INSIDE: Horses do heavy lifting in plowing championships
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T U E S D A Y
May 21, 2013
Track & Field 16 FV Championships N E W S ,
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E N T E R T A I N M E N T abbotsfordtimes.com
Abbotsford Liberals sensed polls were off CHRISTINA TOTH CToth@abbotsfordtimes.com
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Fire trucks and police sirens were wailing and dozens of panicked people were calling out to try to locate one another. The sisters along with the other residents from the 26-unit building stood on the street and watched their homes burn down. Mission Fire Rescue crews arrived at the apartment complex at 3 a.m. to find the building fully engulfed in flames and many residents still sleeping inside, said Deputy Chief Larry Watkinson. RCMP officers and firefighters kicked down doors and dragged some residents from their beds because there were no fire alarms to alert them, said Watkinson.
ollsters and pundits were among the losers on May 14 as their predictions of New Democrat victory melted away by election day, when the B.C. Liberals earned their fourth consecutive win. Early in the campaign, the NDP had a 20-point lead in the polls, but that shrunk to four points before election day. Still, political watchers predicted an NDP victory. “Clearly they were inaccurate,” said Abbotsford West MLA Mike de Jong, elected to his sixth term. The opinion polls “felt inaccurate” even before the campaign, as “the gap [between the NDP and Liberals] didn’t seem consistent with what I was hearing in Abbotsford,” he said. While they finished with more than 50 per cent of the vote, pundits predicted much closer races for Abbotsford-area Liberals, which may have spurred their supporters on. “I saw people mobilized in Abbotsford like I’ve never seen before; they got engaged, and it made a difference. I think they were worried about a possible return to a 1990s NDP style of government, and they participated,” de Jong said. New Abbotsford-Mission Liberal MLA Simon Gibson said opinion polls take an impression at one point in time, “but the mood of the electorate is so dynamic. Perhaps it’s impossible to gauge the views of a populace for an event that will take place in the future.” He’s not sure if the pollsters are asking the right questions. “My sense is that there is a difference between asking ‘who do you support?’ and who the people will actually support,” if they indeed made it to the polling station. The low voter turnout – only 52 per cent of eligible B.C. voters actually exer-
see FIRE, page A4
see ELECTION, page A14
SCAN FOR PHOTOS – ROCHELLE BAKER/TIMES
Dozens and dozens of residents have been left homeless – including 19-year-old Megan Varty-Abrosimoff and her cat Owen – after a blaze gutted a low income apartment complex on Third Avenue in Mission early Friday morning. Fire officials say there was no sprinkler system and fire alarms didn’t sound.
50 displaced in Mission fire ROCHELLE BAKER RBaker@abbotsfordtimes.com
floor balcony. Still clad in their pyjamas, the two sisters only had time to put on shoes and grab their Mission RCMP officer running down the purses before braving the hallway to make hall yelling at people to get out of the their own escape. building was the thing to alert Megan There was so much thick black smoke the Varty-Abrosimoff that a fire pair had trouble seeing and was tearing through her apartbreathing. First reported @ ment building. They made their way down abbotsfordtimes.com Not hearing any fire alarms, the hall and glimpsed their the 19-year-old thought it was building manager directing a prank until she opened the hall door and people down the stairwell. smoke poured into her suite. Outside it was chaos. Slamming the door shut, she ran and pulled Flames were shooting from the roof of The her groggy sister Brandy Hiller, 28, from bed. Willows apartment complex, a three-storey low The pair searched for and gathered up their income building on Third Avenue in central three cats and then flung them off the second- Mission.
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