2006-04-16

VOL. 4 ISSUE 15

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ST. JOHN’S, NEWFOUNDLAND AND LABRADOR — SUNDAY THROUGH SATURDAY, APRIL 16-22, 2006

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WWW.THEINDEPENDENT.CA —

$1.50 HOME DELIVERY (HST included); $2.00 RETAIL (HST included)

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Sculptor J.C. Bear exercises some demons in first solo exhibition

Step into the ring at Hard-Tack Boxing Club’s new location

Back in black (and white)

T

he Independent rolled off the press once again Saturday afternoon, returning after a one-week shutdown, and following an overwhelming show of community support.

“We had more than 600 new subscribers over a 10-day period,” says Ryan Cleary, editor in chief.

“More importantly, the business community rose to stand behind us in terms of advertising, which is what pays the bills in any newspaper. The response has been phenomenal, and very much appreciated.

“The Independent’s demise seemed to catch people by surprise. I think it’s fair to say they didn’t want to see the paper go — we’re back.”

This edition was to be circulated Saturday and Easter Sunday by the newspaper’s regular carrier network. The price of The Independent has risen to $1.50 from $1 for home delivery (although subscribers prior to the shutdown won’t be impacted by the price increase) and to $2 from $1.50 at the retail stand. Advertising rates have not changed.

“Our emphasis on a quality newspaper and strong Newfoundland and Labrador content — both in terms of news and the arts — remains the same,” says Cleary. “Some old faces have left, I’m sorry to say, but some new ones have come on board. Well-known journalist Craig Westcott has joined the paper, as has Steve Kent, as a consultant.

“We’re working on plans to rapidly expand our circulation base. We have a strong business plan with intentions to make ourselves available in short order across Newfoundland and Labrador.

“And thanks too to VOCM, as well as CBC, television and radio, and NTV. It meant a lot to see the other media lend a hand when we were down.

Hopefully we’ll be in a position to return the favour some day.”

QUOTE OF THE WEEK “I want people to work 60 or 70 hours a week instead of trying to scrape up enough hours to get enough weeks (to qualify for E.I.).”

— Jim Bennett, Liberal leader, page 5

SPORTS 36

Hockey team dedicates season to late coach

St. James United Church in St. John’s.

Where spirit meets matter Uptowners and downtowners gathered in St. James United to celebrate Lux Aeterna — Eternal Light

By Susan Rendell For The Independent We skipped the light fandango Turned cartwheels ’cross the floor — Procol Harum, A Whiter Shade of Pale

S

everal Sundays ago I got up at the crack of 10 to go to church. A ritual I once violently cast off, its memory a mouldy bone at the back of some mental closet, scattered among the bones of other rituals of its kind — bridge and sherry, cocktail parties, tennis lessons, Sunday barbeques. Relics of my misspent suburban youth — cast off, casually abandoned or merely mislaid.

I was young when the suburbs were young — when they were in their heyday, before “suburban” became a pejorative followed by “sprawl.”

VOICE FROM AWAY 11

Sister Mae Kierans speaks about her ministry in Kenya

CRAIG WESTCOTT

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LIFE 17

A look Inside with author Kenneth J. Harvey Life Story . . . .

Food column .

Events. . . . . . .

Crossword . . .

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Paul Daly/The Independent

n a crowded Memorial University lecture hall one evening last week, Gilbert Bennett stood and gave a 45-minute talk on the challenges and opportunities of the lower Churchill River hydroelectric project.

Then his real work began. For the next 45 minutes, the audience peppered the vice-president of Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro with questions.

They asked him about everything from the chances of getting redress on the infamous upper Churchill deal to what kinds of benefits the Innu Nation can expect from the project.

Then came one of the toughest questions, but one critical to the viability of the $6-billion to $9-billion project Hydro is hoping to have on stream by 2015.

“The surprise for me tonight,” said one man, “was that this project, to get off the ground, is going to take as much as 10 years. Interest rates are starting to rise. Isn’t there a risk in taking this project so far out?”

When my family’s lifestyle was reflected in every cultural surface, a grin of triumph on its porcelain and chrome face — the triumph of democracy over fascism and communism, the automobile over the streetcar and the milkman’s horse — and science uber alles.

I went to St. James United Church that Sunday to help celebrate the installation of a stained glass window, Graham Howcroft’s spectacular Lux Aeterna. St. James is typical of ’50s architecture; that is to say, it could have served as a living room set for The Donna Reed Show if Donna had been 20 feet tall and extremely religious. A bowl of oatmeal wouldn’t have been out of place on the altar. The United Church is earnestly Protestant, ethics, not mystery, keeps its middle-class heart going at a steady beat.

Middle-class, of course, is a term as unfash-

ionable now as suburban. My father worked hard to attain middle-class suburban status; my mother dated hard to marry it. They travelled a long way, through a Depression and a war, for that pot of barbeque sauce at the end of the rainbow.

I have travelled a long way myself, shedding manners and mores, backyards and front lawns — backsliding more than once — until I finally came to the end of my own rainbow: an attached house in downtown St. John’s, in a neighbourhood once known for its inhabitants’ practice of walking barefoot to save the leather on their one pair of shoes.

I love this house, this street; I love every crack in the saucy sidewalk and the wires that loop in front of the bedroom window like black See “Entertaining God,” page 2

Growing interest Solving interest rate riddle critical to lower Churchill project; former Hydro head says Quebec route only option Bennett allowed there is. “I’m with you in that interest rates are going to be essential,” he admitted.

And that’s putting it mildly.

As Bennett pointed out, there are a number of key factors that have to be resolved before the lower Churchill hydro project can get sanctioned for construction. A land claim and impact benefits agreements must be negotiated with the Innu Nation. The federal and provincial governments have to agree on the form the environmental impact statement will take and who will head the review.

And the province must decide who will develop the power plants at Gull Island and Muskrat Falls, who will get the power from them, how they will get it and how the whole thing will be financed.

But among all the challenges and risks, perhaps none is more important than the matter of interest rates.

If the upper Churchill was a boondoggle because of Brinco’s inability to negotiate a reopener clause to cover inflation, the killer for any lower Churchill project could be interest rates. And that’s because, like the man in the lecture room observed, the project is going to take a long time to develop.

“If you had the right contract, it doesn’t matter,” says Cyril Abery. “You’d have to build into the contract that the price you’re agreeing to (sell the power for) is based on certain interest rates and you’d have to have a clause that if interest rates went up, the price gets adjusted. Otherwise See “He was nuts,” page 2

2 • INDEPENDENTNEWS

APRIL 16, 2006

‘Entertaining God with his old Les Paul — and laughing’ From page 1 necklaces, feathered with grackles and pigeons. I love the Southside Hills, framed in my bathroom window, changing with the seasons from a Gerry Squires to a Gerry Squires — but never a Robert Wood. (Once I swam naked in a pond at the top of those hills, in the days when I didn’t have to have a drink to go to bed with myself.) I love the fact that if I let weeds grow past the garden window, no one will call the Lawn Police.

That Sunday morning St. James was full of people like my parents. And suddenly it was full of us too: the downtown people, visual artists, writers, academics — and the unemployed, the underem-

ployed and at least one purveyor of illicit substances. Sliding into the pews in our leather and our jeans, our beads and polka-dot shoes. Like foreign birds, or gypsies arriving in a market town. A little sheepish, a bit defiant. Awkward, mostly. Wayward children of the suburbs, some of us, come back for a visit — and tickled to death to find the hymns still tucked in where we left them. “Aw, look,” whispered my sister. “There’s This Little Light of Mine …” And then she looked down to make sure her Marc Jacobs hadn’t turned into patent leather Mary Janes.

They were ready for us, the good people of St. James. They nodded and smiled and moved over and handed us

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books and leaflets and collection plates.

The minister made a joke about using marijuana. And another one about a guy on probation.

We were ready for them too. We sat up straight and turned the pages in our hymn books and sprinkled our loonies and toonies over the white lawn of collection envelopes. We laughed at the minister’s jokes. Could be we were even a bit sorry for having thrown Baby Jesus out while we plotted rebellion in the bubble-bath water of our youth.

At the end of the service, stainedglass artist par excellence Graham Howcroft walked up to the pulpit to the strains of Procol Harum’s Whiter Shade of Pale. Wearing sunglasses, presum-

ably to protect himself from his own artwork, he talked about his friend who died, pathologist and musician Dr. Peter Roberts, whose widow, Susan Roberts, had commissioned the window in memory of her husband.

Graham said Peter was probably “entertaining God with his old Les Paul — and laughing.” No one jumped up and yelled “blasphemy!” Although I imagine several people Googled Les Paul when they got home and were disappointed when they found out it was only a guitar.

And then all of us, uptowners and downtowners together, left our seats and went behind the altar and looked up at the great green and blue and gold

window called Lux Aeterna — Eternal Light. On the window’s Latin Cross, Christ was conspicuous by his absence.

At least to those of us who have become Roman Catholic by osmosis from living in between the Basilica and St. Clare’s. At the point where the vertical and horizontal bars intersect, the place where spirit meets matter and the Man-God waits patiently for his cue, Graham’s Christ had gone nova — busting his bones in a blaze of gold, skipping the Light fandango, turning cartwheels across the floor of St James United Church.

One thing both factions were in total agreement on: The resurrection never looked so good.

Power trip — only one logical way for lower Churchill power to get to market, experts say

77 Harv Harvey ey Road

By Craig Westcott The Independent

Stoggers’ Pizza

O

ne of the ways the province is looking at raising money to build the lower Churchill development is on the strength of a power-purchase agreement with a future customer of the power. That’s how Brinco financed the upper Churchill deal in the 1960s.

Back then, the only customer Brinco could get to sign a guarantee that it would buy the electricity was HydroQuebec. With Ontario and some utilities in the United States facing the prospect of energy shortages, it may be easier to find other buyers this time around. There will be enough electricity from lower Churchill to power 1.5 million homes.

But the power will still have to go through Quebec.

“You can’t get the power out of Labrador without going through Quebec,” says Cyril Abery, a president and CEO of Newfoundland Hydro from 1985 to 1991.

Premier Danny Williams has raised the prospect of building a transmission line through the Maritimes.

“We always put that out there to make it sound like we had options,” Abery says.

“But everybody in the business knows that’s foolishness. It sounds good in the newspaper. Joe Smallwood started that back in the 1960s calling it the Anglo-Saxon route. It was crazy then and it’s crazy now.”

Abery says any talk of a Maritimes route doesn’t fool Hydro-Quebec.

“They just smile,” he says. “I mean you’re in the middle of Labrador. The only border we’ve got is with Quebec. So you’ve either got to sell it to Quebec, or go through Quebec.

And there’s no reason you wouldn’t sell it to Quebec. Their money is just as good as anybody else’s money as long as you got enough of it.”

Abery says Newfoundland could sell the power to another customer, in Ontario say, and simply pay Hydro-Quebec to wheel it across its transmission lines. The fee for doing it wouldn’t be unreasonable, he notes.

“But the farther you sell it, the more transmission lines you’ve got to build and the costlier it is,” he says. “And you lose energy on the transmission line. That’s why you can only go so far with the transmission line, otherwise there’s no energy at the end of it.

“The simpler thing is to just sell it to Quebec and let them deal with it.”

Meanwhile, Bill Wells, another former head of Newfoundland Hydro, sees one way around a purchase power contract with Hydro-Quebec or any other customer as the main way of financing the project. But it’s one that didn’t get anywhere in the past.

“If the federal government said ‘We’ll back the project,’ well nobody is going to argue the federal government is going to go broke over (it),” says Wells.

The“best The “bestpizz zza in town” is

BACK!

Churchill River falls

Paul Daly/The Independent

Gilbert Bennett, vice-president of Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro, says obtaining federal backing is an area the utility is going to explore very carefully. He notes the premier raised the idea with all three parties during the last federal election. Stephen Harper, then the Conservative Party leader, now the prime minister, said his party supported the idea of a project “in principle.”

Whether that includes a financial commitment remains to be seen. cwestcott@nl.rogers.com

‘He was nuts in my opinion’ From page 1

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you could get screwed … especially since today interest rates are low and they’re probably going to go up.”

When it comes to interest rates and the lower Churchill project, Abery knows what he’s talking about. From 1985 to 1991, he was president and CEO of Newfoundland Hydro. He helped negotiate a lower Churchill deal with Hydro Quebec in 1991 that thenpremier Clyde Wells ultimately rejected.

“He was nuts in my opinion,” says Abery. “It’s a long story, but the long and short of it is I thought he was nuts.

I’m not so sure we haven’t got another one now.”

Abery wasn’t at Bennett’s lecture, but he well understands how interest

rates could cripple the development.

So does another former Hydro president and CEO, Bill Wells. He headed the provincial Crown corporation from 1995 until about a year and a half ago.

Like Abery, he too tried hard to reach a development deal on the lower Churchill.

The problem is that, while interest rates may be low now, nobody knows what they will be in 15 years time, if the project is even completed by then.

And once the project is sanctioned, the developer will be borrowing money every year until it gets built.

“You’re borrowing, borrowing, borrowing, spending, spending, spending (until 2015),” explains Wells.

“That interest cost during the period of construction, that just adds on to the principle because you’re not paying

anything back. So at the end of the day you’ve got this lump sum of money that you owe and when you close out your financial agreement going forward for 30 years or 40 years financing, what you’re going to pay in interest is determined at that time, it’s not determined now.

“And one of the things is, who takes the risk on interest? That used to come up in previous negotiations. It’s a critical factor.”

Wells says the province, or Hydro, could try at the outset of the construction project to get a lender to agree to a range of future interest rates as some measure of protection, but that would cost a lot of money.

“Interest is a big factor and then it depends on how you’re financing it.” cwestcott@nl.rogers.com

APRIL 16, 2006

INDEPENDENTNEWS • 3

SCRUNCHINS A weekly collection of Newfoundlandia.

There’s no better way to restart this column than with a poem by Sean McCann of Great Big Sea, which he wrote after reading what he thought to be The Independent’s final issue: Stay “Stay,” you say so confident These days are bound to change But I fear for the “entitlement” Determined to remain After 50 years fair warning To get ready for the flood My ship is set for sailing Like so many others should To stay behind would be unfair To my wife and family For reckless, unrealistic dreams Will never set us free Free from fear and ignorance That lead to poverty Free to claim real independence From political apathy I do this for my country I do this for my son I do this to spite the blade That would rather take my tongue Than hear the truth fly from my heart About how we were wrong To sign away our nation When we had just begun So stay and keep your hand out Your eyes down firmly cast But don’t forget the coming drought The next cheque could be your last I’ll take my nod from Noah And make ready for the rain Keep an eye for higher ground And a chance to start again I’ll sail my ship to safer ports And with her flag unfurled I’ll plot a new and better course And build a brave new world.

PAPER TRAIL In keeping with the newspaper theme, for a year or two after the First World War there were seven daily papers in St. John’s — three morning and four evening.

By 1913 the daily papers numbered three — Evening Telegram, Daily News and Evening Herald.

STIRLING MOMENT Geoff Stirling started The St. John’s Sunday Herald (what you know today as The Newfoundland Herald) in 1946 with a printing press he bought from Joey Smallwood, who tried his hand at his own paper but couldn’t make a go of it. How could Stirling succeed, Smallwood pressed him, when his own paper had folded? Stirling told him: “Joe, you’ve got nothing but politics. I’m going to have ghost stories and comics and all kinds of stuff.”

HARVEY’S ROAD The National Post recently reviewed Kenneth J. Harvey’s latest book. Get a load of this line: “Compassionate, endlessly inventive and daring, this may or may not be the work of a tough guy, but is manifestly the work of a major writer, and one who singlehandedly shifts our literary centre of gravity to the east.”

The Globe and Mail’s book section said Harvey may be Canadian literature’s “unknown genius.” In a review for the Globe, Lisa Gabriele wrote: “The first question: Why had I never heard of this phenomenal Newfoundland writer, when it seems that the rest of the world had? … The next question is, what can be done about this ignorance? Nothing, save to shout Harvey’s name from the rooftops and tell you to buy this book.” ryan.cleary@theindependent.ca

Read all about it Over 240 newspapers have come and gone in this province CLARE-MARIE GOSSE

B

efore the days of newspapers, town criers would holler out public information and new laws. St. John’s had its share of these strong-lunged men by the turn of the 19th century, but their profession was soon eclipsed by the birth of the province’s first newspaper, in 1807. It was to be followed by over 240 publications over the next 200 years.

“On 27 August 1807 a newsboy named Billy Barnes appeared on the streets of St. John’s,” writes Paul O’Neill in his book The Oldest City.

“As the apprehensive authorities looked on, (he) walked up and down the Lower Path selling the first issue of the Royal Gazette. The printing office was located on the south side of Duckworth Street a few doors east of Prescott Street.”

The newspaper (fully titled the Royal Gazette and Newfoundland Advertiser) was started by an American loyalist named John Ryan, who moved to Newfoundland in 1806 after a stint as a printer in New Brunswick. It survives today in the form of the Newfoundland and Labrador Gazette, a weekly, free publication of government notices.

An article about the Royal Gazette’s launch and the restrictions imposed upon Ryan by the city’s governor was written on the paper’s centennial in 1907 by editor J.W. Withers.

“A newspaper was looked upon as a sort of dangerous innovation,” he reflects, “a nidus of explosiveness, and a possible menace to the good order of the community or worse still, even to the peace of the world.”

It wasn’t long after the birth of the Royal Gazette that other would-be publishers followed suit. O’Neill writes there were four other newspapers around by 1820 — the Newfoundland Mercantile Journal, The Times, The Newfoundlander and the Public Ledger. The latter was run by Henry Winton, a man O’Neill describes as the most controversial editor of any newspaper to date. Winton was so provocative he suffered several mobbings and in one attack even had chunks of his ears hacked off. The

motto of his paper was: “Open to all parties — influenced by none.”

He was an “arrogant, opinionated man of intellect who defied politicians,” writes O’Neill, “fearlessly faced mobs, survived sadistic mutilation, and bitterly pushed forward ceaseless attacks, especially against the Roman Catholic clergy.” (Bishop Fleming was apparently one of his favourite nemeses.)

O’Neill describes most of the contents of 19th century newspapers as fairly trivial. Full of advertisements, shipping news, rewards for deserted sailors and servants, insolvency notices, bits from British and North American newspapers and slender articles on affairs of the day.

“Editors probably figured everyone already knew the facts by word of mouth,” he writes, “local news rarely filled more than a single column. Frequently there was none at all. The print was often small and uneven. Reading it by candlelight, or even by lamplight, must have been a challenge to the eyesight and an invitation to blindness.”

Scanning Memorial University’s online Historical Directory of Newfoundland and Labrador’s Newspapers, it seems there were many more publications around in the 19th century than there were in the 20th; publications often started up and closed down weeks later, serving brief functions as mouthpieces for various political parties and factions. For the most part, the history of journalism in the province has been a story of failed enterprises.

Over the years there have been 30 daily newspapers printed, and over two-thirds of those started before 1900. The first was the Morning Post and Shipping Gazette (1840), which went daily in 1860.

Brenda Parmenter, a librarian with St. John’s public library’s Newfoundland and Labrador Collection — the main repository for all the province’s original newspaper copies, as well as 4,500 reels of microfilm — says the large collection is invaluable.

Some original issues have been lost in fires (the first three years of the Royal Gazette for example), but she says for the most part the collection is thorough.

“It’s just phenomenal the information that’s in

there,” says Parmenter. “I’ve looked at lots of papers and the problem is you get stuck on something that has nothing to do with what you’re researching, because it is so fascinating.”

Bill Callahan, a staple in Newfoundland and Labrador’s print media over the last 50 years and an editor of all three major daily papers published in this century — the Daily News, The Telegram and Western Star — says newspapers have gradually been worn down by the electronic media, but not as badly as some predicted. He says these days there’s often too much of a focus on “the unimportant whirly gigs” of lifestyles and not enough serious news covered in print.

“When I started in radio in the ’50s with Geoff Stirling, there was talk that radio was going to destroy newspapers, newspapers were going to be passé, and it didn’t happen, but it did hurt,” says Callahan. “Then television came and people said, well newspapers are done for, for sure now, and it didn’t happen, but it did hurt.”

And now there’s the Internet.

“All the electronic media have conspired to remove bits and pieces of the influence of print and there’s not a darn thing you can do about it.”

Callahan says his most significant and memorable job was with the Daily News, where he worked as editor/publisher for 15 years, before the 90-year-old paper, The Telegram’s constant competitive companion, closed down in 1984.

He says his crew did everything they could — bar selling their children — to keep the News alive, but despite coming “perilously close” to making profit a few times, the paper expired.

Callahan calls the closure of the Daily News, which gave many St. John’s reporters their first job, an “indescribably bad” experience.

“After 90 years of publishing it was really tragic … the News was a staple in the community.”

Despite the hardships newspapers face in the modern world, Callahan is adamant the newspaper will never be completely replaced.

“You can take it in your hands, you can turn the pages at your leisure, if you want to doze you can doze and wake up and you haven’t missed a program,” he says.

“Newspapers are different. They have that permanency and they have that tactile relationship with readers, and I think that they’ll be around for a long, long time to come.”

4 • INDEPENDENTNEWS

APRIL 16, 2006

Governor-General Ed Roberts and Minister Clyde Jackman.

Paul Daly/The Independent

No feller from Fortune Local union head worries over fate of FPI plant, lack of voice in cabinet

By Craig Westcott The Independent

C

lyde Jackman may not be the fellow who represents Fortune, but as the only Tory from the Burin Peninsula in the provincial cabinet, he’s expected to speak up for the town in its battle with Fishery Products International to save its plant.

With 351 jobs on the line, the people of Fortune are counting on the Environment minister and MHA for the provincial district of Burin Placentia West to use his influence in cabinet.

But some people, including Bill Mullins, head of the union committee at the Fortune plant, wonders whether Jackman has any influence at all.

Three weeks ago, Mullins, along with representatives of the towns and plants at Marystown and Burin, met with Jackman.

“We expressed that we wanted to get the premier to the table to sit down and go through the difficulties on the peninsula,” says Mullins. “I mean, we’re not hearing anything from him. And we still haven’t had a meeting arranged yet. So I’m wondering how much pull he does have as a cabinet minister. It’s frightening when you’ve got a cabinet minister there and he’s sitting with the premier five days a week and he can’t get a meeting for you, even for an hour or so.”

Jackman admits he hasn’t been able to arrange a meeting between Danny Williams and the three committees.

