. and how this notfor-profit organization delivers leadership development programs for girls and women, and works with organizations to address systemic and workplace barriers that impede the advancement and equality of women, look them up at minervabc.ca or their Minerva B.C. page on Facebook.
Halloween themed WordPlay goes tonight
Frank PEEBLES Citizen staff fpeebles@pgcitizen.ca
The forces of darkness and light, tricks and treats, scary and hilari play with Halloween like a poet toys with language.
WordPlay, the regular writers’ salon at Books & Company, turns the pen towards All Hallow’s Eve when the city’s scribes gather around the creative cauldron tonight.
The leader of the WordPlay gatherings, poet Erin Bauman, loves to stir the pot at the breeziest of times, so she can really sink her literary fangs into an occasion like Halloween when there’s double the bubbles of toil and trouble.
“While we have definitely had this theme in the past, we couldn’t resist the chance to celebrate this holiday again,” said Bauman. “We will of course explore, in prose and verse, the cultural historical origins of Halloween and how it represents another example of appropriation and oppression by capitalism. Yet, feel free to bring spine-tinglingly scary stories for the WordPlay audience to enjoy as well. You can also come in costume if the Halloween mood strikes you.”
Bauman is a believer in poetry being a motivational art medium. She uses her writing for
expose, for calls to action, for calling out.
She doesn’t want writers to feel shy about bringing funny or frivolous writing to this Halloween party, but she also encourages inclined writers to look past the candy and kidding around, and unmask the issues of the day.
“I will probably discuss again how Halloween is a form of cultural appropriation that has in many ways denegrated, and made a joke of pagan culture,” Bauman said, for example. “I also have a poem that highlights the discrepancies between male and female costumes. I notice that costumes for females are almost always sexualized.
“A lot of the outfits don’t offer much coverage, for example a male firefighter costume is full pants and a jacket, whereas a female firefighter’s outfit consists of booty shorts. It is one more example of how women are not valued as people. I also saw a sexy crayon box costume, which to me borders on the sexualization of children, and scares me.”
WordPlay: Halloween Edition is a chance to fright back using poems and prose.
The first readings and recitations get underway at 7:30 p.m.
Admission is free and the public is invited to sit and listen or contribute some creative writing of your own if you wish.
Warm Up to Coldsnap
Warm Up to Coldsnap on Saturday at the Prince George Playhouse see the Prince George Folkfest Society present the BC World Music Collective as a preview to the 2019 Coldsnap Festival, which goes January 25 to Febrauary 2.
This event brings together musicians from Cuba, Mexico, Brazil, Africa, and London, who now make their home in the beautiful province of BC.
Artist line up includes Adonis Puentes, Celso Machado, Tonye Aganaba, Kurai Blessing, JP Carter, Locarno (Tom Landa, Pedro Mota, Robin Layne, Liam MacDonald, Nick La Riviere, Kalissa Landa, JeanSe LeDoujet) and First Nations rapper, Ostwelve.
For tickets and more information visit www. coldsnapfestival.com.
Looking beyond traditional beliefs
Religion has the potential to provide guiding principles for a meaningful life, yet there are few concepts that have been more divisive in human history.
Seeing the tensions that existed in the first half of the twentieth century, Mohandas K. Gandhi, a deeply spiritual man himself, came to the following conclusion: “one should accept the faith into which one was born, but seek always to interpret it in the most broadminded and nonviolent way.”
In other words, Gandhi is recognizing the good in every religion, encouraging each of us to grow in the understanding our respective faiths.
He also seems to be advising us not to become distracted by searching for religions beyond those of our own families. He implies as well that we shouldn’t be actively seeking converts into our own belief systems.
Lessons in Learning
Gerry ChidiaC
The India where Gandhi grew up was ruled by a foreign power “in the name of God and queen.”
As his country struggled for independence, he saw the disagreements and then the violent clashes which resulted from differences in religion. He also saw a world where people were mercilessly massacred due to their beliefs.
Seventy years after Gandhi’s death, we see a world where Buddhists are killing Muslims, Muslims are killing Christians, and Islamophobia is driving political agendas.
It is very easy to point the finger at how everyone else needs to change, or at the apparent absurdity of religion. If we carefully examine the entire scope
of Gandhi’s message however, it is clear that the challenge is for each of us as individuals. Each of us needs to be true to our own mission in life if we are going to be effective agents of universal change.
