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Cap U students launch housing plan BRENT RICHTER brichter@nsnews.com
Capilano University students are among a cohort pushing the province on a new solution that could ease the housing affordability crisis in the Lower Mainland.
The Alliance of British Columbia Students – a notfor-profit advocacy group of graduate and undergraduate student societies – launched a campaign Wednesday outlining how “minor changes” in government policy would allow the universities to begin building student housing on campus. Under the University Act, schools may take on debt for capital projects but only with the approval of the
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Capilano Students’ Union executives Jullian Kolstee, Beatriz Miralles and Michelle Gervais sit amid cardboard mock ups of student housing that doesn’t yet exist. The CSU is floating a plan that would see student residences built with minimal burden on taxpayers. PHOTO CINDY GOODMAN
Stiff sentence urged for fentanyl dealer
JANE SEYD jseyd@nsnews.com
A Crown prosecutor is asking a judge to impose a lengthy 18-year jail sentence on a high-level North Vancouver fentanyl dealer to send a message to those contributing to the dangerous overdose epidemic that has killed hundreds of people in B.C.
Walter James McCormick, 51, is being sentenced after pleading guilty Aug. 29 to five charges including one charge of trafficking fentanyl in North Vancouver and four charges of possessing drugs, including fentanyl, for the purpose of trafficking in North Vancouver, Langley and Richmond. McCormick was arrested Feb. 17, 2015 in one of the Lower Mainland’s first major fentanyl trafficking busts that followed a lengthy undercover police investigation under the name “Project Tainted.”
Prosecutor asks judge to set new standard as case involving first big bust heard in court According to details of the case described by the prosecutor in court, when police raided McCormick’s North Vancouver home at 2681 Poplynn Dr., along with his car and Main Street storage locker, they turned up 30,000 fentanyl pills with a street value of $945,000 – along with cocaine, methamphetamine, marijuana and Alprazolam (benzodiazepine) pills worth about another $1 million. Prosecutor Oren Bick said outside court as one of the first cases of fentanyl dealing to go before a judge, he’s hoping for a stiff sentence.
Because fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid, is so much stronger and more dangerous than other drugs, Bick said dealing it should net a harsher sentence. “I’m asking the judge to treat fentanyl as more serious than heroin and go above the usual cocaine and heroin sentencing range,” he said outside Richmond provincial court following adjournment of McCormick’s sentencing hearing Wednesday. “There are no fentanyl precedents in B.C. at this high level,” Bick said. “I’m asking the judge to forge new ground and stake out at least a first case in high-level fentanyl decision.” Bick is asking the judge for a 10-year sentence for McCormick’s role as a top-level supplier in dealing fentanyl and other drugs from a North Vancouver base in early 2015, and a further eight years for his role in dealing drugs, including fentanyl, in Richmond, while out on bail in May 2016.
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