The Chilliwack
Progress Thursday
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Scene
News
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Theatre
Titanic
Football
The Guild brings back Fiddler on the Roof.
Local Titanic collection continues to grow.
GW Graham focusing on concussions.
Sports
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Trustees cancel bus fees Katie Bartel The Progress Starting next year, no student in Chilliwack will be charged for busing. After two years of charging all students for transportation, Chilliwack trustees voted in favour of dropping the fee. The school district registered a $72,000 surplus in its first year of charging for transportation and estimates an $85,909 surplus for this year. Ongoing expenses, which include software and staffing, are $80,735. “No business would spend the same amount of money to collect fees,” said trustee Silvia Dyck. “The cost-benefit analysis is a wash.” The district started charging bus fees in 2010, after experiencing ongoing shortfalls in the range of $290,000 every year since 2002 when the provincial government froze funding for transportation. Secretar y treasurer Maureen Carradice said the issue at the time the decision was made was whether money intended for classrooms and infrastructure should be taken from the operating budget to support a small number of students, 20 per cent of the district’s total population, who were utilizing transportation. A $200 per student fee, up to a maximum $600 per family, was implemented in 2010. The provincial government recently increased its funding formula, which helped increase transportation revenue. Trustees were presented with a range of options, which included continuing to charge all riders, charge only conditional riders, create a graduated payment system for families with more than one rider, refund the transportation fee, cancel the fee and reduce
Differences clear at all-candidates meeting Robert Freeman The Progress The Rotary Club is all about fellowship, but the differences between byelection candidates were quickly drawn out by questions posed by Chilliwack Fraser Rotarians Wednesday. Asked about splitting the conservative vote, BC Conservative candidate John Martin said his party is “earning the vote” rather than splitting it. He said the BC Liberals “squandered” their once commanding lead in the province by its own policy decisions, driving out party members until “there’s not a safe seat left in the
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Conservative candidate John Martin (left) and NDP Gwen O’Mahony listen as Liberal Laurie Throness answers a question during an all-candidates meeting at the Best Western yesterday. JENNA HAUCK/ PROGRESS
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province.” “We’re giving those people a home,” he said. But BC Liberal candidate Laurie Throness said his party is the coalition of conservatives that has “kept the NDP out of power” all these years, and provided a government based on free-enterprise principles. Throness “appealed to other small-c conservatives” like himself, he said, “to keep that coalition strong.” NDP candidate Gwen O’Mahony said she is “sick and tired” of hearing the two conservative parties “fear-mongering” while the real issue of the byelection is simply selecting an MLA
“who will work for you.” If voters don’t like what she does as the MLA, she said, they can always vote her out in one year’s time in the next provincial election in May, 2013. Asked about the teachers’ dispute, Throness described a BC Liberal government that had “held the line” and refused wage demands made by 130 public sector unions in an effort to balance the provincial budget. There is an “urgent need” to prepare B.C. for the impact of the U.S. debt that has now hit $15 trillion, he warned. But Martin described the BC Liberal government actions as more child-like.
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He said teachers have not always been reasonable, but the government has “the responsibility to be the adult in this relationship and that hasn’t happened.” He said the government’s track record of “literally tearing up contracts” is “absolutely inexcusable.” O’Mahony was asked how the “union-friendly” NDP government would pay for wage increases it would presumably approve. She said the party had in fact supported a mediator in the teachers’ dispute, and would leave contract negotiations at the bargaining table. Continued: DEBATE/ p12
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