What does it mean to interpret our faith, regardless of what form those beliefs are, “in the most broad-minded and nonviolent way?”
As a Middle Eastern Catholic, it is important for me to acknowledge that my faith is part of my heritage, possibly going back to the time of Christ himself. At the same time, the region of my ancestors has always been a crossroad of different ideas, and I too need to be open to the messages of enlightened spiritual teachers from other religions.
I have indeed found tremendous fulfillment studying the works of Jewish, Baha’i, Islamic and Christian writers, along with Taoist, Hindu, Buddhist and First Nations teachers.
Living in Canada, it is a
great joy to interact and share perspectives on life with friends and acquaintances from all different faiths, and with those who do not believe in God.
This celebration of diversity seems quite true to the intention of Gandhi’s statement.
Being broadminded also challenges me to look beyond traditional Catholic teachings to the word spoken by Jesus Christ, which is essentially a message of empowerment.
Women, for example, played a significant role in his ministry.
Jesus broke from the traditions of his age in recognizing the prominence of women around him.
The primary role they played in his death and resurrection story, for example, is quite striking, and provides a challenge to the current status of women in the church.
The spiritual nourishment I gain from practicing my faith also enables me to see beyond the flaws of the Catholic church
Arts council launches new website
Frank PEEBLES Citizen staff
fpeebles@pgcitizen.ca
If you are one of the city’s dominant forces for the arts, you need an online presence that reflects who you are.
The Community Arts Council is one of the premier arts organizations in northern B.C. and one of the leaders in advocating on behalf of artists and arts groups of all kinds.
Last week, a new CAC website went live, plugging them into the community in a modern way that had been lacking.
CAC executive director Sean Farrell said the revamped website was more
than a made-over facade.
It was part of a years-long consultation and public outreach program that had been building up to this reworking of how the public, the CAC members, and the organization itself communicated with each other.
“The point of this new website is that it becomes the go-to point of accessing information to do with the arts and culture in Prince George,” he said.
It will lay out the city’s array of workshops, classes, exhibitions, performances, arts events of all kinds.
The anchor is a sleek new coming events calendar for mapping out the upcoming points on the local cultural scene.
Visit the Haunted Maze
Just in time for Halloween the Haunted Maze is resurrected at the Exhibiton Park at CN Centre fairgrounds Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays from Oct. 19 until Oct. 28 and then again Oct. 31.
The maze is set up in the 4H Barn, 4199 18th Ave.
The event is not only fun, it is used as a way to fundraise for two non-profit organizations in Prince George.
When guests donate cash it will go to Prince George Search and Rescue and
food donations will got to St. Vincent de Paul Society.
Show times vary with different levels of scariness.
There will be no child-friendly levels of scare on Fridays or Saturdays.
Child friendly Sundays are Oct. 21 and 28 from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Intermediate scare takes place Oct. 19, 20, 26, 27 from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m.
Advanced Scare goes Oct. 19, 20, 26, 27 from 7:45 to 11 p.m. and Oct. 31 from 7 to 10:30 p.m.
“We hope everybody takes advantage, because that is what we are here for – to serve the arts and culture of Prince George,” Farrell said, encouraging anyone involved in the arts in any way to use this new tool available to the public at large.
The website can be viewed and interacted with at www.studio2880.com.
to find the same truths that are part of every religious and philosophical tradition. Seek truth and wisdom. Live with humility and honesty. Treat others with respect while having the courage to speak out for what I believe is right. Above all, do all that love requires, even if it is difficult.
As with all great truths, the words of Gandhi remain relevant today. No one needs to abandon their beliefs. The challenge is to embrace them deeply and fearlessly, thus becoming the agents of nonviolent change we are destined to be.
— Gerry Chidiac is a champion for social enlightenment, inspiring others to find their greatness in making the world a better place. For more of his writings, go to www.gerrychidiac.com.
Volunteers deserve a big thank you
If anyone is worried about the demise of paper in our society, they should talk to a parent with children in elementary school.
Home Again
Eighteen pieces of paper and a catalogue came home in my kids’ backpacks today. I thought that when my children went to school, homework would be the thing that I would hate. Little did I know that the bane of parents’ existence would actually be… fundraising.
