Prince George Citizen September 28, 2019

Climate strike

About 100 people gathered at Highway 16 and 97 on

Study pushes B.C. forest sector toward new path

Chuck CHIANG Glacier Media

Despite a tumultuous 2019 that saw the B.C. forestry sector become one of the province’s most embattled industries, there is a possible light at the end of the tunnel if companies embrace a new business model with emphasis on high-value products.

That is among the messages delivered by the Council of Forest Industries (COFI) in a report called Smart Future: A Path Forward for B.C.’s Forest Products Industry, published this month. The report comes as a wave of shutdowns and operational reductions – as many as 38 of them resulting in layoffs and curtailments – has hit the sector since May, causing more than 1,000 people to lose their jobs. Companies have blamed the job losses on factors ranging from a shrinking wood supply (due to mountain pine beetle infestation, fires and a general loss of land base) to intense competition from countries like Chile and Russia.

“We are in a transition,” said COFI president and CEO Susan Yurkovich. “Mills have been curtailing operations… so we are going through this difficult period. But we’ve been hearing from folks

about how to get through these challenges, and what I think is it’s really important to work to support workers and communities as we transition… But we also need to set ourselves up for the future, and there is a bright path if we make some choices now.”

That, Yurkovich said, is where the Smart Future report comes in.

The document lists six main points for provincial and federal governments to consider: transition to a sustainable new business model; protecting the remaining land where wood can be harvested; flexible regulation that safeguards the environment without discouraging investment; increased partnerships with Indigenous communities; “doubling down” on diversifying international markets for B.C. wood products; and wider use of the industry’s knowledge with green buildings using wood.

The applications for solid-wood use is increasing. There is a lot of talk about mid-rises and taller buildings...

— Canfor CEO Don Kayne

sector’s need to move up the value chain in its products. Companies say that as harvests decrease and complications in government regulations multiply, B.C. has become a high-cost producer, forcing small and large operators to cut jobs. Industry leaders fear that as harvests shrink, the cost of producing lumber and wood products is unlikely to drop back down to levels seen a decade ago. According to the report, the annual allowable cut will fall from 70 million cubic metres in 2007 to half that amount by 2030.

we were getting. That’s changed now; we’re now moving back into high-quality fibre, and we have an incentive to get more out of it because the cost is also higher.”

Canfor Corp. president and CEO Don Kayne said that while the cost of wood stemming from an inconsistent supply of fibre is undoubtedly a major issue for the industry, the fact that B.C. wood fibre is returning to high-quality status presents companies with a way forward in turning the sector around. That means the B.C. forestry sector should place greater emphasis on value-added products that can fetch greater profits, like dimension lumber, pulp and paper, pressure-treated components, laminated timber and fibreboards.

No room at the inn for wayward black bear

Mark NIELSEN Citizen staff

mnielsen@pgcitizen.ca

A local motel was a scene of excitement early afternoon Thursday when a yearling black bear wandered onto the premises.

One of the overarching themes of the report is the B.C. forestry

“What we need to remember is, for about the last 15 years or more, we’ve been dealing… with mountain pine beetle-impacted wood,” Yurkovich said. “So over the years, as the quality of the fibre degrades, we did what we should have done by taking out as much of it as possible while it still had value…. So B.C.’s industry developed markets for low-grade wood that was suited to the fibre

“What’s really encouraging about the whole value-added area is that, first of all, we have an increasing opportunity… as we get higher-quality logs that will allow us to take advantage of some markets,” Kayne said.

“The applications for solidwood use is increasing. There is a lot of talk about mid-rises and taller buildings; it’s not a dream or demonstration projects. These are projects that are actually happening around the world...”

“We were talking with one of our guests and she was like ‘I’m sorry, I have to interrupt you, but there is a bear,’ and I’m like, what? No way!” said Carrie Melo, a supervisor at the Spruceland Inn on Central Street West near 15th Avenue. In a panicked state, the bear darted about the motel courtyard. While co-workers took cover, Melo waved her arms and came close to chasing it out.

— see BEAR, page 3

Suspects confessed to B.C. murders in videos

Laura KANE The Canadian Press

SURREY — Two suspects confessed to the murders of three people in northern British Columbia in several videos taken before they shot themselves in a suicide pact, the RCMP said Friday.

The Mounties said Bryer Schmegelsky, 18, and Kam McLeod, 19, expressed no remorse in the videos and did not explain their motives behind the killings that sparked a nationwide manhunt this summer.

RCMP Assistant Commissioner Kevin Hackett said there was nothing from the investigation that gave police a clue as to the motive for the crimes.

“If there was in fact a motive, it’s gone with the accused,” he told a news conference.

Police determined there was a lack of remorse because the videos were “cold” and “matter of fact,” Hackett said.

“Their attitude, frankly, from my observations was not consistent with someone who was responsible for the type of violence offences that they took responsibility for,” he added. Before their deaths, the men were charged with the murder of Leonard Dyck, a University of British Columbia botany lecturer, and were also suspects in the deaths of American Chynna Deese and her Australian boyfriend Lucas Fowler.

The RCMP released new details of its investigation, including descriptions of the videos, and said police located a digital camera belonging to Dyck near where the bodies of the two suspects were

found in northern Manitoba.

The Mounties said McLeod shot Schmegelsky before shooting himself in a suicide pact, and two guns found near their bodies were the same firearms used in the murders of Deese, Fowler and Dyck.

The RCMP said its Behavioural Analysis Unit believes the videos may inspire copycat killers and

that releasing them would be seen as disrespectful to the victims and their families, so they aren’t being made public at this time.

The camera contained three still images and six videos. In the first 58-second video, the RCMP describe Schmegelsky as saying their plan is to march to Hudson Bay, hijack a boat and travel to Europe

or Africa.

In the next, which is 51 seconds, he says they have reached a river that is large and fast-moving and they may have to commit suicide, to which McLeod agrees.

The next 32-second video shows Schmegelsky saying they have shaved in preparation for their own deaths and they now plan to kill more people and expect to be dead in a week, the RCMP said.

