VICTORIA — If you’ve ever typed in your email address on a political party website, talked to a candidate on the phone, or mumbled to a canvasser on your doorstep that you might be willing to at least consider supporting their party, then brace yourself: For the next few days, you are one, politically, of the most important people in British Columbia.
Behind the scenes, B.C.’s election has shifted into the get-out-the-vote phase. That means, the top priority in the war rooms of the B.C. Liberals, NDP and Greens is to find anyone who might possibly be a party supporter, and do everything humanly possible to get them to an advance polling station and lock down their vote.
Need directions to your nearest polling station? Not a problem. Want a ride? Hop in. Aren’t sure you can fit voting into your schedule? No worries, someone will come back and remind you in person tomorrow.
There’s an extraordinary amount of effort being put into advance voting in this election. Small armies of volunteers in each riding work the phones and knock on doors, dedicated entirely to making sure you got out either to cast your ballot this past weekend, or intend to do so in the remaining advance polling that runs Wednesday through Saturday.
For most voters, advance voting is about convenience. You can avoid long lines on May 9 by picking an early day instead.
Elections in other provinces and countries have shown it’s growing in popularity. In B.C., advance voting jumped from 5.74 per cent of total voters in 1996, to 17.57 per cent in 2009 and 20.34 per cent in 2013. In response, B.C. added two extra days this time, and boosted the number of advance voting places from 264 to 348.
But for the parties, it’s something entirely different.
The goal, parties say, is to get the for-sure supporters out early, lock down that vote, and then refocus your volunteers on what can really swing the race in your favour: Undecided and new voters. That can make all the difference in a riding like Saanich North and the Islands, a tight three-way race decided by fewer than 400 votes in 2013, or Coquitlam-Maillardville, where the NDP’s Selina Robinson won by 41 votes last time.
“Get out and vote in the advance polls,” Liberal Leader Christy Clark said in Surrey on the weekend. “Do it today, get it out of the way.”
“If everybody in this room could commit to finding five people that make sure go out and vote in advance polls before voting day, what a difference you are going to make,” she added.
“Early voting is really important,” said NDP Leader John Horgan in his home Vancouver Island riding Saturday, where he voted. “We don’t want to have something come up on election day and not get the chance to vote.”
There are other political considerations as well.
For the NDP, the goal is to increase B.C.’s voter participation rate from the dismal 57 per cent turnout in 2013, because lower voter turnout generally helps the incumbent Liberals. So the more publicity over early voting, the more social media activity where people see their friends vote, the more likely they might do it too.
And buried within that is the hope that easier, more frequent, advance voting will somehow attract the most elusive of all voter types — youth.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau won the 2015 federal election in part because of high voter turnout, and a more than 20 per cent increase in the number of people aged 18 to 34. Elections Canada credited more advance polling stations set up at post-secondary campuses and community centres. Federally, the youth voter turnout rate exceeded 57 per cent.
But in B.C., it remains depressingly low.
Only 40 per cent of eligible voters aged 25-34 cast ballots in 2013, compared to 74 per cent of voters aged 65-74. The NDP are trying to entice young people to the ballot box with promises to eliminate interest rates on student loans and provide grants to graduates. But the party debated internally, and then declined, to go so far as to offer partially-free college and university tuition. So it’s unclear if New Democrats have enough bait on the line to reel in young voters.
Elections B.C., meanwhile, said it has ramped up its use of technology to make voting even easier. You don’t even have to go to an advance polling station in your riding. For the first time provincewide, officials will be able to look a voter up on a laptop and print off their absentee voting card with candidate names, right there on site.
B.C.’s official election day remains May 9. But when the votes are tallied that night, the victorious party will no doubt credit part of its success to the ground game that started this weekend and getting as many voters as possible out to the advance polls.
As of Sunday afternoon 118,270 of the province’s 3,156,991 registered voters have voted at an advance voting location.
The latest homeless camp to spring up in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside was quickly filling up with campers Sunday, a day after the city ordered the camp dismantled.
“We’re building up the camp. More people are moving in. We’re making it nice and pretty,” said Maria Wallstam, of Alliance Against Displacement, a group that is supporting the camp.
About 50 people were staying in 25 tents at the camp at 950 Main Street. It was set up Friday.
On Sunday, Wallstam said a steady stream of people were showing up every hour and asking to set up a tent.
“We’re going to have to turn people away soon,” said Wallstam.
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Maria Wallstam, of Alliance Against Displacement, at a homeless camp on Main street near National in Vancouver.
The city had given the campers until Saturday morning to leave, saying the camp violated the Trespass Act and the City Land Regulation Bylaw but only a Vancouver Fire Rescue official visited the camp Sunday and spoke to them about fire safety.
In a statement the city said that although affordable housing is “a critical challenge”and they support the right to engage in “lawful protest” they don’t support the camp.
“Past protest encampments have raised serious fire concerns as well as health and safety risks which required considerable effort by City, Fire and Police resources in order to protect the safety of those within and outside of the camps,” said the statement. “Given the other pressures on those resources, including the response to the ongoing opioid overdose crisis, a protest encampment represents a significant risk.”
The city said staff are working with B.C. Housing to find housing for those who want it. A city spokesman could not say if there were plans to break up the camp.
Along with an empty lot at 946 Main St., the site has been slated by the city for the development of 30 social housing units in partnership with B.C. Housing and Lu’ma Native Housing Society.
Wallstam, who is not staying in the camp, said most of the campers are homeless people who have been living on the street. In the camp she said, people are able to leave their tents pitched and have their belongings looked after by others when they leave.
“Here there is a whole community of people to back you up. All you have to do is shout,” she said. “There is a very strong sense of community.”
Wallstam said the tent city was set up 11 days before the provincial election to draw attention to what her group perceives as a failure by candidates to adequately address homelessness in their platforms and debates.
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Joyce is homeless and living in a tent at a homeless camp on Main street near National in Vancouver.
Joyce, a 38-year-old woman staying at the camp said her and her fiancé had been living at a downtown shelter before moving to the camp Friday.
“The shelters are dirty and there is lots of drug use there,” she said.
Joyce said she never thought she would be an activist.
“We don’t want to just be promised housing. We want to actually see housing,” she said. “It seems like the homeless are being forgotten about. Now we’re being heard. We have a voice here.”
Michael Broadbent is opening up a new boutique grocery store at 343 W. Pender St. He started to take the tile off the floor to expose the original wood, and then decided to redo the east wall.
The previous tenant had put up wood panelling over an old plaster wall, and when Broadbent removed the panels, the plaster underneath started to crumble. Lo and behold if there wasn’t a sign underneath for The Vancouver Daily World, a newspaper that went out of business in 1924.
The sign is a big white circle, with “Business Office of the Daily World” written in orange. And it’s huge, probably 2.5-metres tall.
“That wall is actually the external wall of the building beside it, which burnt down (in 2003),” said Broadbent. “We’ve been taking (the plaster) off bit by bit. The paint underneath has degraded, so we’re trying to be really careful. It’s almost like pastel now, it just rubs off. We’re going to try and brush it up and put some sealant on it so we can save it.”
The World’s office used to be at 426 Homer St. in a building that is now the Platinum Club massage parlour. But it seems to have also had a business office at 337 W. Pender.
The now-gone building at 337 W. Pender used to house the Dominion Hall upstairs, and was built in 1906. Patrick Gunn of Heritage Vancouver said Broadbent’s building was constructed in 1908, which means the sign was probably only visible for a couple of years before it was plastered over.
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Michael Broadbent, left, and Shawn Pisio strip off the plaster covering The Daily World sign.
Early builders often used existing walls on structures next door, probably to save money. In this case they plastered over the wall, then covered the plaster with wallpaper. One of the layers of wallpaper is an art-nouveau floral design that is almost as interesting as the painted World sign. Unfortunately only bits of the wallpaper are salvageable. Broadbent may frame some of them so they can be displayed.
There are more painted signs on the wall. Part of a hand is perched above The World sign, pointing to the front door of the building. If you go inside 343-347 W. Pender, several letters from a huge sign (“ents” and “cet”) are visible on the stairwell. But the business they’re advertising is a mystery.
Painted signs on walls for long-dead businesses are known as “ghost signs.” Several have popped up in recent years as buildings have come down, such as a sign for the 1922 Harold Lloyd movie Grandma’s Boy that reappeared at Granville and Robson streets in 2012.
The Dominion Hall became the Boilermaker’s Hall and then the Pender Auditorium, which was the site of many of Vancouver’s legendary psychedelic rock shows in the 1960s, such as a Grateful Dead show on Aug. 5, 1966.
The World was the top newspaper in early Vancouver. It was once owned by L.D. Taylor, Vancouver’s longest-serving mayor, and styled itself “The People’s Paper” and “The Newspaper that Prints the Facts.”
Today, The World is primarily known for The World Tower at Pender and Beatty streets, which most people call The Sun Tower, because The Vancouver Sun was located there from 1937 to 1965.
When it went up in 1912 the 17-storey beaux-arts structure was touted as the tallest building in the British Empire. But Vancouver went into an economic recession around the First World War, and Taylor lost control of The World in 1915.
The World went out of business in 1924, when it was bought by and folded into The Sun. Original copies of The World are rare, but it has been scanned and can be read online at newspapers.com, a subscription service that carries many old North American papers.
Art-nouveau wallpaper, circa 1908, was unearthed during a reno at 343 W. Pender St. The wallpaper had been placed on top of plaster, which in turn was on top of an old sign for The Vancouver Daily World’s business office.
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The demolition of a few buildings in the Granville/Robson block in 2012 unveiled a “ghost sign” advertising a 1922 Harold Lloyd movie at the Capitol Theatre.
LANGLEY — The semi-truck rumbles forward as Sophia Athanas smoothly shifts through several gears in quick succession.
Taking advantage of a gap in traffic, she makes a right turn onto 56th Avenue, watching her side-view mirror to ensure her 53-foot trailer clears the curb. Then, she’s shifting up again, cruising through a busy industrial area on the Langley-Abbotsford border with the wind from an open window blowing through her long, blond hair.
