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BACK ON SCREEN? Angelina Jolie and partner Brad Pitt are considering appearing together in film again
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Red Deer Advocate MONDAY, MAY 12, 2014
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Ice hut regulation demanded BY PAUL COWLEY ADVOCATE STAFF
Photo by JEFF STOKOE/Advocate staff
Carol Maier and Alice Mills of Innisfail make their way through the rows of plants at Dentoom’s Greenhouse in Red Deer as they purchase perennials for their gardens.
The good, bad of a late spring PARKS WORK STALLED BUT GARDEN CENTRES BUSY BY LANA MICHELIN ADVOCATE STAFF A cold, late spring means a delayed start on parks maintenance and mosquito control for the City of Red Deer. But on the brighter side, local gardening centres are doing booming business because of pent-up demand. Trevor Poth, parks superintendent for the city, said cooler weather and late snowfalls have caused setbacks for Red Deer’s parks and recreation workers. “We’re late on street sweeping and cleaning the boulevards and shrub beds. We’re about a week behind on that,” he said. Also, the city’s biological mosquito control program is about two weeks behind, since it could not be started while local ponds were covered with ice. Now that water is flowing again, Poth said parks workers started
spreading last week the microbial pesticide called Bacillus thuringiensis israelensis (Bti) on ponds where mosquito larvae will hatch. Poth doesn’t expect the delayed start to have any effect on mosquito numbers. “It shouldn’t have an impact,” he said, since mosquitoes also wait for the ice to melt before laying their eggs on ponds. City workers started playing catch-up on parks maintenance last week. Sports fields have been lined and “playground inspections are in full swing,” said Poth, who expected mowing and mulching in parks to start today. Public washrooms will be open by the May long weekend, after which parks workers will start planting colourful flower beds at City Hall Park and other areas. While overnight frosts can still happen well after Victoria Day, Poth said the city turns on irrigation systems to moisten the annuals and make them more frost resistant.
The City of Red Deer has hired about 120 park workers and expects to have a peak workforce of about 140. “Now if only we can get some nice days,” said Poth, who believes winter-weary city residents are “desperate” to start walking and cycling along park trails. Local gardening centres are doing brisk business in anticipation of warmer weather ahead. (Local temperatures are expected to climb to 18C by Wednesday.) “We’re crazy busy right now,” said Rebecca Bouw, retail manager at Dentoom’s Greenhouses on Sunday. Since winter has essentially stretched to eight months this year, Bouw said eager gardeners are buying anything with blooms — from flower baskets to bedding plants to flowering shrubs. She still recommends holding off on planting annuals outdoors until after the long weekend. lmichelin@reddeeradvocate.com
Lobbying efforts have been stepped up for a provincewide mandatory ice fishing hut registration program. Sylvan Lake Management Committee has fired off a letter to Environment and Sustainable Resource Development Minister Robin Campbell urging the province to craft ice hut regulations, including penalties for rule breakers. The committee also wants the province to boost staff time and resources for the Respect our Lakes program, which was rolled out in 2011 and has had much success in reducing the number of ice fishing huts left abandoned on Sylvan and Gull Lakes when the season ends in the spring. In April 2011, 25 huts were left on Sylvan Lake, creating potential environmental and boating hazards. To tackle the problem, a voluntary registry and public information campaign was introduced the following winter and 14 people signed up. Only five huts were left on the lake the following spring, which the committee touted as proof of the program’s value. Despite the initiative’s success, the province has proven non-committal to undertaking a provincewide program, said Keith Stephenson, a Lacombe County councillor and chair of the Sylvan Lake Management Committee. Representatives for Red Deer County, Town of Sylvan Lake and five summer villages are also on the committee. Further concerns were raised about the province’s support for the program this spring when the committee was told initially that the Alberta Environment and Sustainable Resource Department was too short staffed to help remove the huts as it had done in previous years. After a few frantic phone calls, four Fish and Wildlife staff from Rocky Mountain House and Red Deer were dispatched to help remove three huts left on Sylvan Lake before the ice became too unsafe. However, two huts were stranded on Gull Lake. “These huts will surely become a pollution issue in Gull Lake,” writes Stephenson. He said in an interview that the eight communities around the lake that are members of the committee want to keep the ice hut registration idea on the front burner. “We’re just going to keep pressing until we get it,” he said.
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Collector returns Second World War medal VETERANS VOICES OF CANADA FOUNDER GIVES IT BACK TO FAMILY
Maybe it was the loss of a medal commemorating his own great-uncle’s Second World War death that made him do it. Something compelled Allan Cameron to return another Silver Cross that he had paid $500 only a few years ago to the family it belongs with on Saturday. “I’m a collector and I’ve had it for three years and I decided it was time to get it back to the family . . . I would hope
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that somebody would do the same for me,” said the Sylvan Lake resident. Cameron is founder of the non-profit Veterans Voices of Canada, which records the war experiences of former soldiers in their own words. Since Cameron’s uncle and great-uncle served with the North Nova Scotia Highlanders, he has been collecting artifacts from their unit for years. In 2011, another militaria collector called to see if he wanted to purchase a Silver Cross medal connected to Authur Bedwin, a North Nova
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Scotia Highlander, who was killed in action in Holland in 1945. The memorial medals were presented to the mothers or widows of Canadian soldiers who died while in active service. Cameron bought the Silver Cross, thinking it should belong to someone who appreciates its meaning. But the Central Albertan occasionally thought about Bedwin’s family and whether he should try to track his relatives down and return the medal. “I thought about it a cou-
ple of times and then put it away.” But a story he heard recently made him reconsider his ownership of the artifact. It concerns a New Brunswick man who purchased a Second World War helmet with a soldier’s name printed in it for $30 from an army surplus store. “The fact that (the soldier) cared enough about it to write his stuff inside — his name and the ID number — it wasn’t mine to keep,” Jordan Chiasson told a local newspaper.
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Silver Cross medal has been returned to soldier’s family.
Hunt for Red Deer Boer War soldier’s grave After more than 100 years, researchers believe the body of Angus Jenkins of Red Deer is buried near where he fell in battle.
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BY LANA MICHELIN ADVOCATE STAFF