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CENTRAL ALBERTA’S DAILY NEWSPAPER MONDAY, SEPT. 17, 2012
BREAKING NEWS ONLINE AT WWW.REDDEERADVOCATE.COM
Cyclists parade for bike lanes BY LANA MICHELIN ADVOCATE STAFF A colourful parade of about 75 cyclists passed through the streets of Red Deer on the weekend to show support for the city’s controversial new bike lanes. The cyclists received encouraging honks from motorists, and only one negative comment — a senior citizen in a vehicle shouted, “You should be ashamed!” before the group left St. Thomas Aquinas School to head for the downtown public market on Saturday morning. Cyclists took this latest verbal slam in stride. The general consensus among parade participants, who ranged from children to seniors, was that it’s nice to have the bike lanes and be acknowledged as legitimate users of city roads. “I feel a lot safer now,” said Louise Zanussi, 48, who uses the lanes whenever she can to get around Red Deer. “I’ve always tried to stay out of people’s way,” Zanussi added, but there was a fear motorists were not always aware of the cyclists riding next to them. She likes that the bike lanes give cyclists their own marked out territory, raising awareness of their presence. Dawn Degenhardt, 26, agreed, saying “It was always ambiguous before. Do we go on sidewalks, or roads? We were in kind of a no-man’s land.” The lanes now make it clear where cyclists and motorists each belong, she added. Although various bike parade participants heard anecdotal reports of fellow bikers being spit on and targeted by canthrowing motorists, nothing untoward hap-
Peter Lougheed The fourth annual Community Bicycle Parade was well attended by avid cyclists of all ages, including Lukas Smith, 2, who came along with dad, Lorne, to sign a pro-bike lane petition. Riders in the parade utilized the newly appointed bike lanes from St. Thomas Aquinas school to the farmers’ market.
Body of former premier arrives at legislature THE CANADIAN PRESS
Photo by CYNTHIA RADFORD/ Advocate Staff
pened on Saturday — expect for that shoutout from the elderly woman, who did not accept the cyclists’ invitation to come and chat about her concerns. “It was largely a very positive reaction. We got lots of honks,” said the organizer of the fourth-annual bike parade, Steve Merredew. He later took questions from city residents at a booth at the public market and discovered once people get more information, “it definitely tends to soften their stance.” City Coun. Paul Harris, who rode in the parade along with his partner and Sunworks co-owner Terry Warke, said bike lanes have initially been controversial in every community that’s installed them. But
Viola opens door to Juilliard for young musician BY LANA MICHELIN ADVOCATE STAFF The road from Red Deer to the famed Juilliard School of music in New York City has been an incredible journey for Stephanie Galipeau. Like most kids, Galipeau hated practising the violin when she started at age nine. It wasn’t until she could coax rich sounds out of the violin — and later viola — that she enjoyed playing enough to practise for hours at a time. Galipeau’s efforts to put her own emotions into the music she creates have paid off. The 19-year-old was among the elite seven percent of applicants to be accepted into the world-famous Juilliard School this fall. “I was pretty excited,” said Galipeau, who received her acceptance email last spring. The Red Deer native, who was admitted to the $35,000-a-year program on a partial scholarship, recently moved into residence at Juilliard. Although her family was a little nervous about her relocation to New York City, there’s no reason for worry, she said, since the school is teeming with fellow music students from all over the world. So far, Galipeau has met young people from New Zealand, France, Ireland, Norway and all over Asia.
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Stephanie Galipeau outside the famed Juilliard School of music in New York City.
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each community has gotten used to the lanes over time, as motorists and cyclists gain familiarity with the new configurations, he added. The local outcry “will settle down,” predicted Harris, who will not be in favour of removing bike lanes from 55th Street and 40th Avenue when a progress report on the pilot bike lane project is discussed at Monday’s regular city council meeting. The councillor believes that would be a knee-jerk reaction. He prefers that the pilot project that was two years in the making be given a chance to play out before conclusions are drawn.
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Battle rages against Cicer milkvetch BY LANA MICHELIN ADVOCATE STAFF You wouldn’t touch a rattlesnake’s tail, so keep your mitts off a shakeable weedlike plant that’s invading Red Deer’s Gaetz Lakes Sanctuary. Local naturalists have their hands full trying to keep the pesky Cicer milkvetch from pushing out native vegetation at the sanctuary around the Kerry Wood Nature Centre. Kids love to get their fists around the tactile plant with the hard seed pod that looks and rattles like a rattlesnake’s tail. “It’s fun to shake it. Kids even call it a rattlesnake plant,” said Diane Olson, the centre’s school and youth interpreter. But when the pod is shaken, seeds are released — which compounds the problem. Olson said the sanctuary has inexplicably had an “explosion” of the plant, considered a hardy legume, in the last few years. “It’s everywhere where the path gets plowed.” Cicer milkvetch is a forage crop that’s still grown as cattle feed by some area farmers. But naturalists are trying to educate producers about its invasive qualities, said Olson, who pulls up the plant whenever she finds it. There’s no other way to get rid of it, she added, since Cicer milkvetch was imported from Eastern Europe and has no natural predators in Western Canada.
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EDMONTON — As the sunset sweetened the sky of a gorgeous late-summer day, a motorcade accompanying the body of former Alberta premier Peter Lougheed rolled into Edmonton and up to the front of the provincial legislature Sunday. The coffin, draped in a Canadian flag, was slid out of the back of white hearse and carried along a red carpet, up a staircase Lougheed himself walked many times in his day. A team of RCMP members carried the coffin on its shoulders. Alberta sheriffs kept watch as they entered the building. The coffin was placed in the legislature rotunda, where it will sit for two days, to give people a chance to pay their last respects. Lougheed, who is widely credited as being one of the most influential leaders in the province’s history, died in the hospital bearing his name in Calgary on Thursday at 84. Even though the time of the motorcade’s arrival wasn’t publicly announced until shortly before it arrived, a few dozen people were at the legislature to watch. Braden O’Neill, 25, wasn’t even born when Lougheed stepped down as premier in 1985, but he lives near the legislature and felt compelled to attend. “I grew up knowing that the reason Alberta has such a strong place in Confederation, and in many ways Alberta’s great coming out on the national stage, was due to Peter Lougheed’s leadership,” O’Neill said. Other observers were simply enjoying an evening stroll around the legislature grounds when they noticed something was up. Karl Oelke, from St. Albert, just north of Edmonton, came to the grounds Sunday evening with his wife to take scenery pictures, but was pleased to have stumbled upon the event. “I really appreciated the man. He did a lot for the province. He was sort of a pioneer in a lot of instances. I was very saddened to hear that he’d passed away,” Oelke said.
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A complex legislative process and a lack of political will could derail any plans to change the way Montana carries out its executions, but may be a ray of hope for a Canadian on death row. A3
Officials from the European Union are travelling to Ottawa for what is scheduled to be the penultimate session in their long-running trade talks road show. C3