It’s tempting to label Athanas a “queen of the road,” or, at the very least, a woman making inroads in a male-dominated industry. After all, she’s an attractive young woman at the wheel of a big rig. But, for the Maple Ridge mom, trucking is all about finding a stable, well-paying job, so she can provide for her two sons, ages eight and 18 months. The fact that she’s challenging stereotypes about women’s work is secondary.
“I just want all the women out there to know that if you want to get into this, you can,” she said Friday in an interview at Valley Driving School, where she’s completing her training after recently passing her Class 1 driver’s test.
Athanas decided to become a truck driver after her second maternity leave ended a few months ago.
“In the past I’d worked as a server, but I wanted to find something that paid a little more,” she explained. “Serving is tough. You work nights, weekends, holidays. I’ve always liked driving, so I thought, ‘Why not?’ ”
When signing-up for driving school, Athanas learned about the YWCA‘s Changing Gears program, which receives funding from both the federal and provincial governments to increase the number of women in B.C.’s trucking industry.
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Sophia Athanas stands in front of an 18-wheeler at the Valley Driving School in Langley on April 28.
It’s estimated about three per cent of Canadian truckers are women, said program manager Tina Hurd, who believes the reason is largely due to the male-dominated trucking culture.
“Any-size person can do this job,” she said. “With technology, being a truck driver doesn’t require heavy lifting. It’s really a job anyone can do.”
The free, 23-week Changing Gears program is open to women on employment insurance (or returning from mat leave) and incorporates on-the-road practise, as well as self-defence, and health and safety training. Partnerships with several local trucking companies help grads find work with supportive employers in an industry that’s always looking for drivers. Six women received their Class 1 licences after the program’s first run in September. Nine women, including Athanas, were accepted for the second intake and are in various stages of getting their licences.
When asked about the toughest part of driving a big truck, Athanas didn’t hesitate: “Backing-up,” she said, adding she was very nervous on her first day of the program. “I told my son I was scared. I wanted to show him that as an adult we can be afraid, but we have to push through.”
As she nears the end of the program, Athanas said she feels empowered: “I think that if you challenge yourself, you’ll be amazed at what you can accomplish.”
The good folks with RUNVAN — and trust me they are first-rate people — expect to draw 17,000 runners from more than 60 countries to the Left Coast this weekend for the annual BMO Vancouver Marathon.
Forbes, CNN and USA Today have recognized this May tradition as one of the top destination marathons in the world — for those of us fortunate enough to live and run in this postcard patch of the province, that’s not a shocker!
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Members of West Van Run Club hung around the BMO Vancouver Marathon finish line last year to congratulate teammates and friends! (Gord Kurenoff photo)
This past weekend Fort Langley served up a perfect spring morning for MEC Langley’s Trans Canada Trail Run. Less than 24 hours earlier my Langley Sun Run InTraining crew met for an 8K “victory lap” of a Willoughby neighbourhood and then enjoyed a food feast.
Of course, more than 41,000 ran the streets of Vancouver a week earlier in the 33rd Vancouver Sun Run on a picture-perfect morning. And the next month promises more fun events and memories.
The BMO Marathon will stage a three-day health, sports and lifestyle expo starting on Thursday at the Vancouver Convention Centre. On Saturday there will be a kids’ run and 2.5K walk, followed by Sunday’s race-filled lineup. The half marathon gets going at 7 a.m., the marathon starts at 8:30 a.m., followed by the 8K at 9:30 a.m.
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These Toronto-based women showed up to run in the BMO Vancouver Marathon last year and play tourist. (Gord Kurenoff photo)
I took part in the 8K last year and barely beat a guy dressed in a banana costume to the finish line. That climb from the seawall up to the West Pender Street finish line (think the Sun Run start in reverse) had me blathering like I was presiding over the White House! I “peeled” by the Big Banana with 800 metres to go and received the coveted 8K medal.
He told me his outfit got “super hot” climbing to the finish, but cracked: “You’re sweating tons more than me and you didn’t wear a costume!”
Guess he didn’t notice the spare tire under my shirt!
Like the Sun Run, there will be lots of quality street entertainment, hundreds of signs, thousands of spectators, a huge roster of elite athletes, charity donations and several road closures.
To see the exact lineup, race maps, late entries and more info, click HERE.
For a musical photo recap of last year’s run, and a tribute toPrince, click HERE.
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MEC Langley’s Trans Canada Trail Run attracted a huge turnout on Sunday morning as racers tackled the marathon, half-marathon, 10K and 5K courses that finished in Fort Langley. (Gord Kurenoff photo)
Runners, sun shine in Fort Langley races
Kathie Schellenberg of MEC Langley should of been on speed dial last year for North American communities in need of rain, hail, wind, falling trees, power outages and snow!
We joked that CNN should have just issued her storm gear and let the outreach and learning coordinator with MEC report local weather disasters!
To see my photos of Sunday’s MEC event, click HERE.
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The awesome volunteer official at the halfway mark in Sunday’s 5K asked if I needed anything. I said ‘Smile, I need a selfie as an excuse to stop!’
Well, on Sunday at Fort Langley, Schellenberg almost needed suntan lotion as spring sunshine and hundreds of smiling runners arrived for the Trans Canada Trail Run, which consisted of a marathon, half marathon, 10K and 5K. The half marathon entrants were taken by bus to Pitt Meadows and then they ran back to Fort Langley.
(Apparently, Ms. Schellenberg “forgot” to pay the driver extra to wait at the 5K’s halfway point to take me to the finish line!)
If Sunday’s event wasn’t the best one staged by the MEC Langley crew it certainly ranked 1b. There was a vibe, lots of excitement, runners (and walkers) of all ages and skill levels, and lots of post-race food and vendors.
The next two races in the MEC Lower Mainland 2017 Road Race Series are: June 11 in Steveston (21.1K, 10K and 5K) and July 9 at Abbotsford airport (10K and5K).
For results of Sunday’s events, expected to be posted later in the evening by the good folks at TRIO Sports Events, click HERE.
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The Sun Run InTraining crew from W.C. Blair Rec Centre pose in the frog park outside of Langley Events Centre while doing a wind-up workout on Saturday morning. (Gord Kurenoff photo)
Runners got’er done
When the calendar flipped to 2017 a couple dozen people in Langley made a commitment to do the Vancouver Sun Run.
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As sign that said Multi-Age Licensed Day Care made us all laugh Saturday morning, something we did a lot of since meeting in January.
Led by a quality coordinator Sandra Jongs Sayer — who has completed 27 Sun Runs in the past — this motley crew went through a 13-week, weather-challenged winter of training, became friends and crushed the 10K on April 23.
Inside B.C. Place Stadium, sitting under the Big W after the big run, about a dozen in the group said they were really bummed out that the clinic was over. So, we decided to add an extra unofficial week to say our farewells over breakfast.
We ran 8K Saturday, posed for a number of hilarious (and childish) photos, carbo-loaded after and said our goodbyes. And yes, one extra week didn’t change much — we were all still bummed out to end this pavement-pounding party.
For a fun look at our Get-er Done Run photos click HERE.
FOOT NOTES: Special thanks to Summerfast race director Rick Horne for inviting me to run in the Vancouver Falcons Athletic Club’s flat and fast 10K in Stanley Park on Saturday, July 15. While Rick knows 10Ks aren’t my wheelhouse (yet), he mentioned the post-race baking and treats, which is my wheelhouse. So I’m in! For more info, or to enter the Summerfast 10K Run or Walk, click HERE … The Oasis Shaughnessy 8K and TNT 5K Poker Walk is set for Sunday, May 21. That’s a new date, and hosts Lions Gate Road Runners are busy adding a whole bunch of new attractions (and snacks) to the 8:30 a.m. run/walk that showcases some of the nicest homes in Vancouver. For more info, or to enter, click HERE. Thanks to LGRR for inviting me, and my baker/coach, to tackle the “undulating” route again!
Projects that a couple of years ago created a construction mini boom in the Skeena riding in northwest B.C. are complete, including a $4.8-billion aluminum smelter upgrade and a $736-million power line.
The boom, which created thousands of jobs, was also fuelled by hundreds of millions spent by Shell and Chevron on planning and groundwork for their proposed liquefied natural gas export projects in the riding.
But the nearly $30-billion in LNG projects have not proceeded, battered by reduced global demand, competition from new entrants such as in the U.S., and the need for energy companies to reduce capital spending after oil prices plummeted in 2015.
It has meant the prospects for continuing economic resurgence has dimmed considerably in the riding of Skeena, expected to be hotly contested in the May 9 election.
In the past two decades, the riding’s two main communities, Terrace and Kitimat, have been hammered by huge forestry job losses. That includes the 2010 loss of 535 high-paying jobs in Kitimat when West Fraser closed its paper mill.
There were two sawmills in Terrace; only one remains.
And while Rio Tinto’s modernization of its aluminum smelter in Kitimat secured the plant’s future, it reduced the permanent workforce by 400.
So, the construction jobs were welcome.
Now, people, including those from First Nations that had found jobs in LNG development, are looking for work again, sometimes far afield, or have left the region.
“Our town is dying, losing a lot of industry, services, small businesses. It’s very, very unfortunate,” said former Kitimat mayor Joanne Monaghan.
The economic challenges facing rural communities — although they vary across the province — are expected to be a key issue in the provincial election.
But there are no simple answers the B.C. Liberals, NDP and Greens can dish up, particularly given the minefield they face in navigating policies on jobs, protecting the environment and aboriginal rights.
Enbridge’s $7.9-billion Northern Gateway oil pipeline through northern B.C. — meant to deliver crude from the Alberta oilsands to new markets in Asia — is a prime example of this political challenge.
The federal Liberal government issued a final “no” to the pipeline last year.