Parent Advisory Councils, or PACs for short, are a necessary and important part of the school systems. PACs raise money for playground equipment, manage hot lunch programs and generally just be awesome people raising money for things for the schools and the children in the schools.
I have a terrible tendency to feel guilty about the few people who volunteer their time on behalf of the many so in situations where people need volunteers, I reluctantly raise my hand and end up in charge of a committee.
That is how I ended up becoming the recording secretary of a strata council of a large condo building when we lived in Victoria.
It was terrible.
People fought all the time. There were cranky people that would write the strata council nasty letters because “we weren’t doing enough.” People would get their knickers in a twist because the roof needed to be fixed and people did not like to spend money even though not spending the money would make the roof collapse and cost more money.
More recently, I opened my mouth at a union meeting and now I’m the chair of an engagement committee. I am a sucker for volunteering motivated entirely by guilt.
It is for all of these reasons that I am avoiding making eye contact with any of the PAC members at my kids’ school. I have too much right now and I am
(supposed to be) writing my thesis so I cannot volunteer for one more thing. Which brings us back to the flyers. PACs raise money largely by various fundraising take-home flyers: book orders (hello Scholastic!), reusable sandwich bags, label things with your kid’s names, take your kid’s drawing and make it into overpriced things to give to grandparents for Christmas, flowers, flower bulbs that you mistakenly buy and it spreads like a weed in your garden and you spend the next summer pulling runners and plant babies, and magazine subscriptions.
I am not counting the other charity fundraisers that appear in your kids’ bags throughout the school year like Jump Rope for Heart and Terry Fox Run.
If you donated five dollars to every fundraiser that comes your way, you would be broke and all the children of the world would have the best playgrounds ever. I try to support at least one fundraising endeavor and one charity event each year and try to not let the rest of the requests bother me.
I would like to be able to support everything and volunteer for everything. I am learning that I can’t do that and stay sane. We can all only do what we can and I am so grateful to the people who are doing what I can’t.
To all of the volunteers and especially to the PAC volunteers at every school, thank you so very much.
Thank you.
You are the best.
Halloween Spooktacular
Huble Homestead holds it annual Hallowee Spooktacular Friday, Oct. 26 and Saturday, Oct. 27 from 3 to 8 p.m. at Huble Homestead Historic Site, 15000 Mitchell Rd.
Guests are invited to attend this bonechilling, hair-raising even giving those who feel up to the challenge an opportunity to venture north to the homestead.
Find a flashlight, make sure your footwear is waterproof and put together a costume warm enough for an evening at Prince George’s spookiest Halloween haunt.
There’s pumpkin carving, costume con-
tests and crafts, or head into the animal barn for magic shows with William the Conjurer. The fortune teller’s cabin summons you to see what the future holds. For those preferring a more ghastly evening, a spooky maze and graveyard ghouls await you in the dark. For those looking for a truly terrifying experience, the House of Horrors beckons, with guided tours available for an extra charge. The goosebumps are free.
All other activities are included with a family admission of suggested donation of $10. For more information visit www.hublehomestead.ca.
Megan kuklIs
Not all fats are created equal
Low-fat diets gained popularity in the 1980s as fat was demonized for causing weight gain and chronic disease. Despite the growing fear of fat, Canada had one of the highest rates of trans fat intake in the world through the 1990s.
In response to this statistic, the federal government began implementing changes to food product labeling in the early 2000s, requiring food companies to list trans fat content on their product packaging.
Voluntary targets were initially set by Health Canada for trans fat content in processed foods. While these efforts helped to reduce the trans fat intake of the average Canadian, they may have also helped to perpetuate the idea of fat being “bad” since total fat content and trans fat content were not necessarily well-defined for the consumer, and were likely seen as the same thing by many. In reality, not all fats are created equal.
There are three different kinds of fat: trans fat, saturated fat and unsaturated fat. These types of fat are found in varying amounts in foods and have different effects on your health.
Trans fat can be found naturally in animal-products, such as beef and dairy, and it can also be industrially produced as part of partially hydrogenated oils (PHOs), including hard margarines, vegetable shortenings and commercially baked goods such as muffins.
Trans fats can raise your levels of LDL (bad) cholesterol in the blood. High LDL levels can lead to a build-up of plaque in the arteries and increase your risk for developing cardiovascular disease.
