Friday, August 30, 2019 | Your community newspaper since 1916
Former leader of polygamous sect gets jail time Trevor CRAWLEY The Canadian Press
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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau talks with hydro workers after making an announcement at BC Hydro Trades Training Centre in Surrey on Thursday.
Feds, B.C. to push electrification of LNG The Canadian Press SURREY — The federal and British Columbia governments want to power the production of the natural gas industry in the province using electricity. As part of an agreement announced Thursday, the two governments and BC Hydro are forming a committee to push projects that increase power transmission. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said the agreement is aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions from the natural gas industry, which produces about 18 per cent of the carbon pollution in the province. “We’re taking another major step forward in the fight against climate change,” he said, adding that electrification will also create jobs. B.C. Premier John Horgan joined Trudeau in making the announcement at a BC Hydro training centre in Surrey, saying the two governments are working to make the economy more environmentally sustainable. Horgan said the agreement also takes
advantage of BC Hydro’s ability to provide clean energy for industry in the province. “Our governments are working collaboratively to electrify industries and reduce emissions as we put B.C. on a path to a cleaner, better future,” he said in a statement. Environmental groups have criticized Horgan’s NDP government for its backing of the liquefied natural gas industry in B.C., arguing changes to the province’s tax structure and subsidies are helping a sector that increases carbon pollution. The federal and provincial governments have boosted LNG Canada’s plans for a $40-billion project in Kitimat, which is expected to create 10,000 construction jobs and up to 950 permanent positions in the processing terminal on the coast of B.C. Trudeau said Thursday’s agreement builds on that project. The three-page agreement says $680 million in “near-term” electrification projects are being considered for possible funding.
B.C. Green Leader Andrew Weaver said the deal and the province’s financial commitment to it is a further subsidization of fossil fuel development, including for projects that have not yet been built. “The NDP government is not only providing more subsidies for the growth of the fossil fuel sector but are also neglecting their responsibility to this province to be making the investments for an alternative future,” he said in a news release. Weaver said he supports the electrification of industry, but it must go beyond providing help for the gas sector. “British Columbians are looking for leadership that is investing in their future by supporting the industries of tomorrow, not the dinosaurs of yesterday.” Merran Smith, executive director of Clean Energy Canada, said in a statement that the agreement delivers a critical component to B.C.’s climate plan. “Electrification is the thread that ties all climate efforts together. Powering our cars, our homes and our industries with clean electricity is the only sustainable path forward.”
She said yes, again
Couple rebuilding love after Victoria woman lost all memory of her husband
Victoria Times Colonist A Victoria woman plans to say I do again for what will feel like the first time, after a head injury caused her to lose all memory of her husband. Laura Hart Faganello will marry Brayden Faganello on their anniversary, July 15, 2020, four years after a wedding day she can’t remember. “I’ve learned that love is a choice, and I am choosing to love Brayden,” said Hart Faganello. “On Aug. 19, he proposed to me, again, and I said yes, again.” Hart Faganello, 23, was setting up a business event on April 27, 2017, in Langford when a pole fell on her head and she suffered a traumatic brain injury, she said. Her husband, Brayden Faganello, 25, says after the accident, she lost her sense of humour and her “light.” “She was always down and sad” and in constant pain and sick, he said.
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VICTORIA TIMES COLONIST PHOTO
Laura Hart Faganello and her husband Brayden Faganello will get remarried in 2020. Hart Faganello suffered a brain injury in 2017, and lost all memory of her husband. Hart Faganello’s father, Rob Hart, says his articulate, accomplished and confident daughter
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CRANBROOK — A former leader of a polygamous sect in British Columbia has been sentenced to 12 months in jail for taking a 15-yearold girl into the United States to be married. James Oler, the one-time leader of Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in Bountiful, showed no reaction when he was sentenced in Cranbrook by B.C. Supreme Court Justice Martha Devlin. The sentencing concludes a legal process that began five years ago when he was charged with the removal of a child from Canada under a Criminal Code subsection that the removal would facilitate sex offences. During Oler’s trial, court heard that church records seized by American law enforcement indicated that church leader and prophet Warren Jeffs called Oler on June 23, 2004, and ordered him to bring the girl to the U.S. to be married. Special prosecutor Peter Wilson recommended Oler spend two years in prison. Oler didn’t have a lawyer during the trial or sentencing process, but lawyer Joe Doyle was appointed as a friend of the court to ensure there was a fair trial and he suggested a sentence of between six and 18 months in jail. This was Oler’s second trial. He was acquitted in his first trial when a judge ruled it was unclear that Oler did anything within Canada’s borders to arrange the teens transfer to the United States. At the original trial, Brandon James Blackmore and Emily Ruth Gail Blackmore were convicted for removing a 13-year-old girl from the country for marriage. Brandon Blackmore was sentenced to 12 months in jail, while Emily Blackmore was handed a seven-month sentence. Oler, 55, was also convicted of practising polygamy alongside Winston Blackmore, who was also a leader in the polygamous community. Both men were sentenced to house arrest and probation in June last year. In sentencing Oler on Thursday, Devlin said she considered the nature of the crime and the impact his actions had on others. She also cited mitigating factors for her decision including his clean criminal record prior to the polygamy conviction and that he acted on sincerely held religious beliefs rather than being motivated by money or sexual gratification.
struggled to read and write. She was in her third year at the University of Victoria and had to
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drop out. “The way she put her words together, the way she hesitated… She’s been in some ways reduced to survival mode. It’s been very difficult.” As the symptoms worsened, she would forget why and when she married Brayden Faganello just nine months earlier. Together they had a wedding photography business. She regularly woke up thinking it was three years earlier, when she was 17 and living in Belgium, where her father – a lieutenantcolonel now with the United Nations Command in South Korea – was then stationed. She cringed when her husband, a virtual stranger, hugged her. She forgot the sense of humour that attracted her to him. The two had met as penpals while she was in Brussels and he was in South Africa, and almost a year later met in person in Victoria. But their whirlwind romance came to an abrupt stop nine
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months after they said: “I do.” “I felt completely trapped in the life I was living,” said Hart Faganello. The couple was living in a basement suite in Gordon Head. Living separately wasn’t financially possible, so they became roommates with an imaginary line in their bed. Faganello tried to carry on a normal life, but he says each day was like the moment someone breaks up with you. “It was absolutely heartbreaking, especially as we were still so newly wed,” he said. “It shredded me to bits having that total broken heart.” He lived in that suspended state for almost two years. “Any feelings weren’t being reciprocated,” Faganello said. “She was cold and distant.” While he admits “a lot of people might assess the situation and bail,” Faganello said he had made a commitment to Laura for life and believed they could make it work. — see ‘IT’S A STORY, page 3
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