Penticton Western News, January 30, 2013

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NEWS PENTICTON WESTERN

www.pentictonwesternnews.com

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Work begins on cutting-edge telescope at Dominion Observatory

news

VOL. 47 ISSUE 9

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news

15 page

Penticton selected host for 2016 B.C. Winter Games

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 30, 2013 Health official urges pressure on province for hospital upgrade

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entertainment Eric Church and Colt Ford ready to take on Canada

NEWS PENTICTON WESTERN

Mark Brett/Western News

MAKING DREAMS COME TRUE — Const. Laura Hirst of the Penticton RCMP is served by Orange County sheriff Capt. Mike Toledo in advance of today’s DreamLift Day fundraiser at the Penticton Wendy’s restaurant. The sheriff will be joining other dignitaries and special guests who will be waiting on patrons from 6 a.m. to closing. Money raised will go towards helping send special needs children to Disneyland through the Sunshine Foundation of Canada. Other Southern Interior Wendy’s will also be taking part in the 19th annual event.

PLAN ALTERS POLITICAL LANDSCAPE Joe Fries Western News Staff

Numbers shouldn’t be the deciding factor for determining how Canada’s federal electoral boundaries are redrawn, say local politicians who are upset with a plan to sever the historical tie between Penticton and Summerland. Canada’s soon-to-be 338 federal ridings are drawn so that the population in each is about the same. The map is studied once a decade by commissions in each province and adjustments made to accommodate population growth. The proposed new map for B.C., which was tabled Monday in the House of Commons, adds six new ridings and dramatically recasts the Southern Interior. Most notably, Penticton, Oliver and Osoyoos would join with Trail and Castlegar to form the

new South Okanagan-West Kootenay riding, which would stretch north to include Nakusp. Summerland would then fall in with Peachland, part of Kelowna, Merritt, Princeton and Keremeos in a new riding called Central Okanagan-Similkameen-Nicola. Penticton Mayor Dan Ashton noted the new ridings would split Summerland and Penticton for the first time ever just to balance population numbers. “These lines to me are wrong,” he said. “This is the issue when you have to attach numbers to it and draw lines based on numbers. They should be drawn based on trade… and commonalities, and they’re not.” The electoral quota on which the new ridings are based is 104,763 people, and in the Southern Interior the new ridings vary from that by as much as 15 per cent. Summerland Mayor

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Janice Perrino thinks an exception should also be made to keep her community connected to Penticton. “We’re talking about 11,000 people,” she said. “I would hardly call it huge.” Besides obvious links in the administration of education and health care, Perrino added, the two cities also benefit from being able to lobby a single member of Parliament. The new boundaries will be studied this spring by a House of Commons committee that will accept MPs’ written objections, which will then be sent back to the commissions for consideration. The final realignment will be submitted to Canada’s chief electoral officer in September. John Hall, who chaired the B.C. commission, said his group will consider further changes based on input from MPs. “We look at everything. You can’t not listen

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to people, in my opinion,” he said. Hall noted, however, that while his commission heard loud and clear at public hearings last fall that there were concerns with the PentictonSummerland split, it couldn’t find a workable solution to meet the electoral quota. “All I can say about Summerland is it remains not the ideal solution from the point of view of some people in Summerland, but I think it would be less ideal to lump them in with the West Kootenays,” he said. Okanagan-Coquihalla MP Dan Albas said he also found “some areas of concern” in the proposal and will work with colleagues to persuade the commission to “fine-tune” the boundaries to better reflect community input and address “accessibility issues” for people in the more farflung areas of the new ridings.

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