Trans fats also reduce your blood levels of HDL (good) cholesterol, which has a protective effect against heart disease.
In an effort to curb trans fat intake, Health Canada introduced regulations in the summer of 2017, to ban the use of PHOs in food; manufacturers were given until September 2018 to remove PHOs
Food for Thought
from their products.
On Sept. 17, Health Canada’s ban on PHOs came into effect. It is now illegal for manufacturers to add PHOs to foods sold in Canada.
While banning PHOs in processed foods may reduce the average Canadian’s intake of trans fats, it does not eliminate it. Trans fats are still found naturally in animal products, including red meat, which should be limited in the diet.
Saturated fat is found in many of the same foods as trans fat, including fatty cuts of beef and shortening, and it can have an equally detrimental effect on your health, as well as increase your risk for developing heart disease.
There are different kinds of saturated fats and some have more of a negative impact on our bodies than others.
Since foods naturally contain a mixture of different saturated fats, it’s hard to choose foods based on one particular type, and therefore it’s best to avoid all saturated fat.
Unsaturated fats have the opposite effect on your health as saturated and trans fats. Replacing saturated and trans fats with unsaturated fats can help to lower your overall cholesterol levels and reduce your risk for developing heart disease.
Sources of unsaturated fats include nuts, seeds, fatty fish, vegetable oils and avocados. Health Canada recommends consuming 2-3 tablespoons of unsaturated fats every day.
Coconut oil has been hyped as a superfood with a host of health benefits but there is little evidence to support these claims. In fact, coconut oil is high in saturated fat, which raises LDL (bad)
cholesterol levels.
To help lower your intake of saturated and trans fat, choose leaner meats, lower fat dairy products, and foods that contain little or no saturated or trans fat, and choose meat alternatives such as beans, lentils, nuts, seeds and tofu more often. Saturated and trans fat are listed on the nutrition facts panel, making it easier for you to make informed decisions regarding the packaged foods you buy.
Fats are an important component of the diet and are needed to help the
body absorb certain vitamins, make hormones, such as estrogen, and protect your organs.
Trying to completely avoid all sources of fat, could have a detrimental effect on your health and lead to nutrient deficiencies down the line.
For more information on healthy sources of fat go to www.healthlinkbc.ca/ healthy-eating.
— Kelsey Leckovic is a Registered Dietitian with Northern Health working in chronic disease management.
Kelsey lecKovic
Streaming video fatigue could lead to failure
Mae Anderson Citizen news service
NEW YORK — As Walmart, AT&T and Disney join stalwarts such as Netflix in streaming video and creating original shows, a reality sets in: Not all will survive.
Over the past week, Walmart announced plans to partner with MGM Studios on original shows for Walmart’s video-ondemand service, Vudu, while AT&T’s WarnerMedia said it would create its own streaming service centred on HBO and Turner properties. Disney, meanwhile, is buying Fox’s entertainment businesses to beef up its planned streaming service, set to debut next year.
Add to that some existing, but little-known services, such as Filmstruck, Sundance Now, Mubi and others that offer older movies or niche offerings to subscribers.
These companies are trying to keep up with the changing tastes of consumers as they stream video on demand rather than rely on traditional cable subscriptions. But consumers have limited funds to spend; streaming behemoths like Netflix and Amazon got an early start and a lion’s share of
subscribers so far.
“Too many services (are) going after the same consumer,” Wedbush analyst Dan Ives said. “Streaming represents a significant market opportunity for the coming years but ultimately (streaming video) will have a few clear winners and a graveyard of those vendors that will fail.”
In a way, the overabundance of streaming services echoes the
proliferation of too many cable channels in the traditional cable model and the old complaint of “so many channels and nothing is on.” Back then, cable companies forced you to get those channels and raised monthly fees regularly. Now the power is shifting to the consumer: if they don’t want to watch something, they don’t buy it.
The streaming market is growing, although at a slowing pace.
EMarketer expects the number of people who use one or more video services in the U.S. to grow about 4 per cent to 206 million by 2020. Google’s YouTube and Netflix are the clear winners so far. YouTube has an estimated 191 million users and Netflix about 133 million, according to eMarketer. Amazon has been nipping at its heels, with an estimated 90 million.
