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A look back
It was a year of tension and triumph, change and renewal, anger and action. It was a year marked by a bitter labour dispute, a challenge to a controversial rezoning decision, and changes to the city’s historic downtown. Agriculture grabbed the spotlight for both good and bad reasons. A storm of controversy erupted after a video of alleged animal abuse at Canada’s largest dairy farm, located in Chilliwack, surfaced. But the year also marked the official opening of UFV’s Centre of Agriculture Excellence – a state-of-the-art facility that will shape farming practices for generations. Today, on page 3, the Chilliwack Progress begins a look back at the first part of the year.
Photos Clockwise from the upper left: Chilliwack teachers march is solidarity at the start of a long and bitter strike; Premier Christy Clark opens the new Centre of Agriculture Excellence at UFV; Jeff Kooyman, one of the owners of Chilliwack Cattle Sales faces the media following allegations of abuse at the farm; the Irwin Block comes down at Five Corners; Les Talvio, executive director of the new Cyrus Centre Chilliwack. JENNA HAUCK/ PROGRESS
Middle of the road Chilliwack for income growth The Progress Chilliwack is not scaling heights as the top city in the province for income growth, but it’s not at the bottom either. Chilliwack is riding comfortably in the middle of the pack, ranked at No. 19 among 37 cities ranked in the BC Business ‘Best Cities for Work’ list. They pegged Chilliwack with 12.53 per cent income growth,
and used data from Environics Analytics to rank the cities according to their job markets. They zeroed in on income growth over five years, and made it the most “heavily weighted indicator” of the seven used in the calculation of the rankings, along with population, household income, labour participation and more. “More so than average incomes, income growth reflects a city’s job market trajectory: what’s boom-
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ing, and how much it’s booming,” according the accompanying text on the Best Cities rankings. “To capture some of that, we’ve created this heat map, which plots each of our ranked cities by fiveyear household income growth.” See it all bcbusiness.ca/bestcities-for-work-in-bc-our-rankingof-all-36. They only looked at cities with more than 10,000 residents, and excluded “bedroom communities” like West Van, Port Moody
and White Rock where the salaries are high, but there are few jobs. Oil-and-gas-sector boom-town Fort St. John came in as the No. 1 ranked city, leading the pack at 18.20 per cent, while Terrace, No. 34, experienced the slowest income growth at 7.87 per cent. Abbotsford-Mission was close to Chilliwack, ranked at No. 20, with the same level of income growth, 12.53 per cent. Where Chilliwack and
Abbotsford dif fered slightly was average household income, which was $75,844 for Chilliwack, jumping to $83,818 in AbbotsfordMission. But unemployment is lower in Chilliwack at 6.82 per cent, compared to 8.22 per cent in AbbyMission. Victoria ranked at No. 16, while Kelowna took the No. 17 spot. jfeinberg@theprogress.com twitter.com/chwkjourno
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Jennifer Feinberg