The fourth video is 19 seconds long and they say they will shoot themselves, while the next is just six seconds and appears to have been taken accidentally.

The final 31-second video is what the two men describe as their “last will and testament,” and they express their wish to be cremated, the RCMP said.

search of the vehicle over the next two days turned up identification belonging to the pair.

Police found unspent and spent bullet casings.

An autopsy on July 19 confirmed that Fowler and Deese died of multiple gunshot wounds and it appears that the shooter or shooters stood behind the victims for at least some of the shots.

Also on July 19, a burned truck registered to McLeod was found about 60 kilometres south of Dease Lake. Dyck’s body was found about two kilometres away but was unidentified at that time and police released a composite sketch.

The families of McLeod and Schmegelsky said they were good kids who had left on a trip to northern B.C. and Yukon to look for work, and the pair had limited police interaction and no criminal records, so the RCMP treated them as missing persons.

A search warrant of the truck located spent rounds matching those found at the first crime scene.

On July 22, the RCMP received information that a witness had come forward and stated they knew McLeod and Schmegelsky and believed the boys may have been involved in the murders. The Mounties declined to provide any more information about the witness.

Later that day, Helen Dyck called the police and reported that she believed the composite sketch was her husband.

The RCMP publicly identified Schmegelsky and McLeod as suspects in the three murders the next day.

The camera contained three still images and six videos. In the first 58-second video, the RCMP describe Schmegelsky as saying their plan is to march to Hudson Bay, hijack a boat and travel to Europe or Africa.

The two young men legally purchased a SKS semi-automatic rifle and a box of 7.62 mm ammunition using McLeod’s gun licence at a store in Nanaimo on July 12, the same day they left their hometown of Port Alberni, the Mounties said. The manhunt for McLeod and Schmegelsky led to Gillam, Man., where Dyck’s Toyota Rav 4 was found burned. Officers converged on the area to begin what would be a two-week search.

Hackett said none of the videos are date stamped.

One of the still images shows Schmegelsky lying on his side posing with a SKS rifle, another is a blurred photo with a finger across the lens and the third shows McLeod from the chest up.

The Mounties released a sevenpage, double-sided overview of their investigation to media on Friday.

The document provides a timeline and new details of the homicides, but does not draw any conclusions about motive.

“Interviews of McLeod and Schmegelsky’s families, teachers and friends, seized evidence from search warrants and the six video recordings did not reveal their motivation for the murders,” the overview says.

The investigation began July 15 when the bodies of Fowler and Deese were discovered near Highway 97, south of Liard River Hot Springs. The bodies were found near a van registered to Fowler and a

On Aug. 1, McLeod’s backpack was found containing a full box of ammunition, his wallet and clothing. On Aug. 7, the suspects’ bodies were found with two firearms, one of which was the same gun purchased at the Nanaimo store.

Based on the evidence, police say no other suspects are responsible for the three homicides.

Hackett said police are also satisfied there are no other victims in the case.

In a statement provided through the RCMP, the Deese family said “Chynna was a ray of sunshine, and for her to be taken has made the world feel a bit darker.”

“The impact of such horrendous crimes was felt rippling throughout many communities and we would like to express sincere gratitude to the general public for their empathy and aid during the investigation and manhunt.”

It also thanks the police for “their tireless efforts as a piece of justice has been served in knowing the conclusion of this case.”

Security camera images of fugitives Kam McLeod, 19, and Bryer Schmegelsky, 18, are displayed during a news conference in Surrey in July.

Citizen pressmen look back on paper’s history

Ted CLARKE Citizen staff

tclarke@pgcitizen.ca

When visitors look at The Citizen’s press, they see the loud, inkstained machine from the movies.

When Phil Morrison and Al Wilson look at it, they see memories.

As they prepared to print the last daily edition of The Citizen on Friday night, Morrison and Wilson, two of The Citizen’s five press operators who have each worked with the big, noisy beast for more than 38 years, they couldn’t help but look back with a deep sense of accomplishment.

“We got to work on a piece of machinery in an industry that changed the world, basically,” said Wilson. “The printing press was one of the major changes in the world, and I think that’s kind of cool.”

Now 59, Morrison was just 19 when he joined the Citizen team in 1980, the only non-smoker on a six-man crew that turned the air of the pressroom blue with their cigarette habits.

Wilson, Morrison’s school friend from Duchess Park, started at The Citizen in 1981 and worked three years in the mailroom before he became a pressman.

They both feel a sentimental attachment to the press that worked so well, knowing that for nearly six decades, it has stimulated the senses of our readers in the community. It’s a living and breathing hydraulic machine that hissed and whined as it churned out the daily pages and folded them into a hand-held product that retained the unmistakable smell of ink.

“It’s like going in the same car and driving to Vancouver, you’re with it for eight hours every day and you maintain it and you become attached to it,” said Wilson, 59. Morrison and Wilson have worked on the same Goss Urbanite

offset press for their entire careers, with several additions that brought it up to the current eight units. The press has been printing The Citizen since October 1963, when the paper moved into its new 12,000 square-foot building at 150 Brunswick St., as part of a $300,000 expansion.

The press rarely suffered a breakdown but Morrison and Wilson remember the day, back when the Citizen was still an afternoon paper in the early 1980s, when they had to drive the plates to Williams Lake for printing when an electrical panel blew in the pressroom.

“We left at midnight and got back at noon, so we never missed

Bear tranquilized, relocated

— from page 1

When a truck pulled into the entryway blocking the creature’s path, Melo called on the driver to honk the truck’s horn. The driver did more than that and more or less herded the bear into a stairwell and cornered the animal while Melo called 911.

It turned out that Conservation officers and RCMP were already in the area and looking for the bear after receiving a report shortly after midday of a sighting at Spruceland Elementary School, less than a kilometre to the west.

The students were kept inside the school while, with the help of an RCMP dog and handler, they had followed the bear’s scent through a nearby greenbelt.

“It got sighted a couple of times but it managed to get away on us,” conservation officer Eamon McArthur said. “We conducted some patrols in the area and then we got another report that there was a bear out near the Spruceland Inn.”