Newer upstarts will face a
How the Cold War started in Canada
In the snowy evening of an Ottawa winter, shortly after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a family of three huddled in a small apartment. The curtains were drawn, the conversation quiet. Fear cloaked the room. They should not have been living away from the embassy residences but their crying baby and the legendary verbal fights between his boss and wife next door which often lasted well into the night had given this family more flexibility in housing than most embassy staff. Earlier that day, the husband had placed his family in danger. His name was Igor Gouzenko. He was a cypher clerk at the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa although that title is misleading. He was responsible for coding and decoding messages to and from the embassy. Prompted by
Sidebars to History
an ominous recall to Moscow, Gouzenko felt it was time to make a break. Seeking to escape the Stalinist regime behind the Iron Curtain he had gathered secret documents that had come before him and hid them away in his office.
During the War, Churchill, Roosevelt, Canada’s Mackenzie King, and DeGaulle from France had welcomed Stalin’s Soviet Union as an ally.
The USSR would play the major role in the defeat of Hitler’s Germany. In the years before, following the First World War, the allies had viewed the Soviet Union as an evil source of communist agitation throughout the globe.
Stalin, who had taken over the reins of government after Lenin’s death was a villain, a man who would kill and starve his own people in pursuit of his goals. At the war’s start he had joined Hitler in devouring Poland. When Germany attacked the USSR, Stalin needed arms and equipment badly and the allies were there to provide it, often at great cost in lives. To make Stalin and the USSR more acceptable to their populations, the Allies commenced massive public relations efforts to make Stalin “Uncle Joe” and his regime the friend of the Allies in the public mind. That effort was very successful. The USSR was a friend with whom one shared plans and weapon development.
Except for one item – the fruits of the Manhattan Project and the ways to make a nuclear bomb.
tough battle to compete.
Each company is hoping its own exclusive content will pique viewers’ interest. Walmart and MGM will debut an update on Mr. Mom. WarnerMedia has HBO’s arsenal of hit shows like Game of Thrones. Disney has an endless stream of popular movies such as Frozen and the Star Wars and Marvel franchises. It’s also planning original shows based on those franchises.
Companies risk extinction if they cannot create their own versions of Must See TV shows of the past, said Seth Shapiro, a professor at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts.
“How many things are people going to want to pay for at once? How many subscriptions can the market bear?” he said. Services “that are sort of nice to have but not really essential will fall by the wayside.”
The contest has parallels to the DVD-by-mail competition more than a decade ago. In 2002, Walmart created its own online DVD rental service to compete with Netflix. But the retailer ended that in 2005 and transferred its customers to Netflix, signalling the world’s largest retailer couldn’t beat the internet upstart at its own game.
In the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa, Gouzenko handled documents that disclosed a wide swath of spies and scientists who had obtained access to American nuclear and other secrets. On his final day at the embassy, these were now stuffed under his shirt. Even though Canada was not a full partner in the Manhattan Project, the Soviet embassy kept in contact with Soviet spies around North America including those attempting to gain access to nuclear bomb information. Gouzenko quickly found defecting was not as easy as he had thought. His escape from the embassy was only the start of what had turned into a bad day. With attaché case in hand he stopped at the offices of the Ottawa Journal, no doubt hoping his story if published would give him and his family some security. It was not to be. The newspaper turned him away, failing to understand his mission. He left, shaken, and then returned to try again but the answer was the same.
The Journal staff suggested he go to the RCMP. Instead, as the dark evening hours he stopped at the Department of Justice finding it closed for the day. After asking a policeman on duty to see the Minister of Justice, he was told to come back the next morning.
After a tense night, he, his wife, and their young child again tried to see the Canadian Minister of Justice. After waiting two hours they trudged back to the newspaper offices. By now, the Embassy would know about the missing documents and the missing clerk.
Gouzenko and his wife returned home and left their son with a neighbour to look after then headed to the offices of the Crown Attorney. A secretary took it upon herself to call the RCMP and a constable arrived. After listening to their tale he told them he could not help and left. Growing ever more frantic, the couple did manage to telephone a member of the intelligence wing of the RCMP who agreed to meet them the next morning.
They returned home and remained silent as a Russian Embassy staff member pounded at their door. From his balcony Gouzenko asked for help. His neighbour hopped on his bicycle to contact the local police as
another neighbour took the family in.
The local police were as helpful as the RCMP had been that morning.