But critical blows had already been delivered long before when First Nations and municipalities in northwest B.C. came out strongly against the project over concerns a spill along a river or in the ocean would devastate the environment and the existing tourist and fisheries economy.
In the 2013 election, then NDP-leader Adrian Dix learned the risk of wading into natural resource projects. He was criticized by some trade unions that traditionally support the party for suddenly announcing during the campaign he opposed Kinder Morgan’s $6.8-billion Trans Mountain pipeline expansion from Alberta to Burnaby, a move that had been calculated to shore up environmental support.
Ron Burnett, a past president of the former Kitimat-Terrace Industrial Development Society, believes jobs will be the over-riding issue in the election in the region, given the losses of long-term forestry jobs. “It affects just about everybody,” he said.
Greg Knox, executive director of the SkeenaWild Conservation Trust, said LNG and mining is welcome if done right: “There are a lot of concerns about the impacts from these projects. People are not necessarily opposed, but people definitely want it to be done responsibly.”
There are 33 rural ridings in B.C., those outside the Lower Mainland and Greater Victoria.
Although some of those ridings deemed rural by Postmedia include urban areas — such as Nanaimo, Kelowna, Kamloops and Prince George — they are greatly affected by the industry in their rural regions including forestry, mining, energy, agriculture and tourism.
In the 2013 election, the B.C. Liberals won 20 of those rural seats and the NDP the remaining 13. The previous election the tally was Liberals 19, NDP 14.
There are regions where it is hard to imagine there being much of a change this election, notwithstanding the economic, social or environmental challenges they face.
In northeast B.C., even though unemployment jumped to 10 per cent in March, twice that of the Lower Mainland, the voters in the two Peace River ridings have not voted for a left-leaning party since just after the Second World War.
Vancouver Island has been a stronghold for the NDP for decades, as have some ridings in the Kootenay region, where the unemployment rate was 8.3 per cent in March for the larger southwest corner of the province, including the Okanagan.
A Postmedia analysis, using past electoral history and margins of victory, shows there may only be a half a dozen or so rural ridings that could be in play on May 9.
But even a swing of several seats to the NDP, or Liberals, in rural B.C. would be a significant factor where usually the parties are separated by 15 or less seats in provincial elections.
Among the ridings in play are the Comox Valley riding, won by the Liberals in the last election by less than six per cent of the votes. The riding had voted NDP in the 1990s.
Also potentially in play is Kamloops North, where Terry Lake, who held the health portfolio, is not running again. He won the riding by only about 500 votes in 2009, but a wider margin in 2013.
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Ellis Ross, Liberal candidate for Skeena.
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Bruce Bidgood, NDP candidate for Skeena.
In Skeena — and the other two northwest B.C. ridings of North Coast and Stikine — the NDP have won for almost two decades.
However, the margins of victory have not always been great.
In the 2013 election, the NDP’s Robin Austin won by less than 600 votes in Skeena, and by less than 400 votes in 2005, both times edging Liberal candidates.
Austin is not running again, replaced by Bruce Bidgood, a former Terrace city councillor.
Bidgood said there’s little doubt people want good jobs, but he said he believes they also want affordable living in an unspoiled environment.
He said people in the North want projects to meet the same standards that would be expected in the Lower Mainland, noting it was disappointing the aluminum smelter modernization didn’t include scrubbers to reduce sulphur dioxide air pollution.
“We need a government that will entice investment but also monitor the environment and regulate,” said Bidgood, whose party is promising a revamped environmental assessment and regulatory framework.
Premier Christy Clark hand-picked the Liberal candidate for Skeena, former Haisla Nation chief councillor Ellis Ross, a backer of LNG, although the Haisla were opposed to the Northern Gateway pipeline.
Ross said people want sustainable development that protects the environment, but stressed that jobs are important.
“When the industry leaves town, everybody else leaves town,” said Ross.
“If you don’t have a job and you don’t have services, it’s pretty hard to stick around,” he said, noting Kitimat no longer has a movie theatre, for example.
Ross sees opportunity for forestry, while Bidgood said more focus is needed on smaller companies.
There is no Green candidate in Skeena.
Another rural swing riding is Cariboo North.
Liberal Coralee Oakes won the riding in 2013 by just 600 votes, defeating Bob Simpson, now mayor of Quesnel, who ran as an independent.
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Scott Elliot, NDP candidate in Cariboo North.
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Coralee Oakes, Liberal candidate in Cariboo North.
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Richard Jaques, Green candidate in Cariboo North.
The riding epitomizes the challenges facing constituencies in the Interior with forestry-based economies.
Quesnel, a community of about 10,000, lost a sawmill in 2013 when Canfor shuttered its operation because of a declining timber supply, a result of the mountain pine beetle epidemic that killed larges swaths of lodgepole pine in the Interior.
In 2015, Tolko cut production at its Quesnel mill in half.
The beetle epidemic could ultimately result in more downsizing, and the latest lumber trade dispute with the U.S. will create additional hardship.
Simpson says the resource issues facing the community are complex and important, however, people are also concerned with issues of affordability and services.
Unlike in the Lower Mainland, a nice home can be bought for $250,000, and people who still have well-paying industrial or public service jobs are doing fine, he said. But people with lower incomes in service jobs find rent expensive, said Simpson.
“We have no middle economy,” he said. “I do think the key consideration (in the election) will be — how does it feel in my household.”
In Kamloops-North Thompson, which was last held by the NDP in 1991, the proposed $1.3-billion Ajax gold and copper mine promises to create hundreds of construction and long-term jobs.
However, the proximity of the proposed mine to the community, including an elementary school, has made the project controversial, another example of how environmental concerns in resource-based communities can be paramount.
John Schleiermacher of the Kamloops Area Preservation Association, who opposes the Ajax mine, said the community is not anti-development, pointing to its general support of the proposed Trans Mountain oil pipeline expansion.
But it’s an issue of the location of the Ajax mine and the mining waste area, which was recently opposed by area First Nations following their own environmental assessment, he said.
“It’s going to be a big part of the election,” said Schleiermacher.
Moe Elewonibi was playing for the Philadelphia Eagles when he suffered a nasty knee injury.
Already dabbling in alcohol and street drugs, he soon began to abuse prescription medications as well, and began a twisting tale of addiction, treatment and relapse that ended here in B.C., where he now works as a counsellor at Edgewood Treatment Centre in Nanaimo.
Today, in response to the drug overdose crisis that claimed nearly 1,000 lives last year, Canada’s largest private addiction treatment company announced it will offer free treatment to one opioid addict each month over 12 months, services worth about $500,000.
Edgewood typically takes in about 50 patients a month across Canada for help with alcohol, street drugs, gambling and eating disorders. Opioid addicts typically stay in the facility for 65 to 75 days, usually at a cost of $425 per day.
People arrive to treatment hopeless, and Elewonibi was no exception. After being injured and swaddled in a hip cast for months, he became addicted to painkillers and ended up in treatment. He relapsed a few years later, this time on street drugs.
That chapter closed when his mother found his drug paraphernalia, confronted him, and took him to Edgewood at her own expense.
“I remember when I first arrived, after I stopped drinking and using. I was disappointed when I woke up the next day,” he recalled.
But the treatment and ongoing support allowed him to return to the game and begin anew, sober.
At the end of his pro career — which included two stints with the B.C. Lions — Elewonibi worked as a probation officer and as an addictions counsellor for the John Howard Society, but ended up working at the treatment centre that finally gave him back his life, Edgewood.
“It’s an amazing process to watch, you see the light coming back into people,” he said. “When you get in a room with other people with the same problems, there’s a real unifying effect and you understand: I’m not a monster or crazy.”
Like Elewonibi, more than 50 per cent of the clinical staff are in recovery. Recovering from what, it doesn’t matter.
“Once you are weaned from whatever substance brought you here, the treatment we offer is the same for everyone,” said Elizabeth Loudon, Edgewood’s clinical director. “We want people to stabilize, learn about their addiction, recognize unhealthy behaviour, and practice new behaviours before they head out of in-patient care.”
Unlike government-funded harm reduction plans that maintain opioid addicts with methadone and suboxone, Edgewood is an abstinence-based program consisting of withdrawal management followed by psychiatric therapy, peer counselling and out-patient support lasting up to a year.
Many addicts also have untreated mental issues, so that piece is integral to Edgewood’s program.
There are 1,500 government-funded treatment beds in B.C., according to the ministry of health, including 500 added in the past three years. Plus, there are an unknown number of private beds with fees ranging from a few hundred dollars a month up to $26,000. Some allow substitution drugs, others do not.
Wait times for treatment vary wildly from facility to facility, many between two weeks and four months, according to a survey by drugrehab.ca.
“We are watching all these people pass away due to fentanyl,” said Loudon. “We believe that we provide some pretty amazing care, so we really wanted to reach out and help some of these people who are struggling with opioid addiction.”
About 50 per cent of opioid addicts treated by Edgewood remain sober after six months.
“Opioid addiction is harder to treat than other addictions, so we tend to do a lot of work with them post-treatment for at least a year,” she said.
Continuing care usually includes family counselling, which Edgewood is also providing at no charge.
People interested in applying for free opioid addiction treatment can call Edgewood’s admissions line at 1-250-760-1117 or apply at
First in a three-part series; John Horgan profile on May 3, Andrew Weaver on May 4.
Flanked by an excavator, surrounded by two dozen workers and wearing her trademark blue hard hat, B.C. Liberal Leader Christy Clark delivered the kind of campaign speech that suggested how she hopes history will remember her.
The Fort St. John speech highlighted the image Clark has crafted for herself in the Interior and across northern B.C., where she’s shifted her government’s power base and made her most ambitious gamble: the $9-billon Site C dam.
To her vocal critics, Site C is a hydroelectric white elephant that will saddle the province with unnecessary power at overly expensive rates. To Clark, it’s a glimpse into how she defines her six years in office.
“B.C.’s electricity is clean, reliable and low cost, because we have had premiers in the past that have the courage to look forward, not one year or two years, but 10 years, and endowed us with this incredible dam system we have that’s given us this clean energy,” she told the April 18 rally at Inland Concrete.