They arrived to find the bear in the stairwell. The bear was tranquilized, tagged, removed and released back into the wild north of Prince George, McArthur said, and noted there were no recent reports of garbage bears in the area.

“My thought is it probably wandered (into the city) in the dark and maybe laid down in

the thistles or whatever, because it had a few burrs in its fur,” McArthur said. “And when the school bells started ringing, I think it just got scared, was running around and just didn’t know what to do.”

He said it was among the oddest spots to find a bear in the five years he’s been a conservation officer in Prince George. He did have to deal with a bear that had wandered into the garden centre at a local big box store a few year ago.

“Normally, they stick to the woods but if they’re that panicked, you never really know where they’re going. But there was no evidence of aggression and there weren’t even any garbage cans knocked down in the area to suggest it was even remotely a garbage bear which is why we made the decision to let it go,” McArthur said of the one he dealt with on Thursday.

Melo said the encounter made for a few tense moments, particularly when it looked like the bear was heading in someone’s direction. “But once it was trapped upstairs, it wasn’t so bad,” she said.

McArthur said conservation officers have been busy doing “nightly audits” looking for households who leave their garbage cans out the night before collection day. Those who are caught risk a ticket carrying a minimum $230 fine.

that edition,” said Wilson. With the move to the new building, that marked an innovative switch to offset printing from letterpress (hot lead) printing, used in the first 47 years of the Citizen’s 103-year history. The offset process, in which the ink is transferred from a plate to a rubber blanket, replaced Linotype and allowed the pressmen to more accurately print photographs, advertisements and graphics. It gave page designers the option of using three colours, and by the early 1970s, full colour. The pressmen at the time had to be retrained to acquire the mechanical skills required for the new phototypographic system. Pre-press compos-

ing staff were sent to Vancouver to learn camera and paste-up techniques.

“We used to have to cut out every photograph and put it in holes that came in the pages,” said Morrison. “When I first started we printed full-colour on the front page four times a year, now we do that every day.”

In October 1988, the press was given a new home at 145 Brunswick (the former Hudson’s Bay Wholesale building) in a $1 million expansion. The four-unit press added a second tier which increased the single press-run capacity from 32 pages to 48 pages. Once it got up to speed, the press was producing the daily

Citizen, five weeklies, a biweekly and a monthly tabloid. Running full-bore, the press could produce 30,000 copies in one hour and speed was an asset when on some days the paper was well over 100 pages fat. It took five press runs and 22 thousand-pound rolls of newsprint to produce and it was a tough job for the pressmen to keep up to the pace.

“We’re proud about not missing editions in that time, that’s a good record and that we’ve kept that thing maintained and running and we’ve had no major injuries,” said Morrison.

When pressman Ross Baird retired in the early 1990s, Morrison was speaking in front of the crowd at the reception and asked Baird to come up and hold up his hands.

“I counted his fingers and thumbs and said, ‘that’s how you mark a successful career in the pressroom, you leave with all your digits.’ It’s a dangerous piece of equipment and we worked with that risk every day. We both just about got eaten by the thing.”

Wilson got his hand burnt and crushed in the rollers about 15 years ago when the newsprint web broke and he didn’t realize the rollers were still spinning. His hand got sucked in, which left him with a few fingers pointing at odd angles.

Morrison remembers working on a hot day and peeled down his coveralls, tying them around his waist. With the press running fulltilt, one of the sleeves got caught in the delivery belt where the folded papers come out and the press was dragging him into the larger rollers when he finally got close enough to reach up and hit the kill switch.

“They had to cut my coveralls off, and there I am in just my underwear and work boots,” said Morrsion.

“It was funny and scary.”

Man linked to loaded, stolen handgun charged

Citizen staff

A man known to the police and courts is in custody on suspicion of carrying a loaded and stolen handgun.

Crown counsel has approved seven charges against Julien Nassem Lazarre, 21, from a Wednesday morning arrest that began when Prince George RCMP’s street crew unit were called to a report of a theft from a vehicle in the 1400 block of Carney Street.

Officers happened upon Lazarre and another man known to police, Devin Albert Olson, 31. They “immediately tried to flee the area on foot when told to stop,” RCMP said. Both were apprehended after a brief foot chase and one was found with an empty holster beneath his

clothing. An RCMP dog and handler were called in and found the gun nearby, police said.

Lazarre faces five firearms-related charges as well as counts of possessing stolen property under $5,000 and obstructing a peace officer.

Olson, who was released on a $1,000 recognizance, has been charged with identity theft and obstructing a peace officer.

Both have criminal records. In January, charges against Lazarre that included a count of attempted murder from a December 2017 shooting incident at a 1300-block Strathcona home were stayed due to a lack of evidence. Also in January, Olson was sentenced to time served in relation to a January 2019 home invasion after serving 376 days in custody.

CITIZEN PHOTO BY BRENT BRAATEN

Citizen pressmen left to right, Phil Morrison, Al Wilson, Chuck Nisbett, Thomas Croke and Steve Hill gather for a picture prior to the last run of the press.

Youth gather to demand drastic climate action

Mia RABSON The Canadian Press OTTAWA — Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish activist whose global crusade sent tens of thousands of Canadians into the streets Friday to join others around the world in demanding action on climate change, says the nasty backlash she has faced from some leaders is proof positive her message is getting across.

Thunberg has been mocked and ridiculed by some of the world’s most powerful people, including U.S. President Donald Trump, who dismiss her calls to climate action as the musings of a silly schoolgirl. In Canada, People’s Party Leader Maxime Bernier called her a mentally-ill pawn of adults. But if adults are mocking children, they must be feeling the heat, Thunberg said during a news conference in Montreal where she continued to be the focal point of a massive, international day of action.

“I don’t understand why grown-ups would choose to mock children and teenagers for just communicating and acting on the science when they could do something good instead,” she said.

“But I guess they must feel like their worldview or their interests or whatever it is, is threatened by us. We should take as a compliment that we are having so much impact that people want to silence us. We’ve become too loud for people to handle so they try to silence us.”