Because government is in negotiations with FPI, he says a date to meet with the local committees has not been set. But Jackman insists Williams is a big part of government’s deliberations on FPI Ltd. “I mean the number of meetings I’ve been involved in, he’s been there,” Jackman says. “The (Fisheries) minister, (Tom) Rideout, is the chief spokesperson on it here, but the premier is very much on top of this and very much involved in it.”

As for his own role, Jackman says he’s in constant touch with the local union heads and workers at Marystown and Burin, who are located within his own district, and has been passing along their concerns to Williams and the rest of cabinet.

Meanwhile, in Fortune, the one place that FPI has definitely said it wants to abandon, time is running out. The plant usually re-opens in February every year.

This year it stayed closed. The workers’ employment insurance cheques will start running out at the end of April.

Mullins expected to spend this weekend waiting for a phone call from the Fish, Food and Allied Workers union office in St. John’s, summoning him to a meeting with FPI. As he waited, 15 more plant workers on his seniority list were leaving the province to look for

work out west.

An official from Cooke Aquaculture, the company Rideout touts as a possible replacement for FPI in the Fortune plant, visited the town April 5 and toured potential salmon farming sites in Placentia and Fortune Bays.

But even if Cooke does decide to set up shop at Fortune, it will take at least two years to get a crop of salmon in the water and reared big enough for processing. Mullins says the workers won’t be able to survive in the interim, unless FPI leaves a wild fish quota attached to the plant.

“We went through Christmas with a big cloud over our shoulder and here it is Easter and we still don’t know where we are,” Mullins says. “It’s pretty devastating around here now. There are a lot of homes up for sale.”

Jackman too senses time is running out for the workers of the Burin Peninsula. He wants the company to feel the same pressure.

“They have got to soon make a move,” he says. “This is drawn out long enough.”

Jackman says the government is looking at what it can do to resolve the crisis, but he won’t reveal the options.

“I wouldn’t want to comment specifically on that right now,” he says. “Just that we’re exploring the possibilities.” cwestcott@nl.rogers.com

Colonial Building restorations moving ahead; announcement soon on old museum

W

ith $500,000 set aside for the restoration of the Colonial Building in this year’s provincial budget, government will soon issue a proposal for building experts and architects to submit plans for sprucing up the 156-year-old site into a heritage centre, Tourism Minister Tom Hedderson says.

A decision on the future use of the old Newfoundland museum building on Duckworth Street in downtown St. John’s, currently under the jurisdiction of the Department of Transportation and Works, has yet to

be announced. Dave Salter, a department spokesman, says the province is considering a number of options, including using the 100-year-old building for government offices.

“It’s one of those things,” he tells The Independent, “we could find out something as early as next week or it could be three weeks.”

The old Newfoundland museum building, home to the province’s first public library, was left empty when the Rooms officially opened last year — although it still houses parts of the natural history collection, which is

stories from here

Petro-Canada is proud to sponsor the Month of the Arts. Through our support of RCA Theatre, the Newfoundland Symphony Orchestra, Petro-Canada Hall, and Theatre Newfoundland and Labrador, we are helping to nurture and develop homegrown talent.

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still being transferred.

According to Hedderson, the building continues to be kept up and is in sound shape, but there are some interior, deferred maintenance issues requiring attention. No specific monies were allocated for the building in this year’s budget.

Jerry Dick, co-ordinator for the province’s Heritage Industries Association, says he’s surprised a plan for the old museum building has yet to be put in place.

“There have been informal discussions about it,” he says, “people saying it should be this, that or the other.

I think there have been some assumptions that it will become a court building.

“It certainly is a significant building from an architectural and a historical point of view.”

Dick is pleased with the action the province has taken to date in ensuring the future of the Colonial Building, which was home to the legislature prior to construction of Confederation Building.

Last October the Tourism Department released a management plan that directly reflected a previous proposal submitted by the heritage association.

Using an overall financial estimate of up to $6 million, the province plans to restore the Colonial Building into a cultural centre to house various heritage organizations, as well as a public interpretation of the province’s political history.

The biggest cost for the site will be updating and conserving the neoclassical building and grounds, which have some pricey structural, esthetic and functional demands.

As well as provincial government funding and possibly the creation of a charitable foundation to cover costs of the restructuring, the Tourism Department is hoping for some federal support.

“We feel that it’s not only of provincial importance but it’s of national importance,” says Hedderson. “Part of what we’re going to do this year is attempt to engage the federal government and their various departments and agencies into partnering with us.”

— Clare-Marie Gosse

APRIL 16, 2006

INDEPENDENTNEWS • 5

Out to lunch with Jim Bennett Actually it’s supper, with the Liberals’ economic agenda as the main course

By Craig Westcott The Independent

“Two bucks an hour more in payroll is a buck in E.I. off the feds …

It’s free money. To me it’s a nobrainer. Why aren’t we doing this?”

J

“I want people to work 60 or 70 hours a week instead of trying to scrape up enough hours to get enough weeks (to qualify for E.I.).” really quick stabilization of population and it would give us a baseline for economic recovery.”

Bennett figures the province needs a million people to give it a viable economy.

Another part of his platform involves luring fishermen out of their boats and into other forms of self-employment. Newfoundlanders don’t look at entrepreneurs the same way other Canadians do, he argues. Many of the real risk takers in this province, financial and otherwise, are fish harvesters, he says.

“We seem to have focused all of our entrepreneur efforts and our capital into the fishery,“ says Bennett. “That’s one area where I see a lot of capital tied up and it’s underutilized.”

Bennett thinks the provincial and federal governments should consolidate the industry through buy-outs and create opportunities for people leaving it to find other work, whether in aquaculture, sawmilling or sheep farming.

“We need to find economic opportunities and take the energies of people who don’t want to fish anymore — for a variety of reasons — and access the capital they have tied up in their fishing enterprises,” says Bennett. “Many would choose to stay (in the fishery) and that’s good.

But many would choose to go to something else and that’s even better because it creates employment.”

Bennett’s other economic recovery planks are a little more conventional, if not exactly in accord with someone who describes himself as to the right of most of his caucus members.

Bennett favours the provincial government marketing secondary products such as lumber and building materials harvested from Newfoundland trees. He thinks the Department of Tourism should set up weekend excursions targeted at people in Ontario. And he would

offer more incentives to mining companies to explore for minerals in rural Newfoundland in exchange for minority ownership stakes.

Then there’s hydroelectric power. Unlike premier Danny Williams, who advocates Newfoundland becoming an “energy warehouse” for North America, Bennett wants the lion’s share of any power generated from the lower Churchill to flow to Newfoundland.

“We need to develop the lower Churchill hydro for us,” says Bennett. “Economically, I’m more afraid Williams will develop the lower Churchill and sell it to Ontario and Quebec than I am of any other move that he could make, including losing the offshore.”

Bennett says cheap energy in Newfoundland and Labrador would be Newfoundland’s competitive advantage against the other economic powers of the world.

cwestcott@nl.rogers.com

Have you noticed the benefits our oil and gas industry is bringing to Newfoundland and Labrador?

Busy restaurants and hotels.

The Keg, St. John’s, NL

im Bennett settles in for supper, a mountain of spicy nachos spilling over his plate like a volcano.

He asks for help to polish it off.

The new Liberal leader is going to need a lot of help, not only with his meal, but with his agenda of making his party more palatable.

Bennett is hoping to help the party help itself by concocting an economic recovery plan that will entice voters back, one that will eventually double Newfoundland and Labrador’s population.

It’s a tall order, made no less challenging by some of the ideas Bennett is touting. Mixed in with the usual stuff you would expect to find in a political party’s economic platform, such as developing tourism and spurring more secondary processing of products, there are ingredients that may raise the eyebrows of some business leaders, if not cause outright indigestion.

Take his stand on the minimum wage.

“We must get to $8 and we should get beyond that,” says Bennett. “I don’t know if we can get there in one move, probably not. It might take a couple of moves.”

But Bennett thinks the minimum wage jump should only be for people over 18. For students and people under 18, Bennett says the rate should be $6. That would encourage employers to give young people their first jobs.

Bennett argues increasing the minimum wage would accomplish a number of things, including boosting income tax and sales tax revenues for the province. But mostly, it would raise the amount of money coming into the province through employment insurance payments to seasonal workers.

“Two bucks an hour more in payroll is a buck in E.I. off the feds,” says Bennett. “It’s free money. To me it’s a no-brainer. Why aren’t we doing this?”

Hiking the minimum wage would also force big multi-nationals like Wal-Mart to pay a living wage to their workers, says Bennett. That would raise a company’s costs, helping local small business owners to be more competitive.

He would really like to see the average pay in Newfoundland rise to $10, or even $12, and for people to work 45 or 50 weeks a year. That would keep more people living in rural Newfoundland, he reasons.

“We need to go to existing entrepreneurs and find out what they need to make them more profitable, bigger,” Bennett says. “I want people to work 60 or 70 hours a week instead of trying to scrape up enough hours to get enough weeks (to qualify for E.I.). I think that would give us a

Bennett says there are a number of ways the province could pay for the project. His preferred method would see bond issues floated in Japan, the United States and Germany. The interest rates on the bonds wouldn’t be that high, he says, and once they were paid off, the development would be completely owned by the province.

“We may need to sell some (power) into the North American grid to make it viable,” he concedes, “because the industry is not here yet. But we can’t just sell it and let it all go.”

Bennett says he’s afraid that if the province starts selling most of the power to central Canada, that region will manufacture some kind of a national crisis to justify getting most of the power for good. He points to the National Energy Program of the 1970s that saw the federal government dictate to Alberta that it had to sell its oil to the rest of the country for less than the world price.

“I know the powers of central Canada too well to trust them,” Bennett says. “No offence to them.”

Bennett says the party’s full economic agenda will be moulded over the course of the next year and tweaked and finalized at a major policy convention next summer.

“I’ve looked at different areas around the world to try to design a composite economy for this province,” Bennett says. “I don’t think any one model actually fits for us. But components of different models can go together … You may not know where we’re going to end up, but we need to end up far differently than where we are today.”

Spin-off benefits from the oil and gas industry accounted for more than $370 million in retail sales in the province last year. The industry has invested more than $15 billion in the province since 1991. To learn more please visit www.capp.ca.

A message from:

403, 235 Water Street, St. John’s, NL Canada A1C 1B6 Tel (709) 724-4200

6 • INDEPENDENTNEWS

APRIL 16, 2006

Easter rising I

f you’re going to rise from the dead it might as well be on Easter Sunday when such events traditionally take place. The Independent’s death and resurrection are curiously timed, there’s no denying it, but that’s just the way it came down. Besides, I gave up bad remakes for Lent.

Oh, and before I continue, I should warn you not to look here for news of the week — I’ve been out of the loop altogether lately. That said, I have it on good authority that Tim Hortons’ rollup-the-rim contest is nearing an end (I chewed my way around the entire rim of my last double-double before realizing I wasn’t holding a contest cup).

To begin, you should notice a striking difference between the old Independent and new Independent — ads. The wonderful thing about a startup newspaper is the fact there’s very little advertising in the early days — meaning there are empty pages to work with in terms of writing, the creation of fabulous designs and the ability to play pictures big (which is a must with Paul Daly’s work).

At the same time, the first rule in the newspaper business is this: advertising pays the bills. If you don’t have ads,

RYAN CLEARY

Fighting Newfoundlander you don’t pay the bills. The Independent lived on life support for its entire two-and-a-half year run.

Those days are done. The paper either stands on its own financially or it dies again — simple as that.

Brian Dobbin is still the majority owner and publisher, in case you were wondering, although some of the staff have been given an equity stake, meaning we’re also owners. Costs have been cut — we’re in the process of moving from our offices on the St. John’s waterfront to a spot deeper in the city’s folds. I’ll miss the way ships sailed, silent and ghostly, past my office window late at night. I’ll miss the conversation piece that is the bubble — the peculiar circle in the harbour where the city’s sewage rises to the surface. I’ll miss the cruise ships in summer and shopfronts in winter. I’ll miss certain people, more than they know.

I’ll miss a lot of things, but sacrifices had to be made for The Independent to return.

Almost two weeks ago, I walked into the offices of VOCM and inquired about the cost of an advertising campaign. I figured if I could raise enough support — in the form of new subscriptions and advertising — I could revive the paper.

No sooner had I signed on the dotted line and handed over my credit card than I bumped into Randy Simms in the hallway.

Within minutes I was on the air (first-time caller, I might add) and the revival had begun.

The response has been phenomenal.

To date, we’ve had more than 600 new subscribers, and advertisers are actually calling us. People — the well known and not so well known — offered their support and volunteered their time.

We had offers of fundraisers and benefit concerts, and messages from Newfoundlanders and Labradorians around the world. The CBC has also been there — both radio and television — in helping us back to our feet.

Let’s face it, The Independent hasn’t

always gotten along with the public broadcaster (the Die CBC die column during last year’s labour strike didn’t help … please God that will never, ever happen).

A few people suggested we remove the Pink, White and Green from the masthead — calling it a Townie flag, saying they don’t appreciate what they see as a suggestion of separatism. The Pink, White and Green stays put. The flag represents the new Newfoundland and Labrador. It represents the death of negative stereotypes and life to renewed hope for this place and our people. That’s the way I see it.

It’s important for The Independent to carry on — for no other reason than to offer an alternative to the other newspapers in this province, all but one or two of which are owned by a Quebec-based company. Competition is good for the reader and good for the advertiser, that’s been my message these past two weeks. In a day and age when so many products and services are controlled by mega-companies, it’s good to be an independent local voice.

Back to sacrifices — the one constant with The Independent will be the quality of the editorial content and the

Newfoundland and Labrador focus.

Our lineup of local columnists remains intact. The one voice that was dropped was Michael Harris (local trumps national). Ray Guy — whose health hasn’t been the best as of late — will rejoin us when he’s up to it. Craig Westcott has also joined out team as a reporter and columnist. Steve Kent is on board in terms of sales, marketing and a column (see Prime Properties, and make sure to watch its evolution).

Our circulation base will continue to increase until the paper is available most everywhere you look.

And so we’re back. To be perfectly honest, we actually came off the press on Saturday — not Easter Sunday. It’s an Easter rising, I suppose you could say that, with similarities to the one on Easter Monday, 1916, when a force of Irishmen attempted to seize Dublin and destroy British rule.

But that analogy isn’t right either.

The Independent is a newspaper devoted to our people and our place — let’s leave it at that.

Ryan Cleary is The Independent’s editor in chief. ryan.cleary@theindependent.ca

YOUR VOICE ‘Terrible indeed’ Dear editor, I think the loss of The Independent is terrible indeed. Your paper was wonderful and captured the Newfoundland and Labrador soul in the way no other paper does.

Great work, great patriotic contribution and some darn good journalism to boot.

If you remain in business I will gladly subscribe so that a copy of your paper finds its way to Trinity every week.

If there is anything else I can do please be in touch.

Donna Butt, Rising Tide Theatre, Trinity

‘Cover to cover’ Dear editor, I am writing in response to the post on rantandroar.ca — I want The Independent back and so does my father. We are both subscribers and have been for almost two years. I read

almost every issue cover to cover. I agreed or disagreed with many of your editorials — but enjoyed them all.

Josh Taylor, St. John’s

‘Saddened to hear’ Dear editor, I was saddened to hear the paper had run its last issue because I really enjoy reading it. You’ve got some wonderful writers and I hope the folks there in Newfoundland can dig deep

and help the paper out. Best wishes for the future.

David Kelly, Reporter, King’s County Record Sussex, N.B.

‘Relevant to where we live’ Dear editor, Sign us up!

Where else are we to find literate and articulate articles that are fully

relevant to where we live and who we are?

Dell Texmo, St. John’s

‘Mourning the loss’ Dear editor, Last year, a very good friend of mine died in a car accident, and I have always regretted not making one more phone call, one more visit, telling her one more time how much I appreciated her being a long-time friend.

Earlier in the week, I heard of The Independent’s fate, and so today, I read the last issue, savouring every article, every word.

I have been a loyal fan since your inaugural issue, and today there are thousands of us across the province, mourning the loss.

As an entrepreneur, I can appreciate the hard decision Brian Dobbin had to make. I can only say I empathize with the difficulty such external pressure brings. As a reader,

I appreciate how long he let the paper run.

But especially, I sincerely appreciate the edgy courage you all brought to every issue. You should, as I’m sure you do, feel very proud of the craft you’ve honed using this vehicle. No one can ever take that from you.

I don’t have to wish you luck, because your skills, your professionalism, will propel each of you in coming years.

I look forward to seeing you all, in print, wherever you choose to apply yourself.

Thanks for the pink, white and green memories.

John Sheridan, CEO, The Hanlon Institute Inc.

AN INDEPENDENT VOICE FOR NEWFOUNDLAND & LABRADOR

P.O. Box 5891, Stn.C, St. John’s, Newfoundland & Labrador, A1C 5X4 Ph: 709-726-4639 • Fax: 709-726-8499 www.theindependent.ca • editorial@theindependent.ca The Independent is published by The Sunday Independent, Inc. in St. John’s. It is an independent newspaper covering the news, issues and current affairs that affect the people of Newfoundland & Labrador.

PUBLISHER Brian Dobbin EDITOR IN CHIEF Ryan Cleary MANAGING EDITOR Stephanie Porter PICTURE EDITOR Paul Daly PRODUCTION MANAGER John Andrews

sales@theindependent.ca • production@theindependent.ca • circulation@theindependent.ca All material in The Independent is copyrighted and the property of The Independent or the writers and photographers who produced the material. Any use or reproduction of this material without permission is prohibited under the Canadian Copyright Act. • © 2006 The Independent • Canada Post Agreement # 40871083

The Independent welcomes letters to the editor. Letters must be 300 words in length or less and include full name, mailing address and daytime contact numbers.

Letters may be edited for length, content and legal considerations. Send your letters in care of The Independent, P.O. Box 5891, Station C, St. John’s, NL, A1C 5X4 or e-mail us at editorial@theindependent.ca

Rocking our boats — again Editor’s note: the following column appeared in the latest edition of 53 North Magazine, based in Labrador City.

T

he presses stopped rolling last weekend for the St. John’s-based paper called, appropriately enough, The Independent.

53 North readers may recall we attempted to help that publication “find its niche” here in Labrador West about a year ago by slipping a copy inside our regular issue.

The Independent offered unique perspectives, award-winning reporting, and some of the best journalistic photography ever found on newsprint.

Flipping through its pages in our offices, we oohed and aahed over gorgeous layout and design — and, frankly, spent hours trying to figure how we could incorporate some of their stylistic elements into our pages. It’s tough just getting the news on the pages before it’s time to start printing, doing it with The Independent’s design esthetic was an incredible achievement.

It wasn’t just a pretty alternative paper, though — it had real meat on its bones.

Only great articles earn a nomination for the Michener award for public service journalism, articles like The Independent’s analysis of the costs and benefits of Confederation to the province.

Editor Ryan Cleary’s eye for a good story — not just sensational ones — and his grasp of the essential points of even the murkiest political or economic presentation enlivened and informed his paper. His belief in this province’s potential, his faith in the essential value of our communities and culture created pointed editorials. They pulled no punches. They called stupid “stupid,” without euphemisms.

Paul Daly’s great photographs — could anyone else persuade Leo Puddister into a leprechaun’s outfit? There’s photojournalism, there’s art, and there’s a Paul Daly photograph. His images were worth 10,000 words. As often as not, the article accompanying was superfluous.

Cleary recruited some of this province’s best writers, and gave them

NGAIRE GENGE

Guest column

the freedom to rock our boats. Any halfway decent writer who knows what commas are can knock out news stories.

Cleary’s team made you care. Made you care about stuff you’d never think of, like how boots are made, or how a Christian radio station survives — flourishes — for 60 years, even when attendance at churches fell 80 per cent in some communities.

The Independent truly encouraged diverse voices. While their overriding focus remained this province’s place in the grand scheme of things, wildly opposing positions co-existed on its pages and, instead of feeling more confused, readers came away feeling more informed.

The Independent supported our arts community, found sports stories behind scores, and diligently attempted to bring features from all across this province into its pages. A gaggle of columnists provided opinions to keep readers thinking long after that edition went into the trash. It enjoyed the remarkable ability to incite in individual readers both laughter and anger from a single page.

It could be insightful; it could piss people off. For months, the premier’s office refused to answer calls from The Independent. Not that controversy really hurt the paper much; during that period, its circulation continued to grow.

Circulation was rising steadily in any case.

Yet, it failed.

As a start-up, it struggled under the uncertain hand of original owners who, while inspired by a vision of what a second provincial newspaper ought and could be, lacked the persistence to follow through.

The arrival of Brian Dobbin — a selfmade man whose company is the force behind projects like the Humber Valley Resort — offered a grace period from certain financial constraints while Cleary got the paper’s content back in perspective.

Yet, it failed.

A fine publication, stylish and dedicated, with financial backing, growing readership, and a staff any editor would give their eyeteeth to work with, and it failed.

Contemplating the closure of a publication that any news staff would say, without reserve, had everything right on paper, is saddening. The loss of that second mirror on our decision makers, the loss of those pages devoted to community victories and innovations, and the loss of that talented staff lessens our ability to learn from one another, our mistakes and our success.

A week into the official end of The Independent, Ryan Cleary dug his heels in again, called stupid, “stupid,” and appealed to readers and advertisers to keep this great publication alive.

Newfoundlanders often need their boats rocked.

A Costco seal oil controversy doesn’t happen every day, so they need The Independent. Labradorians also need to be reminded to pay attention. Not doing it is a lot more hazardous here where a moment’s inattention can cost you a ferry run, decent electrical rates, or a dozen police officers.

Iceland, with a little less than twice the population of the Metro St. John’s area, spread out over 120 times the geography, supports four daily newspapers, several national weeklies, plus dozens of regional publications.

It’s a diverse, growing country with an enthusiasm for its culture and an active interest in promoting it at home and abroad.

That Labrador west, home to about 10,000, remains home to two print voices, pages for all the incredible stories still to be told here, and the readers and advertisers who find value in both of them, says much about our vibrant culture and the people who live right here.

Time to put up and subscribe, eh, Ryan? Our cheque is coming! Before complacency kicks in again, before our boat settles too much, before the presses get quiet.

Ngaire Genge is the editor of 53 North Magazine in Labrador City.

APRIL 16, 2006

INDEPENDENTNEWS • 7

This makes sense?

Ivan Morgan says we need debate about why we are putting our troops in harm’s way

T

here is so much I don’t like about having our troops in Afghanistan. I am far from convinced they are serving any really useful military purpose, other than placating the lunatic Bush administration (and no, I don’t think “lunatic” is too strong a term).