“Why do we have the fourth-lowest rates in North America today, and why are we able to work mostly from clean power in B.C.? Because a generation under W.A.C. Bennett made that investment in our future. Our kids deserve that from us.”
W.A.C. Bennett, B.C.’s 25th premier, looms large over Clark’s premiership, both as an inspiration and comparison. He holds B.C.’s political longevity record at 20 years in government. The B.C. Liberals will match it if Clark, B.C.’s 34th premier, leads them to re-election on May 9.
But it’s more than just Bennett’s tenure that Clark seeks to emulate.
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W.A.C. Bennett — the original ‘Premier Hard Hat’ — at the ceremony marking the construction of the Peace River Power Dam in July 1964. Christy Clark has embraced many of his themes, and image, in her campaigning since becoming premier in 2011.
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B.C. Liberal leader Christy Clark presses the flesh, with her trademark hard hat on, in greeting workers at the April 18 campaign stop at Inland Concrete in Fort St. John. Clark’s sunny populism on the campaign trail is reminiscent of a ‘happy warrior’ from an earlier era in W.A.C. Bennett.
She has steeped herself in his legacy as a builder who ambitiously grew B.C.’s modern highway and ferry system from 1952 to 1972. As a risk-taker, who famously nationalized what is now B.C. Hydro amid a dispute with Ottawa over the Columbia River Treaty, and then called a snap election to increase his majority. As a visionary, who brushed aside short-term criticism to build the dams on the Columbia and Peace Rivers that today form the backbone of our modern-day power system. As the grandfather of populist politics in B.C., who ran his government like he ran his Kelowna hardware store, while fighting against the business elites and unions who’d shunned him in Vancouver and Victoria.
“W.A.C. Bennett is the greatest premier British Columbia ever had,” Clark said in an interview. “What always impressed me about him was his ability to look into the future and see what was needed. And he endured all the critics who couldn’t see as far as he could, and who criticized him and said this isn’t needed. In so many cases, especially B.C. Hydro, he ended up being right.”
And where he wasn’t right, he knew how to pivot. Bennett’s famous “second look” saw him dramatically change government’s course if his fine-tuned political instincts sensed it was out of step with public sentiment. He would do it all with his trademark Cheshire cat grin, in place at all times, no matter how bad things got. Veteran journalist Bruce Hutchison once described it as a “fixed neon smile, the bustling salesman’s assurance, the relentless torrent of speech.”
Clark certainly has the instincts, the populist touch, the pivot and the smile. Those were most recently on display last year, when she abruptly introduced a 15-per-cent foreign buyers tax, after months of insisting foreign buyers weren’t distorting Metro Vancouver’s housing market. The Opposition, media and pundits howled at her for flip-flopping. But Clark, like Bennett, believed only one thing really mattered: showing the public she was listening.
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Brad Bennett (above), who has been a campaign-trail confidante of Liberal Leader Christy Clark for her last two campaigns, is the direct connection between Clark and his grandfather, the legendary W.A.C. Bennett. ‘She loves both sides of the job, politics and governing and setting good public policy, visioning, making stuff happen just as much as my granddad did,’ he says.
Clark has surrounded herself with the Bennett legacy. She holds his old riding in Kelowna (“the cradle of free enterprise,” as she once dubbed it). Bennett’s grandson Brad is campaigning alongside Clark for the second time. Her two closest aides, Adam and Jordan McPhee, are the grandsons of the late Robert Bonner — W.A.C. Bennett’s attorney general, closest adviser and perhaps the only colleague he ever really trusted at the legislature.
“She loves both sides of the job, politics and governing, and setting good public policy, visioning, making stuff happen just as much as my granddad did,” said Brad Bennett, chairman of B.C. Hydro, whose father Bill was also premier from 1975 to 1986.
“My dad didn’t like the politics part of the job much. But she’s similar to my dad in the style and way she runs government and delegates to her ministers.”
Clark also shares some of the same criticisms directed at W.A.C. — mainly that she’s all politics, all the time, and that a perpetual desire to run for re-election appears to overshadow her governing.
Clark’s personal life has been well documented over her almost 20 years in politics. She’s a 51-year-old single mother of 15-year-old Hamish. If you ask (and even if you don’t), she’ll regale you with stories about his musical theatre, teenage ways, protective instincts and the challenge of finding enough quality time for the two of them. Her ex-husband, Liberal strategist Mark Marissen, remains one of her most vocal public supporters.
Clark’s personal appeal was certainly part of her come-from-behind victory in 2013. But since then, with no internal critics and complete control of a legislative majority, Clark’s had four years of unopposed freedom with which to govern.
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Christy Clark on election night, 2013, hugs her son Hamish while celebrating her first election as premier. ‘I work really hard to carve out good time for just the two of us,’ she says.
And yet, as her critics point out, she’s made only a few dramatic moves during that time. She spent her early days setting up a tax regime for a liquefied natural gas industry that has failed to materialize. Her jobs plan has remained largely unchanged for years, although she credits it with giving B.C. the lowest unemployment rate in Canada. Her budgets have tended to feature constrained spending and service cutbacks, although most recently they have been awash in cash from the booming (some argue out of control) real estate sector.
Clark’s kept many key cabinet ministers in place for almost her entire four-year term, such as Finance Minister Mike de Jong and Jobs Minister Shirley Bond. She has said she doesn’t feel the need to constantly freshen portfolios, nor does she redirect her government off into new directions annually like her predecessor Gordon Campbell did with his sudden fixation on, say, the carbon tax, or First Nations reconciliation.
Instead, Clark seems to take a bigger-pictureview of governing, while her ministers hash out details. “You can get endlessly ground into the dirt if every day all you worry about is issues management,” said Mike McDonald, her longtime friend and former chief of staff.
“The premier worries about which way the ship of state is heading and getting it through rough waters. She’s really sorted out what’s important in her role.”
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Christy Clark has kept many of her key cabinet ministers in place, like Finance Minister Mike de Jong (right), over her post-2013 election, four-year term in office rather than shuffling the deck.
W.A.C. Bennett was his own finance minister because he trusted no one else with the numbers. Campbell could be de facto minister of everything, at times. Clark, said McDonald, operates more as a chairman of the board.
Outgoing Energy Minister Bill Bennett, who served under both Clark and Campbell, said Clark is willing to be challenged in private.
He cited his idea for B.C. Hydro’s 10-year rates plan.
“That was not enthusiastically supported, either, internally,” he said. “But she let me give it my best shot, so to speak, within cabinet and within caucus, and I was able to convince people it was the right thing to do. It goes on. I’ve got a whole list as long as my arm.
“She will challenge you hard,” he added. “And if you are not up to it, you are not going to get to do it. But if you are prepared and got all the facts at your fingertips and make a strong argument of the politics of it, she’s not overbearing.”
Clark said she’s never understood the management style of browbeating colleagues into yes-people. “We’re made better when we are surrounded by smart people. And why have smart people around, then, if you won’t let them talk?” she said.
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Liberal cabinet minister Bill Bennett (right) with Christy Clark during a 2013 campaign stop in Cranbrook. Bennett, who is retiring from politics, says Clark is willing to engage in give and take with her ministers in private. ‘If you are prepared and got all the facts at your fingertips and make a strong argument of the politics of it, she not overbearing,’ he says.
Although Clark shares similarities to W.A.C. Bennett’s brand of populist leadership, she’s not quite the mirror image of the legendary premier, said veteran political scientist Norman Ruff.
“His populist sign was that the big businesses are against me, the big unions are against me, the people are for me,” said Ruff. “Whereas I’m not so sure that she comes across as antagonistic to big business. So the whole populist jigsaw isn’t quite there.”
Clark has nonetheless tapped into Bennett’s “politics of resource exploitation,” which remain a bedrock of B.C. political success, said Ruff.
Despite W.A.C. Bennett’s legendary political antenna, he lost the pulse of an evolving province at the 20-year mark, as B.C. transformed into the modern welfare state, including social assistance and universal health care, leaving behind his vision for The Good Life, which advocated job creation in natural resource industries and through expansion of the province’s transportation network of highways and ferries.
“In nature you have two laws, both opposites — a law of growth and a law of decay,” Bennett told biographer David Mitchell for the book W.A.C. Bennett and the Rise of British Columbia.
“The older a tree gets, it starts to decay. The older a government gets, it gets into some problems. … We’d been in office longer than any other government in the history of the province. People thought it was time for a change.”
Decay and change are now major risks for Clark’s Liberals, too, at the 16-year mark of their tenure in power.
But she rejects the comparison. Key to her argument is convincing the electorate they are judging her for a second term as premier, and not 16 years of Liberal rule or her 16 non-consecutive years as an MLA in both opposition and government.
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B.C. Liberal Leader Christy Clark dons one of her favourite accessories — the industrial hard hat — for a campaign appearance at FibreCo Export Inc. in North Vancouver this week.
“I think that different leadership creates a very different political party and government,” she said.
“Most people would say I’ve operated our government a lot differently from the way my predecessor did. But this job focus is something that’s new for our government. It does harken back to the glory days of W.A.C. Bennett, for sure. He wanted to get the working man working, get it done. That’s what I want to do, too.”
W.A.C. Bennett could be a deeply unpopular and polarizing figure as well. One major criticism was he appeared to care more about the economy, at times, than people. It’s a critique that has been levelled at Clark, too, especially because she helms a government that has refused to raise the welfare rate for a decade.
The NDP has painted her as a cold elitist, whose argument that the unemployed should find jobs is a reflection of a mean-spirited character. Clark said that’s unfair, and has recently begun speaking about her late father’s mental illness and alcoholism, and how his job as a teacher was for many years the only thing that kept him alive.
“When he retired, that was when he started to die. And he died pretty fast after that, because it was work that allowed him to find the meaning in life and give him an identity in the world … that allowed him to live with his untreated mental illness,” said Clark.
