Phantom parody haunts Surrey stage page 30
Wildcats proud to place third page 26
Thursday November 29, 2012
Serving Surrey and North Delta www.surreyleader.com
Coal port plans rile activists
Seven-year-old to launch Christmas display – to benefit Camp Goodtimes
Lighting up the fight against kids’ cancer
New Surrey terminal, North Van expansion proposed
by Jeff Nagel
by Boaz Joseph GAGE STALEY knows what he wants from Santa this
Christmas: A camera. A bit shy at first with a visitor talking to his mom Krystie in their Clayton Heights home, the sevenyear-old becomes interested in a second flash unit going off on his couch during a family portrait session, and he asks how it works. “He’s so smart, it’s crazy,” say Krystie, relaxing at home after spending the week with her son at B.C. Children’s Hospital. He is indeed ahead of the curve academically, being in Grade 2 and keeping up with his grades despite being in and out of the hospital, battling cancer, since the age of three. He’s undergone multiple surgeries, chemotherapy and radiation, all sprinkled with increasingly short-lived remissions of Stage III neuroblastoma. His mother recites the drama over just the past couple of years: Remission, relapse, remission, relapse… and Gage takes one form of medicine or another every day. Early on, tumours on his spine even resulted in paralysis, and Gage underwent a year of physiotherapy to learn how to walk again following major surgery. Last summer, while he was doing better, Gage came back beaming from a one-week stay at the Canadian Cancer Society’s Camp Goodtimes. See LIGHTS / Page 10
CLIMATE CHANGE activists are vowing to fight plans to build a new coal export terminal on the Fraser River in Surrey and expand an existing one in North Vancouver. Fraser Surrey Docks has applied to build a terminal in Surrey that would bring in thermal coal from Wyoming via the BNSF railway that runs through White Rock and Delta. It proposes to export four million tonnes of coal a year initially, with potential to Lois Jackson double that later. Meanwhile, Neptune Terminals aims to increase its exports of B.C.-mined metallurgical coal used in steelmaking from 12 million to 18 million tonnes. To activists like Kevin Washbrook, of the group Voters Taking Action on Climate Change,
“I think the coal dust is something people are really concerned about.”
BOAZ JOSEPH / THE LEADER
Gage Staley, 7 (with his mom Krystie Biernaczyk), will flip the switch at the Lagerstrom family’s Lightup 2012 on Saturday evening. The Fleetwood holiday light display collects donations for the Canadian Cancer Society.
Editorial 6 Letters 7 Sports 26 Arts 30 Classifieds 33
Save time, save money.
See PLANS / Page 5
On the prowl again.