Harper’s defence minister, Gordon O’Connor, tells us this week in the House that our security here at home depends on battling terrorists in Afghanistan. Says who? The point of terrorism is that it is organized and sneaky. If there are troops on the ground in Afghanistan, these people will just move elsewhere. We are not talking about the Wehrmacht here; we are talking about a very small band of highly motivated and elusive fanatics.

Eliminating them is more a job for our intelligence agencies than the big blunt instrument called the Armed Forces.

I resent the implication, used by some, that any criticism of what they are doing is somehow un-Canadian. I think I am very Canadian if I keep my soldiers home, instead of putting them in harm’s way to please the Americans.

IVAN MORGAN

Rant & reason I am not against using our troops to bring peace, by force if necessary, to troubled regions. I am against being bullshitted. O’Connor invoked the Sept. 11 attacks in New York as reason to be in Afghanistan. Says who?

Weren’t most of the terrorists involved in that attack middle class, westerneducated Saudi nationals?

The sensible thing to do would have been to invade Saudi Arabia, a tyrannical absolute monarchy. Instead, after the terrorist attacks in New York, the West drove a bunch of hillbillies out of Kabul. Now we are using our young people (an uncomfortable number of them from this province) to bring peace and order to a countryside that has been lawless since time immemorial. This makes sense?

Another thing that drives me crazy are politicians who try to sound tough

by using silly macho phrases like “staying the course” and “taking the fight to the enemy.” What course?

“Taking the fight to the enemy” sounds macho and proactive, but the entire point of terrorism is to not give your opponent a target to retaliate against, in the hope that they might panic and do something stupid and reactionary like invade Afghanistan or Iraq. Then, as a terrorist, you can recruit thousands of suddenly resentful locals. Everyone knows this. So who would be so stupid as to actually fall for the ploy?

This week we saw the issue of whether our military forces should be in Afghanistan debated in Parliament.

Sort of. Naturally all leaders are in support of our forces. Who isn’t? But there needed to be real debate, and there wasn’t.

It is precisely because of my faith in our Armed Forces that I question the wisdom of keeping them in Afghanistan. If I am putting a Canadian soldier in harm’s way, I want to be absolutely sure it is for a very good reason. And so far, I remain to be con-

vinced.

This week we also saw the Harper government “returning” to the practice of not lowering federal flags to halfmast when a soldier dies on active duty.

I read a lot of twaddle in the press on the return to a “protocol” that the Liberals broke in 2002 by lowering federal flags to mourn the loss of four soldiers in a military accident.

I looked up the protocol, and learned that flags are only “supposed” to be lowered to half mast when “important” people like sovereigns and their relatives, or senators and the like, die. But it is not customary to formally mourn a Canadian soldier with lowered flags.

So, if I am to understand this correctly, if Fergie died, the feds would lower our flags. But not for a brave Canadian soldier. Who makes up these rules?

Could this “return to protocol” also be a convenient way of avoiding the looming unpleasant reality of flags flying permanently at half-mast? That could make minority rule tough to sustain. You have to wonder about the timing.

I’m no pacifist. I know there is an

evil in the world, and I know the price of freedom is vigilance. I believe Canada has an obligation to protect innocents wherever we can, and that means we sometimes have to put our soldiers in harm’s way. We had a chance in Rwanda — a real chance — to use well-trained and professional soldiers to save hundreds of thousands of innocent lives. We didn’t.

Now I worry that stupid people have put our troops in an impossible situation for the wrong reasons.

This is not the first time this has happened. Had anyone refused to order young Newfoundlanders over the ridge near Beaumont Hamel on July 1, 1916 they would have been summarily shot.

It is precisely because those brave young men obeyed their orders that I feel we all have an absolute obligation to question — and question strongly and defiantly and thoroughly — exactly why we are putting our troops in harms way.

So why are we?

Ivan Morgan can be reached at ivan.morgan@gmail.com

HARPER COMES TO TOWN

YOUR VOICE Look forward to ‘rebirth’ Dear editor, I applaud you for trying to give The Independent new life. We read the newspaper each week and really enjoyed it. I was so disappointed when our paper carrier told me this

would be the last issue. I have just subscribed through the website … I look forward to its rebirth.

Marie Evans, Mount Pearl

‘Vital, vibrant, and powerful’ Dear editor, To all at The Independent: great news! Fantastic to hear you’re digging in to save the paper — please add my name to those who desperately want The Independent to survive and thrive. I’ve renewed my own subscription just recently, and I’m sending out my own support message to everyone in my address book. It seems, sometimes, that we always lose the best things going, and it

looked like our best weekly read was to be the latest casualty.

Fortunately, there may be enough discerning readers to revive and sustain your quality publication. The Independent is a vital, vibrant, and powerful force in the life of this province. All the best and good on ya — live long and prosper!

Pete Soucy, St. John’s

Unpopular opinions welcome Dear editor, Although I was not a regular reader of The Independent, I always found something of interest when I did pick it up.

I was very sorry to hear that you had ceased to publish. With all the competition from the national and global media — not to mention the Internet — communities need all of the local voices they can possibly support.

I also think St. John’s needs the kind of thoughtful journalism that can

only be provided by a weekly. I have disagreed in the past with your paper’s editorial stance on certain issues, and you have at least one columnist that I can’t bear to read.

But I’d hate to think there was no outlet in this city for unpopular, or even misinformed, opinions.

Good luck with your efforts to resurrect The Independent. If you get it up and running again, I will be happy to be a subscriber.

Gerard Hayes, St. John’s

Good to have you back Dear editor, The Independent is back. Now I can rest easy and enjoy a most interesting newspaper on a Sunday morning while enjoying a coffee on the patio deck. Seriously, I was very saddened to hear of the demise of one of the best newspapers in Canada. The Independent is a very “meaty newspaper.”

By that I mean it has great stories related to all aspects of Newfoundland life. Its articles on Newfoundland are some of the most informative and interesting I have read. The Independent is a very important source of information to the kids in school today because of the in-depth writing. The paper, I find, has reporters who are well educated in the field of journalism and it shows

in the stories they write.

The Independent also plays another important role to readers in that it reports on stories on everyday happenings throughout Newfoundland and Labrador, which I find is lacking in other printed media.

I’m not really interested in what happens in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Timbucto, or Never Land, but I am interested in what happens in Conne River or Stephenville or Gander. I get this from The Independent and I appreciate it. I enjoy the human-interest stories the reporters write about and the detailed stories on current and past politics.

Welcome back Independent.

Don Lester, Conception Bay South

Federal Fisheries Minister Loyola Hearn (left) and MP Fabian Manning (right) accompanied Stephen Harper last week during his first visit to Newfoundland and Labrador as prime minister. While in the province, Harper made good on an election promise, officially reopening the Gander weather office.

Paul Daly/The Independent

Faith in the fighting Newfoundlander Dear editor, We tremendously enjoyed getting The Independent delivered to our door each Sunday, and look forward to getting it delivered once again, hopefully this time perhaps by the Easter Bunny.

A loonie was a small cost for the entertainment and information it provided. I would suggest that a toonie would be in order for the re-instatement of The Independent to help insure the

success and continuation of the paper.

However, as you are well aware, in addition to the paid circulation the success of any publication depends on the paid advertising. In that light, I might add that it’s my opinion the advertisers out there are definitely missing the boat by not taking full advantage of what you have to offer. I feel sure that this is one paper that is read by all from cover to cover.

‘First piece of mail I open’ Dear editor, I am in Nova Scotia, an ex-pat Newfoundlander. The Independent comes in the mail, usually Thursday or Friday. It is the first piece of mail I open on arrival. It is my weekend read. The Independent is the only newspaper I have ever read in its entirety from cover to cover. It is by far the best paper in existence. I am so sorry to see it go. But I know the voice you have raised in The Independent cannot be silenced. I

know that somehow you will be back.

I need to hear that voice and when you do come back put me on you mailing list immediately. Consider me a subscriber now for your next effort.

Thank you very much for renewing my interest in newspapers and thank all the writers and workers at The Independent for a job that was superbly done.

Kevin Christopher, Canning, N.S.

I had almost given up on the fallacy of the fighting Newfoundlander, but you guys/gals were helping to restore my faith in it once again. All I can do now is wish you and all at The Independent the very best of luck in your endeavors. Hang in there man, we do need people like you!

Let’s get ’er flying again, Walt Chidley Beautiful downtown, Mount Pearl

Easter advertising Dear editor, If The Independent rises like Christ at Easter, Battery Radio would like to take out an ad.

Please let me know how/when we can do this, at your convenience. Also if there’s anything I can do to help personally, just call.

Chris Brookes, St. John’s

8 • INDEPENDENTNEWS

APRIL 16, 2006

YOUR VOICE ‘Sunday morning habit’ Dear editor, Very sorry to read The Independent will stop publication.

As a visual artist living in St. John’s, I was very fortunate to have the opportunity for your paper to do an article on my work last fall.

I am sure I speak for many of the talented artists, musicians, and actors in the province when I say that your paper provided a great service for the Newfoundland cultural community. Connecting, informing, educating, questioning, enlightening, creating and com-

municating ideas … in many ways driven and motivated by the same inner dynamics that inspire painters to paint, singers to sing, and writers to write.

I think I may have just made a case for your paper being an artform. That being said, it is a sad day for all to lose such an engaging form of art. The paper had already become a Sunday morning habit for my wife and me. I would get up early, put the coffee on, throw a coat on over my pajamas and head up to Brown’s store to pick up The Independent.

Back home with hot fresh-brewed cups of coffee we would settle in with a section each … anyways, it is with great regrets that we read of your paper stopping.

The talent and professionalism of your staff was apparent from the first issue.

We hope this is only a short stop on your creative journey and we are wishful that we will read your paper again on a Sunday morning soon.

Jim Miller, St. John’s

‘Mournfully missed’ Dear editor, A friend of mine said he saw something on TV and suggested The Independent was to stop publishing. I was hoping he had gotten it wrong. To my disappointment, my carrier confirmed it for me on Sunday.

For some time I did not have a subscription, but did frequently buy a paper.

I have kept every copy. These papers have such value to me — I have never been able to throw away a single copy. Like with life and death,

we have to move on. Like with life and death, it won’t be easy. You and your co-workers will be mournfully missed.

Frank O’Neill, St. John’s

‘Anything at all we can do’ Dear editor, Presently enroute to Calgary for a show and lamenting the loss of your wonderful and important work and wondering if there is anything at all we can do to help. The independent has become essential Sunday reading for us and we are very sorry to see it go.

Looking forward to Sunday.

Professional Development Seminars 2006

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APRIL 24

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The Fundamentals of Project Management: Explore the

What was almost lost Dear editor, I’m submitting this letter in the belief that it will find you still at your desk.

During The Independent’s temporary hiatus I paid close attention to the reaction, especially on radio call-in shows.

Most commentary, by far, expressed disappointment, even sadness, at this unexpected and abrupt turn of events.

What was surprising was the source and direction of some of the criticism — particularly the inferences that The Independent’s primary purpose was the promotion of separatism, and that the flag flown in its masthead nothing more than a relic of religious sectarianism.

More relative to the name and mission of The Independent is the fact that nearly all newspapers in this province — including The Telegram and Western Star — are owned and controlled by Transcontinental Inc., a Quebec-based media company. The Independent is owned by Newfoundlanders, written by Newfoundlanders and printed in Newfoundland. Its production and editorial policy is thus independent of any meddling by outsiders. This is why its folding would be such a regrettable loss, and why we must not permit that to happen.

As for the Pink, White and Green, it is the closest thing we have to a national flag. The history of our people and our cultural evolution in this land did not commence in 1949, which is why the current official provincial flag, the artistic merit of its unique graphic design notwithstanding, is so irrelevant. An article by a young high school student in the last issue of The Independent expresses well the pertinence and deep emotional attachment many of us feel for the old flag.

My belief is that despite this setback, maybe even because of it, The Independent will remain and be stronger than ever, because now we are more aware of what it is we almost lost.

issues of people, planning, and control in effective project management

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Lloyd C. Rees, Conception Bay South

Alan Doyle, Bob Hallett, and Sea McCann

Paul Daly/The Independent

‘Made a difference’ Dear editor, This province can ill afford the loss of The Independent.

In your short life span you made a difference. You assembled a team of journalists that would be the envy of any newspaper in Canada.

I always looked forward to reading your in-depth articles and editorials on matters of vital concern to the peo-

ple of this province, all well researched and all well written. I sincerely hope that the business community, through their advertising, and the general public, through their subscriptions, will rally behind you and that the life of The Independent will be extended for years to come.

Burford Ploughman, St. John’s

No faith in Harper Dear editor, I have to say, I really don’t understand why Stephen Harper is getting so much praise for giving us back our badly needed weather station. Everyone is talking about what a great prime minister this man is turning out to be and he’s only been there for the past three months. Surely God the people of this wonderful province can see through Mr. Harper.

A leopard doesn’t change his spots people, and no matter how much I respect Danny Williams for some of the different things he has done for our beloved province, I don’t put

much faith in Harper. He thinks it should be illegal for a woman to have the right to choose what happens to her own body. He wants tough punishment for someone caught with weed and hash, which I might add are not narcotics and are not as dangerous as a lot of the legal drugs. He does not want homosexual marriages to be legal. Let’s not forget all of this.

Mr. Harper is a man who will never have my vote, unless it is to vote him out!

Amanda McCarthy, Upper Island Cove

Ploughing more fields Dear editor, Like many, I too regret the demise of The Independent. But if this note is in the public domain, The Independent, like Lazarus, lives!

It was certainly the best written of all local news publications and I should remind all readers that they can help sustain it. As a weekly with local control, it is in a unique position to make a significant contribution to the issues important to us as a province, as a people, as a culture. I say to all readers, don’t lose this resource.

Of course, The Independent has a vigorously biased nationalism, which, in my view, grew a little tiresome from week to week. The history of fervent nationalism has not always been among the proudest moments of humankind. Indeed, it has been sig-

nificantly responsible for a great deal of human slaughter throughout the centuries.

That’s not to say Newfoundland hasn’t badly needed a print voice over the years. I simply would like to see the talent at this newspaper applied to a broader spectrum of topics. No doubt we will see this over time.

However, the paper must be true to its own convictions, and with a little luck and help, it will.

I hope we all help this paper revive; it is so well written, edited, managed, and presented. There is a lot of talent and energy in Ryan Cleary and his small group, so I hope Ray Guy doesn’t put the horse down yet ... she and he may well plough a few more fields.

Good luck!

Robert Rowe, St. John’s

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From the staff at

APRIL 16, 2006

INDEPENDENTNEWS • 9

Nina Patey

Paul Daly/The Independent

The clergyman’s daughter Social activism is second nature for aspiring NDP leader

By Craig Westcott The Independent

more, but I didn’t want to be the yellow dog that gets run all the time because you just lose your credibility,” Patey says After her two failed stabs at politics, Patey went to graduate school, studying political economy at Brock University in Ontario. She was back home and wrapping up her thesis, which focused on the fishery, when the cod moratorium was announced. Patey met with Cabot Martin, founder of the Newfoundland Inshore Fisheries Association (NIFA). She told him about her work and volunteered her services.

“It was the wrong time for me to be getting involved in anything, but I did,” Patey says.

“And so I had probably one of the three most interesting weeks of my life.”

Martin and NIFA tried to help fishermen find a response to the moratorium. Patey helped organize a rally of about 400 fishermen in the Goulds.

“I took photographs at the rally,” she says.

“They are pictures of some of the most poignant and tragic looking expressions on the faces of Newfoundlanders, because the cod was gone and we all were realizing it.”

F

or a while it looked like the NDP would make it three for three. That is, the third Newfoundland political party to choose its latest leader by acclamation.

But then along came Nina Patey. On the last day that the NDP was accepting nominations for the leadership, Patey filed her papers.

Patey gives provincial New Democrats a choice between two feisty female social activists. Lorraine Michael, a former nun and executive director of the Women In Resource Development Committee, announced her leadership bid last month.

Some people may see Patey as a spoiler. To listen to Patey, there’s more to it. For her, it’s the resumption of an ambition she first exhibited in 1984. That’s when she ran as the NDP candidate in the federal riding of St. John’s West against John Crosbie. The following year she ran provincially in St. John’s Centre against Progressive Conservative Paddy McNicholas.

“I wanted to participate in politics some

YOUR VOICE

Could have, should have

Once the compensation packages were announced, Martin folded up NIFA. Patey returned to Ontario to defend her thesis — then it was back home for a job with the Inter-Church Coalition for Fishing Communities.

“That job was the high point of my social activist career,” Patey says. “It was fascinating. I beat around all over Newfoundland, I put 50,000 km on the car … It was a dream job at a nightmare time in Newfoundland history.”

Patey held meetings on wharfs, in people’s kitchens, in high school gyms and at community halls. At one point she was asked to serve as a preacher for the day in Keels, Bonavista Bay to address the social issues of the fishery.

Being the youngest of seven children of Salvation Army Brigadier Cecil B. Patey, she had no trouble.

“I spoke about the stewardship of resources, that we’re in the world to care for the world, not to exploit and destroy it,” she recalls. “It was a fantastic time and I liked the whole ecumenical thing about it.”

She also appreciated the stories she heard.

Fishermen shared the lessons of a lifetime at

sea. She was told of abuses and wastage in both the inshore and offshore sectors.

The 14 church leaders who had formed the committee disbanded it after two years.

“When that ended I looked up and I saw that I had a six-year-old and an eight-year-old and they hadn’t seen me in two years because that job was like a 70-hour work week,” she says.

Around this period, Patey went through a divorce, and lost her father to cancer.

She started Sustainable Communities Consulting, and worked with rural groups to get companies and industries off the ground.

When stiff competition forced her to close up shop, she took to writing.

Already a columnist with The Express, she started writing commentaries for The Fisheries Broadcast and CBC-TV. Her topics were usually social issues, from the fishery to abortion rights. Since then, she has been teaching creative writing, helping look after her elderly mother, who passed away in October at age 92, and raising her children.

See “Heave,” page 10

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Dear editor, We could have and we should have.

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Why didn’t we all, as a community, make sure this didn’t happen? Thank you so very much for your brilliant paper, you did an absolutely splendid job!

Now with Heather Mallick gone from The Globe and Mail and The Independent gone, they may as well take the weekend away altogether.

There’s no point. I am so very, very sad to see you go.

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Count me in Dear editor, I certainly hope you are successful (in reviving The Independent). I am a Newfoundlander who has been living in Edmonton for over 20 years but still have close ties to the island. I discovered your website over a year ago and really appreciate its perspective and articles. Count me as a subscriber in the future.

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APRIL 16, 2006

10 • INDEPENDENTNEWS

‘Heave it out of you’

LIFE STORY

From page 9 “When you’re involved in elder care it’s very hard to have a public life,” she says. “I also had small kids. Now they’re 17 and 20 and big and bossy and opinionated. It’s the right time to get back in.”

Patey says she learned a lot from her earlier forays into politics, things she can bring to bear this time.

Campaigning against Crosbie familiarized her with the media and the need to be clear in expressing ideas and views.

“You had to heave it out of you real quick and concisely,” she says.

Patey admits she “had some conflicts with the party” in her early political life, including clashes with the party’s provincial leader, Peter Fenwick. But she does have heroes within the party, principal among them, writer and social activist Helen Porter.

“I saw Helen all my life as a role model for a whole bunch of things I wanted to be,” says Patey. “She was a woman in a public forum, but not a religious capacity. It just gave me a picture of a secular, intellectual world beyond the confines of the world my parents provided me.”

If she wins, Patey says her priority as leader will be to improve the party’s grassroots public relations and locate the people who, over the years, have voted for the party. She would also aim to have candidates in every district in next fall’s general election, something the party often strives for, but rarely accomplishes.

As for the party’s main opponent, Danny Williams, Patey says the premier is doing some things right.

“It’s good to have some gumption and not to jump whenever an oil company tells you to jump,” says Patey. “But I would like him to take some of that oil money and invest it in the fishery.”

Patey says she’s not afraid to face the legislature. She prides herself on having a tongue like a piece of barbed wire.

“I think that arms me very well, don’t you think, for the House of Assembly?” she says, laughing.

The leadership is set for May 2628 in St. John’s. cwestcott@nl.rogers.com

‘The man of experience’ John McNeill revelled in the adventure of building Newfoundland and Labrador anew, from top to bottom

By Cabot Martin For the Independent

Men like McNeill burst out of Town in the early ’50s with skill and energy, making life-long friends and sweethearts as they went.

J

ohn McNeill died a few weeks ago at the age of 72 after a long, long illness.

McNeill was the kind of friend whose death leaves not only an unfillable void, but that nagging feeling of guilt of visits not made, of things not said, of small acts of kindness forgotten in the rush of life.

A column to make amends.

McNeill was born a Townie in 1934, but was saved from that limitation by his marriage to the beautiful, formidable and all-caring Rowena Mills of Mills Siding, Trinity Bay, a.k.a. Shoal Harbour.

At the start of our relationship in 1972, McNeill was the man of experience and I the envious younger friend. And so it remained.

On graduating from Field College, McNeill had been more or less turned from the doors of Memorial as “qualified” but “unsuitable” for academic life. So he became first a surveyor; then a constructor and businessman and then a project manager, who could put an arse in a cat, on budget and on time.

Anyway, by the time I met McNeill, he was building all sorts of buildings, big ones and small ones, in Town and out.

I was always impressed how, with his “project management” magic, he could help an often disparate group of citizens produce a home for the elderly, ready to move into, with staff trained and ready for work.

He was a man of strong artistic appreciation, and not just as a great musician.

He took a really run-down, ugly heap of a building on Gower Street and turned it into the prize-winning, beautiful restoration that Victoria Hall is today; his better monument compared with say his Scotiabank glass tower on Water Street.

The original Victoria Hall, richly appointed with gas lighting installed, had been built after the fire of 1892 to

show that the city could not be kept down; McNeill thought that such a statement was needed again.

You know it well: the tall, reddish place just by Gower Street United with the great big Newfoundland tricolor flying proudly over it.

That vibrant ochre color, that’s McNeill; the glassed in eagles perch of an office on the top floor overlooking the harbour, the careful detail, the look of class, that’s McNeill.

And that the hum of young creativ-

ity and energy emanating from it under new owners would be music to McNeill’s ears.

Then came ill health.

He was mostly confined to home for his last 20 years, a fate made tolerable only by Rowena’s constancy and care, and the friendship of numerous loyal friends. And though surely tested by the hand he had been dealt, he was always eager for news of progress, of new things a-building, to the end.