“It was after he died, I spent a lot of time thinking about that, and that was when I realized how much a job matters.”
Back on the campaign trail, Clark’s Bennett-inspired stump speech continues to evolve.
“This province was not built by people without guts. This province was built by determined, hard-working people who were prepared to put their backs into it,” she said at a recent Prince George rally. “That’s what built resource communities like Prince George, and that’s what’s built every single inch of this province. We in the B.C. Liberals have not forgotten working people, and we have not forgotten hard work.”
It’s a speech you could almost imagine W.A.C. delivering. Voters will ultimately decide on May 9 whether Clark is merely a brief imitation of one of the province’s greatest premiers, or the true heir to the Bennett dynasty.
The City of Vancouver will try to collect on a repair bill of at least $9.9 million after un-permitted drilling on a city residential lot caused a massive aquifer flood that has yet to be contained, and has endangered neighbouring multimillion-dollar homes.
In September 2015, Feng Lin Liu, owner of 7084 Beechwood, was building a mansion on his $3-million vacant lot. A contractor who was hired “on a handshake” to build Liu’s home hired an inexperienced team of drillers to install a geothermal heating system, according to the city. The drillers — also hired on a handshake — pierced the aquifer, unleashing torrents that have been gushing about two million litres of water a day. The accident sparked an evacuation order and fears that a sinkhole could swallow about 12 nearby homes.
The drillers quickly fled the construction site and left Canada, according to the city. Liu is now responsible for the damage, deputy city manager Paul Mochrie told Postmedia News last week.
By March end, the city had paid $7.9 million to stop the underground flood, Mochrie said. The city hopes that B.C. Groundwater, the company contracted to cap the aquifer and shore up shaky ground, will finish the task by midsummer, leaving the city with an estimated bill of $9.9 million.
But the city has repeatedly underestimated the difficulty and cost of the operation. In September 2015, a city staffer wrote, “total costs may go to $200,000 … (and) it sounds like the homeowner is taking some steps to manage things.” Last August, the city estimated it could take another month to stop the flooding and finish repair work under 7084 Beechwood.
“It is the first time in B.C. anyone has had to deal with a flooding aquifer in a dense urban area,” Mochrie explained. “Even for the contractor, it has been very difficult to ascertain.”
Thierry Carriou of B.C. Groundwater said the firm is now trying to pour concrete and plug the breach, and he is “confident” of a 70-per-cent chance the task will succeed.
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Nearly two million litres of water spill each day from an accidental breach of an aquifer at a house under construction at 7084 Beechwood St. in Vancouver.
“There is always risk until the well is fully empty, but the risk has been reduced,” Carriou said.
When the city’s final bill is paid, efforts to recoup costs in B.C. courts could prove as messy and challenging as plugging the aquifer.
The city has declared the drilling accident at Liu’s Beechwood lot a nuisance. Mochrie said under the order, since Liu didn’t “remedy” damage for the un-permitted drilling work, the city took over and paid for repairs. The city has since applied unpaid taxes against the property, he said.
Property-tax documents indicate about $2 million in tax has been levied, so far.
“That tax needs to be paid by anyone who owns the property,” Mochrie said. Mochrie said that could include CIBC, the bank that provided Liu with a mortgage for the property. CIBC is now foreclosing on Liu’s Beechwood property, legal filings show, and a number of contractors have also placed builder’s liens against the property.
In January, Liu stopped making his mortgage payments, and CIBC is now owed $1.67 million on Liu’s $1.75-million loan, B.C. Supreme Court foreclosure filings say. CIBC has had difficulty locating and serving Liu with legal notices, according to recent court filings.
In late April, a B.C. Supreme Court order permitted CIBC to send Liu notice-of-foreclosure proceedings to the mailing address of a $3.7-million, 5600-block Elizabeth Street home. Mortgage documents for the Beechwood property say that Liu is a businessman, and that his home address is a $5.5-million, 2600-block Edgar Crescent home.
The value of Liu’s Beechwood property was assessed at $3.06 million in 2016. But an updated 2017 assessment has reduced the value to $2.09 million, which means the city’s mounting repair costs will far exceed the property’s value.
Mochrie said the final tax bill against the Beechwood property could be increased.
“Our legal team will be exploring every legal avenue, including if there are other assets the city could seek and claim (from Liu),” Mochrie said. “In order to collect, we will be looking to find him.”
Mochrie said the B.C. government — which has jurisdiction over underground water regulations — has committed to pay $1 million of the city’s un-recovered aquifer repair bill.
The two homes adjacent to the Beechwood lot remain evacuated. They were valued at a combined $9.3 million last year. The surrounding 10 properties, which were put on evacuation alert, were valued at a combined $50 million in 2016. Impact on the real estate market immediately surrounding 7084 Beechwood remains an unanswered question while work to repair the aquifer continues.
“We have no indication there is further risk to these properties,” Mochrie said.
In August 2016, Postmedia attended Liu’s listed home address in the 2600-block Edgar Crescent in Arbutus Ridge, an affluent Vancouver neighbourhood to the north of Beechwood. A middle-aged man answered the door, but said his English wasn’t very good. When asked if he was Liu, the man indicated he didn’t understand the question. When shown Liu’s name and street address, the man repeatedly said, “No.”
A few kilometres south of Edgar Crescent is the Kerrisdale home of Libo Sun. City documents obtained through a freedom of information request list Sun as the contractor at the Beechwood property.
MAPLE RIDGE — Officials say the mayor of Maple Ridge has cut her public appearances following a series of online harassment.
Ted Swabey, chief administrative officer with the City of Maple Ridge, says officials recently received “credible information” about a personal threat to Mayor Nicole Read.
He says Read has “curtailed her public appearances” while RCMP investigate.
Ridge Meadows RCMP were not immediately available to comment on the case.
Swabey says the situation has been difficult for Read and her family and that the mayor is hopeful she can resume her duties soon.
He says all elected officials and staff should feel safe and be able to do their work free of harassment.
A trio of B.C. Green party candidates have apologized to their party over unsavoury or offensive posts found on their Twitter or Facebook accounts.
Over the past several weeks, James Marshall, Arthur Green and Ryan Marciniw have scrubbed their accounts of questionable content that had been missed by a contractor hired by the party to vet its candidates’ social media content, confirmed Stefan Jonsson, the party’s director of communications, in a Monday interview.
The handful of offending posts, which date back to 2008, include mostly poorly attempted jokes and crackpot conspiracy theories.
When asked whether the candidates still had the support of the party, Jonsson said: “Yes. Because they have all expressed sincere regret and apologized. It would be a very different story if they backpedalled and tried to make excuses.”
Marciniw, the Green party candidate for Richmond North Centre, had tweeted in support of fat shaming (claiming it had led him to slim down) and retweeted a controversial message about the holocaust.
Jonsson said Marciniw understood what he was agreeing with or commenting on “was so insensitive and inappropriate.” He had removed the tweets about a month ago, Jonsson said.
Nearly a decade ago, Marshall, the Green party candidate for Vancouver-West End, posted content that made light of pedophilia and drug abuse. Those posts were deleted Sunday.
“He’ll be the first to say they were in poor taste and inappropriate attempts at humour,” Jonsson said.
Of the posts by Green, the party’s candidate for Fraser-Nicola, Jonsson had this to say: “The party does not condone any 9/11 ‘truther’ theories and he appears to be posing questions about them.” Green’s posts were taken down “a while ago,” Jonsson said.
“They all — independently of one another and independently of this making its way to the surface —- have moved on from these views, and regret what they did,” he said.
It is common for parties to vet their candidates’ social media accounts.
B.C. Liberal party Leader Christy Clark shut the door on the business community’s request for a value added tax Monday, ending several days of speculation her party would consider major tax reforms should it win re-election.
Clark told the editorial boards of The Vancouver Sun and The Province that she’d concluded a hard “no to the value added tax” (VAT) and repeated her earlier refusals to reconsider the unpopular harmonized sales tax (HST), which was defeated in a 2011 referendum.
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B.C Premier and B.C Liberal Leader Christy Clark at Postmedia office in Vancouver, B.C., May 1, 2017.
“No to HST, no to a value added tax,” she said. “We are going to be looking though for ways to be tax competitive, we always are.
“If I’m re-elected for my second term, in the next four years, it doesn’t include a VAT or an HST,” Clark added.
B.C.’s business community had previously asked Clark to reform the current provincial sales tax into a value-added model, which would exempt the various stages of machinery and processing on items rather than the current system of applying the PST to each stage.
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B.C. Premier and B.C. Liberal Leader Christy Clark arrives at Postmedia office in Vancouver, B.C., May 1, 2017.
Clark had appeared to hedge on the issue last week, saying on April 28: “We do know that the tax competitiveness panel came back with a recommendation for a value added tax — which is different. And so what I’ve said is, look we’ll be prepared to talk to the business community and British Columbians about different ways we can reach tax competitiveness but it isn’t going to be an HST.”
Earlier Monday Clark had left the door open when pressed by media. “VAT, what do you mean by that?” she asked a reporter. “Oh, do you mean the tax that was recommended by the tax competitiveness commission? We’ve said we’re going to talk about all the things they’ve recommended. But we will not end up anywhere that looks like an HST.”
Clark told the editorial boards she meant to say she’s willing to talk to the business community about other reforms.
“In the past they’ve said we should go back to the HST. Nope. Now they are saying they want to go to a VAT, and I’m saying nope. That doesn’t mean we rule out more tax competitiveness.
“Here we are facing a rising tide of protectionism from Donald Trump south of the border, so we’ve got an aggressive protectionist administration, now is the last time that we should be raising taxes. The massive tax increases from the B.C. NDP, combined with what could be a more tax competitive and certainly will be a more protectionist government south of the border is a recipe for disaster for jobs.”
Clark also flatly rejected any potential increase to the PST if re-elected, and said she would not change any of the tax exemptions on consumer goods and services, such as haircuts and restaurant meals.