This entire week has become known as the “Week for Future,” starting with an emergency climate session at the United Nations on Monday where Thunberg lashed out at world leaders for not taking the climate crisis seriously enough.

Thunberg began weekly sit-ins outside the Swedish legislature last year, which over the course of a few months grew into a global phenomenon. One week ago, millions of people around the world marched in protest against governments not taking drastic climate action. Another day of global protest took place Friday, including in more than 85 cities and towns in Canada.

From St. John’s to Vancouver, and as far north as Inuvik in the Northwest Territories, tens of thousands of Canadians came out in force. They came in strollers and on skateboards, on bikes and in army boots, wearing knee braces and leaning on crutches and canes. From babies to baby boomers, grandkids to grandparents, they filled parks and the lawns of legislatures and Parliament, toting papier-mache Earths and trees, some with full potted plants on their backs. Their message was clear: bolder action is urgently needed to save the planet from the crisis of cli-

mate change.

The grassroots groups behind the Canadian marches have some specific demands, including refusing any new oil and gas projects and cutting emissions to be just one-quarter of what they were in 2005 by 2030.

In Halifax, several thousand people marched through the streets and ended their protest at the headquarters of Nova Scotia Power. In Toronto, thousands more filled the front lawn of the provincial legislature and the streets around it.

In Ottawa, the crowd size exceeded most Canada Day celebrations, filling the streets for more than a dozen city blocks as the marchers wound their way through downtown from city hall to Parliament Hill. Some added a truly Canadian flavour by putting their placards on hockey sticks and insisting their chants be delivered in both official languages.

Many of those who came out called Thunberg their inspiration.

“I think she has revolutionized how we look at activism,” said Pascal Morimanno, a 17-year-old marching in Fredericton.

“She is one person but there are millions of youth out here now because of her. She is the face of new activism.”

“This movement has been built around children fighting for their future,” added Roy Bateman, a 13-year-old marching in Toronto.

“(We’re) also fighting for those who are less fortunate and also those who will be more harshly effected by climate change.”

He said politicians could address climate change but are making the wrong choices.

“It’s a matter of priorities,” he said. “They want to have their comfort but who says they get comfort and we get a dirty, unclean, messed up planet (in the) future.”

Coming as it has in the midst of Canada’s federal election campaign, many candidates and four of the six mainstream party leaders joined events in their cities Friday. Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau, Green Leader Elizabeth May, and Bloc Quebecois Leader Yves-Francois Blanchet all marched in Montreal, while NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh marched in Victoria.

Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer said there would be Conservative representation at the Montreal march, but he was not personally attending any events. In fact, he flew over many of them Friday as he made his way on his campaign plane from Montreal to Vancouver for an announcement in British Columbia.

Bernier, the only national party leader to deny climate change is a crisis caused by human activity, is campaigning in his home riding of Beauce in Quebec.

CP PHOTO

Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, centre, takes part in a climate strike march in Montreal on Friday.

Security backlogs hamper RCMP, audit shows

The Canadian Press

The RCMP was struggling to keep staff security clearances up to date during the time a senior employee allegedly tried to pass secrets to adversaries, an internal Mountie audit shows.

The audit report stressed the importance of regularly reviewing the security status of RCMP employees to guard against the threat of an insider betraying the national police force by sharing sensitive information with the wrong people.

The auditors found all of the RCMP sections across Canada responsible for screening had “a significant backlog” of security updates to do, as well as smaller backlogs of new clearances and upgrades to higher security levels. Overall, the audit concluded that “risks and gaps” were hampering effective delivery of the security-screening program to the force’s nearly 30,000 employees, 25,000 contractors and more than 17,000 volunteers in over 700 communities.

The little-noticed Audit of Personnel Security, completed in 2016 and quietly made public in edited form last year, takes on new relevance following the arrest this month of RCMP intelligence official Cameron Jay Ortis. Ortis, 47, is accused of violating three sections of the Security of Information Act as well as two Criminal Code provisions, including breach of trust, for allegedly trying to disclose classified information to an unspecified foreign entity or terrorist group.

RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki has said the allegations against Ortis, if proven true, are extremely unsettling, given that he had access to intelligence from domestic and international allies.

The charge sheet lists seven counts against Ortis under the various provisions, dating from as early as Jan. 1, 2015, through to Sept. 12 of this year, when he was taken into custody.

He made a third, brief court appearance via video link Friday. Ortis is scheduled to return to court next Friday, once the Crown discloses more about the case to the defence. At that time, a bail-

hearing date might be set.

“One of the many questions raised by the Ortis case is what internal security measures failed or might have failed,” said Wesley Wark, an intelligence expert who teaches at the University of Ottawa. “The question of security clearances and security monitoring must be front and centre.”

The RCMP’s personnel security program aims to ensure the reliability and security of people who have access to the force’s information systems, data and premises, the internal audit says.

This is achieved through the force’s security-screening process, which supports the issuance, denial, suspension or revocation of basic RCMP reliability status or, if required by the position, a secret or top-secret security clearance.

A top-secret “enhanced” clear-

ance entails extra screening including a polygraph examination, commonly known as a lie-detector test.

Reliability status and secret clearances are valid for 10 years, while top-secret clearances must be updated every five years.

“Updates are a critical insiderthreat mitigation measure,” the audit report says.

Lucki told a Sept. 17 news conference that Ortis held a valid topsecret clearance, but said he had not undergone a polygraph test.

The RCMP declined to tell The Canadian Press this week when Ortis, who joined the force in 2007, underwent his most recent security update. The police force also provided no answers to questions about any steps the RCMP may have taken in response to the internal audit’s findings.

The auditors said the force’s departmental security program had “experienced challenges in meeting service level expectations” due to funding pressures and increasing demand. Eliminating security-clearance backlogs would reduce risk to the RCMP and help the force direct program resources to new security-clearance files, the audit report said.

Security clearances, including renewals, are time-consuming, and renewals can be treated as less urgent because of an assumption that a previously cleared person can be trusted, Wark said.

Even so, backlogs of securityclearance renewals, especially those involving top-secret levels, are “a serious issue,” he said.

