LOCAL NEWS: PIPELINE ECONOMIC IMPACT ▼ A3
Times
Thursday, November 28, 2013 ▼ Volume 48 No. 48 ▼ www.clearwatertimes.com ▼ $1.35 Includes GST
THE
NORTH THOMPSON
Second Place Best All Round Newspaper Third Place Best Editorial Page All of Canada <1,250 circulation 2013
SINCE 1912: Ray Austin is 99. See page A2 inside.
Second Place General Excellence B.C. and Yukon <2,000 circulation 2013
AG Foods buys Safety Mart Keith McNeill Safety Mart, Clearwater’s only supermarket, has been sold to AG Foods of Calgary. The deal will take effect as of Nov. 30, according to Wade Elliott, one of the three Safety Mart owners. AG Foods has been the store’s major supplier for many years, he said. The company apparently has been working with Safety Mart for some time to make the move and build a new shopping center next to Highway 5. Safety Mart owns the property next to the new roundabout on the highway beside Clearwater’s courthouse. The supermarket’s present owners also own a logging com-
pany, MW Sharke Contracting, which logged the property recently, in apparent preparation for construction. He and his partners, Rob Sunderman and Kelvin Arndt, felt the risks involved in the move were too great, said Elliott. Apparently an analysis they did showed they would lose money for at least the first five years. They therefore sold the business and the land by the highway to AG Foods. The deal involves the stock, store equipment and so on only, said Elliott, as well as the property by the highway. The building presently occupied by Safety Mart, along with the rest of Brookfield Mall, continues to be owned by Sandy Reid, a
Vancouver-based businessman. Elliott said Safety Mart has a renewable five-year lease with Reid for the building. He was not sure what would happen with the lease. He also did not want to predict what AG Foods’ plans would be, now that they have bought the business, saying that’s for AG Foods to announce. It would have been 20 years ago this December when he, Sunderman and Arndt bought the store, said Elliott, but their roots in the business go back farther than that. Elliott said he started working at Safety Mart when he was 14 years old. He went logging for a while when he was 20, came back to the store for a while, and then went logging again. Continued on page A6
Vice-regal visitor B.C. Lieutenant-Governor Judith Guichon (l) accepts a bouquet from North Thompson Communities Foundation board chair Cheryl Thomas while Simpcw First Nation representative Celena Slater prepares to give her a beaded purse. Guichon was being welcomed to a fundraising event held by the foundation at the Wells Gray Inn on Saturday evening, Nov. 23. For more about the story, see page A3 inside. Photo by Keith McNeill
Grinch threatens Clearwater Food Bank Christmas hampers Keith McNeill Unless new sources of funding are found, this could be the last year that Clearwater and District Food Bank distributes Christmas Hampers. That was the grim news delivered to the Times recently by food bank chair Heather Stanley and treasurer Patrick Stanley. “Things are just snowballing,” said Heather Stanley. “We're seeing more seniors coming in, more seasonal employees who have lost out due to changes in EI, more people on disability whose pensions aren't keeping up with the cost-ofliving. We can't expect the community to keep paying more.” A bigger clientele means the food bank
needed bigger premises, which in turn means more rent – even though their landlord is giving them a “super deal”, they said. Total budget for the food bank this year will be about $40,000, an increase of about $10,000 over last year. Their bill at Safety Mart is about $23,000 per year, plus they spend about another $5,000 buying meat from Rainer's in Darfield. Both local businesses go out of their way to help, the food bank representatives said, but they can only do so much. Other expenses include rent, insurance, and general operating costs. As members of Food Banks Canada, they take part in the national food sharing system.
Unfortunately, the food they receive nationally is sometimes of uneven quality. A recent shipment of baby food, for example, was all stale-dated and had to be discarded. Sometimes they receive too much of one item and so have to make a trip to Kamloops to trade for other items with the food bank there. Gleaning from local gardens is an important source of produce in season. Food bank volunteers also spend a lot of time canning and preserving the fruits and vegetables donated. As of the end of October, the food bank had given out about 30 more of their regular food hampers than they gave out during all of last year. One result has been they've been reduc-
SAFETY MART FOODS
OVER 1000 SPECIALS EVERY WEEK
LOCATED AT BROOKFIELD SHOPPING CENTRE • CLEARWATER, BC • 250-674-2213
ing the amount of food in each hamper – especially the higher cost items such as meat and fish. “Our mandate is to feed the hungry,” said Heather Stanley. “We've never turned people away but it's getting to that point. How do you decide who is going to get fed and who won't?” “The majority of the people we see are not just sitting on their duffs and expecting a handout,” she added. Everyone who works at the food banks is an unpaid volunteer, the Stanleys emphasized. Writing grant proposals is not something that comes easily to them, and some application forms are extremely complex. Now Christmas is coming up. Continued on page A2
BRUNSWICK SARDINES 00 106g tins
10/$10.