WHERE COLLECTORS ARE KING
RIDERS ROUT ESKIMOS big win B1
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CENTRAL ALBERTA’S DAILY NEWSPAPER
BREAKING NEWS ONLINE AT WWW.REDDEERADVOCATE.COM
MONDAY, JULY 9, 2012
Council urged to expand ban TO PROHIBIT SMOKING NEAR PLAYGROUNDS, RECREATION AREAS BY LAURA TESTER ADVOCATE STAFF
SMOKING BYLAW
Banning smoking within 10 metres of a playground, soccer field or other recreational area where children play would be welcomed here, say some Red Deer residents. City of Edmonton passed a bylaw this spring banning cigarette smoking within recreational areas where children frequent. Red Deer councillors Lynne Mulder and Chris Stephan said they would support bringing a similar ban here. “It’s for the kids, but it’s also a nuisance for the people around who don’t smoke,” said Stephan, a father of three small children. Stephan believes council would have to seek such a bylaw. Mulder said it’s likely this issue will come to city council chambers soon. Council would consider amending the bylaw to add these restrictions.
She’s received a lot of emails from residents requesting the city’s smoke free bylaw be expanded. “I really do believe we should keep the air around our children safe,” said Mulder. “So I would certainly support something like that.” The City of Red Deer prohibits smoking in all indoor public places and work places including drinking establishments and private clubs. Individuals who smoke in non-smoking areas will be responsible for fines ranging from $200 to court imposed fines of up to $2,500. Mulder Kalinka Borissova-Petkova wrote a letter to the Advocate, expressing her surprise at how many adults were smoking and discarding their butts in front of children at Rotary Park and the playground at Bower ponds. “And children running around, playing, enjoy-
ing childhood (subconsciously) were breathing in someone else’s smoke,” said Borissova-Petkova, a mother of a small child. “I am asking our city council to change the bylaw in favour of those little children playing outside on the designated areas for them, called playgrounds, and prohibit smoking there.” Red Deer resident Ron Baugh expressed concerns as well, saying both the city bylaw and the provincial laws require physical buildings for smoking restrictions and as a result, events such as Saturday’s public market in Red Deer, can permit smoking. Coun. Dianne Wyntjes said she can understand how some people would like to see smoking banned in vehicles to protect child passengers. “And I get it around food and perhaps even festivals, but where I’m stuck right now is the whole element of parks,” Wyntjes said. “How far do we go on that? How do we police that because that involves additional resources as well.”
Please see SMOKE on Page A2
95TH BENALTO PRO RODEO
Hometown rodeo, fair has devout following BY LAURA TESTER ADVOCATE STAFF
Photo by JERRY GERLING/Advocate staff
While hundreds of thousands are whooping it up at the Calgary Stampede, others are content to attend a much smaller rodeo in Central Alberta. The 95th Benalto Pro Rodeo held Friday through Sunday brought a wide array of fans to the community 13 km west of Sylvan Lake. Doan Ball has been attending the Benalto rodeo since he was two. He loves supporting the local rodeo put on by the Benalto Agricultural Society. He sponsors the buckles given to bullriders. “This is one of the better rodeos of similar size because they always get good stock,” said the retired rancher. “And when you’ve been here all your life, it’s great to be here.” The hometown rodeo is always the best, added his friend Brian Johannson of Spruce View. He used to bullride in high school and is now a commercial contractor. Johannson has no plans to attend the Biggest Show on Earth, which is celebrating its 100th year in Calgary. “There’s more than 200 people,” he said with a smile. “It’s too big and it’s too commercialized.” “And you have to sit so far away down there (at the rodeo) that you almost have to have binoculars,” added Ball. “The chuckwagon races are good.”
Thalia Hibbs with her kids, left to right, Kiana, Thomas and Harrison, walking through the fair grounds. Please see BENALTO on Page A2
Top court to hear overturned election case this week BY STEVE RENNIE THE CANADIAN PRESS OTTAWA — A Conservative MP desperate to hold on to his riding and a Liberal runner-up who went to court to get the razor-thin result overturned will make their cases to the Supreme Court of Canada this week. The outcome of the case will determine whether Prime Minister Stephen Harper has to call a byelection in the Toronto riding of Etobicoke Centre. Tory MP Ted Opitz won the riding by just 26 votes over Liberal Borys Wrzesnewskyj in last year’s federal election. But Wrzesnewskyj went to court, claiming procedural irregularities. Earlier this year, an Ontario Superior Court judge found that Elections Canada officials made clerical errors at the polls. Justice Thomas Lederer threw out 79 votes and overturned the final result. Opitz appealed the case to the Supreme Court, which will interrupt its summer break Tuesday to
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hear the case. Only five other election results have been nullified by the courts since 1949. None of those rulings were appealed and byelections were quickly called to re-determine the will of the people in each riding. The Etobicoke Centre result was overturned on the basis of improperly filled out paperwork for voters left off the list of electors or who needed someone to vouch for their identity. In his ruling, Lederer specifically stressed the irregularities were the result of clerical errors by well-meaning Elections Canada officials, not the product of fraud or intentional wrongdoing. However, since then, Wrzesnewskyj has resurrected other more serious allegations of ballot-box stuffing and voter suppression by Opitz’s campaign, though nothing has been proven. “Those are all very serious issues,” he said Sunday. “Hopefully what we’re going to do through this process is restore people’s confidence in the integrity of the system. You can’t have confidence in a
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Sunny. High 32. Low 14.
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system that someone shows up without any ID and is handed a ballot. You can’t have confidence in a system that somebody shows up, isn’t on the voter’s list in the poll, and is handed a ballot.” A Conservative party spokesman said Opitz was not available for an interview. Until the top court resolves the case, Opitz is vowing to continue doing his job as MP for the riding. Wrzesnewskyj counters that Opitz should sit out votes in the House of Commons. “It undermines ... our confidence in the democratic system that we have if we don’t know who the actual member of Parliament is,” he said. Meanwhile, CBC News reported last week that Elections Canada filed a motion saying it found some of the voters whose ballots were thrown out because of registration certificates that were missing or were unsigned. Forty-four of the disqualified voters are in fact on the National Register of Electors. The Supreme Court was not immediately able to provide copies of the documents.
CANADA
BUSINESS
TWO KILLED IN SMALL PLANE CRASH
ACCOUNTABILITY QUESTIONED
Moments after taking off into the bright, sunny skies of B.C.’s Okanagan Valley, a small twin engine plane clipped two trees and slammed into a sports field, killing the two people aboard. A5
Environmentalists are trying to force the provincial government to show it’s followed through on previous recommendations to reduce the effect of oilsands mines before any more projects are approved. C3