The case of Jeffrey Paul Delisle, a naval officer who pleaded guilty

in 2012 to giving classified material to Russia, shows the system is not always on top of the challenges. Wark noted Delisle’s top-secret clearance had expired in 2011 but he continued to have access to sensitive databases.

Following the Delisle case, the government ushered in revised security-screening standards in 2014.

One new element was the concept of “aftercare,” which requires departmental security staff and other personnel to monitor and report on any changes in an employee’s situation that might raise security concerns, Wark noted. Such changes could include misuse of drugs or alcohol, sudden changes in a the employee’s financial situation, expressions of support for extremist views or unexplained frequent absences.

CP PHOTO

RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki provides an update on the ongoing investigation, arrest and charges against Cameron Ortis at RCMP National Headquarters in Ottawa on Sept. 17.

‘A great sadness’

At 78 years of age, possessing neither a computer nor the desire to have one, losing my daily newspaper is a great sadness.

It will be the first time in my settled existence (as opposed to the gypsy years) that I will not have a valued, if sometimes exasperating, source of local and world news to carry around with me and rustle through to my heart’s content in the quiet moments that the day allows.

The PG Citizen will doubtless be my last daily newspaper. I have enjoyed and appreciated it. Thank you. And thank you especially for keeping it going as long as you possibly could.

Valerie Sinclair, Prince George Sorely missed

I always read The Citizen with a pair of scissors in my hand, ever ready to clip out articles, editorials and pictures which I know will be of special interest to anyone of a number of family and friends. When I am finished reading, the paper I’d thought to pass on to a neighbour has so many missing pieces is now fit only for the recycling bin! And if I deem a particular article ought to be sent out to more than one person on my mailing list, I’d solicit my P.G. friends to “save me that write up on page such and such about so and so, please.” I’ve even trotted down to The Citizen office to beg up to a dozen copies of whatever page of a Frank Peebles or Nathan Geide article.

I will sorely miss this iconic publication but good to know you will not completely abandon us and leave us with only the internet and fake news.

Joan McKay, Prince George Cover to cover

I started reading the Prince George Citizen in high school as part of the daily social studies homework. In order to participate and receive credit for this, and due to the distance we lived from town, dad would bring the paper home every day from work for me.

Approximately 20 years later, I still read your paper despite diminished eyesight. The feel and smell (literally!) of the newspaper is the highlight of my day; from local and world news, letters to the editor, sports, and even the obituaries, I’ve read it all, cover to cover.

I was shocked and saddened to hear that the subscription service would be no more. I will have to join the digital world despite my “old-fashioned” ways. Instead of folding or cutting out articles of interest for family or friends, I’ll send links through Facebook Messenger.

For the last seven years, I’ve had the pleasure of receiving outstanding customer service from our carrier. He arrives on time with our newspapers, with a smile, every single day.

He must have seen me bending down with difficulty to reach my newspaper and decided it would help to roll up the paper and put it inside the doorknob. I will miss his kindness and exceptional customer service. So, to him I would say, wherever your future leads you, fly high, keep smiling and continue being you.

Thank you, Prince George Citizen! Jen McEachen, Prince George Let it ride

I was so saddened to hear about the changes about to take place at The Citizen, though not overly surprised.

I couldn’t begin to tell you how long we have been subscribers and I will truly miss my daily perusal through the paper. We did cancel for a couple of months, a few years back, but I really like having it in my hands, so we resubscribed.

I would like to thank all of you for your hard work and dedication over these many years, with a special nod to the carriers who deliver through some pretty horrendous weather conditions often in our city.

I will look forward to receiving the Thursday edition and wish all of you much continued success. As to your request regarding the refund on our subscription, please just “let it ride” for the remainder of the year and we will reconsider once the New Year arrives. Best wishes and thanks.

John and Marnie Bosdet, Prince George

Excellent journalism

I’m really going to miss The Citizen and I am grateful for all the excellent journalism and photography carried on your pages. Your newspaper has touched me in many ways. Before we moved to Prince George in 1992, I ran a classified ad in The Citizen looking for a place to live. When I began work with the B.C. government, I dealt regularly with Citizen reporters and photographers. I learned that when I received an inquiry from a journalist like Gordon Hoekstra, I had better find out as much as

I could even when the bureaucracy didn’t have answers or didn’t want to comment. When that job finished, I found my next job (and several after that) through career ads in The Citizen. When I worked for the CNIB, I was grateful for all the support your newspaper provided to charity events and fundraisers.

During Prince George’s centennial in 2015, I was proud to have my articles on local history published in your paper. We’ll miss The Citizen showing up each day in our mailbox.

At Christmas, our carrier would leave us a card. One year, after we had left him a card and gift in our mailbox, I noticed a large “thank you” written in the snow on the windshield of my truck. Thanks to all of you for your hard work and best of luck in the future.

Jeff Elder, Prince George Old paper friend

Having just read this morning’s paper I have to finally write and say that my mind and heart are full of emotions about the dramatic change in a good friend of mine. The loss of the Citizen as a print daily is of staggering import to our community and to me. So significant that people who only occasionally pay attention to the content of your pages will suddenly wake up one day down the road and wonder what presence is missing from their lives and forever be diminished by the loss their old paper friend.

Like all friends, we have spent much time together. Sometimes you have filled me with joy, new insights, laughter and curiosity. Other times you have left me outraged, hurt, saddened by your inexplicable nonsensical actions. Always, you have given the greatest gift of all, you have stimulated me to want to know more, to learn more, to have a better understanding. I am not going to list even one of your regular writers as I would then have to list them all. Each of them has written words at one time or another that I have cut out of the paper and placed in my treasury of wisdom (actually it’s just a well-used file folder) where I keep whole columns and snippets from sentences where one of you has chosen and used words that inspire, infuriate and always inform.

You asked about stories of personal engagement with the Citizen. Mine are from a slightly different perspective.