The B.C. NDP has jumped at the issue in recent days, portraying Clark as having an agenda for stealth tax hikes. Her predecessor, Gordon Campbell, said in the 2009 election he wasn’t considering an HST, then introduced it after winning, and was forced to resign amid public outrage.
“That’s a complete contradiction to what Christy Clark has been saying throughout the entire campaign,” NDP candidate Carole James said in response to Clark’s comments Monday.
“It’s the same old behaviour from Christy Clark, which is tell one thing, try to keep it hidden, if you get caught out change your mind. People see through that. She can’t be trusted going into the campaign to tell you really what she’s going to do.”
Clark also covered a wide range of other topics during the hour-long editorial board, which was streamed on Facebook Live.
She rejected one viewer’s question about whether it would be fairer to just charge a $1 toll on every Metro Vancouver bridge, rather than a proposed $500 annual cap on the Port Mann and Golden Ears bridges.
“I just don’t think now is the time to make it less affordable for people,” she said. “That’s exactly what tolling all the bridges would do for people.” The NDP have proposed to eliminate the tolls on the bridges entirely, and pay for the costs by emptying the $500 million government Prosperity Fund.
Clark also defended the scandals accumulated during her record, including a lengthy court fight with the B.C. Teachers’ Federation, the health firings case, political donations and other matters.
“I think having no controversies and having done nothing that upsets anybody is not a good recipe for leadership,” she said when asked how she’ll restore public trust.
“Governments are never perfect and no human being is perfect, but I would say leadership is also really difficult. And making difficult decisions doesn’t make everybody happy. But one of the things I said in the debate was it’s not always easy doing what’s right, but doing what’s right is working. Our economy is growing and unemployment is the lowest in the country.”
Clark also responded to a question about the massive hiring of teachers caused by her government losing its court fight on teacher bargaining, and how that has displaced some daycares.
“Can we get it fixed before the fall? Absolutely,” she said, of finding some way to prevent the daycares from being displaced by school expansions.
But she again rejected the premise that she should apologize to parents for an almost 10-year court battle with teachers that government ultimately lost in Canada’s highest court. She was asked if that had resulted in lost years of classroom resources for kids.
“What do you mean by lost years, when our kids are number one in reading, number three in science and number six in math?” she said. “So to me our kids are getting great outcomes in our schools, not just compared to the rest of Canada, not just compared to the rest of North America, our kids are number one in reading all around the world.”
When asked about her government appearing to care more about business and jobs than people, and refusing to raise the welfare rate for a decade, she said that’s why her focus has been on creating more jobs.
“Focusing on jobs is not about focusing on business,” she said. “Focusing on jobs is about focusing on people … there is nothing that affects your ability to cope and make life affordable more than having a job, and a good paying job, so that’s why I’m focused on that.”
On the welfare rate, she refused to budge amid criticism that it should also be raised in a similar fashion to how she’s raised the disability rate. Instead, she pointed to programs created like the Single Family Employment Initiative, which gives free tuition and child care to single parents who want to go back to school to train in an in-demand profession.
“Welfare was always considered to be a temp support for people,” she said. “Most people are on and off it in a reasonably short period of time. If people can’t work they should be on disability. That’s why we’ve raised those rates.”
Clark also said she’s likely to land on the age of 19 as the age for legal marijuana consumption in B.C., but has not definitively made up her mind on that issue. Any higher age would open up a black market, she said.
And she refused to speculate about how she would continue to govern if British Columbians elect a minority parliament as some polls are suggesting.
“I think basing predictions out of the polls is unwise,” she said.
Earlier in the day, at an event at STEMCELL Technologies in Vancouver, Clark also faced questions about why her party is not talking about incentives for density along transit lines, or forcing municipalities to increase density in exchange for provincial transit funding — both arguments she’s made in previous months while in government. She said she’s felt more willingness from municipalities to work with her on the issue of housing supply, and so would like to try consultations with them first.
VICTORIA — When British Columbians voted in the 2015 federal election, they did so in larger numbers than ever before, boosting turnout to 70 per cent, a 10-point gain over the federal election just four years earlier.
Eligible British Columbians also voted in significantly larger numbers than they had in the previous provincial election.
About 1.813 million voters cast ballots in the May 2013 election that returned Christy Clark and the B.C. Liberals to power. In October 2015, federal returning officers tallied 2.374 million ballots in B.C., a gain of 561,000 in people voting in a little over two years.
With B.C. headed for another provincial election on May 9, speculation abounds about whether there might be a repeat of the surge in turnout and, if so, to what effect.
Warranting particular attention is the huge increase in turnout among younger voters in the election that brought Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the federal Liberals to power.
Elections Canada estimates a 20 percentage point jump in voting by eligible Canadians aged 18-24 and a 15-point increase in the 25-34 age bracket.
Turnout increased for older age groups as well, but those folks were already voting in relatively large numbers. Those in the 18-34 range have tended not to participate all that heavily in the past, but last time they turned out in the 60 per cent range.
Looking back to the 2013 provincial election, turnout was below 50 per cent for 18-24s and below 40 per cent in the 25-34 bracket. The low turnout was a factor in why the opinion polls wrongly predicted a B.C. NDP win.
Veteran pollster Angus Reid blamed oversampling of younger voters — who leaned NDP but didn’t vote — for an election eve poll that put the NDP ahead by nine points when they would go on to lose by five.
If voters under the age of 34 had turned out in the same numbers in the 2013 provincial election as they would do across Canada in the subsequent federal election, they would have cast 125,000 more votes here in B.C.
They could have thereby affected the results in dozens of ridings, depending on where those votes were distributed and to which parties.
Looking now to this year’s provincial election, the 18-34s have potential significance for another reason. For most of their lives the only government they’ve known is B.C. Liberal. Only those at the top of the age bracket were even eligible to vote in the 2001 election that brought the Liberals to power.
For the fifth election in a row, the Liberals are striving to remind the electorate of the record of the NDP government in the 1990s. But younger voters will have few if any memories of that era or know why, at the end of it, the New Democrats were dealt one of the most humiliating electoral defeats in provincial history.
The question remains whether younger voters, having turned out in record numbers in the last federal election, will do the same in B.C. this time.
One has to be careful making too much of any federal result in the provincial arena.
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NDP Leader John Horgan, Liberal Leader Christy Clark and Green Party Leader Andrew Weaver.
B.C. voters inhabit “two political worlds” in federal and provincial elections, to quote the title of a landmark book by University of B.C. political scientist Donald Blake. The parties, the issues, the alignments are different, and recognized as such by the electorate.
The 2015 federal turnout was a departure from recent trends in national elections as well, fuelled as it was by the determination among many voters to defeat Stephen Harper and by the youthful presence of Justin Trudeau.
The New Democrats have tried to brand Christy Clark as a female Harper, with about as much success as some Liberals in framing her as a homegrown Margaret Thatcher. Nor can any of the three provincial party leaders lay plausible claim to the Trudeau charisma.
Still, one of the commonplaces of turnout is that a person is more likely to vote this time if they voted before. So having embraced the habit of voting in 2015, some of those younger voters may well be more inclined to do it again.
Particularly if they are stirred up by the affordability crisis in housing, the need for more transit, shortfalls in funding for education and training, environmental threats and other issues where the deck would appear to be stacked against them by older generations.
All three parties have tried to address those and other concerns of the younger voter: the Liberals by stressing the opportunities from economic growth, the New Democrats by touting increased program funding and better-paying and unionized jobs, the Greens by challenging the status quo on both sides of the political spectrum.
The Greens, in particular, have targeted the non-voter, whose numbers exceeded the vote tally for any of the parties.
“The party that won the last election was not the B.C. Liberals,” as leader Andrew Weaver noted in the second debate. “It was the non-voter; 45 per cent — that’s almost one in two — didn’t bother to vote because they were not inspired to vote.”
It remains to be seen whether any of the current leaders are sufficiently inspirational to generate a game-changing turnout at the polls. But the possibility adds to the uncertainties in a campaign that seems wide open with only a week to go before election day.
CRANBROOK — The B.C. Supreme Court on Monday heard an application for a charter argument for abuse of process in the trial of two polygamous leaders connected to Bountiful, a small community near Creston.
A lawyer for Winston Blackmore, a former Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints leader, is seeking a stay of his polygamy charge.
Blair Suffredine, Blackmore’s lawyer, is arguing that Blackmore’s rights to a fair trial were violated through an abuse of process.
Jim Oler, Blackmore’s co-accused who is self-represented, expressed interest in seeking legal advice to file a similar notice.
Suffredine’s intent to file the notice, which is being presented as a challenge relating to various sections of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, was filed last Thursday and discussed on Monday.
Suffredine laid out his argument, pointing to conclusions made by Richard Peck, a former special prosecutor who declined to lay polygamy charges in 2007, but asked that a reference case be tried to test the constitutionality of Section 293 that defines polygamy as a criminal act.
That reference case, with a ruling upholding polygamy as a crime, was delivered in 2011.
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James Oler, who is accused of practising polygamy in a fundamentalist religious community, arrives for the start of his trial in Cranbrook, B.C., Tuesday, April 18, 2017.
Suffredine said that evidence collected between the early 1990s when polygamy at Bountiful was first investigated and the 2011 reference case should not be held against Blackmore since it wasn’t legally clear whether Section 293 of the Criminal Code was unconstitutional.
“What I’m arguing is that after someone has ruled that it is constitutional, it’s not fair to go back to somebody who behaved according to what they were told by the Attorney General and now prosecute them for what they did then,” said Suffredine, in an interview outside the courtroom,
Peter Wilson, a special prosecutor appointed to the case in 2012, said the notice of the charter argument should be considered once the trial is finished and a verdict has delivered, since it never came up as an issue beforehand.
“Fundamentally, I don’t understand it,” Wilson said during court proceedings before Justice Sheri Donegan.
Suffredine said he didn’t file a charter challenge because he wasn’t sure what evidence the Crown would bring forward, calling his intent to file a “fluid situation”.