So amidst the present day “Avalon only” boom times, remember McNeill and many of the best of McNeill’s generation did not simply soak up the post Confederation glow.

Not for them the comfortable pew.

Men like McNeill burst out of Town in the early ’50s with skill and energy, making life-long friends and sweethearts as they went.

They were young and full of life, reveling in the adventure of building Newfoundland and Labrador anew from top to bottom. You name it; they built it. No conditions tough enough to stop them.

The dirt flew in all directions.

For McNeill, this sometimes meant spending the winter under canvas, once while surveying the TCH cutoff on the east side of Birchy Lake; sleeping amid the snows not far from where I now work.

The next time I go there, I bet I’ll hear: “Time is money; A job worth doing is worth doing well; Don’t move a stick or stone more than you have to.”

So. Time to find a way of ending this attempt at obituary.

I even dug into the King James Version because, while not given to quoting the Bible, McNeill was certainly good at the hymns and was a Scot and so was King James. And it does contain more than a lesson or two.

I got stuck on the parable in Matthew of the three men who were each given some money to look after.

Parable ends by favouring the two who increased their “talent” by wise investment and admonishing the one who buried his “talent” and brought back merely what he was given.

I take from this that we are instructed to do something with our lives; like McNeill.

And something else.

Although it’s probably not in the Bible, it’s still safe to say that the nation that forgets it’s great is destined to perish.

McNeill was one of our great.

Province assessing natural gas options

I CITY OF ST. JOHN’S ESTIMATED REVENUE AND EXPENDITURE 2006 REVENUE

EXPENDITURE

TAXES: Residential property tax (net) $ 47,420,000 Business property tax (net) $22,750,000 Business tax $ 19,425,740 Water sales commercial & municipally $ 8,185,180 Water tax (net) $ 14,525,000 Water tax Harbour Clean- up $1,883,310 Water Treatment Reserve $ 2,140,000 Accommedation tax $1,103,800 Utility tax $ 5,500,000 $ 123,713,030

GENERAL GOVERNMENT SERVICES: Legislative $ 830,310 General government $15,362,430 Engineering services $ 4,027,170 Pensions and employee benefits $2,039,640 Other general government $ 350,000

$22,609,550

PROTECTIVE SERVICES Traffic enforcement Fire protection Protective inspections Animal and pest control

$ 20,551,890

GRANTS IN LIEU OF TAXES: Government of Canada $ 2,000,000 Government of Canada agencies $ 540,000 Government of Newfoundland agencies $ 50,000 SALES OF GOODS AND SERVICES: General government services $ 788,840 Tranportation services Parking meters $ 1,179,600 Other $ 255,580 Environmental health services Tipping Fees $3,350,040 Other $ 93,000 Recreation and cultural services $ 1,292,700 Other general services $ 89,960 OTHER REVENUE FORM OWN SOURCES: Business and amusement licences $ 119,300 Construction and other permits $ 1,671,820 Traffic services revenue $ 2,130,000 Rents, concessions and franchises $ 35,400 Interest on investments $ 527,300 Interest on tax arrears $ 2,000,000

$ 2,590,000

$7,048,700

$ 6,483,820

CONDITIONAL TRANSFERS FROM OTHER GOVERENMENTS: Government of Newfoundland Recovery of debit charges $ 9,158,430 Municipal Operating Grant $ 3,101,300 Government of Newfoundland agencies Rental housing projects OTHER TRANSFERS: Transfer from other funds Assessments on water, sewer and Street improvements

$55,500

$ 600,000

$ 12,315,230

$ 600,000

$ 2,238,860 $ 14,722,210 $ 2,895,760 $ 695,070

TRANSPORTATION SERVICES: Road transport Administration $534,860 Streets, roads and sidewalks $ 6,018,670 Snow clearing $ 11,737,950 Works depot $ 1,091,170 Traffic services $ 1,042,260 Street cleaning $ 92,280

$ 20, 517,180

Other transportation sevices Parking meters Street lighting Public transit Disabled Para- Transit service

$ 82,400 $ 3,380,880 $ 6,240,040 $ 750,000

$ 30,880,510

ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH SERVICES: Water and Sewer Services $ 17,853,780 Garbage and waste collection and Disposal $ 8,547,600

$ 24,401,380

DEVELOPMENT SERVICES: Environmental planning and zoning $1,037,070 House and real estate $ 1,410,660 Tourism and Economic development $ 1,762,160

$ 4,209,790

RECREATION AND CULTURAL SERVICES: Parks an open spaces $ 5,738,260 Recreation $ 5,142,020 Civic Center Corporation $ 1,000,000 Other recreation an cultural services $ 876,010

$ 12,756,290

FISCAL SERVICES: Debit charges Temporary debt Other long term debt Debanture dept Other debt charges

$ 26,171,150

$ 200,000 $ 4,556,290 $ 21,278,880 $ 136,000

Transfers to reserves and other funds Provision for uncollectiable taxes $ 1,000,000 Provision for obsolete inventories $ 25,000 Snow clearing reserve $0 Provision for Harbour Clean –up $1,663,310 Capital expenditure out of revenue $ 1,483,880 Contribution to 2006 Capital Works $ 6,888,030

TOTAL REVENUES

$ 152,751,780

TOTAL EXPENDITURE

$ 37,242,370 $ 152,751,780

ntroducing fallow field legislation could be just as important to the development of Newfoundland and Labrador’s untapped natural gas reserves as it is to its oil.

The fallow field concept was broached recently

by Premier Danny Williams in the wake of failed negotiations with the companies involved in the Hebron oil project. The concept means the province would pass a use it or lose it law — in other words, set time limits on how long a company can own rights to a discovery without developing it.

In its energy plan discussion paper, the province recently estimated Newfoundland and Labrador could possess as much as 60 trillion cubic feet of natural gas reserves, worth billions of dollars. The rights to some of these untouched reserves, however, are already in the hands of oil companies that made discoveries in the 1970s and wrote them off as economically unfeasible to develop at the time.

Today, with increased energy demands and advanced technology in gas transportation, those reserves have sky-rocketed in value.

As is the case with Chevron’s rights over the Hebron oil field, which was discovered two decades ago, those companies still hold discovery licenses over the gas reserves, which never expire and yet also don’t obligate the owners to develop the sites.

Ed Byrne, minister of Natural Resources, says the province is examining the possibility of implementing the fallow field concept (which has already been successfully adopted in the U. K.) as a last resort approach to solve specific problems like the current Hebron impasse.

As for natural gas, he says the province is closer than it’s ever been to development.

“There’s a number of concepts that we’re interested in, but nothing that we’ve signed off on yet,” he says. “There’s some fairly high level assessments occurring right now on natural gas and the

Ed Byrne

Paul Daly/The Independent

role it will play in the economy of the province.”

Byrne says decisions relating to natural gas will be worked out in the province’s energy plan, due to be released later this year.

Probably the biggest decision government will have to make is how best to transport the resource.

There are three options available: building multiple pipelines around the province and out to the North American grid, liquefying the gas and shipping it out to market by tankers, or harnessing the gas into pressurized plastic containers for distribution.

Using pressurized containers for transportation is a concept patented by Newfoundland company Trans Ocean Gas. It’s a new approach, bearing implications for petrochemical producers internationally, and it would likely be the most cost effective method for gas transportation in the province.

– Clare-Marie Gosse

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INDEPENDENTWORLD

SUNDAY THROUGH SATURDAY, APRIL 16-22, 2006 — PAGE 11

Afghan and Canadian soldiers keep watch near a bomb blast site in Kandahar last week.

Ismail Sameem/Reuters

Jingo journalism Media still quiet on Afghanistan facts; American style, sugar-coated news prevails

By Antonia Zerbisias Torstar wire service

I

t was a year ago March that an ex-military friend shipped out to Kabul as a private contractor to help shut down Camp Julien and relocate Task Force Afghanistan to Kandahar.

Canada was jumping from the proverbial frying pan into the fire. I wondered if I had slept through the national debate on the shift in the mission.

But no: as we now know, there was virtually no debate at all.

Then, nobody seemed to care.

Canada’s media and political leaders have declared their support for the role our troops are playing in Afghanistan. But polls suggest that citizens are not so rah-rah. A Decima Research survey released last week shows that we are split: 46 per cent of the respondents say that sending troops was a good idea while 45 per cent disagree,

which is why last week’s parliamentary of civilians. Kidnapping is on the rise. debate was not much more than political American contractors are being targeted. posturing.

Some 200 schools have been burned or Canadians also deserve more from the closed down. And Lieut. Gen. Karl media that accepted the Eikenberry, the senior Ottawa line, whether it American military officer came from the Paul expects the violence How aware are most here, Martin Liberals or the to get worse over the Stephen Harper spring and summer.” taxpayers that they Conservatives, on the In his March 27 report, war.

Parenti detailed have contributed Not the mission. “The Afghanistan’s failed millions to putting war.” economy, the drug trade As the Nation’s and how the U.S. is warlords and drug Christian Parenti wrote “slashing its funding for from the field: “Taliban from a smugglers in power? reconstruction attacks are up; their tacpeak of $1 billion in 2004 tics have become more to a mere $615 million aggressive and nihilistic. this year. And thanks to They have detonated at least 23 suicide the military’s recruitment problems, the bombs in the past six months, killing for- United States is drawing down its troops eign and Afghan troops, a Canadian diplo- from 19,000 to 16,000. In short, despite mat, local police and in some cases crowds (President George W.) Bush’s feel-good

rhetoric, the United States is giving every impression that it is slowly abandoning sideshow Afghanistan.”

That leaves guess-which-country, along with Europe, holding the bag? Are Canadians getting a true idea of how very big and dirty that bag is?

Not from most of their media.

True, we have many brave journalists humping their computers and cameras along with the troops right now. (I count many of them among my friends.) But their grunt’s-eye view, though colourful, does not deliver the big picture.

For example, how aware are most taxpayers that they have contributed millions to putting warlords and drug smugglers in power? Human Rights Watch estimates that 60 per cent of the members of the new Jirga have warlord connections.

Last week, the Sun’s Eric Margolis wrote See “None of this,” page 13

VOICE FROM AWAY

Running on empty

By Craig Westcott The Independent

A

fter 20 years of running alcohol and drug rehabilitation centres in the United States, Sister Mae Kierans was feeling a little fried herself.

So what did the St. John’s native, educator and psychotherapist do for a break?

She headed to Africa for a visit and became half of a two-woman mission helping AIDS-stricken women and children survive the crushing poverty, crime and corruption of Kenya.

That was in December 2004. She’s been there ever since, except for visits to see her relatives and friends, such as the one last week that took her home to St. John’s to see her dad, engineer Tom Kierans.

“I had worn myself out and thought, what will I do next?” Kierans says, trying

Mae Kierans doesn’t have much to work with in her African mission, but she manages to make a difference to explain how she made the transition from running a rehab centre to ministering to AIDS victims and orphans.

“I went to Kenya to see if I could be of some use, and people were literally hanging on to me saying, ‘Please come back, please come back.’ Especially the moms with AIDS.” Kierans couldn’t say no. But she was

apprehensive. Just days before her arrival, a priest had been hacked to death. His murder followed the killings of a couple of other priests and a bishop.

“I was at his funeral,” Kierans says. “If you work on behalf of the poor, you put your life at risk. So I was a little nervous.

“But it was these women, who knew I couldn’t speak their language, we spoke through interpreters, who said, ‘Promise you’ll come back.’ So that was the turning point for me.”

Since that first visit, Kierans and another nun have since set up a mission of sorts, tending to whatever problems the people bring to them.

In one case, Kierans bought some charcoal for an AIDS-infected woman so she could start her own charcoal business. She also sponsored the woman’s two children See “It’s hard to know,” page 13

Mae Kierans

Craig Westcott/The Independent

APRIL 16, 2006

12 • INDEPENDENTWORLD

‘Come near at your peril, Canadian wolf’ W

hy do Newfoundlanders so strongly support the continuation of the seal hunt?

Because it made possible our survival as a people. Because it advanced our economy and helped us overcome the sometimes harsh and hostile environment in which we live. Because we honour our forefathers and mothers who worked so hard and endured so much to establish an enduring society on our island and in Labrador. Because we must resist attempts by groups such as the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) to attack and deplore our seal hunt for their own selfish purposes.

We do not forget that the IFAW, founded in 1969 by Brian Davies, had a budget that grew from $6 million to $64.7 million during 1999 and a staff of 250 by 2001, according to Donald Barry’s new book, Icy Battleground.

To understand our support for the seal hunt, you must know a little of our history and culture.

Newfoundland was settled because of access to cod and survived because of the supplement of the spring seal fishery. No one was ever assisted to migrate to or settle in Newfoundland, since British colonial policy was hos-

JOHN CROSBIE

The old curmudgeon tile to settlement in Newfoundland; favouring a monopoly of the fishery for the fishermen and merchants of England who sent out fleets of vessels every spring to fish until fall.

In Newfoundland, settlement was discouraged by the “mother country” from 1633 onwards, with those who did being harassed and forced to leave their homes and fishing premises. Those who moved to settle in Halifax had their travel paid and their living expenses as well for their first year of living in Halifax.

No one could obtain secure title to land in Newfoundland until the early years of the 19th century. Until 1904, almost half of our coast was known as the French Shore, with the French having the right to settle and fish. Even when the French shore was eliminated after 191 years, France still retained the islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon, less than 10 miles from the south coast of Newfoundland, creating difficulties

A sealer drags a seal off an ice pan in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

and disruption in the fishery.

We have not forgotten that when Sir Robert Bond, then prime minister of Newfoundland, negotiated a free trade treaty with U.S. secretary of state James Blaine in 1891, the treaty was vetoed by Britain at the urging of Canada, which feared the damage this might do to Canadian trade with the

Paul Darrow/Reuters

U.S. These memories encourage us to support the seal fishery despite what the urban population of North America or Europe may think.

The seal hunt today is not the seal hunt of our historic memory. The days of sailing vessels, wooden wall steamers and steel vessels are over. The hunt

tee time

that remains is conducted by small inshore vessels of 65 feet or less which have not been permitted to take “whitecoat” or “baby” seals since 1987.

We believe the current hunt is closely and carefully managed and as humane as a hunting operation on vast and dangerous ice floes can be.

The seal hunt is, as is the cod fishery, a proud background to this province’s current survival and improving economy, with our latest struggle for prosperity the ongoing battle with the federal government over revenues from and the right to manage and regulate the offshore development of oil and gas off our shores — all of which we brought into Confederation in 1949.

Mainlanders should not forget that it was the killing of beaver and the fur trade that enabled Canada to be opened up and created the wealth that resulted in such cities as Quebec and Montreal.

No wonder the 19th century anticonfederation song in Newfoundland warned: With our face turned to Britain Our back to the Gulf, Come near at your peril, Canadian wolf!

John Crosbie returns April 30.

Ethics act hands power to watchdogs

By Chantal Hébert Torstar wire service

T

he proposed Accountability Act brought forward by Prime Minister Stephen Harper has as many clauses as the Titanic had cabins — and some are more comprehensive than others.

But without the momentum of the sponsorship scandal, no federal government could have hoped to steer a legislative cargo ship this size past the many icebergs that would normally be in its path.

If and when the act has negotiated safe passage through Parliament, it will redefine the way business is conducted in the nation’s capital. It will take years after that to know if the end result is a more transparent body politic or the further alienation of the federal system from the Canadian mainstream.

For now, the winners are the various officers of Parliament, the auditor-general, the information commissioner, the chief electoral officer, the next ethics commissioner and a handful of new watchdogs.

Under the act, they become the federal equivalent of Big Brother. Little of what goes on around Parliament Hill will escape their surveillance.

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LONG ARMS The arm of the auditor-general will reach into the books of whoever benefits from federal largesse. No important part of the life of political parties will be shielded from Elections Canada.

The information commissioner will be allowed to dig into the files of his fellow officers of Parliament as well as those of Crown corporations and government foundations.

No prime minister will be able to spare his/her ministers from the wrath of future ethics commissioners.

The lobbying industry is an obvious loser. Its discretion will be sharply curtailed as it strives to operate under lights that are likely to be far too bright for many public officials’ comfort.

Loss-wise, the Liberal party is not far behind. It had not adjusted well to a system based on individual donations; now those will be further reduced (to $1,000) while corporate taps dry up completely. Only a new government with optics on its side could have delivered a kick to so many hornets’ nests. As parties age in power, they tend to lose their appetite for scrutiny.

Already, in the two short months since the election, the Harper government has had second thoughts about the amount of light it wants to shine on its own dealings. As a result, part of its access-to-information plans were relegated to a discussion paper.

There may come a time when the Conservative party rues the day when it put itself at the mercy of the generosity of individual Canadians for its sustenance. (In 1992, an unpopular Brian Mulroney relied on corporate Canada to finance the referendum campaign for the Charlottetown constitutional accord.)

TWO IVORY TOWERS Under a regime that would make it harder for political staff to enter the civil service and harder still to use lobbying as an exit strategy, academia could become the chief reservoir for extra-government resources in federal politics.

Whether the system will really be strengthened by an exchange of intellectual fluids between two ivory towers remains to be seen.

Whether the imprimatur of the government’s chief accountant should be the litmus test of a sound cultural or native funding policy; whether an ethics commissioner with judicial powers should have a veto on the political discretion of the prime minister of the day or whether both amount to unduly shifting the political burden onto unelected bean-counters remains to be seen.

If the government has its way, this mammoth bill will be law by the summer.

Politically, few are likely to dare stand in its way — except maybe the Liberal Senate — but from a policy perspective, it may be folly to rush headlong where angels for so long feared to tread.

One way or another though, give Harper full marks for strategy. The prime minister has found a way to engage Parliament Hill in a wide-ranging debate that in no way involves the survival of his young minority government.

APRIL 16, 2006

INDEPENDENTWORLD • 13

‘It’s hard to know where to start’ From page 11 in school. Some of the women she helps are grandmothers raising their grandchildren because the mothers have died of AIDS. The village she works in has about 5,000 people and lies just west of Nairobi. Most people live in dirt floor shacks with no running water or electricity. Water is sold in jerry cans. Cooking is done on small barbecues.

“They have what we call flying toilets,” says Kierans. “There’s no water. To be crass, plastic bags are used as toilets and then flung out of the slum and they land God knows where.”

Kierans also works in Kibera, a city of 800,000 people, regarded as the largest urban slum in East Africa. She spends one day a week counselling AIDS orphans at a school. She also teaches one day a week at a college in Nairobi.

Kierans uses donations from family and friends to do her work.

DON’T LOOK UP “It’s hard to know where to start,” Kierans says.

“I have to say, I’ve been there about a year and a quarter and I liken myself to the women at a long check-out line in the supermarket.

“They don’t look up at the line, it’s too discouraging. I just try to look at the women in front of me and what they need that day and get it for them.”

Kierans says the first woman who welcomed her in Kenya was a 35-year-old mother who was dying of AIDS. She had three children, the oldest about 15.

“These kids are looking after their mothers. The roles are reversed. Everybody is in a one-room shack. There is a piece of sponge on the floor for a bed.

“The mother is vomiting and has diarrhoea, which happens at the end of AIDS, just before you die. These little kids are cleaning up their mother, and she’s embarrassed and they’re embarrassed.”

In this case, the mother was eventually taken to the hospital in Nairobi, where she died.

“The body is not released until the health bills are paid, and of course these little kids don’t have any money,” Kierans says.

“The mother had said to Teracia (the oldest daughter), ‘Don’t have a funeral for me, just let me go to the pauper’s grave,’ which means the body just gets put in a plastic bag and dumped in the common pauper’s grave.”

But the daughter went to Kierans and said she wanted to give her mother a proper funeral. So Kierans had a small coffin built, went into Nairobi, paid the medical bills, put the woman’s body in the coffin and had it hauled back to the village in the back of a pick-up truck.

“The whole thing only cost me about $150,”

Scenes from Kenya, submitted by Mae Kierans.

Kierans sys. “But it’s money they don’t have.” young teenagers raise themselves. There, Kierans With help from her father Tom and her brother sits on a chair in a small dirt floor room and takes Tom, Kierans put up a small tin roofed school with visitors. a kitchen. It costs about $500 a month to operate.

“I say ‘What is your name and how can I help Kierans and the other nun nursed some of the you?’” Kierans says. “About every third kid says AIDS-stricken mothers back to enough health so there’s no food at home. The school has a feeding that they could take antiprogram that operates AIDS drugs and work in Monday to Friday. They the kitchen. The ironic give them porridge for “The mother had said to thing about AIDS treatbreakfast and corn and ment is that you have to beans in the afternoon.

Teracia (the oldest daughter), be healthy enough to So they get two small take the medication. meals a day.

‘Don’t have a funeral for me, Often the women are “But the kids complain not that strong. Because there is no food at home. just let me go to the pauper’s their immune systems And I thought, these kids grave.’ Which means the body are weakened by AIDS, can’t start feeling sorry they’re more susceptible for themselves, or it’s just gets put in a plastic bag to other diseases, includgame over. So I say to ing tuberculosis and them … You need to be and dumped in the common malaria. grateful that you’re getThe United Nations ting fed Monday to pauper’s grave.” supplies some of the Friday in this school. Do anti-AIDS drugs for free, you realize how lucky but not drugs to treat the other diseases. you are?’

“I just try to respond to the next thing that’s in “Then I think to myself, I hope nobody ever front of me,” Kierans says, “whether it’s a kid that hears me talking like this. Can you imagine? It’s needs to go to school, or a mom who doesn’t have awful, but you can’t let the kids feel sorry for an income.” themselves.”

At the Jesuit-run orphans’ school in Kibera Kierans and the other nun try to help other where Kierans counsels once a week, many of the women become self-employed too, so that they

don’t have to sell their bodies and contribute to the AIDS epidemic.

Kierans thinks people in the west would respond if they knew what was happening in Africa. But the media, she says, don’t report it.

“I started sending a little (e-mail) newsletter back to my family,” says Kierans. “The people who get these newsletters — and it was not my intention — they send me $25, $10, $20, amounts of money which I use to bring help to these people.”

One friend sent $200 and asked Kierans to buy sewing machines for the women she is helping.

“I know that if (others) knew about it … they would be generous and respond,” she says. “And so part of what I’m doing there — I’m not young and energetic anymore — I’m just trying to raise awareness in my own little circle of a continent that is going down the tubes so fast.

“I’m still trying to make sense of it myself. And it bothers me that it doesn’t make the headlines that it should make in the western world.”

