THE WEDNESDAY
CANADIAN COMMUNITY NEWSPAPER AWARD 2012
TRI-CITY NEWS CANADIAN COMMUNITY NEWSPAPER AWARD 2012
Monty entrepreneurs
School’s in for arts
SEE LIFE, PAGE 15
SEE ARTS, PAGE 22
DEC. 19, 2012 www.tricitynews.com
INSIDE
Tom Fletcher/10 Letters/11 A Good Read/18 Sports/26
SARAH PAYNE/THE TRI-CITY NEWS
Greg Wright of Port Coquitlam shovels the sidewalk in front of his home on Coast Meridian Road on Tuesday morning. Below left, a seasonal — and timely — decoration at a home on Watkins Avenue in Coquitlam.
Snow day: schools open, traffic snarled By Sarah Payne THE TRI-CITY NEWS
Kids dreaming of a white Christmas woke up to a winter wonderland Tuesday morning, but for commuters the white stuff wasn’t such a welcome treat. It was slow going on slippery side streets that hadn’t been plowed and even Port Moody’s St. Johns Street resembled a parking lot. Drivers reported commutes that usually take 20 minutes were stretching out to well over an hour. One northeast Coquitlam resident said it took her husband an hour just to make it as far as the Ikea store. see RESIDENTS, page 13
Pickton probe urges regional police force Oppal findings slam both VPD & Coq. Mounties By Jeff Nagel BLACK PRESS
School district weighs in on what to do on a snow day. See page 13
M i s s i n g Wo m e n Inquiry commissioner Wally Oppal is calling on the province to create a Greater Vancouver police force after concluding a badly co-ordinated police response was a key underlying factor that let Port Coquitlam serial killer Robert Pickton keep murdering women for years after he should have been caught.
The former attorneygeneral, in his fourvolume report titled “Forsaken,” says fragmentation of policing in the Lower Mainland led to multiple police failures, including uncoordinated parallel investigations and the failure to share key evidence. He recommends an expert panel develop a proposed new regional policing model and implementation plan. “It is clear from the evidence that a regional police force stood a good chance of apprehending Robert Pickton much earlier,” Oppal said, noting the Lower Mainland
ASSAULT ARREST A 16-year-old has been charged in connection with the late-night assault in October of a security guard in PoCo. See story, page 8 is the only major centre in Canada without a regional force. The patchwork of municipal police and RCMP detachments in the region came into stark focus during the inquiry as Vancouver Police took the view no crimes were committed in their jurisdiction be-
cause Pickton’s farm was in Port Coquitlam, which is policed by Coquitlam RCMP. “The missing and murdered women were forsaken twice,” he said in the report, “once by society at large and again by the police.” see SYSTEMIC, page 3