The family was certain that the embassy would not stop and thankfully took a neighbour’s offer to stay in her apartment. Around midnight, a couple of Soviet Security members broke into the Gouzenko apartment and started to turn it upside down, an act that waived the diplomatic status. The local police removed, but did not arrest, the Soviet agents as the Gouzenkos watched through a keyhole from the adjoining apartment. Finally, the next morning, the RCMP took in the family.
Advised of all this, Prime Minister Mackenzie King, fearful of antagonizing Stalin, initially refused asylum. The arrival of a senior British intelligence officer, perhaps the head of MI-6, turned the tide. The family was spirited away to a cottage on a nearby lake and, after a time of debriefing, King notified President Truman of the defection and the Soviet spy activity in both Canada and the USA.
The Cold War had started. Gouzenko and his family would remain under protective custody in a small Ontario town for years, fearful of reprisal. When he did appear on a Canadian television program years later he was concealed under a bizarre white hood.
The family continued to live in a small Ontario town under an assumed name, still under RCMP protection. Gouzenko even wrote a novel – The Fall of a Titan – that won the annual Governor-General’s Award in 1954. Earlier, a movie based on his defection was released by Hollywood.
Gouzenko’s defection triggered an “anti-Red” purge in the Western Allies. In the USA, Senator Joe McCarthy started his horrendous witch-hunt and soon the “bomber race” became the “missile race,” then the “nuclear race” leading to the policy of “mutually assured destruction” (“MAD”). S chool children had bomb drills during which they hid under their desks or in a school basement and only chance and one man’s decision prevented the Third World War during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The days of nice Uncle Joe were over.
There’s barbecue on the bayou
Jim Shahin Citizen news service
The platter of food in front of me seems out of place. Smoked brisket, pork ribs and pulled pork in New Orleans?
The seafood-centric city has taken its Big Easy time catching up with a frenzy that has seemingly gripped the rest of the country for about a decade. But barbecue fever has finally arrived.
A lunch at McClure’s Barbecue shows how this newcomer cuisine is trying to find its voice in a town with such an established culinary identity. The platter mates traditional Southern meats with such sides as fried boudin balls, red beans and rice, Creole potato salad, barbecue jambalaya, and, in a nod to Louisiana’s French-Acadian history, BBQ Poutine. Among the sauces is one called NOLA East, which includes soy sauce, hoisin, Sriracha and chiles for a tangy Asian flavor profile that draws from the city’s Vietnamese population.
“Lots of the restaurants serve Texas-style barbecue and Kansas City barbecue and North Carolina barbecue,” said New Orleans Times-Picayune food critic Brett Anderson, who had declared that his city “is now officially barbecue country” in an article last year. “A lot of these restaurants are looking for what’s indigenous to southwest Louisiana.”
In a phone interview later, owner Neil McClure concurred.
“I think if I’m trying to create my own style of New Orleans barbecue, it’s with those sides,” he said.
Central City BBQ, which opened in 2016, bathes meats in the smoke from smoldering oak in giant all-wood offset smokers, like in Texas, and the menu runs the usual pan-regional gamut. But there’s also smoked boudin (freckled with tomato for a Creole touch), spoonbread and buttermilk- and Tabascoaccented Creole coleslaw.
“We’re adding a little flair,” manager Jonathan Rodriguez said.
The annual Hogs for the Cause barbecue competition, a fundraiser for pediatric brain cancer that began in 2009, has launched some of the city’s newer barbecue joints, several of which work to simply get the basics right.
Frey Smoked Meat Co., which opened in 2016 and grew out of a barbecue team that competes at the contest, removed gumbo from its menu.
“We’re first and foremost a barbecue place,” manager Boe Reboul said. “Gumbo isn’t what people come here for.”
The Joint, opened in 2004, is perhaps the granddaddy of the city’s modern barbecue wave. Husband and wife co-owners Pete and Jenny Breen moved into their small, funky current location in the Bywater neighborhood in 2012. They smoke pork, ribs, chicken and brisket over oak and pecan wood in a custom-made all-wood smoker. Pete, who grew up in Baltimore, likens their style to crowd-pleasing music.