Anyone interested in helping Kierans can send donations to the Sr. Mae Kierans African Fund, c/o Sr. Shirley Anderson at St. Joseph Mother House, 2025 Main Street West, North Bay, Ont., P1B 2X6. Income tax receipts are issued for the donations. cwestcott@nl.rogers.com

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‘None of this is true’ From page 11 that, “The public is getting distorted news from Afghanistan because the North American media has substituted jingoism and flag-waving for reporting of hard news.

“Afghanistan’s complexity and lethal tribal politics have been marketed to the public by government and media as a selfless crusade to defeat the ‘terrorist’ Taliban, implant democracy, and liberate Afghan women.

Afghanistan is part of the ‘world-wide struggle against terrorism,’ we are told.

“None of this is true.”

Too many of us, in the absence of serious and in-depth analysis, are coming to the wrong conclusions about this mess. Conclusions such as that women there are significantly better off and that the country is being “rebuilt’’ — or that Canada is a beacon of civility.

According to Human Rights Watch, Canada has been “trying to undermine critical international protections” and “sought to dilute a new treaty outlawing enforced disappearances.”

By not reporting these facts, media are betraying the people on the ground, troops and journalists included.

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APRIL 16, 2006

14 • INDEPENDENTWORLD

Eric Schlosser

Vince Talotta/Torstar wire service

Reality of fast food dished out to kids

By Scott Simmie Torstar wire service

lion last year, with nine out of 10 American children visiting a McDonald’s every month. North America has become a drive-through nation, with ross.That may be one of the reactions of an explosion in waistlines and attendant health young readers to a new book that takes a problems mirroring the proliferation of fast-food riveting — and sometimes revolting — outlets and sedentary lives. look at the fast food industry.

The book outlines the history of this transforAnother response might be to think twice mation and the role marketing to young people before downing that next meal from McDonald’s, has played in our changing eating habits. It shows KFC, or Burger King. how mascots, cross-promotions, “playlands” and Chew on This: Everything You Don’t Want to massive ad campaigns start targeting toddlers, in Know About Fast Food is the newest assault from the hope of creating cradle-to-grave brand loyalty.

Eric Schlosser. He’s the award-winning American “(McDonald’s) sells or gives away more than 1.5 journalist whose 2001 book, Fast Food Nation, billion toys every year,” says the book. “Almost bruised the reputation of fast-food giants and one out of every three new toys given to American turned some consumers into activists. This effort, kids each year comes from McDonald’s or anothwhich he co-authors with Charles Wilson, is er fast-food chain.” aimed at informing one of the industry’s prime Why are those toys given away or sold at low demographics: kids. prices? For starters, they’re pretty cheap to make The authors of Chew on This “share with kids — usually in factories in China, but Schlosser and the fascinating and sometimes frightening truth Wilson argue the real answer is that they help sell about what lurks between more food. In one 1997 those sesame seed buns, what McDonald’s promotion, Chew on This … visits a chicken ‘nugget’ really is, giving away Ty Teenie and how the fast food indus“flavour factories,” where Beanie Baby toys over a 10try has been feeding off childay period boosted sales of dren for generations,” says a Happy Meals from 10 milchemicals are mixed to promotional page. lion to 100 million. produce the tastiest shake, It won’t be on the stands Much of Chew on This is until May 10 but the book has devoted to the food itself. It soft drink or candy — already hit the radar of takes readers to the reeking McDonald’s in the United of Greeley, Colo., flavours often tested using feedlots States. The influential magawhere cattle spend their zine Advertising Age devotes young children as market final days fattening up two full pages of coverage to before being turned into Chew on This and to a feature burgers in massive slaughresearchers. film, based on Fast Food ter/packing houses. It Nation, scheduled for release later this year. It reveals how a single patty might contain meat says top McDonald’s marketing executives have from “hundreds or even thousands” of different convened a “war council” to deflect criticism. cattle.

In an e-mail, the national communications man“A modern plant can produce almost a million ager for McDonald’s Restaurants of Canada Ltd. pounds of hamburger meat a day ...” but a single says the corporation has not yet seen the book so animal with “E. coli can contaminate 32,000 cannot comment. pounds of that ground beef.”

Industry concern over the book, Chew on This, Not just the beef comes under a microscope. is understandable. Packed with statistics and Chew on This examines the (37-day) life and muckraking journalism, it challenges young read- death of chickens bred to become fast-food ers in the first few pages to open their eyes before morsels. It visits “flavour factories,” where chemthey open their wallets — or their mouths. icals are mixed to produce the tastiest shake, soft “The food you eat ... helps determine whether drink or candy — flavours often tested using you’ll be short or tall, weak or strong, thin or fat. young children as market researchers. It shows It helps determine whether you will enjoy a long, how selling larger portions of fries and soft drinks healthy life or die young ... So why is it that most helps the fast-food giants increase profits. people don’t think about fast food and don’t know Chew on This urges kids who feel strongly much about it?” asks the introduction. about the issues to take action. To question why a “The simple answer is this: the companies that pop machine’s in their school, or a fast-food sell fast food don’t want you to think about it. They restaurant’s across the street. Schlosser told don’t want you to know where it comes from and Advertising Age fast-food giants “get their point how it’s made. They just want you to buy it.” of view across every single day on TV. If they Buy it we do. Chew on This contains mostly believe in democracy, they should welcome critiU.S. statistics but the numbers tell quite a tale. cism and debate.”

Spending on fast food in the United States has Two ingredients the authors think are healthy jumped from $6 billion (U.S.) in 1970 to $134 bil- for everyone.

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APRIL 16, 2006

INDEPENDENTWORLD • 15

MacKay fails to convince U.S. to budge on border security WASHINGTON

By Tim Harper Torstar wire service

F

oreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay says Washington has a “forge ahead” mentality on new border measures which threaten the Canadian tourism industry, but says much of the blame for that must be laid with the previous Liberal government.

MacKay, in an interview following his first meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, said the best Ottawa can expect right now is to be “kept in the loop” as Washington moves to further secure its borders.

Legislation that has passed the U.S. Congress will compel Canadians travelling to this country by air or sea to carry passports by next January; a year later, all travellers crossing the border will require passports or similar secure identity cards.

Rice told MacKay yesterday that Washington is looking for an inexpensive, easily obtainable alternative, but said that, despite difficulties within her own department in adhering to the congressional deadlines, the timetables will not be moved.

“We have a law, and the first point is that we’re going to uphold the law,’’ Rice said, echoing comments made by U.S. President George W. Bush at a trilateral summit in Cancun, Mexico recently.

MacKay said the previous Paul Martin government let the U.S. initiative move too far along without engaging Washington.

“If they (the Liberals) had been able to engage prior to the legislation, we would be in a much different situation.

We might have been able to satisfy them with certain initiatives. This is an after-the-fact assessment, I acknowledge that, but this might have led to something less than what they are headed toward.

“It might have alleviated much of the confusion and consternation that is now going to go on in the tourism and convention industry.”

MacKay has no shortage of allies in the U.S., including chambers of commerce, trade and tourism organizations, and even the American Trucking

After the Stones …

Moncton gets Alan Jackson

L

ast year, the Rolling Stones rocked Moncton’s Magnetic Hill concert site.

As an encore, promoters will stage an all-day country music concert that will include superstars Brooks & Dunn and Alan Jackson.

Fans have until August to decide if cowboy boots are appropriate dancing footwear for an all-day field concert in the heat of summer.

“I think it will be a better party than the Rolling Stones ‘cause country fans know how to party,” says concert promoter Harold MacKay. Country Rocks the Hill will also feature Sugarland and Nova Scotia’s rising country star George Canyon.

The event follows last year’s Rolling Stones concert that saw about 80,000 fans from around North America descend on Magnetic Hill for an allday concert.

Neither the officials from the city nor the promoter would put a cap on the ticket sales, saying the site can hold 80,000 people if that many want to attend. But MacKay says he doubts the event will sell that many tickets, even though he’s still hopeful.

“I’d like to say 80,000, but 30,000 will be nice,” he says.

Although the city lost money working with the Rolling Stones and event promoter Donald K. Donald, it vowed to bring more concerts to the site made famous for hosting Pope John Paul II in 1984.

Last year, the city had to fork over capital costs to upgrade the site, something it won’t do this year. He won’t confirm the city is negotiating with the Eagles for a concert later this summer at the same site, saying only that this concert is the only one planned so far.

—Telegraph-Journal

Condoleezza Rice and Peter Mackay

Yuri Gripas/Rueters

Association, which represents 35,000 trucking companies.

“It is incompatible with the sense of community,” said the association’s Margaret Irwin. “Windsor may be the other side of the border, but it is part of the Detroit community. It’s like asking someone from Virginia to show a passport to get into the District of Columbia.’’

Paul Frazer, a former Canadian ambassador who is now a Washington lobbyist, said the private sector on both sides of the border must step up efforts.

“Governments can only do so much,” he said. “The private sector can credibly bring forward data on jobs, impact on community, and the impact of a system which is unevenly implemented.”

MacKay said he stressed to Rice there would be fallout on both sides of the border.

He said Ottawa is not yet ready to come to Washington with a proposal for a security card to be used by Canadians that could satisfy U.S. concerns.

He said he told Rice that Canada has taken steps to mollify some of Washington’s security concerns, including moving toward arming border guards and working to make computer systems at the border more compatible.

“We will be in the loop every step of the way. That’s the best we can hope for right now.”

presents

He said he expected a meeting between Public Security Minister Stockwell Day and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to deal with the “nitty gritty’’ of what would be acceptable to the U.S. MacKay said he thought he and Rice have a “chemistry” and said he was looking forward to establishing a personal rapport with the secretary of state.

There is also clearly a different atmosphere here with a new Conservative government north of the border.

The night before his meeting with Rice, at the residence of Ambassador Michael Wilson, MacKay was welcomed by the likes of former secretary of state Colin Powell, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Peter Pace, Fran Townsend, homeland security adviser to President Bush, Thomas J. Donohue, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and John Negroponte, the director of national intelligence.

“We had the A-list there,” MacKay said. “I think it is a clear signal that they want to engage at the highest level and get the relationship back to professional, focused levels and that was what it was all about.”

“It’s a sign the Americans believe there is a government with an agenda that will stick to that agenda,” says one Washington insider. “They believe the adults are running the show.”

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16 • INDEPENDENTWORLD

APRIL 16, 2006

INDEPENDENTLIFE

SUNDAY THROUGH SATURDAY, APRIL 16-22, 2006 — PAGE 17

Kenneth J. Harvey

Paul Daly/The Independent

Wounded eloquence After writing more than a dozen books, Kenneth J. Harvey says he may finally be able to pick a favourite

By Stephanie Porter The Independent

A

s timely and high-profile as the subject of wrongful conviction is, Kenneth J. Harvey maintains his latest novel, Inside, was not inspired or driven by the predicaments of Druken, Dalton or Parsons.

“I’d heard of the cases, but I didn’t follow them,” says Harvey, adding he’s been asked the question quite a bit by readers and the media. “The Lamer inquiry really wasn’t in my mind at all.”

Inside is the story of Myrden, and begins with his release from prison after doing 14 years for murder. Exonerated on the basis of DNA evidence — but not necessarily innocent (Myrden blacked out the night in question) — he steps back onto the streets of downtown St. John’s, back to the home of a woman he doesn’t love, back to a life he’s not sure how to deal with.

Although eventually well compensated for his time behind bars, money is far from Myrden’s primary concern. “Inside is more

about a man getting out and trying to deal with where he’s come from,” Harvey says.

“Not necessarily prison as an institution, but the prison of his family heritage.”

Harvey has more than a dozen books — collections of essays, biographies, poetry, novels — to his name. He’s been published in the United States, United Kingdom, Russia, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden, the Netherlands and France, and garnered more than a few nominations and awards. (Most recently, he won the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award for 2003’s The Town That Forgot How to Breathe).

But until Inside, Harvey insists he’d never been able to pick a favourite work, or fictional personality.

In the course of the struggle to break the cycle of darkness and violence, to find some sort of meaning or purpose, to change his life by saving the ones he loves, Myrden — and his “tragic nature” — became near and dear to Harvey’s heart.

“I have a bit of Myrden in me, as do most people, I suspect,” he says. “I love him as a character.”

Harvey says this book required little in the way of actual research — a trip to Her Majesty’s helped out, as did a six-year stint living on Field Street, St. John’s, where much of the novel is set.

“It was easy (to get inside Myrden’s head),” says Harvey. “I’ve always had an affinity with wounded eloquence, the life of the down-and-out character, the wounded beauty of that.”

And once started, the book came quickly, flowing out in a matter of three weeks. The style — short, clipped, breathless sentences — simply invented itself. “It just came out that way,” Harvey says.

Selling well — the book has been embraced by critics and the public — Harvey says he’s “extremely surprised” by the strength of some of the early accolades.

But he hardly has time to enjoy the attention Inside is capturing.

In between travel and promotional engagements, he’s tight up against a deadline for his next work, this one a significant departure from the taut, focused, and quick Inside.

“Blackstrap Hawco is a multi-generational epic, starts in the 1800s and comes up to present,” he says. “It’s about 1,000 pages, and I’ve been writing it for 15 years. What was most difficult is that the different periods are all written in different styles. Very complicated.”

(By contrast, Harvey says Inside was “easy, but … certain parts were intense.”)

It’s a challenge to balance all the commitments but, Harvey says, “that’s the business I’m in. No complaints. Well, a few, but I’m happy with the attention. It’s extremely gratifying to see Inside do so well.”

While the depth and colour of Myrden’s character is what ultimately drives Inside, Harvey admits the whole theme of wrongful conviction may be a drawing card for some readers.

“People like the idea of the law being wrong,” says Harvey. “I think, too, that people are fascinated with the idea of being locked up in prison, probably because most people are only a few steps away from See “Just hide,” page 23

LIVYER

From music to mortar and back After more than a decade away, musician Jeff Dyer gets ready to step back on the stage

By Clare-Marie Gosse The Independent

H

e’s a musician with mortar on his hands. Jeff Dyer, a fixture in the local music scene over 10 years ago, has been on a performance hiatus, single-handedly building a two-storey stone house, travelling, teaching voice and guitar and raising a family.

But now he’s ready to put aside the

hammer and nails, brush off the dust, and get back behind the mic. In two shows this month, Dyer will once again belt out rhythm and blues and jazz standards, as well as a few originals from his past two albums, Gaia and Days Gone By. Dyer sits in a comfy chair in the main room of his rustically beautiful home on Logy Bay Road, speaking with a soft but rich voice, which hints at his vocal chord capacity. The walls around him are made

of blocks of stone in varying shades and shapes, lovingly scavenged from downtown demolitions. A giant window frames the rough landscape outside.

In 1979, when Dyer decided he wanted to build a house out of stone on land left to him by his father, he was faced with a lack of materials on the island.

“There’s no quarries,” says Dyer, who See “See I like,” page 22

Paul Daly/The Independent

APRIL 16, 2006

18 • INDEPENDENTLIFE

GALLERYPROFILE

J.C. BEAR Sculptor

J

. C. Bear named his inaugural solo show Exercising Demons, not for any internal disturbances or physically active fiends, but because he views the work as, literally, exercises.

“There’s an element of practice in all of these,” he says, looking around the confines of the Rogue Gallery. “These are some of my first finished works.”

It’s an impressive first body of work — varied, though there are obvious recurring themes and colours. Devious heads and devilish figures peer up at visitors from each side, mischievous looks, protruding horns, clumsy big feet, a grinning Great Frog from Hell.

With only a couple of ceramic exceptions, Bear lets the colours of the clay stand on their own, organic and textured.

“I quit work in summer 2002,” says the former MUN professor. “I’d always planned to stop working at about that age; always planned to retire by 55.

“As a kid in boy scouts I did some wood carving … but I certainly hadn’t done anything you would call art before.”

With a father who taught industrial arts, Bear says he grew up in a household where people “did things.” It was a valuable part of growing up, he adds, given how many people these days have little exposure to working with their hands.

Bear says it never occurred to him he wouldn’t be able to develop his artistic side.

“I didn’t think about that,” he says. “I just always planned to do this … You hear, people say, ‘oh, I would never do that. People imagine you can draw or you can’t … but you start and you learn and you practice and you get better.”

Bear started with figure drawing courses offered at the Anna Templeton Centre, and workshops at the clay studio in Devon House. He’s full of kind words for the instructors, artists, and craftspeople who inspired him at every turn.

“I do this at something more than a hobby level,” he says. “It’s not what I would call ‘art,’ but …. It’s what I do now.”

Bear points to one of his earliest works in the show, a series of devil heads, impressionistic but lacking the detail and refinement of work completed just months later. Most recently, Bear has begun portrait sculpture work, from live modeling sessions and photographs.

There are two striking faces on display, true to life — although Bear couldn’t resist adding devil horns to the sculpture of his neighbour.

“I just wanted to have some fun … I think he’s actually sort of flattered.”

Asked about his obsession with characters from the bowels of the earth, Bear mentions an early reading of The Devil’s Dictionary, written by Ambrose Bierce in 1911, as an influence. He smiles, glancing at a favourite creature, holding business cards at the gallery’s door.

“Even though they’re trying very hard, it’s hard for them to look serious,” he says of the demons. “They’re always commenting on something …

“And besides, they’re the ones that have the most fun.”

Exercising Demons is on display at the Rogue Gallery (Eastern Edge Gallery), Harbour Drive, St. John’s, until April 22.

— Stephanie Porter

APRIL 16, 2006

NOREEN GOLFMAN Standing room only

D

o you have the radio on right now? While you are reading this gloriously resurrected newspaper, sipping your coffee, chewing on your bagel? If not this minute, odds are you will be listening to the radio sometime this holiday weekend. Canadians listen a lot. On average we are listening about 20 hours a week. That’s way more than we read, go to the movies, or have sex.

Apparently we are listening more at work and in our cars than ever before. At home we have a radio in almost every room. We listen to waterproof radios in the shower and retro designed radios in our kitchens. We wake up to the news, eat lunch to open line, and go to sleep to music. On weekends, we tune into the opera — or definitely not — and lose ourselves in documentaries, readings, and interviews. Radio is our loyal cooking and cleaning companion, the best company to have when we are alone and wish to hear how the world is humming.

We are familiar with books and plays and movies through radio programs and in this province we learn almost everything we know about the rich local music scene from what gets played and who is talking about it.

Radio is such a major part of our lives that we take it completely for granted. It’s essential background, like the weather and Tim Horton’s. It is part of an invisible environment we would not want to live without. Its impact on our knowledge about the world and, indeed, even on our psyches, is astounding, but that authority is, curiously enough, scarcely recognized. Radio is at once ubiquitous and ignored, hugely influential and virtually unexamined.

In particular, the arts community owes public radio a huge debt. This was never more obvious than during last summer’s CBC lock-out, when it became clear that without the major public broadcaster to promote, circulate, and comment on the arts, listeners were suddenly plunged into darkness, or, more to the point, deafness. Since the resumption of regular programming, we have returned to taking it for granted.

Nothing speaks more directly to the wholesale under-scrutinized medium of radio than that such scant attention has been paid to a local, independent producer who just won one of the world’s most prestigious arts awards.

The award is the Peabody, the producer is Chris Brookes, and the show for which he won this and many significant international awards is called The Wire, an eight-part series about the juice of radio itself — electricity and its influence on music.

First consider the Peabody. It was established in the U.S. in 1940 to be “the Pulitzer Prize of radio.” Juries of distinguished experts, educators, and journalists receive literally thousands of eligible entries in a variety of categories from all over the world. Past personal Peabody achievers include Rod Serling, Walter Cronkite, Orson Welles and Christiane Amanpour. Today the

INDEPENDENTLIFE • 19

Radio ga ga Local radio documentarian Chris Brookes just won the Peabody, the Pulitzer of radio and television. Why didn’t more people notice?

Chris Brookes

Paul Daly/The Independent

awards extend to television and so the competition is staggering.

Now consider that Chris Brookes, working away in his studio, “Battery Radio,” in the shadow of Marconi’s historic undertaking, just won one of these babies, along with his co-producers Paolo Pietropaolo and Jowi Taylor of CBC. Perhaps you recall a teeny item about this in the corner of an inside page in the papers on April 6, the day after the awards were announced. Perhaps you were idly browsing on-line and came upon a link to the announcement on the CBC web page.

But chances are the whole thing went by you the way it escaped the media itself, an almost invisible marking on an otherwise cluttered landscape of signs and noise.

Now think of what happens when a local writer, singer, visual artist, or filmmaker wins a nomination — let alone the award itself. We go nuts, bragging about “our” excellence, “our” talent, and “our” genius. Images of the contender and his/her work proliferate faster than Paris Hilton’s credit cards and before you know it the new household names are answering 20 questions in the Sunday edition of a local paper.

Attention is good and it is important to celebrate our stars, not to ignore or avoid them, even if we aren’t always crazy about what they paint, sing, film, or write. But it is worth asking why we consistently ignore both the subject of radio as an artproducing medium and its creators, like Chris Brookes, who consistently produce internationally recognized works of excellence.

There are other strong examples of unexamined shows and unacknowledged creators right here within earshot. The Memorial University “campus and community” radio station, CHMR, has a wisely loyal audience and a noble history of on air-voices and programmers, from Bob Cole to Ann Budgell to Sean Panting, in addition to many more familiar names.

And VOWR, although founded as a religious station by an ambitious United Church minister, continues to produce original programming directed to local music and the performing arts, as well as guest interviews and discussions with artists from all over the province.

Radio like this, fresh and uncanned, has been nurturing our imaginations for years, helping to create informed communities of listeners who appreciate being plugged into something different, original, and, in the best examples, terribly exciting. Radio like this is almost always commercial free and resolutely not corporatized.

So it is that artists like Chris Brookes have been enhancing our community for decades, although you’d hardly know it. The Peabody adjudicators deemed his documentary The Wire nothing less than “ear-opening … audio dynamite.” The award will be presented June 5 in New York by the popular and irreverent critic of mainstream media, Jon Stewart. Let’s hope we hear a little bit more about that.

Noreen Golfman is a professor of literature and women’s studies at Memorial University. Her column returns April 30.

$200,000

IN SCHOLARSHIPS? not bad for a start The catch: This is your one chance – scholarship money is only available to those who attend the Vancouver Film School Canada Roadshow 2006. www.vfs.com/scholarships The Roadshow is a great time to check out award-winning films by our grads, have your own portfolio reviewed, and find detailed information about the many programs available.

Schmooze us when the Roadshow stops in

St John’s Saturday April 29 @ 2pm The Fairmont Newfoundland, 115 Cavendish Sq.