When I first went to sell advertising for the “new” radio station, CJCI, one of my favourite things was to take The Citizen to task as an effective advertising medium. With hundreds of clever words, I would convince local business people that the new medium of CJCI Radio was so infinitely superior to tired old print. In time, I discovered the word and concept of synergy and relished the opportunity to work with Citizen sales reps to make joint presentations that promised, and delivered, wonderful bottom-line results to “our” advertising clients. I appreciated and respected those

fine people and miss them dearly as none of them work for you now. In time I ended up managing, publishing and owning a couple of community weekly newspapers and those successes were built on what I had learned from my Citizen competitors years earlier. Another of the many things I learned from the Citizen.

For various reasons , mostly good, my name has appeared in The Citizen many times since I arrived in P.G. back in 1965. I always considered it a great honour and, in a way, a successful evaluation of my efforts in community service when one of your writers made mention of my efforts to serve our city and its people in their reporting.

For me the pinnacle of being in your paper was when as part of your coverage of the P.G. centennial, you did a survey of youngsters in city schools asking who they though were ten people who had made significant contributions to our city in the past century. By some strange circumstance, you had my name and picture as one of that group of people the youth chose. I would never have thought it possible, still don’t really.

Neil, you touched me more than you can ever know when at the last elections in one of your editorials trying to encourage people to run for civic office you asked “where are these people when we need them?” And… my name was in your list. Unfortunately I think my time has passed but who knows.

Neil and Colleen, I wish the ending of the Citizen Daily print edition was not happening. You and the head office have made a decision that I disagree with (not the first time) and, despite my disagreeing with your decision, I want you to know that I wish you well.

You have done many good things but none more important than the individual lives you have impacted through your attention to their efforts, their lives full of success and failure but mostly just the way you and The Citizen have always cared about, paid attention to and encouraged local people, businesses and organizations.

I can tell you that next Saturday morning I will shed an honest tear over your leaving to travel new pathways. Your old friend will miss you.

Roy Spooner, Prince George

So many changes

I have watched The Citizen grow from a weekly paper in the 1940s, to a bi-weekly, to a five-day and then a six-day-a-week daily and then reverse that process back to a weekly print addition.

During the Second World War, my dad was a printer/linotype operator at the paper. Towards the end of the war, when I was nine or 10, one day after school I was hanging out at the paper office on Quebec Street, getting in the way so my dad handed me a paper and told me to go and sell it.

I didn’t even get out the door and I had sold it. At that time a paper boy bought two

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papers for five cents and sold them for a nickel each for a tidy profit.

So I bought four papers and went out and sold them. Then four and so on. I started going to the paper each Thursday, buying papers, then picking a downtown corner and hopefully selling them all.

Occasionally I was too optimistic and had unsold papers when my stomach was telling me it was time to go home for supper. I quickly learned that I could slip into one of the many beer parlours and sell two or three papers before being booted out by the bartender.

This worked well until one day I tried selling papers at a table where my dad and the other printers at the paper were having an after-work beer. I was told to leave in no uncertain terms. So I moved up the ladder from on street paper vendor to an established route which took in most of the Crescents area of the city. Thus started my career in the newspaper business. When I was about 15 or so, the foreman of the printing department, Nestor Izowsky, gave me a part-time job which graduated to full time when I completed school. I stayed with the paper for nearly 10 years through its transition to a daily. I worked as a compositor, linotype operator and pressman.

Compositors and linotype operators have gone the way of the dodo bird and, from this latest transition at the paper, pressman may meet the same fate. In those early days, the printing staff at the paper exceeded all of the other staff combined and that has shrunk to near nothing.

I have subscribed to the paper for many, many years and will miss that paper in my hand in the morning. My 84-year-old brain is trying to grasp how to read the darn thing on the line, pun intended. So far not well. I have enjoyed writing the occasional letter to the paper when I felt strongly enough about something and appreciate that the paper published most of them. The paper has had many excellent journalists over the years, not the least of which are Mark Nielsen and Neil Godbout.

I am saddened and a little frightened by the demise of paper newspapers but we have survived many other changes in what is a changing world. So I hope this new technology will find a way to provide us with unbiased, investigative, inquiring journalism so we can properly assess what is going on around us.

John Warner, Prince George

Morning ritual

Thank you to all the staff for their work on The Citizen. I don’t know what my hubby and I will do first thing in the morning now! He gets up earlier than me which works well as I get to take over when I get up. It was our early morning ritual along with coffee for some 46 years. But I did miss my laugh of the day – Pickles.

Darlene Ohori, Prince George

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Much appreciation

I have been a loyal Citizen reader and subscriber for decades. At the time I was very upset when you switched from afternoon to morning delivery, but I got over that soon enough. Like so many others, my morning ritual quickly evolved to include reading the paper and doing the puzzles with my coffee, and I willingly started getting up an hour earlier in order to have that time. It was worth it.

I have learned so much, and felt so connected to the community, through your pages. I’ve ranted and cheered at letters to the editor, and written quite a few of my own in response, in my mind anyway.

There are, and have always been, clippings with recipes, quotes, upcoming events, obituaries, editorials, just plain interesting articles I wanted to save or share, and even a few Ann Landers columns, in drawers, on a bulletin board, or tucked into the pages of books, all around my home.

When I considered moving away from Prince George, and did a pros and cons list, our daily local paper was one of the pluses for the “stay” side.

I don’t think I have agreed with a single word written by Nathan Giede in your pages, until today, when I appreciated every word he wrote about The Citizen and the importance of printed news.

Thank you to the carriers who have come out in all weather to get our papers to us every morning. Thank you to your wonderful and patient staff who took our calls whenever our papers weren’t in our mailboxes when our coffee was ready.

Thank you for hanging on as long as you did.

And thank you for all the years you have informed, entertained, taught, challenged, provoked

and amused us. I’m glad we will at least still have Thursdays with you. And we will just have to get used to reading on a screen the rest of the time, and bookmarking, instead of clipping, interesting articles.

Wendy De Marsh, Prince George

Trust in you

To the entire staff of The Prince George Citizen: your stellar work and dedication to telling the story with truth and depth has been noticed.

That you find yourselves on this day in September 2019, moving to a once a week printing, after over 100 years in the business of fact and principle says more about

this newspaper than any other medium of news. It tells the world that journalism, true reporting, is deeply appreciated by your audience.