“I look at it as a greatest hits,” he said. “We never came in with the idea of doing anything specifically New Orleans.” Yet as if by osmosis, heritage
seeps in. The vinaigrette on the Joint’s salad is deepened with smoked Creole tomato. And the restaurant serves a Louisiana sausage known as chaurice (a local variant on chorizo) made by a company called Creole Country.
The Louisiana-centric sensibility has historical roots. In a June article for the Houston Chronicle, barbecue columnist J.C. Reid noted that trench cooking of whole hogs in Cajun Country, west of New Orleans, is one of the South’s oldest barbecue traditions, but never caught on commercially. “The boucherie is a long-standing community tradition involving a hog that’s slaughtered and cooked on the spot,” he wrote.
Barbecue aficionado and New Orleans resident Howard Conyers, host of a PBS Digital Studios show called Nourish on the network’s YouTube channel, agreed that whole hog cooking has been part of the state’s culinary history. But in recent years, he said, what’s called barbecue in Cajun Country isn’t what most folks would imagine: Typically, it’s “a really big pork chop with a bone in it,” he said. Conyers cited Hogs for the
Cause and barbecue’s popularity nationally for the cuisine’s local emergence.
Rien Fertel, a Louisiana food and barbecue expert, said New Orleans barbecue traditions are unseen by the general public. “It’s going on every Sunday at second-line parades,” he said. “It’s mostly African American crowds. Because it’s street culture, it’s something that’s always there but relatively hidden.”
Fertel acknowledged that these barbecues revolve around sausages, burgers and pork chops. “There is no low-andslow barbecue to speak of” at these events, he said. There is, though, at the city’s restaurants nowadays. A progenitor of a New Orleans barbecue style is VooDoo BBQ & Grill, which opened on Mardi Gras in 2002. Its menu offers gumbo, jambalaya, red beans and rice, and meats dry-rubbed with Creole, Cajun and Caribbean seasonings. “It’s a fusion of all the best that BBQ and New Orleans has to offer,” its website reads. Through franchising, VooDoo has locations as far away as Florida and Indiana. Perhaps because of the way people think of New Orleans
cuisine, until recently barbecue has struggled. “People don’t come to the French Quarter to eat barbecue,” said Tenney Flynn, co-owner of the seafood restaurant Fins. Flynn co-founded Zydecue in 2004 in the Quarter as a barbecue/Cajun/Creole hybrid. It was shuttered in 2016. Its sausage was made by chef Alex Patout and its seasoning blend concocted by Paul Prudhomme. “We would take a little license with barbecue history and say that barbecue existed with the western Louisiana cochon de lait,” recalled co-owner Tenney Flynn. “We’d say it was the genesis of barbecue.”
Barbecue origin story aside, if the city has a signature barbecue item, it might be that cochon de lait.
The name derives from the days when tender, flavorful young pigs (cochon) still feeding on their mother’s milk (lait) were slow-roasted over wood embers.
These days, it’s typically smoked pork shoulder piled into French bread with coleslaw.
Walker’s Southern Style BBQ, which began selling the sandwiches in 2001 at Jazz Fest, serves what many consider the definitive version.
The flavourful, juicy, spicerubbed pork is smoked for 16 hours and piled onto Frenchstyle bread, baked by James Beard award-winner Dong Phuong, that’s dressed with a spicy mayo-based sauce and topped with dry slaw.
It’s sensational. Not surprising, perhaps, given that owner Jonathan Walker took first place in whole hog at the 2014 Hogs for the Cause.
Such local traditions are still trying to find their way into the city’s contemporary vision of barbecue, though. When Walker said to me, “Tell them we do barbecue,” he pulled something from the smoker and held it high with a pair of tongs: It wasn’t cochon de lait, or trenchcooked pork, or even smoked boudin.
It was a rack of ribs.
Citizen news serviCe photo by walker’s southern style bbQ
Barbecue ribs and sausage at walker’s Southern Style BBQ in new Orleans.
Citizen new serviCe photo byMia reade-baylor-the Joint
Ribs, pulled pork, mac and cheese and homemade pickles at the Joint.
Automated cars could end wide range of jobs
Jordan Press Citizen new service
OTTAWA
– More than one million jobs could be lost to the coming boom in automated vehicles with ripple effects beyond the likeliest victims, internal government documents warn.
The documents from Employment and Social Development Canada give a glimpse into the ongoing concerns and policy options government officials have wrestled with to help workers whose jobs may be threatened, and young people who are entering the labour force.