RSVP for this event rsvp@vfs.com or call

1.800.661.4101 ext 4013

Vancouver Film School Where Results Matter

APRIL 16, 2006

20 • INDEPENDENTLIFE

IN CAMERA

Pulling punches Hard-Tack Boxing and Fitness Club in St. John’s recently moved to a new downtown home, two storeys above Water Street. Groups of young athletes gather daily to socialize, train and spar. Some do it just for fun, others are trying to make it professionally. Photo editor Paul Daly and senior writer Clare-Marie Gosse dropped by to get a feel for the fight.

I

t’s almost nine o’clock on a weekday evening. In a large space in an old building in the heart of downtown, a group of young people, ranging in ages from about 15 to 20, sweat, pant and grunt to the beat of background hip hop music.

Most are wearing helmets and boxing gloves, taking practiced swipes at a partner as they dance above floor mats; others are wailing on punching bags.

Some are doing crunches to pass the time between sparring. Occasionally a couple climb up into a large boxing ring and go at it for a two or threeminute round.

The atmosphere — dark, clean walls, high ceilings and shining spotlights — is that of a streetwise, big city boxing club. When they’re not moving and sweating, the young boxers smile, laugh and joke together. They’re all shapes and sizes; one particularly petite member shakes off a helmet to reveal long, swinging hair — the only girl in the group. There’s a sense of contentment, fun and focus in the air, and it’s clear every one of them loves being a part of it.

Trainer Ed Raymond, 25, moves between his 15 or so students, occasionally blending in as one of them

until he starts calling directions and answering their questions. He says he’s been boxing for 10 years, first as a competitor and then as a coach.

“These are competitive kids,” says Raymond. “I’ve got kids here that are going to the winter games in 2007 in February … I’ve got kids that are just here to get in shape and some kids are just here to have fun. I’ve got some older people, people in their 20s and I’ve got 10, 11 year old kids here that are hoping to start a career.”

Hard-Tack Boxing and Fitness has been up and running for just over 10 years, owned and operated by local

APRIL 16, 2006

amateur and professional trainer, John Stanley. The club is open to everyone from beginners to experts and even offers non-contact cardio kick-boxing and boxing fitness for kids aged five and up.

George Lakos, 17, is one of Raymond’s students hoping to take boxing further than simple fitness.

Although he’s only been training for eight months, he says he’s wanted to box since he was 10 years old. Lakos has already won three of the four competitive fights he’s had so far and is working towards making the 2007 Canada Winter Games.

INDEPENDENTLIFE • 21

“I like the fact it’s good self defence,” he says. “Plus it keeps you healthy. I’ve quit smoking since I came here.”

Lakos is slender and strong. He says training can be tough and although he recommends the sport to others, he says you have to have commitment.

“You have to really want to do it, because you’ve got to jog, you’ve got to do all this, it’s all up to you … you’ve got to keep in shape.”

Raymond says fitness is a crucial aspect of the sport, especially when the kids are so keen to “spar” with one

another as quickly as possible.

“Boxers are probably one of the best in shape athletes in the world,” he says. “Our kids they fight three rounds, two minutes, and it’s pretty tiring.

“Being in shape is very, very important. I can’t stress it enough … if they’re not in shape, the mind’s willing, but the body can’t.”

As well as all body shapes, ages and sizes, Raymond says the sport attracts outgoing and shy kids alike.

“I’ve had all kinds … it builds confidence, there’s no doubt in my mind.”

Speaking with several of the boxers, like 15-year-old Jamie Halleran and 19-year-old Justin Dewland, as they’re gathered around, watching a sparring match in the ring, the same sentiment comes up over and over again: boxing is hard work, but well worth it.

Shawna Kean, currently the lone female, overflows with enthusiasm.

She says although she’d like to see more girls involved in the sport (there’s only a small handful competing in the Avalon area), she doesn’t mind being the only one at HardTack.

Kean is animated, feminine and, by her own admission, small for her age (18). It’s hard to believe only moments earlier she was pounding the daylights out of a much larger, male partner. Enticed into the sport six years ago by two older male cousins who later dropped out, she says she tries to stop by at least three times a week for training and has had 15 competitive fights so far.

“I love it,” says Kean. “It’s just … everything, the sparring and fights; I love it … just being in the ring and everyone watching you fight and being able to kick some ass.”

APRIL 16, 2006

22 • INDEPENDENTLIFE

GIRL ON THE ROAD

Eggs for Easter

The key to perfect scrambled eggs? Read on

W

Peg Norman and partner Gerry Rogers stand by as Canadian folk artist Ferron performs a sound check before her show last Thursday at the LSPU Hall in St. John’s. Rogers, a major fan of Ferron’s work, is about to embark on a film project, documenting the independent singer/ songwriter’s return to music after a five-year hiatus. Rogers will be filming Girl on the Road in a similar style to her previous work My Left Breast, following Ferron as she travels through southern USA, up the California coast and back to her home in B.C. An icon in her music genre, Ferron has been credited by Rolling Stone for the resurgence of folk music in the 1980s and hailed as a female Bob Dylan. Rogers describes Ferron’s music as “funny, brazen, lyrical and downright mystical.”

Paul Daly/The Independent

‘I like a gutsier sound’ From page 17 grew up in St. John’s, “but they were tearing downtown apart, so that’s where I got my materials from.”

He built the house in three stages, starting off with a tiny, stone bachelor pad/loft, adding a bathroom and kitchen and then the second level and main room. He and his wife, Eleanor, and their 10-year-old son Isaac, are now just getting used to occupying the completed package.

“I’ve always used my down time to build,” says Dyer, who has no formal training in construction.

“I got books and stuff and I read. If I saw someone mixing mortar I asked them, you know, ‘what are the proportions?’ and watched them do it … I’ve always found that if you pick people’s brains and do a little reading you can do anything in the world.”

When he was a teenager, already gifted with a great voice and an ear for music, Dyer says he realized natural talent wasn’t necessarily the most important basis for accomplishment.

“I used to play with (local musician) Sandy Morris and I used to think geez, how lucky is he to have that talent to play guitar, because all I did was sing.

And I thought that’s what it was, I thought, you know, Sandy was born with a classical guitar and he started playing it. I remember clearly realizing when I was 18 that that wasn’t the case,

he may have some talent, but it’s application and it’s work and staying into stuff.”

That same year, Dyer says he learned to swim, play guitar, flute and started piano and it wasn’t long after he started to think about building, harbouring a desire (as a townie) to acquire the resourceful skills of a bayman.

“Round the bay, people knew how to do everything and I always admired that,” he says.

When Dyer was in the midst of his musical career, playing shows at the

Fishing Admiral and the Carriage Works, forming bands and writing and recording music, he was particularly known for his powerful, smooth voice.

As well as writing originals and reworking classic pieces with harmonies and bridges, Dyer says he likes to occasionally add his own extensions to existing R and B tunes, which were often written to fit two-minute radio slots.

He loves focusing on melody and adapting tunes with thin, high vocals to fit the breadth of his own voice.

“I like a gutsier sound,” says Dyer. “I take tunes — like a Smokey Robinson tune — and I bring it down … and sing it full voice.

“I also like harmonizing stuff … I like the jazz harmonies; I like the chords in jazz and it’s not that I don’t like simplicity, it’s just that I really like melody and harmony.”

He’s looking forward to his return to the stage and says audiences can expect “some new material, some real good players and a mix of original tunes, some jazz standards and some rhythm and blues.”

Joining Dyer for his evening performances of originals, Motown numbers and some “great crooners,” will be Bill Brennan on piano, Jack Dawe on bass, John Lane on drums and Glen Collins on guitar. The show is scheduled for April 21 and 22 at the Majestic Theatre, Duckworth Street, St. John’s.

hen I wake up in the morning, the first thing I do is NICHOLAS stumble into the kitchen to GARDNER get the coffee going. Normally, I am in no shape to talk to anyone without Off the eating path that first hit of caffeine.

The process of making the coffee in the morning is as ritualistic as the either. events that follow, including a showAt this time choose the bread proder and dressing for the day. uct — I prefer English muffins. The My coffee is made using a simple nooks and crannies keep the eggs Italian espresso pot, and the coffee, secure, and the soft texture is a perfect stored securely in the freezer for match. longevity, comes direct from Italy as When the toast or muffin is in the well. Served with warmed milk in a toaster remember your eggs. You bowl, nothing beats a café latte for don’t want them to overcook — they breakfast. need to stay slightly wet.

I am reminded that today is Easter Put a little spread of butter on the Sunday and for that we have to have muffin and then add the eggs. some eggs. I make scrambled eggs at Nothing is better. home — but I use the delectable The eggs will be very creamy tastFrench way of doing them. ing. It will amaze you that there are My scrambled eggs require only only eggs in the mixture. Enjoy this two ingredients, real butter and fresh with a good cup of coffee and your eggs. No more, and no less. Since the day is set. But if you are looking for a eggs are the main event they are not way to jazz it up a little, this recipe cut with anything — no milk or water. lends itself to a lot of other applicaThis makes for a luxurious end prod- tions, like a very elegant canapé for uct. that next über cool shindig.

I whip my eggs together in a bowl Instead of making it for two, make first, and season them with a little salt it for three (nine eggs) and garnish and pepper. Try getting free-range them with smoked salmon. Instead of eggs if possible. You will find a world bread, you can make elegant mini torof difference. I get mine in the outside tilla cups using a cookie cutter and a markets in the summer time, or in the mini-muffin tin. Here’s how: organic section at my local grocery Cut out rounds of the tortilla shell store. with a 2 1/2-inch round cookie cutter I generally use six eggs for two and push them down into a slightly people. It might sound like a lot but buttered muffin tin from the centre to believe me, when you see how good create cups. they are, you will not Bake the mini cups go back to your old in a 350-degree oven eggs again. until they start to turn The trick to Into a pan over low golden on the edge. this dish is to heat I add about a teaTake them out of the spoon and a half of tins and let them cool keep the curds butter. on a baking rack. In When the butter the meantime, get the moving slowly. melts and I have smoked salmon from moved the butter the fridge and cut sevaround the pan a bit, I add the eggs. eral slices into thirds.

The trick to this dish is to keep the Cook the eggs like above and when curds moving slowly. I like to use a they are done add about a teaspoon or silicone spatula for this. It is soft so of the mixture to the tortilla cups enough to move the eggs around, but topped with a portion of the smoked will not melt under the heat of the salmon. This will be a winner when pan. paired with a light chardonnay or The object is to have large curds of other light white wine. It should make scrambled eggs. Keep the eggs mov- about 18 or so. ing in the pan as they begin to cook Who says eggs are just for breakand they will start to thicken. Also, fast? the use of low heat will allow the eggs to cook slowly and help retain the Nicholas is an erstwhile chef and moisture. The eggs are going to be food writer now eating in St. John’s. served slightly wet. They should not be runny, but they should not be dry nicholas.gardner@gmail.com

Sam Roberts thinks globally

S

am Roberts has too much of the laid-back slacker/hippie in his soul to set his sights on world domination. But he is hoping to extend his global reach with his band’s sophomore outing, Chemical City.

The 31-year-old Montreal rocker’s tuneful 2003 full-length debut, We Were Born in a Flame, sold nearly 200,000 copies in North America, a respectable figure by most standards. But something like 90 per cent of those discs were purchased in Canada.

In the U.S., the album didn’t gain any traction until it was released a second time, by Universal’s Lost Highway.

“We have some ground to stand on (in the U.S.) now,” says Roberts. “Now we have a new record and we’re going to be there to hammer the point home on stage. It’s a second chance.”

Just having new material is a welcome change. Going back to the 2002 EP The Inhuman Condition, which introduced several of the songs that reappeared on the full-length, Roberts and his band have been recycling the same set list for four years.

Chemical City is less taut and more limber than its hooky predecessor, with songs routinely stretching past four minutes and, in the case of Mind Flood, clocking in at longer than eight. It’s also more of a group effort, which is why the quintet — including guitarist Dave Nugent, keyboardist Eric Fares, bassist James Hall and drummer Josh Trager — is now billing itself as The Sam Roberts Band.

“I still write on my own. And that’s why my name is still stuck on the front,” Roberts says. “But that’s not a completed record. That’s a demo or something. The way the band ends up playing it changes the tone or the whole musical direction.”

— Torstar wire service

APRIL 16, 2006

INDEPENDENTLIFE • 23

EVENTS

POET’S CORNER

APRIL 16 • Open mic at Hava Java, Water Street. Every Sunday, 8:30-10:30 p.m.

• The Avalon Unitarian Fellowship’s regular Sunday service starts 10:30 a.m. at the Anna Templeton Centre, Duckworth Street.

Frank Maher, Rick West, Stan Picket and Andrew Lang. Auntie Crae’s, Water Street, 12:30 p.m.

APRIL 17 • Little Bear and the Enchanted Wood, live musical theatre, Mile One Stadium, 1 p.m. and 4 p.m., 5767657.

APRIL 20 • T’ai Chi Chih classes at The Lantern, 35 Barnes Road, 579-7863 to register or visit.

• End of exams bash with COE, Jigger and My Antonia, Junctions club.

APRIL 18 • Canadian Idol auditions at the Village Mall, 8 a.m.-5 p.m.

• Folk night at the Ship Pub featuring Scott Goudie, 9:30 p.m.

• Lunch-time music featuring the Great Casavant Organ, David Drinkell, organist at the Anglican Cathedral, 1:15-1:45 p.m., free.

• The 56th Provincial Drama Festival begins at the Corner Brook Arts and Culture Centre. Continues through April 22, (709) 637-2580, www.artsandculturecentre.com.

• Newfoundland Orchid Society meeting, 8-9:30 p.m., Memorial University Botanical Garden. New members welcome.

• Lunch and traditional music with

APRIL 19 • CNIB presents the National Film Board’s Seeing Blind at the LSPU Hall, 8 p.m. Reception to follow.

APRIL 21 • Coat of Many Colours, a tribute to Dolly Parton, featuring top local musicians under the direction of Sandy Morris. St. John’s Arts and Culture Centre, 8 p.m. Continues April 22.

• An intimate evening with Jeff Dyer, accompanied by Bill Brennan, Glen Collins, Jack Dawe and John Lane. The Majestic Theatre, 9 p.m., 579-3023. Dyer also performs April 22.

APRIL 22 • Sinfonia #4: Mostly Baroque, with soloists Michelle Cheramy (flute),

An image from the show Joy, a whimsical celebration.

Paul Daly/The Independent

Alison Black (violin) and Mary O’Keeffe (harpsichord). D.F. Cook Recital Hall, Memorial University, 8 p.m.

IN THE GALLERIES • In Full Bloom, a group exhibition

of new work by artists represented by the Red Ochre Gallery, 96 Duckworth St. • Exercising demons, clay sculptures

by J C Bear, Rogue Gallery at Eastern Edge, 72 Harbour Dr. Until April 22.

• Where Wonder, What Weight by Will Gill and Beth Oberholtzer, The Rooms. Until May 14.

• 4 points of view, exhibition showcasing Denis Chiasson, Michael Pittman, MJ Steenberg and Taryn Sheppard, Leyton Gallery of Fine Art. • Open Images: Open Narrative, large multifocal works by Libby Hague and Yael Brotman (Toronto), Eastern Edge Gallery, Harbour Drive.

• Equinox, work by Anna Templeton Centre’s textile program participants, third floor, Craft Council Gallery, Devon House.

• Men, by Cathia Finkel, at RCA Gallery, LSPU Hall, until May 7.

• Joy, a whimsical celebration, by Cara Kansala and Pam Dorey, Craft Council Gallery, Devon House, until May 5.

• Spring! A multimedia group exhibition in the Craft Council’s Annex Gallery. Until May 5.

Bury me in Newfoundland Don’t bother with a box.

Lay me right in the Rock, naked.

Put a marker if you must — on a piece of driftwood burn my name but know, I won’t be here long.

Last fistful of dirt and I’m gone: bone splinters shedding skin, shards of me marble the dark gray granite — I am jagged cliff edge.

Spools of hair tumble, reach down to stretch along the sharp red sand, under the smooth backs of beach rocks — I am seaweed. Luscious green licking salt from the sea.

My teeth shatter on the rock below, washed in white foam, rubbed with salt — I am broken seashells, scraping and pulling in time with the tide.

My breasts find a barren.

Caress the carpet of moss till nipples push through — partridgeberry, the rich, red sting.

Danielle Devereaux, St. John’s

Bat t e r y R ad i o independent production Radio features Audio documentaries Acoustic films Audio guides Co-producer of the 2006 Peabody Award-winning radio series THE WIRE www.batteryradio.com

Ken Harvey

Paul Daly/The Independent

‘Just hide away and write and find your voice’ From page 17 being in there themselves.

“I think most people have done something in their lives that has brought them near to getting locked up.”

Harvey is cagey when asked if the statement applies to himself. “Let’s just say I’ve been a naughty boy, back in the good old, bad old days.”

Harvey and his family currently live in Cupids, an hour’s drive from St. John’s. He has no intentions of going anywhere else.

“There is no other place like (this province),” he says. “I’ve done a few writer-in-residence gigs at other loca-

tions, but when I’m away I always know I’m coming home … It’s a nice break, but not a permanent departure.”

Harvey is a founder of the ReLit Awards (“ideas, not money”), open to books published by independent Canadian literary publishers. The annual awards ceremony — held during bonfire beach parties in British Columbia and Newfoundland (usually at Middle Cove beach) — has become a popular early-summer fixture.

“The Canadian literary scene is prospering,” says Harvey. “Newfoundland is a vibrant breeding ground for writers now … We’ve always been an extremely artistic people. I think it has to do with the isolation, stewing in our own

juices for so long. Being detached.

“It’s great as long as we don’t get too close to one another and become literary clones. That might be a problem. It never hurts to remind people to try their best to be original and individual and don’t hang around in groups, blabbing on and on about writing, as the end product often ends up being literary duplication.

“Just hide away and write and find your voice.”

As for his own career, Harvey says he’s content where he is, and with what the future holds.

“I’m happy that more people are reading my books,” he says, simply.

“That’s where I want to be.”

576-0359

APRIL 16, 2006

24 • INDEPENDENTLIFE

WEEKLY DIVERSIONS ACROSS 1 Neighbourhood 5 Goes astray 9 Small amount 12 Michelangelo sculpture 17 First black Canadian to win the Victoria Cross 18 Cat cry 19 Here to Herve 20 White poplar 21 Repeatedly (3 wds.)

24 Excessive enthusiasm 25 Though 26 Like rock 27 Dread 28 Hole puncher 29 ___ Ridge, France 30 Broken: On the ___ 33 Spills the beans 36 Start for marketing?

37 Marsh grass 38 Authority on diamonds?

41 Indian exercise method 42 Hungarian sheepdog 43 Fence openings 44 Organ with a drum in it 45 Continental abbr.

46 Traded 47 Make merry 48 It ends a threat

49 Capital of Taiwan 51 Golf’s Lorie 52 Strictly accurate 53 Benefit of marriage 57 Deal with a rootbound plant 60 Restaurant reading 61 “World’s largest ___” (Glendon, Alta.)

64 Atop 65 Westminster ___ 67 Impolite 68 Poet Dennis ___ (“Alligator Pie”) 70 ___ et poivre 71 Talking tests 72 Dried up 73 Fuel from a bog 74 Norse goddess 75 Cunning trick 76 Senorita’s lang.

77 Ridicules (with “at”) 78 Muslim religion 80 Sound of a heavy fall 81 Drunkard 82 First Nations people in Quebec 84 Wedding cake part 85 ___ the Hun 88 Expanse of sand 90 Spring delicacy (2 wds.)

93 Physician: prefix 94 Soft food for infants 95 Victorian expletive 96 Eight: comb. form

97 Go too fast 98 Attempt 99 Small fishing boat 100 Care for DOWN 1 Cry when the lights come on 2 Indian music form 3 Middle East airline 4 Arabian Nights hero (2 wds.)

5 Internet communication 6 Lease 7 Retina receptor 8 African language 9 Journal 10 Hydrochloric ___ 11 Storage container 12 Beaver construction 13 Nearer the stern (naut.)

14 OPEC country 15 Pelvic bones 16 Pricey 22 CBC’s forte 23 Trivial Pursuit, e.g.

29 African grassland 30 Celebrate 31 Virginia dance 32 Identifies, briefly 33 So long!

34 Oaf 35 India tourist stop 36 Focus of Ottawa

spring festival 37 Yukon’s official bird 39 Not fem.

40 Ready for Rene 42 Couple of couplets 43 French joint 46 X marks the ___ 47 Save for a ___ day 48 Montreal show of 1967 50 Graphic symbol 51 Proposal joints 52 Limerick’s country 54 Walk at an easy pace 55 Reject disdainfully 56 Large London park 57 Hurry 58 Foil relative 59 Fertilize (a flower) 62 Mirth 63 Twelve months 65 Opera solo 66 Lemon ___ (herb) 67 Enjoy a chapter or two 69 Some aliens 71 Alta.’s bird: great horned ___ 72 Incited 73 Northern B.C./Alta. river 76 Butter from a tree 77 Notes (down) 79 Sugar (Fr.) 80 Liable to upset 81 Get ready for exams

82 Heron’s kin 83 Kind of tide 84 Russian emperor

85 Gelatin from seaweed 86 Parasites 87 Aboriginal TV net-

work 89 Coal scuttle 90 Appropriate

91 Long follower 92 Turf See solutions page 35

WEEKLY STARS ARIES (March 21 to April 19) Whether a waiting period is taking longer than expected, or just seems that way, the anxious Lamb would do well to create a centre of calm within her- or himself, and not do anything rash.

TAURUS (April 20 to May 20) Practical matters dominate the week, but cultural activities are also favored, especially those that can be shared with someone special in the Bovine's life. Some important news might be forthcoming.

GEMINI (May 21 to June 20) You need to know more about a possible career move in order to see if it offers a real opportunity or just a change. You're sure to get lots of advice, some of it good, but the decision must be yours.

CANCER (June 21 to July 22) The arrival of hoped-for good news about a loved one dominates most of the week and provides a great excuse for the party-loving Moon Child to plan a special event to celebrate.

LEO (July 23 to Aug. 22) Leos and Leonas rushing to finalize their plans might want to think about slowing down the pace, or risk overlooking an important consideration that could become a sore point down the line.

VIRGO (Aug.23 to Sept. 22) The week's challenges call for logical approaches. But sentiment also has its place. Sharing memories with a special someone, for example, strengthens the bond between you.