Where so many other newsprint papers across the province and around the world abandoned printing long ago, this committed staff, all of you, continued, knowing how much welcome your hard work has been.

You have been loyal to the citizens of this city. And the citizens of Prince George will continue to trust in you online. Good luck and best wishes to those who will be moving on to other ventures. On the other hand, I really look forward to your oncea-week paper newsprint contributions!

LETTERS WELCOME: The Prince George Citizen welcomes letters to the editor from our readers. Submissions should be sent by email to: letters@pgcitizen.ca. No attachments, please. They can also be faxed to 250-960-2766, or mailed to 201-1777 Third Ave., Prince George, B.C. V2L 3G7. Maximum length is 750 words and writers are limited to one submission every week. We will edit letters only to ensure clarity, good taste, for legal reasons, and occasionally for length. Although we will not include your address and telephone number in the paper, we need both for verification purposes. Unsigned or handwritten letters will not be published. The Prince George Citizen is a member of the National Newsmedia Council, which is an independent organization established to deal with acceptable journalistic practices and ethical behaviour. If you have concerns about editorial content, please contact Neil Godbout (ngodbout@pgcitizen.ca or 250960-2759). If you are not satisfied with the response and wish to file a formal complaint, visit the web site at mediacouncil.ca or call toll-free 1-844-877-1163 for additional information.

Thank you, all. Your printings will be much missed.

Jan and Ron Manning

Prince George

Daily memories

Without my daily morning Prince George Citizen, I might have to find something stronger than coffee, for my morning fix. It is indeed sad to see the Prince George Citizen daily print edition

discontinue and similar to aging, changes are difficult to accept.

Compared to other readers, I might be considered a youngster with just 42 years of reading the Citizen, but it will be missed just the same.

At different times, our four children – David, Rebecca, Daniel and Mary – delivered The Citizen on cold winter mornings, assisted by their mother, similar to hundreds of other children and parents in Prince George, so they can fund special school trips and hot-dog days. But unfortunately, their children will not have the same experience, with the discontinuation of the daily paper.

As a photographer and community volunteer, I made a few friends at the P.G. Citizen, some humorous and others with deep emotions, who are no longer with us. Their photographs and personal stories had quite an impact on me. Some of The Citizen memorable stories were “Getting lost at Lost Lake” and Princess Diana and Prince Charles visit to Prince George. I also suggested to a Citizen reporter that since the memorial hospital in Tortola, British Virgin Islands, has the same name as their family and a rumour exists that a pirate treasure named after their family, is buried at Smuggler’s Cove. He should lead an expedition into finding it, as a family inheritance. Goodbye, Prince George daily Citizen. Have a happy retirement. Vince Ramcharran

Prince George Call

250-5623301 to advertise in The Citizen today

Outta my way

Kelly Road Roadrunners paces running back Brendan Watts has a step on Prince George Polars tacklers Emerson Muratori (20) and Finely Peacock (81) as he runs the ball during a

B.C. Secondary School Football Association Northern Conference double-A varsity game Thursday night at Masich Place Stadium. The Roadrunners went home with a 28-16 victory. The College Heights Cougars will be in Vanderhoof today at 12:30 p.m. to face the Nechako Valley Vikings. The four-team Northern Conference kicks off its 2019 regular season with two games next Saturday at Masich Place Stadium. The defending-champion Polars will play Nechako Valley at 4:30 p.m, followed by the Kelly Road-College Heights game at 7 p.m.

Timberwolves hungry for wins

Ted CLARKE Citizen staff tclarke@pgcitizen.ca

David versus Goliath?

Any time the UNBC Timberwolves take on the UBC Thunderbirds in a game of soccer the potential is there for a mismatch of biblical proportions.

That’s unavoidable when a school with a long and successful soccer history and a student population of 61,000 (UBC) takes on a small university like UNBC with just 4,000 students that is fielding a team in only its eighth year in the league.

It shouldn’t even be close, but sometimes it is.

Take last year, for instance. A year ago Saturday, the T-wolves men’s team met the Thunderbirds on their home turf in Vancouver and ended up playing them to a 1-1 draw. UNBC lost 7-0 to UBC the following day, but for the T-wolves coming home with a tie was a major victory.

Friday night at Masich Place Stadium (6 p.m. start), the T-wolves (4-4-1, seventh in Pacific Division) were trying to replicate last year’s success against the T-birds (5-1-1, first in Pacific), always a threat to win the U Sports Canada West title.

“UBC is always extremely strong, but we know they have lost a number of key players from last year,” said T-wolves forward Stu Rowlands, who leads his team with four goals in nine games this

season. “This gives us a big opportunity to take some points from them. We must come in confident, and ready to compete.”

UNBC gained a split last weekend in Edmonton, losing 3-2 to Alberta when they allowed two goals in the final two minutes, then shutting out Grant MacEwan 1-0.

“Currently we are happy with our results, but there is always room for improvement,” said Rowlands, in a team release.

“Looking at the standings now, we must at least have a 0.5 ratio or better if we are going to have a fighting chance.

“We must perform in order to make playoffs. It will come down to the last few games.”

The T-birds have scored 15 goals in their seven games but have allowed seven over that stretch. In their nine games the T-wolves have scored 13 times and have given up 13.

After Friday’s game the T-wolves will have just five games left, including a rematch with UBC Sunday at noon at Masich, followed by two games next weekend at Trinity Western and a two-game home series Oct. 19-20 against Thompson Rivers University.

The UNBC women (3-1-2) are on the road Saturday afternoon in Kelowna to face the UBC-Okanagan Heat (0-6) and will be in Kamloops Sunday afternoon to play the Thompson Rivers WolfPack. TRU (1-4-1) hosted the Calgary Dinos Friday night.

Hall of Fame boxer Meda dies at 73

Ted CLARKE Citizen staff

Jack Meda was never one to back down from a fight.

You don’t get to be a Canadian heavyweight boxing champion without having a lion’s share of courage.