“At this point, I don’t have any argument about the section itself, but I may have an argument about it’s application to somebody who’s claiming religious freedom,” Suffredine said.
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Winston Blackmore, who is accused of practising polygamy in a fundamentalist religious community, returns to court after a lunch break in Cranbrook, B.C., Tuesday, April 18, 2017.
In addition to the discussion about the charter challenge, Justice Donegan delivered a ruling allowing statements Jim Oler made to police regarding his wives to be admitted into evidence.
Investigators met with Oler in October 2005 to gain his permission to interview his wives during an investigation into alleged sexual exploitation.
Oler admitted to having three wives and said he would set up a time for police to conduct interviews. Since it was a general inquiry and not a formal police interview, it was not recorded.
Police formally interviewed three of Oler’s wives in January 2006 inside a police vehicle outside his home. The women gave their names and date of births, but refused to answer other questions.
Justice Donegan ruled that Oler knew he was under police scrutiny, but that his statements about his wives were made voluntarily outside of the scope of the sexual exploitation investigation.
Given the evidence presented throughout the trial, Crown counsel also applied to amend the indictment to add a fifth woman to Oler’s polygamy charge, based on his statements to police and marriage records.
A Vancouver man who was convicted in connection with a fatal shooting 22 years ago was on Monday sentenced to life in prison with no parole eligibility for 25 years.
On April 2, a B.C. Supreme Court jury found Jaswant Singh Gill guilty of the December 1994 first-degree murder of Thomas Eldon Akerman, 26.
During a Mr. Big undercover police operation, Gill confessed he shot Akerman three times in a vehicle parked near Metrotown in Burnaby. Asked by the undercover cop posing as Mr. Big whether the fatal shooting was a “drug thing,” he replied that it was a “greed thing.”
The jury also found Gill guilty of the February 2006 manslaughter of his 33-year-old wife, Gurpreet (Ruby) Gill, but after submissions from the lawyers in the case decided he was not criminally responsible for that slaying because of a mental disorder.
Several victim-impact statements in the Akerman case were provided to B.C. Supreme Court Justice Laura Gerow before she handed down the mandatory sentence on the murder conviction.
In one of the statements, Akerman’s stepmother said the “ripple effect” of Gill’s actions was far-reaching for all concerned.
“It’s truly a tragic series of events, and one I am sure we all wish never happened,” said Yvonne Akerman in her statement.
“We are sad, we are numb, we were torn in our emotions, we were at a loss as to what happened over the years. We are scared, we are scarred, and we are now moving on in peace knowing justice has been served.”
Chantal Riding, the older sister of Akerman, said in her statement the “tremendous shock, loss and pain” of the day her brother was killed does not go away.
“The question of who did this horrific thing and why has been answered and a conviction reached. I am pleased that there has been a conviction for my brother’s murder.
“It doesn’t bring him back or lessen the pain of loss, but in having justice serviced, my belief is that others will be protected from experiencing the loss my family suffered.”
During the undercover operation, Gill first confessed to the fatal assault of his wife Ruby, who had come to Canada from India after an arranged marriage with her husband in 2000.
When he was asked how many people he’d killed in his life, he made the startling admission he had killed two people and proceeded to provide details of the fatal shooting.
Dorothy Darnel lived almost long enough to see her violent assailant charged.
“There may have been some profanities, but I think there would be a big smile on her face,” Darnel’s son Wayne Harris said on Monday. “She’d be, ‘Yes, you’re going to pay now.'”
Darnel died in Langley on Dec. 15, 2015.
Police in New Westminster, using 20-year-old DNA evidence, have now charged a 48-year-old Vancouver man with a violent assault on Darnel on Oct. 4, 1996, one of the NWPD’s most notorious cold cases.
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New Westminster police sketch of suspect in the Oct. 4 sexual assault of 79-year-old Dorothy Darnel. Darnel was attacked in her home as she slept. Her attacker beat her so severely that her cheekbone was shattered and she would lose sight in one eye.
James Gray faces charges of aggravated sexual assault, break and enter, forcible confinement, robbery, choking to overcome resistance, and uttering threats.
Court records show Gray has a variety of convictions, including for drug possession and driving offences.
“It feels finally like closure,” Harris said from Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, where he now spends most of his time. “We’d pretty much given up hope the guy would be found. My thing was, this guy was still out there getting away with it. The streets are a little safer now.”
It was almost 4 a.m. on Friday, Oct. 4, 1996, when Darnel was attacked, her face shattered to the point she permanently lost sight in one eye. Police at the time said she was “viciously attacked.”
A man had crawled through the living-room window of her second-storey apartment in New West, straddled her in her bedroom, then beat and raped her.
Less than a month shy of 80 and living on her own, Darnel fought back with her wooden cane, but the attacker wound up using it on her.
In an interview with The Vancouver Sun in 1997, she described her terrifying ordeal.
“He pounded the side of my head so badly my eye split wide open,” she said. “I was in total shock, in absolute terror.”
She eventually was able to flee up three flights of stairs to the apartment of the building manager, who called police.
“It’s a despicable act that has personally offended every police officer and civilian in this police department,” Cpl. Gary Weishaar of the NWPD said at the time.
Darnel remembered her attacker well: He was blond, had a goatee and wore a black T-shirt that read “Some people are alive simply because it’s against the law to kill them.”
Darnel told The Vancouver Sun the attack had traumatized her, and she was still in therapy to deal with her emotions, but that didn’t stop her from stepping forward at seminars to warn seniors to take safety seriously.
She urged them to install peepholes, bar their windows and never buzz strangers into their apartment.
“If you’re alone, you’re vulnerable,” she told them. “Don’t let strangers into your building, don’t open your door to anyone you don’t know, secure your home.”
The NWPD’s major crime unit caught a break when RCMP forwarded DNA from a March, 2016, break and enter in Coquitlam. It led to the charges being laid.
Darnel was an enthusiastic Toastmaster, weaver and ballroom dancer, according to her obituary. She died peacefully in her sleep, 15 days after turning 99.
“She was independent almost to the end, no walker until she was 97,”said Helga Petersen, a longtime caregiver to Darnel. “She was a very strong, proud woman, very lovely.”
“It means a great deal to me to see this 20-year-old case has come to a close,” said New Westminster police Chief Const. Dave Jones, who was among the officers involved in the original investigation.
Columbia River-Revelstoke voters have gone NDP in all but one provincial election since 2001. So, it would seem to be an easy riding for Gerry Taft to win.
The mayor of Invermere has a swell resume. He’s been on council 14 years. He’s an entrepreneur who started his first business selling Lego in Grade 3. He’s operated a hotdog car, sold real estate and recently sold his two companies — Gerry’s Gelati and Stolen Church Coffee — to become a full-time politician. And did I mention, he’s only 34.
But from the get-go, this has been anything but easy and it’s possible that his troubles have soured voters. If they have, the B.C. Liberals’ candidate Doug Clovechok, who first ran in 2013, will most likely be the beneficiary. The Greens candidate may hive off a small protest vote. But Samson Boyer is only 18.
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Doug Clovechok. Candidate mugshot for the B.C. Liberal party for the B.C. Election 2017.
Taft spent the first two weeks of the campaign in B.C. Supreme Court. He’s being sued for malicious defamation.
Devin Kazakoff is suing him and asking for $175,000 in damages. The judge has reserved his decision. Kazakoff is an animal rights’ activist. He pleaded guilty, paid a $2,700 fine and was given a conditional discharge after tampering with traps set by the district of Invermere in 2014 during its controversial deer cull.
The conditional discharge means Kazakoff does not have a criminal record — a fact that Taft ignored when he sent out a subsequent press release and made online statements.
Taft refused to apologize. So, Kazakoff sued for general, punitive and aggravated damages.
Of course, things weren’t great even before that. When NDP incumbent Norm Macdonald decided not to run again, Spring Hawes was the first to announce her candidacy. As a woman who uses a wheelchair after a spinal cord injury, she seemed a good fit with the party’s equity policy. That policy says that if a retiring incumbent is male, the replacement candidate should be a woman, visible minority, indigenous, disabled or LGBTQ.
Taft didn’t seem to fit the criteria as a white, able-bodied, male in a long-term relationship with the mother of his son. Still, he got “equity status” for a reason he kept secret until after he’d secured the nomination. Only after nosy journalists kept asking, Taft told the local newspaper that he is bisexual.
For some, the question lingers: Is Taft telling the truth or is he simply an ambitious and even ruthless politician?
That said, Taft has been a popular mayor and member of the regional district’s board. He has been particularly outspoken in his opposition to the controversial Jumbo Glacier Resort that’s been toddling through the development approval process for 26 years.
It did get provincial approval for its master development agreement to develop Crown land in 2013. The following year, the Liberal government created the Jumbo Glacier Resort Municipality and appointed a mayor and councillors whose salaries are paid by B.C. taxpayers.
In 2014, Taft’s motion at the Union of B.C. Municipalities opposing provincial funding for towns without residents was unanimously approved. Nothing changed.
Jumbo still has a paid council and not a single resident. Its future remains uncertain. In December, the Supreme Court of Canada reserved judgment on the Ktunaxa Nation’s challenge to the development. The Ktunaxa argued that the development is located in a sacred area, that its critical to grizzly bear habitat and that the province failed in its duty to consult.
When Taft’s Liberal opponent first ran in 2013, he supported Jumbo. This time, Clovechok told CBC, “I’ve listened to constituents and they would rather us move toward something a little bit more productive.”
Aside from Jumbo, jobs and housing affordability are big issues as the riding transitions from resource extraction to more tourism.
Paradoxically, its economic conversion has been fuelled by oil-rich Albertans who flooded across the border in boom times. As fast as developers could build condos and homes along golf courses and adjacent to ski hills, Albertans bought up recreational properties in Kimberley, Invermere, Radium Hot Springs and Golden.
