STRAHL MISSES ALL-CANDIDATES MEETING TO BE WITH PM HARPER Candidates say we deserve a ‘boots on the ground’ MP
times
Lofty goals { Pg. A17 }
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Chilliwack
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 2015
{ Page A3 }
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The eagle case has finally landed . . .
› Cover Story
. . . and after nine years all charges are dropped BY PAUL J. HENDERSON phenderson@chilliwacktimes.com
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Paul J. Henderson/TIMES
Ann Delorme and Gord Green at the Wellington Avenue condominium where they had a confrontation with Liberal Party canvassers last week.
Can’t stop fed election canvassers W BY PAUL J. HENDERSON phenderson@chilliwacktimes.com
Delorme said one of the three female canvassers showed her “something on her phone” and proceeded to go up the elevator in the building, knocking on doors and leaving Liberal pamphlets behind. Delorme got one strata council member out of her apartment, and then two others, including vice-president Gord Green, to talk to the canvassers.
“We don’t permit solicitors,” Green said. “We have a bylaw that doesn’t allow it. She got right in my face. She said ‘No, I’m not leaving.’” Eventually, if reluctantly, the group of canvassers, which included candidate Louis De Jaeger’s campaign manager Tanya Crowell, did leave the building. { See ELECTION, page A11 }
{ See EAGLE, page A6 }
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hen a group of Chilliwack condominium owners kicked federal Liberal election canvassers out of their downtown apartment building last week, they were shocked at the response. “She showed me her Liberal ‘thing’
and I said ‘I don’t know how you got in, but you have to leave. Nobody invited you in here,’” Ann Delorme told the Times. Delorme, who is a senior, lives in her Wellington Avenue condo alongside mostly other older folks. It is a quiet building the owners fiercely guard against solicitors and other strangers. “She said to me, ‘No, I’m not leaving. I have every right to be here.’”
nd just like that, 3,422 days after charges were laid against two local First Nations men for poaching eagles, Crown counsel dropped the charges. Gary Abbott and Ralph Leon were the last of 11 men first charged in 2006 after a 15-month investigation that lingered in the courts for nine years, and that included a mistrial, a fraud conviction against a senior conservation officer in charge of the investigation, calls from local Sto:lo leaders to drop the case, and accusations of highly unethical and disrespectful behaviour on the part of the B.C. Conservation Officer Service (BCCOS). Abbott, Leon and nine other men faced a total of 105 charges related to the unlawful possession of dead wildlife, trafficking in dead wildlife and other related offences. Charges stemmed from a BCCOS investigation that began with the discovery of 50 dead eagles in North Vancouver. The lead investigator, senior conservation officer Rick Grindrod, used undercover operations to attend cultural events such as powwows to, in part, lure First Nations men into illegal
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