A 2017 presentation predicted automation could kill some 500,000 transportation jobs –from truck drivers to subway operators to taxi drivers and even courier services – as well as more than 600,000 additional jobs such as parking attendants, auto-body repair workers and even police and emergency personnel.
It warns that retraining some of these workers may be difficult and that jobs they may turn to that require similar skills are also likely to be automated.
to help navigate their entry into the workforce.
A recent federally-funded opinion survey suggests there isn’t a lot of public awareness about government programs on this front, and recommended the government create an online tool to help workers navigate their ongoing education and training needs
RBC is launching something along those lines this week, with a focus on the fears young people have landing a first job.
Those fears are significant in the context of heightened nerves about whether the jobs young people are interested in doing will disappear as the world of work changes, said Mark Beckles, RBC’s senior director of youth strategy.
A separate briefing note from earlier this year to the top official at the department said national efforts, some of which may not be within the government’s mandate, will be needed to counteract the negative effects of automation.
from being left behind in a techfuelled economy. It is an issue
The federal budget in 2017 pledged about $1.8 billion over six years to help pay for expanded skills training programs in provinces and territories to try and keep traditional workers
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says the government is working on tackling.
“We’ve seen the challenges and the anxieties that are out there amongst Canadians right across the country and our focus is on making sure that everyone
has a real and fair chance to succeed,” Trudeau told a Monday morning meeting of representatives from Canada’s Building Trades Unions.
Earlier this year the Liberals launched an advertising campaign to educate younger workers about federal programs and services that they can use
“Employers today are hiring for the future and employers are telling us that many of the jobs for which they are hiring, young people are coming out of school without the requisite experience or requisite education,” Beckles said in an interview.
“The challenge then becomes how do we close that skills gap to ensure that young people can come out of university or college with the right skills and the right experiences to be competitive for those jobs.”
This week, the Cannabis Act officially became law, legalizing the recreational use of cannabis in Canada. However, it can’t be stressed enough that this landmark decision in no way relaxes the laws that make getting behind the wheel of a vehicle while impaired an offence.
In advance of the act coming into force, the Government of Canada posted information underlining how drugs can impair one’s ability to drive safely and increase the risk of getting into a collision.
The percentage of Canadian drivers killed in vehicle crashes who tested positive for drugs (40 per cent) now actually exceeds the numbers who test positive for alcohol (33 per cent) – and impaired driving is the leading criminal cause of death and injury in Canada.
Most of us are accustomed to seeing television ads and public service announcements about the dangers of drinking and driving.
It’s a message that has made its way into our subconscious. In the same manner, all drivers need to get the same message about driving high on cannabis.
A poll conducted by the British Columbia Automobile Association (BCAA) earlier this year found that the vast majority of respondents – more than 90 per cent, between the age of 18 and 34 – make plans for a safe ride home before enjoying a night out, and more than half regularly volunteer to be designated drivers.
BCAA attributed this to the fact that millennials are the first generation to have grown up in an environment where impaired driving was never a normal or accepted behaviour.
However, the poll also revealed some troubling findings, indicating that nearly one-in-ten said they had driven behind the wheel under the influence of cannabis and some 20 per cent of millennials think their driving is “the same or even better” when high.
Because millennials grew up surrounded by anti-impairment messages, it is hoped they will show leadership about responsible driving and ensure friends and family get home safely.
To understand why driving and cannabis don’t mix, consider that medical studies suggest it can slow down reaction time, interfere with motor skills, and ability to pay attention and multitask. In other words, it impairs your ability to properly function as a driver.
Every motorist has experienced a range of situations in which their ability to act quickly and decisively was the difference between a safe outcome and an accident.
Consuming any product that may impair your ability to respond to a child jumping in front of you or a vehicle swerving unexpectedly is simply irresponsible.
Legalities and debate about testing aside, all drivers need to get the message that any level of impairment is not okay.
To all teenagers, young adults, parents and grandparents – let’s please work together to keep BC’s roads safe. Blair Qualey is president and CEO of the New Car Dealers Association of BC.
Blair Qualey
Citizen news serviCe file photo
File photo shows a self-driving nuro vehicle parked outside a Fry’s supermarket as part of a pilot program for grocery deliveries which would elminate jobs in Scottsdale, ariz. in 2014.
