108th Year - Week 5
Wednesday, February 4, 2015
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On your mark... ONE MORE TO GO Steelheads take game one in playoffs.
The littlest racers prepare for the annual Kiddies Snowmobile Races at Heritage Park last Saturday. Eighteen racers showed up to race around the tracks.
SPORTS/A8
Kendra Wong photo
BURNING BRIGHT Ski hill remembers Rick Schmidt.
OUR TOWN/A21
AN AUTHOR’S STORY Richard Wagamese visits Smithers.
COMMUNITY/A22
TransCanada Pipelines soon opening office in Smithers
Unist’ot’en camp blockade plans steel bridge gate By Chris Gareau Smithers/Interior News
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TransCanada Pipelines is planning to move in, as a Unist’ot’en-run camp meant to block the company’s LNG pipeline is strengthening its effort to keep them out. TransCanada’s Coastal GasLink Pipeline Project director of project planning and execution Greg Cano said an information office should be open in Smithers by May. Open houses in Houston, Smithers, Terrace and Kitimat are tentatively scheduled for mid-April.
All this comes as TransCanada moves closer to hiring contractors for building the pipeline from the Dawson Creek area to Kitimat. Negotiations with Moricetown and other band councils are still happening, but Cano said he expects job fairs looking for local construction companies and workers to start up in October. There is strong opposition from Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs, but Cano said he hopes to negotiate a deal with them through the Office of the Wet’suwet’en.
“Some of them have worked for us on some of our field programs. It’s a very diverse group and we continue to work through the Office of the Wet’suwet’en,” said Cano. Members of the Unist’ot’en clan of the Wet’suwet’en have been camping near where the Coastal Gaslink and other pipelines are planned to cross south of Houston since 2010 to enforce a blockade of any construction. Freda Huson with the camp said there are no negotiations to be had, and that court rulings back up their claim that hereditary chiefs and
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not band councils get to decide what happens on the territory. “They’re not coming in. All our people said no, and even if they took us to court we would win,” said Huson. The band system is one created by the federal government that Huson and others at the camp reject, believing in the traditional hereditary system. “We know that’s worked for thousands of years, and this democratic system that we have here now which we call Canada does not work. Right now Christy Clark forked out all this money
to create this limited partnership because they’re in such a bad deficit, they’re hoping these pipelines are going to be the province’s saviour, which it’s not going to be,” said Huson. An online fundraising campaign raised over $10,000 for a steel gate to be constructed at a bridge where the camp is set up. “We have just an honour gate with a (sawhorse) that you could just move, and we find that people in the late hours of the night, they would just move that and try to go in,” explained Huson. See PRICES on A20
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