LIBRA (Sept.23 to Oct. 22) A brand-new approach to a prob-

lem could have a good chance of succeeding if it's based on a solid foundation of fact to strengthen its potential for standing up to scrutiny.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23 to Nov. 21) A favorable report should give your optimism an important boost as you confront another phase of a challenge. Don't be timid about accepting advice from someone you trust.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov.22 to Dec. 21) You might want to target another goal if your current aim is continually being deflected. But stay with it until you find that first sign of an opening, and then follow through.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22 to Jan. 19) Although offers of advice might not always please the usually surefooted Goat, good counsel is

always worth considering, especially from those whose experience can be invaluable.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20 to Feb. 18) Don't rush to make up for lost time. Your productivity can be measured not only by what you do, but how you do it. Move carefully until the job is done the way you like it.

PISCES (Feb. 19 to March 20) Emerging facts about someone you know might cause you to rethink your relationship. But remember to make judgments in context of a full situation, not just on scraps of data.

BORN THIS WEEK You are known both for your love of acquiring beautiful things as well as your generosity to others.

Fill in the grid so that each row of nine squares, each column of nine and each section of nine (three squares by three) contains the numbers 1 through 9 in any order.

There is only one solution to each puzzle. Solutions, tips and computer program available at www.sudoko.com SOLUTION ON PAGE 35

INDEPENDENTBUSINESS

SUNDAY THROUGH SATURDAY, APRIL 16-22, 2006 — PAGE 25

Janine Piller

Paul Daly/The Independent

By Stephanie Porter The Independent

F

or 12 years, an ever-growing number of residents and businesses in the capital region have paid Janine Piller to pick up their trash.

Or some of it, anyway.

Piller’s company, Atlantic Blue Recycling, is currently the capital city’s only curbside pickup recycling service. It’s also the only recycling operation that collects certain plastics, glass and tins for recycling — most depots only accept paper products and beverage containers.

For a few dollars a month, Atlantic Blue’s trucks come by residences for collection every second week. Piller says the interest in her business is growing daily — in the past three years alone, her client base has more than doubled.

While many are grateful for her service, she admits there are those who can’t come to grips with the idea of paying someone to take their recyclables away.

“Oh, there are people out there who tell me I’m the kind of person who ruins

‘It’s respect’ Municipally sponsored curbside recycling in St. John’s may take over much of Atlantic Blue Recycling’s business. But owner Janine Piller doesn’t see it as an ending — it’s expansion Newfoundland, charging for this,” she says, rolling her eyes.

“But the thing with recycling is, it’s going to cost. It costs other places … there are taxes that go to pay for that, there are tipping fees.

Yes, you get some money for the materials, but not enough for the cost of what it takes to get the material into a form that can be sold to other markets. It takes a lot of expensive machinery and a lot of effort.”

Piller has heard the rumblings that St. John’s will soon start its own citywide, comprehen-

sive curbside recycling program.

Former Environment minister Tom Osborne told The Independent he expects an announcement will be made within months; the actual start up could be more than a year away.

Far from seeing a municipally sponsored recycling program as an end to the business Piller worked so hard to build, she says it may present a new opportunity for her.

“The city’s plan, I know it’s coming,” she says. “From the feedback I’ve had from the city, they’ve been really appreciating what

I’ve been doing for the past 10 or 11 years.

“I am hopeful, that when they do get into the serious curbside recycling they would see me as someone with some skills to offer them. I’m hoping there will be some opportunity there.”

She knows the markets, she says, and as office paper recycling becomes mandatory, commercial pick-up operations have been booming.

Piller’s business has become more complicated over the years. When she began, it was a simple pick-up and delivery service — there were other depots in town to take care of warehousing, sorting and shipping the materials to their final destination.

When the beverage deposit system came in, Piller faced her first real hurdle: suddenly, she had to have her own warehouse space, and do her own sorting. Her staffing needs increased, and so did the cost of the service to consumers.

“And then we just kind of went along with that for a few years,” Piller says. “And then the plastic plant burned down and the local company wasn’t taking plastic anymore. And the company I was working with for paper didn’t See “A big leap,” page 26

Something doesn’t add up

A

t the risk of having someone cut the ears off me, I’ve named this column the Public Ledger.

It’s a nod and a wink at the ghost of Henry Winton, the fearless, if controversial editor of the 1800s, whose paper of that name often stabbed an icy finger at the goings on of Newfoundland politics and public life.

We could use someone like Winton around again. Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition is discredited and mostly useless. Coming out on the wrong side of the Hebron debate merely confirmed it. The hierarchy of Newfoundland’s third party, the New Democrats, appear determined to sit on the sidelines forever as the con-

CRAIG WESTCOTT The Public Ledger science of the nation rather than make the changes that would give them a shot at power.

So it’s left to the press to nip at the heels of government.

The government itself is in a disturbing state.

Yes, we have a premier who is well respected, even feared. But the talent pool around him is ankle deep. It consists of a

Finance minister and Trevor Taylor and… wait, give me a minute I’ll think of someone else…

OK, it consists of Loyola Sullivan, Trevor Taylor, maybe Ed Byrne, and maybe Tom Rideout. The rest are mannequins.

Put yourself through the mental exertion of picturing every other cabinet minister booted out and replaced by one of the silent unwashed in caucus. Would it make any difference?

Not a dash.

Given that sorry situation, we’re fortunate Williams is as smart as he is. But no man is perfect. And anyone who’s too big to take advice from others is a fool.

Williams has some large issues at hand,

including the lower Churchill, Hebron oil and the fishery. A slip on any one of them could be as bad as the worst boondoggles of the past, upper Churchill included.

What’s most disappointing about the premier is his vacillation over FPI. His performance in the House of Assembly last summer during the income trust debate was a near perfect example of speaking out of both sides of your mouth at the same time.

The man who won’t let his cabinet ministers go to the loo unless they raise their hands and ask permission first allowed most of them to vote for a deal which he said was lousy.

Does the word disingenuous come to

mind?

For those Tory caucus members who don’t know what that means, ask Loyola.

He was a schoolteacher. He’ll explain it to you.

Yes, it was the previous government that let the sharks into the FPI fishbowl.

That is mostly the reason they are disarmed in this debate. But it’s the current government that is afraid to go in and clean the tank. Danny Williams is willing to stand up to ExxonMobil, but seems scared witless of John Risley.

Something about that doesn’t add up.

But then, it‘s often difficult to balance the public ledger. cwestcott@nl.rogers.com

26 • INDEPENDENTBUSINESS

Inflation rate unlikely to see increase

APRIL 16, 2006

HEBRON HEAT

By Steven Theobald Torstar wire service

“That would more than wash away the electricity price changes,” he says.

“They are just not in the same league ortgage costs are rising, as the cut in the GST.” gasoline prices are back in The lower sales tax will have a simthe news and Air Canada ilar effect on the core inflation rate, even got into the act by jacking up its which drives the central bank’s policy fares. on interest rates.

The latest blow to the cost of living Though the core rate will fall below is higher electricity rates in Ontario. the Bank of Canada’s 2 per cent tarBut economists insist the inflation get, financial markets expect at least rate — a key statisone more interesttic for negotiating rate hike. wage increases — The central bank Inflation will fall as remains on life suphas increased its port. overnight rate, soon as the federal Indeed, the loomwhich directly influing cut to the GST variable-rate government tables its ences will push it into a mortgages, steadily coma. over the past few first budget and Last week, the months.

Ontario Energy In fact, last week’s implements the Board hiked provinstellar employment cial electricity sup- promised reduction to and housing starts ply rates by about 16 reports have promptper cent, adding its goods and services ed speculation the from $7 to $10 to bank could tax, economists say. central monthly utility bills hike its overnight for most households rate, currently 3.75 starting May 1. per cent, to as high “While on paper it looks devastat- as 4.5 per cent. ing, it’s probably not as important as “I’m not getting on that bandwagwhat we are seeing in gasoline and oil on,” says Marc Lévesque, chief markets,” says Doug Porter, deputy strategist at TD Securities. “I don’t chief economist at BMO Nesbitt get the sense that the Bank of Canada Burns. is itching to drive rates above 4 per Porter estimates higher electricity cent.” prices will add about 0.2 percentage Mortgage costs have twice the points to Ontario’s consumer price weighting in the basket of goods and index, currently rising at an annual services that are tracked to compute clip of 2 per cent. the consumer price index.

But inflation will fall as soon as the Those higher borrowing costs take federal government tables its first time to work their way into the inflabudget and implements the promised tion rate since most people have reduction to its goods and services fixed-rate mortgages, Lévesque sugtax, economists say. gests.

Dropping the GST to 6 per cent On the other hand, consumers will from 7 per cent will automatically be feeling more flush if Ottawa shave 0.6 percentage points off the decides to cut the GST while retaining inflation rate, and the effect will last the former Liberal government’s for a full 12 months, Porter says. income tax reductions.

M

Premier Danny Williams answers media questions about the unsuccessful Hebron-Ben Nevis negotiations at the Fairmont Hotel Newfoundland last week. Prime Minister Stephen Harper, in St. John’s on an official visit, declined to get involved in the questioning.

Paul Daly/The Independent

Time shutting Canadian bureau

By Tony Wong Torstar wire service

T

ime magazine is shutting its Canadian news bureau — the first time in more than a decade that the venerable American newsmagazine will not have full-time editorial staff covering its northern neighbour.

The Toronto-based bureau will officially close April 28. According to one source, the cuts are purely a “financial decision,” by Time magazine headquarters in New York.

“There will obviously be much less

Canadian content, but it will not be entirely gone,” says one source.

Time may continue to publish the Canadian newsmaker of the year and Canadian heroes editions and perhaps do special features. However, during a period of sometimes prickly relations with the United States, the magazine’s Canadian coverage was an important attempt to bring Canadian issues into the forefront for American readers.

The cuts are part of a larger decision

by Time Inc. to lay off 250 jobs by the spring in an effort to cut costs.

The Canadian edition will still carry Canadian advertising and still be brand-

ed as Canadian despite having less original Canadian content.

Despite the cuts, advertisers in Time’s Canadian edition will still be able to claim 100 per cent deductibility for taxation purposes. Under the Foreign Publishers Advertising Services Act, the magazine was allowed a grandfathered exemption.

Time has been publishing in Canada since the 1940s and at first covered the country through the use of freelancers.

During the 1990s, the bureau was beefed up with two full-time editorial staff and Canadian coverage was given more emphasis.

‘A big leap for me’ From page 25 take paper any more.

“So I thought, I’m going to have to give this up, or I’m going to have to find a new market …”

That moment, which she thought might be the end of her business, turned out to be the key to greatly increased success.

Piller dug in and, with advice from the MultiMaterials Stewardship Board, she found solutions. She won’t reveal her methods or markets, but she does stockpile, prepare, and ship material off the island.

“I do plastics, tin cans and glass jars which nobody else does. And I feel good about that. I just found an answer to that problem and kept the business going.

“I had this thought that I couldn’t ship off the island. And then I realized that maybe I could … it was a big leap for me, organizing all these warehouses and tractor-trailers.”

Piller says her three children — the youngest was only eight when she began — have been supportive. She currently has two full-time and two part-time employees and is busy every day of the week.

Piller grew up on a busy farm in Saskatchewan, but feels she belongs in Newfoundland. She ran in the 2004 federal election as a candidate for the NDP party. It was a learning experience, she says, and one she’s not sure she’ll repeat.

“I would like to think I can make a change. I guess everyone says that,” she says, aware that in promoting her business, she is working for an attitude adjustment among the residents of this province.

“I don’t always like the label environmentalist, I don’t like labels,” she says. “But … everything we use comes from the earth, it feeds us and keeps us healthy and happy. So why would it be so terrible to send back some of the things we use and find a way to use it again? It’s respect.”

APRIL 16, 2006

INDEPENDENTBUSINESS • 27

Women’s labour participation rate dips

Don’t rule out private sector President of board of trade says public-private partnerships can work, even in health services

I

s “privatization” still a dirty word? To some, apparently so.

Sadly, it seems as though the concept of involving the private sector in any aspect of what is considered a traditional public service is still taboo to some in this province.

Our provincial government recently issued a Request for Expressions of Interest (REOI) in search of proposals from private firms, not-for-profit organizations, and/or community associations to design, build and operate several planned duplex units for the care of residents suffering from dementia.

The REOI reportedly yielded a handful of responses, all (or the majority) of which were from private sector proponents.

Then about a week ago came warnings from CUPE of the bogeyman better known as “privatized healthcare.”

“Once you open Pandora’s box, the private sector could be here, and be here forever,” said CUPE’s Wayne Lucas.

Unfortunately, when questioned by the media about the status of the REOI, Health and Community Services Minister Tom Osborne stated it was pretty much a done deal that the private sector would not be involved, at least not in terms of owning and operating the facilities.

“I feel comfortable saying that, at the end of the day, that’s how the system is going to be operated. I can’t tell you today that the decision has been finalized and carved into stone, but I believe that’s how the system is going to operate — publicly owned and publicly operated,” he said, as reported by the Western Star. He also said the long-term care facility in Corner Brook is going to be a publicly owned and publicly operated facility.

Does that mean that, despite not having made an official decision on how the project will proceed, government has all but cast aside the private sector proposals? Not necessarily.

Perhaps there’s a good reason why those proposals are seemingly to be

By Steven Theobald Torstar wire service

RAY DILLON

A

Guest column rejected in favour of publicly owned and operated facilities. Otherwise, what would prevent us from considering something a little different, and a little innovative? Certainly, it’s only fair to the firms that responded to the Government’s REOI. Heaven knows the expectations on government to provide increasingly high-quality services and infrastructure in the face of strained public finances are constantly growing.

Budget 2006 invested aggressively in an infrastructure strategy to the tune of $2 billion, but the province is still facing a hefty infrastructure deficit.

And, as for healthcare, that sector alone accounts for approximately 31 per cent of all government expenditures, while health facilities command close to 11 per cent of capital expenditures.

The imperative is there to look for ways of delivering services and operating public buildings in an efficient manner. That means delivering the same or higher level of service at a reasonable cost. It should be value for money that we’re after. And that’s where public-private partnerships (P3s) have their place.

I beg to disagree with CUPE and others who contend that P3s do not work. Never have, never will, they say. The private sector is out to make as big a profit as possible at the expense of those who rely on highquality service, they say.

Not true. Yes, the profit motive is clearly there. But, what the private sector brings to the table is resources, expertise, and innovative capacity that government typically does not possess. Projects carried out by the private sector are more likely to be completed on schedule and on budget without overruns. In the U.K., for instance, a 2003 report by the National Audit Office found, in con-

CUPE president Wayne Lucas

trast to traditionally procured projects, projects procured through the Private Finance Initiative were largely being delivered on time (76 per cent versus 30 per cent) and on budget (78 per cent versus 27 per cent).

Public-private partnerships are utilized far and wide for infrastructure and service projects, in a variety of sectors, from transportation to water to health.

An independent study conducted a few years ago on the Chancellor Park pilot project here in the province examined quality and cost of service, and also provided some comparisons to the design and funding arrangements of long-term nursing care services in four other provinces.

The 2003 report from that evaluation noted “public-private partnership arrangements are commonplace in Canada and the public and private sectors are viewed by provincial governments as equal players in the provision of long-term care.”

Further, the report concluded: “This evaluation indicates that this arrangement, namely the use of a public-pri-

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Paul Daly/The Independent

vate partnership arrangement similar to the CP pilot project, for the delivery of nursing home care can be continued.”

Turnkey facilities whereby the public sector carries the financing and the private sector partner handles the design, construction and operation are not uncommon. Creative, stringent contracts can be put in place to ensure performance-based objectives are met, while the Government either maintains ownership or enters a lease agreement.

So, the argument that public-private partnerships never work is simply not true. Sure, P3s aren’t always the answer. But, the fact is they can work, and they do work, around the country and around the world.

Are the proposed dementia duplexes prime candidates for the private sector to construct and operate?

Government will ultimately decide.

But let’s not be too quick to rule out the role of the private sector in these types of projects.

Ray Dillon is President of the St. John’s Board of Trade.

fter climbing to parity with men in 2004, the labour force participation rate of Canadian women may be showing signs of plateauing.

In fact, the rate for women 25 to 44 in the workforce dropped last year, the first decline outside of a recessionary period, Statistics Canada reports.

The overall dip is small, less than half a percentage point, but Alberta and British Columbia posted slightly larger declines, nearly two full points.

StatsCan suggests a possible reason for the drop might be that household incomes in those provinces may be high enough to live on just one paycheque.

Avery Shenfeld, senior economist at CIBC World Markets, dismisses that explanation. He says the movement of women into the job market has been a trend that has finally reached maturity.

“At this point we will see the minor ups and downs.”

It’s wrong-headed to try to explain what could be a one-time blip in the data, says Monica Boyd, a professor of sociology at the University of Toronto.

“If we start seeing over the next two to three years a decline, then we have a trend line.”

There are some legitimate reasons women, specifically those 25 to 44, could start leaving work in the years ahead, Boyd notes.

In the past three decades, one of the key drivers behind the rising female participation rate has been a return to the labour market comparatively quickly after having children.

The slight dip last year is likely not a significant development, says Doug Porter, deputy chief economist at BMO Nesbitt Burns. “We have gone through a huge adjustment with women entering the labour force in the past 30 years, and we effectively reached the saturation point.”

Despite all that progress, Canadian women working full-time still make, on average, only 71 per cent of a man’s earnings, as of 2003, according to the latest data available

28 • INDEPENDENTBUSINESS

APRIL 16, 2006

‘Prevention’ medicine rooted in ancient China Canadian-based Cold-fX outsells Advil cold and sinus two to one

By Dana Flavelle Torstar wire service

T

ake a bright young immigrant from China, a Canadian hockey icon and progressive health legislation and what do you get?

One of the most popular cold remedies in Canada.

Cold-fX marries traditional eastern herbal remedies with modern western scientific methods, and uses legendary hockey commentator Don Cherry as its promoter.

The result is a drugstore favourite that outsells even such multinational brands as Benylin, Advil and Tylenol, according to independent market research firm ACNielsen Canada.

“Even we didn’t believe it. We didn’t know how good we are,” says Jacqueline Shan, co-discoverer of the drug, as well as chief science officer and chief executive officer of CV Technologies Inc., an Edmonton-based company founded to make and sell Cold-fX. Like many apparent overnight successes, ColdfX was a long time in the making. The story begins when Shan, a self-described “shy, nerdy” student, is handpicked back in China at age 15 to attend Beijing’s most prestigious medical school 27 years ago.

After graduation, she entered a doctoral program in pharmacology, and her passion for research and the Chinese government’s growing interest in western medicine eventually brought her to the University of Alberta.

By the time she was 28 she had a second doctorate, in physiology, and was running several research projects under the watchful eye of her mentor, the late Dr. Peter Pang, a world leader in physiological research.

Together, they discovered the component of ginseng that forms the basis of Cold-fX. The remedy is designed to help the body’s natural defences fight infection, Shan says.

Consumers take the pills during cold season to prevent the onset of symptoms, or lessen their impact once a cold has begun, she adds.

Shan says she invested years looking for the ideal compound in the ideal dosage that would do the most good. Her search touched on everything from Echinacea, a popular herbal cold remedy, to chicken soup, a family favourite, before she settled on ginseng.

Shan, now 42, is in a tailored black business suit and handing over the glossy ACNielsen chart that she used in a slide presentation at the company’s annual general meeting earlier this year to prove its success.

For the 12 months ended January, 2006, ColdfX outsold its nearest competitor, Advil Cold and Sinus tablets, by more than two to one, according to the market research firm.

But the route out of the lab was far from clear.

The idea for the product nearly died twice before a critical change in federal health regulations and the support of Cherry brought Shan and her colleagues back from the brink.

Their early efforts to commercialize the drug by calling on big pharmaceutical companies flopped.

“They didn’t believe an herbal remedy could be patented. They didn’t think there was a market for the product,” Shan says.

“All their drugs are marketed through doctors.

They’re more focused on prescription drugs because there’s more money to be made on them.”

Friends and family, angel investors, the National Research Council and listing on the TSX Toronto Venture Exchange, helped keep the company afloat.

“I’m driven by the passion for research , especially when we get these beautiful results.”

As recently as three years ago, however, CV Technologies’ landlord evicted the firm from its premises and she had to lay off most of her staff.

The turning point came when Ottawa moved to more closely regulate herbal remedies through the new Natural Health Products Act. For the first time, Shan says, she saw the possibility of marketing Cold-fX directly to consumers.

That’s because the legislation provides that compounds meeting Ottawa’s standards for efficacy, quality and security can be issued a natural health product number, with the NPN assuring consumers that the offering is effective and safe from batch to batch.

For the first time, companies like CV Technologies could make scientific claims based on its research, Shan says, a development that helped the product move out of the health food store and into mainstream drug stores. Cold-fX is now carried in Shoppers Drug Mart, Loblaws and Costco.

The company had already conducted numerous clinical trials, including one involving the Edmonton Oilers hockey team. Elite athletes, it turned out, are ideal cold remedy test subjects because their rigorous training puts their immune systems under severe stress.

The connection to the Oilers also led the company eventually to Don Cherry, who was already a Cold-fX fan.

Plagued since childhood with bronchitis, Cherry said the common cold is a frequent and debilitating experience for him.

Sales, meanwhile, soared to just shy of $32 million in 2005. Profits hit $10 million.

The results of CV Technologies’ latest clinical trial have been published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. The company was named Marketer of the Year by Marketing Magazine last year and was the TSX Venture Exchange’s top performer before moving onto the big board in Toronto.

Don Cherry and Dr. Jacqueline Shan at the TSE broadcast centre.

Colin McConnell/Torstar wire service

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APRIL 16, 2006

INDEPENDENT SPECIAL SECTION • 29

30 • INDEPENDENT SPECIAL SECTION

APRIL 16, 2006

APRIL 16, 2006

INDEPENDENT SPECIAL SECTION • 31

32 • INDEPENDENT SPECIAL SECTION

APRIL 16, 2006

APRIL 16, 2006

INDEPENDENT SPECIAL SECTION • 33

34 • INDEPENDENTSPORTS

APRIL 16, 2006

Shaq’s manifesto: play as team or die

By Dave Feschuk Torstar wire service

I

t was more than 13 years ago when Shaquille O’Neal tallied his first NBA triple-double. On that night, in his sophomore season with the Orlando Magic, the 21-year-old version of a generation’s most dominant big man racked up 24 points, 28 rebounds and an astounding 15 blocked shots.

Last week, O’Neal’s second career tripledouble was decidedly less freakish. More to the point, it was a marvel to unselfishness.