Sales have slowed since the oil bubble burst. But, people are still coming. Although now, they’re more likely to be either cashing in on high housing prices on the West Coast or fleeing in search of affordable communities in which to raise their families.
Still, in this riding where life is lived on Alberta time with Alberta media being the primary source of news, it will be interesting to see whether that too plays into voters’ decision about whether to stick with the NDP or switch.
WHITEHORSE — More than 100 aftershocks had shivered across the Alaska Panhandle, southern Yukon and parts of northwestern British Columbia by early Tuesday following two powerful earthquakes a day earlier, but seismologists say while people need to be prepared, it isn’t time to be alarmed.
The U.S. Geological Survey reported the aftershocks, including at least a dozen Tuesday morning, in the wake of the 6.2 and 6.3 magnitude earthquakes Monday that were centred near Skagway, Alaska, but were felt as far away as Whitehorse and Ross River, which is more than 300 kilometres away.
Earthquakes Canada also reported a 4.5 magnitude quake jolted the Carcross region, about 75 kilometres south of Whitehorse on Tuesday morning.
Earthquake seismologist Alison Bird of the Geological Survey of Canada said continued shaking is expected.
“It’s sort of a swarm of activity, there seems to be some intense earthquakes,” she said.
“It’s fairly normal to have this sort of thing. This is an area that gets a lot of earthquakes anyway, but sometimes it sort of flares up in sudden activity.”
Powerful earthquakes almost always spawn aftershocks that can continue for years, she said, adding that the level of seismic activity in the Haida Gwaii region of B.C. remains elevated, five years after a magnitude 7.8 quake there.
Following Monday’s earthquakes, the Yukon government issued messages via Twitter confirming that the school in Ross River, about 200 kilometres northeast of Whitehorse, remained closed as engineers checked for safety.
The four-storey Lynn Building in downtown Whitehorse was also closed after being evacuated Monday when large cracks were spotted in its foundation but other structures, as well as the clay cliffs overlooking downtown Whitehorse had been checked and declared safe.
“It is a good reminder that we can have large earthquakes in that area and they can get much larger than this, so people up there tend to be prepared for that sort of thing,” said Bird.
Bill Doskoch was looking for work in Vancouver when he was arrested, for being Ukrainian.
At the dawn of the First World War, the Canadian government rounded up more than 8,000 mostly single men of German, Austrian and Ukrainian ancestry, sending them to 24 concentration camps scattered across the country. One such camp was at Morrissey, not far from Fernie.
As a civilian prisoner of war, Doskoch was moved frequently, eventually incarcerated in five camps between 1914 and 1920 and only released after most others prisoners were long gone.
“He was quite a rabble-rouser apparently and refused to take internment lying down,” said Sarah Beaulieu, an archeology PhD candidate at Simon Fraser University. “He was very angry about being interned.”
Beaulieu is pursuing an excavation at the site of the Morrissey camp this summer. She has already detected an escape tunnel and recovered artifacts, including a barbed-wire crucifix.
Morrissey was regarded as a particularly barbaric experience, with abusive guards, solitary confinement and hard labour.
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Bill Doskoch is one of the few prisoners from the Morrissey Internment Camp who talked about his experiences. Here, in 1918, Doskoch is in the back row, fourth from the left, with his collar turned up.
A report by Consul of Switzerland Samuel Gintzburger, from 1917, notes that prisoners were “absolutely destitute” and were subject to “physical coercion” at the hands of guards. Protests were frequent.
“It was notorious for mistreatment of prisoners,” Beaulieu said. “At the time it received several note verbales (diplomatic protests) from Germany threatening retaliation on Canadian and British prisoners of war should the conditions at Morrissey not improve.”
Beaulieu learned of Bill’s wartime adventures from his daughter, Anne Sadelein, who resides in Edmonton where Doskoch settled in the 1920s. He remained a union activist throughout his life.
“My father spent a lot of time in black holes for writing letters and inciting stop workages or being political,” said Sadelein.
Doskoch was often at the centre of disputes over prisoner labour in the camps.
The Canadian government misinterpreted a clause from the 1907 Hague Convention on the rules of war so that the civilian PoWs could be used as labourers building roads and parks.
Some archival records note that prisoners were paid 55 cents a day for voluntary labour, but that 30 cents a day was deducted to pay for their room and board in the camp.
When civilian internees became aware that the clause in The Hague Convention only applied to military PoWs, Doskoch copied out the entire convention by hand as a reminder of their rights, according to Sadelein.
“He knew that they had been illegally arrested and wanted to do something about it,” said Beaulieu. “Most of the prisoners were civilians with no military connections who had come to Canada to settle the Prairies.”
Morrissey had been a coal-mining camp between 1902 and 1904, but was a ghost town when the federal government converted it into a concentration camp on Sept. 28, 1915. The Canadian government would later use the term internment to avoid the association with German concentration camps after the Second World War.
“They were very badly fed: fat and potatoes,” said a female descendant of a Ukrainian Morrissey internee interviewed by Beaulieu. “No vegetables, fruit or milk and these were young men — a lot of them in their early 20s. They had to work very hard. Ten hours a day sometimes. I can’t say that it was a nice, kind camp.”
Beaulieu has the names and faces of a few prisoners. Unfortunately, in 1954, a lot of the archival material was destroyed by the Canadian government because they had no place to store it. So very little is known about the operations of these camps today.
“When I first came to do interviews people weren’t really aware of the camp at Morrissey and the few that did were under the impression that it had been a sanctuary for destitute foreigners during the First World War,” she said.
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A guard watches the fence in winter at the Morrissey Internment Camp.
The internees have largely stayed in the shadows, even after the government offered to pay them for their labours. Though prisoners were supposed to be paid for their labour on release, those monies were never given to them. Most were too afraid to fight at the time and were loathe to apply for it when it was available in 1929 because it would have revealed to their families that they had been prisoners.
Interviews and documents being collected by academics such as Beaulieu are being gathered and organized by the Canadian First World War Internment Recognition Fund, which is also funding her work in Morrissey.
In the archeological investigation, ground-penetrating radar revealed the presence of about 20 graves, some of which date to the coal-mining period. But a cluster of seven others are likely prisoners, some of whom likely succumbed to Spanish Flu or tuberculosis. The remaining graves are a mystery.
“It wouldn’t be surprising to me if there were more deaths than the government officially reported. Four of the graves are marked and there was one for a German, Hermann Rellmann, who died in the camp and whose remains were exhumed and sent to Kitchener, Ont., under the terms of the German War Graves Commission Act.”
Paul and Melissa Donnett felt fortunate to find daycare for their young son Leo in Vancouver’s West End after hearing stories about wait-lists stretching up to two years.
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Paul Donnett with his son Leo.
Starting their search behind couples who signed up the moment they discovered they were pregnant, they were “extraordinarily lucky” when an agency referred them to Nahid Zohdi, a mother who loved kids and once worked as a nanny before deciding to open a small, registered daycare in the neighbourhood in March.
“It was great timing because she was just starting out,” said Paul Donnett. “After a few test runs, we knew it was a match made in heaven.”
But several weeks later, the Donnetts have been plunged back into a hell familiar to many Metro Vancouver parents: struggling to find child care while trying to hold down a full-time job.
By operating a daycare from her rented apartment, Zohdi unknowingly ran foul of a building policy forbidding tenants from running small business in their home. At the beginning of April, she was given one month to find a new place to live or relinquish the daycare, leaving 18-month-old Leo and the one other child she looks after without a caregiver.
“We love the West End. We want to raise our family here. I don’t understand why apartments are permitted to deny access when daycare is so urgently needed,” said Donnett.
Their dilemma highlights the growing challenge young families across the region face. As the city and other town centres densify, increasingly dominated by multi-storey residential buildings designed to attract young families, the challenge of finding daycare increases.
Zohdi said she’s contacted almost 20 other rental buildings in the area to ask if they’d allow her to run her small daycare, and every time she had been told no. In one case, she discovered home businesses were allowed, but when the landlord discovered she was talking about a daycare, she was refused.
Now Zohdi’s started to think about leaving the West End and opening a daycare somewhere else.
“What I’m doing, it helps others,” she said. “In many of these places pets are welcome, but kids are not. I don’t know what to do.”
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Paul Donnett with his son Leo and daycare owner Nahid Zohdi.
About 80 per cent of residents in the West End live in rental units, while the City of Vancouver’s West End Community Plan identified a shortfall of 348 daycare spaces for kids under five in 2013, said Kathryn Gibbons, one of the founding members of West End Families in Action, an advisory board that meets at Gordon Neighbourhood House.
“I understand some of the reasons why an apartment might say no to daycare, but given the crunch, I think it’s really unfortunate to see this happen,” she said. “We’d love people to be able to open daycare spaces with less hurdles.”
Although Zohdi did not require a license from Vancouver Coastal Health because she cared for less than three children, she registered her daycare with a referral agency. She looked into acquiring a license to care for four kids, but found in order to do so she’d need a ground floor unit.
Gibbons said new developments should set aside appropriate spaces, possibly including ground floor units, for child care. The city has made strides toward accommodating families by requiring developers to include family sized units in new builds, but the work is being undone by the lack of daycare space, she said.
“Developers aren’t clambering to build daycares, so we’d like to see more action from the city,” she said, adding the West End may be the “canary in the coal mine” for an issue that will affect more neighbourhoods as densification continues.
The owner of Zohdi’s apartment building wasn’t unsympathetic to child care challenges in the neighbourhood, but pointed to the risks associated with allowing small businesses to run out of rental units unchecked.
“We understand there are significant child care challenges across the region, however, operating a child care business out of a residential rental unit is a breach of the Residential Tenancy Agreement,” said a statement from Hollyburn Properties. “Our priority is to maintain the safety of our rental communities for all residents and guests.”
For the Donnetts and baby Leo, the experience has them questioning whether the West End is the right place to raise a family.
“We want our boy to love the West End, and contribute to its success and sense of community. But without daycare, we’ll be forced to move,” said Donnett.