Facing incessant double teams from the defensively porous Raptors, O’Neal compiled 15 points, 11 rebounds and a careerhigh 10 assists in a 106-97 win.

No matter that Dwyane Wade, the Heat’s blink-quick top scorer, was off nursing flulike symptoms.

On a squad that has been plagued by the me-first streaks of some of its key players — most notably Antoine Walker, whose unfailingly unintelligent shot selection has seen him frequently nailed to the bench — O’Neal’s exercise in ball-sharing might as well have been a manifesto for Miami’s pending playoff run.

O’Neal’s message: play as a team or get trampled.

“Guys know that if they put the ball in my hands I’m going to keep all my players involved,” says O’Neal. “If we can get Antoine to play like that the rest of the season and the playoffs, we should win it. He’s the missing link.

“He had a fabulous game. Now we just need him to develop some type of consistency.”

That it took Walker 78 games to have his game of the year is hardly news to anyone who’s been wondering what Pat Riley, Miami’s architect and head coach, was thinking when he overhauled the Heat’s roster after they came within a couple of minutes of winning Game 7 of last year’s Eastern Conference final against the Detroit Pistons. Perhaps Riley assumed his

Miami Heat center Shaquille O'Neal snarls for photographers.

Marc Serota/Reuters

renowned knack for motivating players would turn Walker, no stranger to accusations of ball-hogging, into a model teammate; that his aura would turn back the clock on the diminishing skills of 37-yearold Gary Payton.

Certainly Riley has convinced the currently svelte O’Neal of the benefits of lopping off the love handles. And he has also presided over an MVP-worthy season by Wade.

But the Heat, after winning 59 games last season, won only their 51st last night. And just when they hoped they’d be perfecting their tenuous team chemistry, they’d been slumping alarmingly, winning just six of their past 12.

Walker is one of those guys who has been sub-transcendental. Payton, meanwhile, has been serving as the not-so-serviceable starting point guard in the absence of Jason Williams, who is out with tendinitis in his chronically wonky right knee, and perhaps it’s his poor play that got Riley to musing about using O’Neal as something of a “point centre” during the playoffs.

If they’ve got another gear, if they’re ready to challenge the Pistons, the Heat haven’t revealed it.

There are those who’ll tell you that for all Riley’s tinkering, Miami still boasts the two best players on the floor on most any given night.

But the complementary players, depending on their bent, can subtract from that — just as Walker and Payton have sometimes subtracted from the duelling dominance of Wade and O’Neal. Riley picked those guys, and he’s running out of time to assimilate them as last season’s near-miss slowly gives way to this season’s big disappointment.

“This is the first time I’ve had to do this in my career, so I’m just trying to learn it and get good at it,” Walker says (and by “do this” we’re assuming he means “play with prudence or suffer consequences”).

“I’ve got a week and a half before it needs to be just about perfect.”

UNDERSTANDING YOUR OH&S LEGISLATIVE RESPONSIBILITIES Sundin C-worthy still PREVENTION WORKSHOP SERIES - LEADERSHIP AND ADMINISTRATION

This practical workshop will provide senior managers with an overview of legislative requirements relating to the management of their occupational health and safety program. Participants will gain knowledge of: federal and provincial legislation; þ Bill C-45: Implications on Management of Companies; þ the general duties of employers and workers; þ underlying principles of OH&S legislation: internal responsibility þ system and due diligence; the elements of an OH&S program; þ a strategic, effective OH&S policy; þ the importance of employer participation in an OH&S program; þ demonstrating commitment and leadership; þ cost-benefit analysis for health and safety; and þ practical exercises involving due diligence, recent court decisions þ involving safety violations, and an effective OH&S policy.

Locations l l l l l l l

St. John’s, Holiday Inn, April 18 St. John’s, Holiday Inn, April 19 Marystown, Hotel Marystown, April 20 Gander, Albatross Hotel, April 21 Stephenville, Holiday Inn, April 25 Corner Brook, Greenwood Inn and Suites, April 27 Happy Valley-Goose Bay, Hotel North, May 9

All sessions are 4 hours in duration (8:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.)

REGISTRATION IS FREE To register for workshops please call Valerie Ducey at (709)778-2926, toll-free 1-800-563-9000 or e-mail vducey@whscc.nf.ca Visit our website www.whscc.nf.ca

PRIME

By Damien Cox Torstar wire service

I

t wasn’t, as some have suggested, Mats Sundin’s best game wearing the Maple Leaf crest on his chest.

Since arriving in Toronto 12 years ago, he has frequently flourished against opponents who aggressively contested every inch of ice in games that mattered a great deal more.

The Florida Panthers, let’s face it, were generous in the room they afforded the Leaf captain last week, and he took full advantage of it to register his four-goal, two-assist masterpiece.

Not until Nathan Horton dragged him to the ice in overtime did any of the Panthers offer Sundin anything approximating a rough ride.

So to suggest that, in his 1,235th appearance as a Leaf in either regularseason or playoff competition, Sundin dramatically and emphatically delivered his signature performance would, really, horribly underrate the superb Swede’s contributions over the years.

He’s been better and in bigger games many, many times.

That some in Toronto’s hockey community haven’t noticed and have preferred to question the captain’s personality or production while heralding an assortment of goons, checkers and phonies over the past decade is more of a comment on those observers than it is on Sundin.

Indeed, if you introduce Tie Domi at the Air Canada Centre, and then Sundin, it will be Domi who gets the larger round of applause and noisy cheers.

That tells you, for better or worse, all you need to know about what breeds loyalty and popularity in this hockey city.

Leaf fans, of course, have long liked Sundin.

They’ve just never unconditionally loved him.

Still, there was a message, or perhaps symbolism, in Sundin’s splendid evening April 11 against the Panthers.

First, it was a statement from Sundin that, at 35, he still has some gas left in the tank.

The early portion of his season was wrecked by the combination of inactivity during the lockout and an eye injury, and nobody would blame the guy if coming to work to skate with the

wingers he has to carry on a nightly basis might leave him disheartened now and then.

But clearly, the Leafs can still make him the centrepiece of their team even as it moves into a rebuilding phase.

He leads by example, has always cared more about his teammates than the various “leaders” who prefer to express themselves through temper tantrums and is still a legitimate topthree forward on any team in the league.

He is not Peter Forsberg, he is not Jaromir Jagr. But he is as close to those people as the Leafs currently own or have the prospect of acquiring in the near future.

Once, four or five years ago, the Leafs might have been able to hit a home run by dealing Sundin.

Now, the possible assets that might be acquired through a Sundin deal are less significant than the considerable benefits of keeping him.

Indeed, it was interesting at the Olympics to gain an understanding of how much more the Swedish national team values Sundin as a player and leader than it does Markus Naslund, although Naslund is younger and a better scorer.

The second significant element of Sundin’s spectacular evening was that there was real affection in the building that night and a strong sense of appreciation throughout the city all day.

NEEDS STABILITY This is a franchise that desperately needs some stability as it enters a challenging cycle of change, and it’s a team that needs to learn to respect its worthiest veterans rather than ship them off as has been the case for decades.

The last Leaf captain to retire in the team’s uniform was George Armstrong some 35 years ago.

That’s a comment both on the changing nature of the industry from those days and the number of times the Leafs have shifted gears and adopted new rebuilding plans over the years.

It will be up to Sundin, to some degree, if he retires as a Maple Leaf.

But for the team, making this happen five or six years down the road would restore a sense of soul that’s been missing for a long, long time.

A LITTLE OF YOUR TIME IS ALL WE ASK. CONQUERING THE UNIVERSE IS OPTIONAL. Think it requires heroic efforts to be a Big Brother or Big Sister?

Think again. It simply means sharing a few moments with a child. Play catch.

Build a doghouse. Or help take on mutant invaders from the planet Krang.

That’s all it takes to transform a mere mortal like yourself into a super hero who can make a world of difference in a child’s life. For more information...

Big Brothers Big Sisters of Eastern Newfoundland 1-877-513KIDS (5437) www.helpingkids.ca

APRIL 16, 2006

INDEPENDENTSPORTS • 35

Spurned Tellqvist resigned to fate Once groomed for job as Leafs’ No. 1, goalie in doghouse

By Paul Hunter Torstar wire service

N

Toronto Maple Leafs goalie Mikael Tellqvist celebrates his team's win against the Carolina Hurricanes at the end of the third period of their NHL game in Toronto March 21, 2006. The Maple Leafs defeated the Hurricanes 3-2.

REUTERS/Mike Cassese

Out for a joggle on streets of Boston

By Morgan Campbell Torstar wire service

T

oronto’s Michal Kapral is a marathoner who juggles.

Boston’s Zach Warren is a juggler who runs marathons.

The pair are the two fastest “jogglers” in the world and, on Monday, they will match up for the first time in the Boston Marathon. They plan to raise money for charity, and standards for jogglers around the world.

The match-race within the larger race was born when Kapral lost his world record to Warren last November.

Last September, Kapral, juggling three beanbags all the while, finished the Toronto Waterfront Marathon in three hours, seven minutes and 46 seconds, beating the previous record by more than 13 minutes.

Two months later, Warren bettered that time by 41 seconds, prompting the one-on-one challenge for charity.

Kapral is raising money for a cancer centre at Sick Kids’ Hospital, while Warren is raising money for a circus for children in Afghanistan.

“I kind of thought that, since I smashed the world record by 12 minutes, it would stick around for a while,” says Kapral, 33.

When a reporter told him of Warren’s record run, Kapral sent his phone number to the 24-year-old Harvard divinity student. “Zach called me up and said, `Let’s go for it.’”

Each man will have a distinct advantage Monday.

Kapral, an editor and personal trainer, is the stronger runner. Without his beanbags, he won the Toronto

Marathon in 2002 and has a best time of two hours, 30 minutes.

Warren, meanwhile, is the stronger juggler and doesn’t know how he’d do if he simply raced a marathon, because he’s never done it.

TOUGHEST PART “I find running to be great, but I like to multi-task,” says Warren, who once conducted an interview while riding a unicycle, ran a marathon while talking on his cell phone and takes professional juggling gigs to pay his tuition.

The two also have different opinions on the toughest part of the race. For Warren, it’s navigating the traffic of the first few kilometres while keeping his beanbags aloft. For Kapral, it’s the last half hour.

“The combination of the weariness in your arms and your legs and your brain is enough to put you on your back,” he says. “You have to find a way to keep going.”

As the race progresses, the beanbags grow slimy with sweat. Couple that with fatigue and drops become a problem.

Each time a runner drops a beanbag, rules state he must go back to where it fell and continue running from there.

Kapral said he and Warren each had about 15 drops during their world record runs.

About 23,000 people will participate in the Marathon, but Kapral’s and Warren’s world record attempts won’t earn them a starting spot with the world-class runners at the front of the pack. Instead, based on their qualifying times, they will start together in about 3,000th place.

Tale of two games From page 36 coaches who stand out — both on and off the court, exemplify and teach sportsmanship, teamwork, positive attitude and respect.

Regardless of awards, I’m sure Winters is going to continue to volunteer his time as a youth coach, but it is nice for good guys like him to receive some recognition. And when you consider the number of people who were nominated for the honour, Happy Valley-Goose Bay is lucky to have guys like Winters around. Congrats.

••• The first two games of the Herder final last weekend at Mile One didn’t settle who exactly is the clear-cut better team. If anything, it probably indicated the series between the Conception Bay Cee Bee Stars and Deer Lake Red Wings will again go the distance this year. Last year, Deer Lake won game seven at the

Pepsi Centre in Corner Brook.

This year, it was a tale of two games.

In game one, the Red Wings got the jump and were clearly more prepared to win the battles. Deer Lake’s goalie Brad Wall was also superb in the opener.

However, things were immediately different in game two, and the Cee Bee Stars revved things up from the start and had total control of the game.

So with three games this weekend on the west coast, there could be a winner declared by the time you read this. Who will it be? Based on the first game, Deer Lake could sweep all three and repeat.

Based on game two, the Cee Bee Stars could sweep and clinch on the road.

My money (figuratively, not literally, since I really have no money to bet) is on the series returning to Mile One next weekend. Conception Bay will win two in Corner Brook and wrap it up in game six on Saturday. George Street, look out!

Solutions for crossword on page 28

Solutions for sudoku on page 28

ever has the future been so clouded for Mikael Tellqvist.

For years, since he was drafted 70th overall by the team in 2000, he was the Maple Leafs’ goaltender in waiting. Even in his early career struggles as he adapted to the North American game, the Leafs stuck with him, expecting the talent he showed for his native Sweden to pay off here.

Now he appears to have gone from backup to back-of-the-mind afterthought.

It’s been almost three weeks since he started a game, the second of two disastrous outings at Montreal. He sits each night at the end of the bench, as he did again last week at Nassau Coliseum, under a baseball cap watching Jean-Sebastien Aubin perform in the role everyone thought he would eventually inherit.

It is Aubin, so spectacular since arriving from the minors, who has taken over for the injured Ed Belfour.

It is Aubin, as Tellqvist waits and wonders, who signed a one-year, one-way contract extension this week.

Tellqvist, too, has a contract for next season. At least the Leafs hold an option on his services for one year at

$589,000. Since Tellqvist is only 26, there’s little doubt they would lock him up as an asset even if they had no plans on keeping him.

That gives the Leafs two goaltenders for next year, neither one of which is an obvious No.1. It seems very unlikely, in this salary-cap era, that they will keep two backup goaltenders on the payroll on guaranteed contracts.

Particularly since prospects Justin Pogge and Tuukka Rask will soon be working their way up the ranks.

The expectation is that Toronto, after buying out Belfour, will seek a starting netminder on the free-agent market or in a trade. Tellqvist could always be part of a package if another team needed a goaltender back.

“I don’t know what they’re thinking at all. We’ll wait and see after the season,” says Tellqvist.

“I don’t know what their plans are, if they’re going to bring in another guy or not. I don’t know.”

No one is certain what Toronto will do, although it does seem the signing of suddenly hot Aubin puts Tellqvist on a slippery slope out of town.

Tellqvist wants to stay in Toronto but, good team guy that he is, said he holds no resentment towards Aubin’s surprising success and his new contract.

“It’s good for him. There’s nothing I can worry about,” he says. “Maybe

‘Everything was about having fun’ From page 36 stand on the bench or watch from the stands.

But he went to the game anyway, a surgical mask over his face to lower the risk of picking up an infection, and watched the girls from the rink’s control room.

This year, at the all-Newfoundland tournament in Corner Brook, the girls earned bronze again.

“With Brian everything was about having fun,” says Quigley’s mom Joan, who has been the team’s manager since it was founded. “The room was always upbeat. He was very competitive, he wanted to win, but you had to have fun doing it. If you talk to his students they’ll tell you he was as much fun in the classroom as he was when he coached the kids.”

Brian’s wife Sandra agrees he was competitive, which is why he’d enjoy the tight games this year in the annual spring play-offs in the Metro Senior Female League.

“He always wanted everyone to do their best,” says Sandra. “He used to say, ‘Don’t ever give up.’ I remember when that girls league started and going down and watching the first practice. Going home that night I said to him, ‘Oh my God, what are you going to do with them?’ Those were my exact words. And he said, ‘You know something? In a couple of years they’re going to be OK.’” Turns out he was right. cwestcott@nl.rogers.com

they’re thinking they want him and me next year in Toronto, you never know.

We’ll see what happens.”

Tellqvist, whether it is with the Leafs or not, believes he has earned the opportunity to have an NHL job next season.

“I think I had a pretty solid year.

Coming into training camp, nobody even expected me to make the team, everyone was questioning me. I at least proved myself to be a pretty good backup I think,” he says.

“I’ve still got a little way to go to be a No.1 guy but I’m 26 and it’s not too bad for being a goaltender. You can have your best years when you’re 28, 29, 30. I’ve still got two more years to get better, that’s the way I look at it.”

In what were two of Toronto’s biggest games of the season last week, Tellqvist allowed five goals on 30 shots in the first and six goals on 29 shots in the second.

“The first game I didn’t think was too bad if you look at the goals,” Tellqvist says, recalling that Montreal meltdown.

“The second game was terrible — but you know what? — it happens ...”

As long as the Leafs stay in the playoff hunt, it’s possible that Tellqvist’s terrible night in Montreal was his last game, and unfortunate legacy, in a Toronto uniform.

Dear Mr. Dunphy

By Karen Quigley January 2006 Coach, you were the greatest, The best I ever had.

You stuck with us through thick and thin, The good times and the bad.

You always had believed in us, Pulled us up when we were down.

Praised us for a job well done, Always smiled instead of frowned.

You helped us reach our higher ground, Taught us how to win.

Not only in the sports we played, But our lives and ourselves within.

You taught us that life can always be fun, If that is what you desire.

To never stop learning, teaching, and sharing, And always be reaching higher.

We saw you as invincible, But that was our mistake.

No man can live through everything, There’s only so much you can take.

The day I heard you had it, That unforgivable curse.

I always thought you’d pull it off, Getting better, never worse.

You held your own, I must agree, Fought it off with all your might.

But it seems your time has come, And I commend you for your long fight.

You never EVER gave up hope, Never let it keep you down.

You stayed positive in the hardest times, And always held your ground.

The times we shared were good and bad, And that I know is true.

But now I know not to be sad, But glad that I met you.

INDEPENDENTSPORTS

SUNDAY THROUGH SATURDAY, APRIL 16-22, 2006 — PAGE 36

Karen Quigley

Paul Daly/The Independent

By Craig Westcott The Independent

T

hey’re in the crossovers for the league championship again this year. The CBR girls hockey team has tied their last three games against Avalon and need a win to advance to the final round.

Brian Dunphy would have loved it.

Unfortunately, the founding coach of the girls hockey program in Conception Bay South passed away last year, just two days after Christmas.

But his coaching legacy lives on, the special armbands his players wear this season in his honour only the most obvious sign of the influence the caring mentor and father of two had on their lives.

“I remember how he would always enter the dressing room and just start pacing and thinking at first,” says Karen Quigley, a 17-year-old goaltender who was one of Dunphy’s original players on the girls team he helped get off the ground five years ago.

“And then he’d always start off by saying that we did a great job and that no matter what, we can always play well. He never got mad. If there was a problem, he’d say what it was and how we could fix it. He always tried to stay on the positive side. Most people can point out a problem. But not many can point out the problem and then fix it.”

When Dunphy, a math teacher at Roncalli High School in Avondale,

Brian’s girls CBR girls hockey team dedicates season to popular, respected coach was diagnosed with cancer two years ago, the players didn’t take it all that seriously. Dunphy himself was so positive about it.

“He never let it drag him down,” says Quigley. “Right from the start I thought, ‘Well, this is nothing, he’ll get better.’ So it (his death) kind of took me by surprise. We knew how much he had done for us all the years that he was with us and we figured we’d make armbands to show our appreciation and to dedicate the rest of the season and our hard work to him.”

The armbands are a royal blue colour with Dunphy’s name in white.

Quigley, who now plays in net for a top high school girls hockey team in Warner, Alta., keeps a couple of the bands hanging in her bedroom. She has Dunphy’s initials written on the back of her helmet.

Marg Noftle, treasurer of CBR Minor Hockey, points to Dunphy’s other coaching accomplishments — 16

national softball tournaments involving all leagues, bringing back four medals, including a gold with a midget boys squad.

“To lose somebody like that,” says Noftle, shaking her head. “We lost a very good coach who supported female sports in this province.”

Dunphy’s widow, Sandra, says her husband’s own love of sports as an athlete probably influenced his decision to coach.

“I was with him for 23 years and he was coaching even back then,” she says. “It was a really, really big part of his life. He lived for it.”

Once his daughters Danielle and Ashley started playing sports, Dunphy started coaching their softball and hockey teams. In 2001, when the CBR Minor Hockey Association got interested in organizing a girls team in response to a decision by the Newfoundland and Labrador Winter Games committee to introduce the

sport the following year, Dunphy signed on as coach.

Sandra says Dunphy always remarked on the difference between coaching girls and boys.

“Girls are more willing to learn, they’re attentive. He always used to say that,” Sandra recalls. “They listen and take everything in.”

In that first season for the girls hockey team, they failed to make the regional playoffs. The following year, however, 24 girls showed up to participate and Dunphy coached them to a gold medal at the all-Newfoundland tournament in Rocky Harbour. The following year, the team earned gold again, this time in St. Anthony. In 2004 they took bronze, followed by silver in 2005.

The CBR girls hosted the tournament that year. Dunphy was taking cancer treatments and was too sick to See “Everything,” page 35

Easter on ice

E

aster week in Newfoundland and Labrador sees hundreds of young hockey players, coaches, parents and friends head to local rinks for the annual smorgasbord known as Hockey Newfoundland and Labrador’s provincial minor hockey championships.

Over 40 tournaments will take place over the course of the Easter holidays in nearly every rink across the province.

That’s in addition to the several female tournaments that took place last weekend.

With that many vehicles on the road, it’s no wonder the gas gougers have

BOB WHITE

Guest column decided to raise the price of petro.

Smart business, I guess, but downright corrupt in my books.

Back to the hockey … and there will be lots of it. Chasing banners to hang from the rafters of their home rinks, each team will play in their own Stanley Cup playoffs. For the players, it’s something they’ve been looking forward to

for months.

Upsets, blow-outs, nail-biters, shootouts, come-from-behind wins, controversies, great passes, spectacular saves, and cheering fans — this week will see it all and much more.

Have fun, and stay safe.

••• Great news out of Labrador last week, when one of the Big Land’s finest sporting personalities was bestowed a prestigious award.

Dave Winters of Happy Valley-Goose Bay was selected the Jr. NBA/Jr. WNBA Coach of the Year as one of the top youth league coaches chosen from

the nearly 50,000 Jr. NBA/Jr. WNBA coaches in the United States, Canada and abroad.

I lived in Goose for a few years, and I’ve seen Dave in action so I can attest to his coaching abilities. He was a tremendous athlete himself, carving out a fine career in several sports, particularly soccer, basketball and lacrosse (he played for the national team in lacrosse). In fact, he played just about every sport, and no matter what it was, he was good at it.

A long-time volunteer coach, and a key figure in the unique and successful Labrador Winter Games, Winters has

been a leader in the local sports community. According to the NBA’s press release, “Winters, of the Queen of Peace After School Basketball Program, creates a positive and rewarding basketball experience for his players. Winters is a great teacher, not only focusing on the fundamental skills of the sport, but highlighting sportsmanship, respect and teamwork. He is commended by parents for treating each child with respect and exhibiting strong leadership and great patience.”

The award recognizes member See “Tale of two,” page 35