He wasn’t afraid to out up his dukes defending his honour in the years he spent working in B.C. logging camps. Those skills in self-defence also came in handy for Meda when he had to keep unruly customers from causing trouble working as a tavern doorman in downtown Prince George.

Meda died Sunday of a heart attack at University Hospital of Northern B.C. He was 74.

The six-foot, 220-pound scrapper officially began his boxing career in 1967 when, acting on a dare from a group of amateur boxers, he entered the 1967 B.C. Golden Gloves boxing championship in Vancouver and came home to Prince George with second-place honours. After that, there was no stopping him. He trained at the Spruce Capital Boxing Club with with coach Harold Mann and won gold at the 1969

B.C. Winter Games, and became a three-time Golden Gloves champion from 1969-71, winning in consecutive years.

Meda went on to win gold in the heavyweight division at the 1970 Canada Winter Games in Saskatoon and that same year came home from the Commonwealth Games in Edinburgh, Scotland with a bronze medal. He won the Western Canadian and Canadian heavyweight amateur titles in 1970 and 1971.

To achieve that level of fitness

he trained religiously, frequently running along the streets of Prince George, back when running was an unusual activity.

“People would see him and say,”Who’s that crazy guy running every day,” said Meda’s wife Carol.

Boxing for the national team in 1970, Meda boxed in invitational events in New York, Montreal, Sweden, Finland and Norway and went on to compete at the 1971 Pan American Games in Cali, Colombia and at the North American championships in Albany, N.Y.

He finished his boxing career in 1972 after an undefeated season. In 2003, Meda was inducted into the Prince George Sports Hall of Fame.

Meda spent most of his working years as a logger, most recently at Mount Milligan mine.

Meda was born Nov. 17, 1945 in New Westminster, the eighth of 10 children. He leaves behind his wife Carol, daughters Jody Matters and Bobbie Meda, and six grandchildren.

The family will hold a service at a yet-to-be determined date.

Thitikul continues big year with world junior title

The Canadian Press MARKHAM, Ont. — Thailand’s Atthaya Thitikul has captured the world junior girls golf championship for the second year in a row.

The world’s No. 2-ranked women’s amateur golfer finished the four-round event on Friday at 11 under par, two strokes ahead of Korean Ye Won Lee at Angus Glen Golf Club. Two-time reigning runner-up Alessia Nobilio of Italy was third at 6 under.

Brooke Rivers of Brampton, Ont., was the top Canadian, tying for 15th at 6 over.

Korea won the team competition at 13 under. Thailand was second and Italy was third. Canada 1 tied for seventh and Canada 2 was 19th.

Thitikul, 16, became the youngest ever winner of a professional event when she won the Ladies European Thailand Championship at 14 years 4 months 9 days in 2017. The previous record was held by Canada’s Brooke Henderson.

MEDA

Lions look to stop Stanback, stymie Alouettes

Gemma KARSTENS-SMITH

The Canadian Press

SURREY — The B.C. Lions may be looking for their third win in a row, but coach DeVone Claybrooks says his team still has plenty room for improvement.

“We still haven’t played a perfect game by my standards,” he said on Friday. “We’re just trying to get better and trying to win the next game.”

The Lions’ next test will be much tougher than their previous two outings – wins over the free-falling Ottawa Redblacks.

Today the Lions (3-10) host the Montreal Alouettes (7-5), who have won four of their past five.

B.C. already faced Montreal once this season, dropping a 21-16 decision back on Sept. 6.

But this week, the Als will be without quarterback Vernon Adams Jr., who was suspended by the CFL after swinging a helmet at Winnipeg’s Adam Bighill in Montreal’s 38-37 comeback win last week. Alouettes coach Khari Jones said missing his starting QB is “unfortunate” but the club accepts it and will move on with Matt Shiltz at the helm.

“We’ll be OK,” he told reporters in Montreal this week. “These guys rally together really well. I have all the faith in the world in (Shiltz) and I’m excited to see him get out there and play. He’s been practising really well.”

The Lions haven’t been thinking too much about who’ll be tossing for their opponents, Claybrooks said.

“We can’t control who plays,” he said.

“All I’m worried about is what we do. If we focus on us, execute and do our thing, we’ll be fine.”

Shiltz has slotted into two games this season, completing 11-of-16 attempts for 107 passing yards, and said this week that he’s ready to go out and do whatever’s asked of him on a given play.

“Whether that’s hand the ball off 40 times a game or have 50 pass attempts, I just go out there, read the defence and get the ball to the open guy,” he said.

“When you think about it that way, it’s a pretty simple game so I’m going to go out there, do

B.C. Lions

everything I can to move the ball down the field, protect the football and hopefully come out on top.”

Claybrooks called the 26-yearold Butler University alum “a mobile kid (who) can make all the throws,” but said the Lions will be focusing on shutting down the Als’ run game.

Running back William Stanback already has 748 rushing yards and five touchdowns for the Als in 10 games this season.

He could also get some help from former Lion Jeremiah Johnson, who’s expected to be back in the lineup after missing two games with a concussion. B.C. will also

have to work around what Lions

quarterback Mike Reilly called “a very good defence.”

“They’re not really the team that’s going to have busted coverages and breakdowns and things like that that you’re going to be able to take a bunch of big shots over the top,” he said. Instead, Reilly expects that his offence will have to make long, sustained drives.

That task has become a bit easier for the veteran quarterback in recent weeks, thanks in part to a stronger offensive line.

While the Lions allowed 42 sacks in the first 10 games of the

season, Reilly has been hauled down just four times over the past three games.

He credited “fantastic” protection across the field with allowing him to make big plays.

“I think we’ve all done a better job on protection, but certainly it starts up front (with the offensive line),” he said.

“Protecting really well, but also getting the run game going. That always makes it a lot easier on the back end.”

Montreal at B.C. Lions Saturday at B.C. Place.

CITIZEN SPORTS

PLAYOFF IMPLICATIONS: The Lions’ faint hope of a post-season berth could be snuffed out this week if they lose to the Alouettes and the Edmonton Eskimos beat the Ottawa Redblacks.

SCORING BIG: Montreal has 24.8 points per game heading into Saturday’s contest, good for second in the league. The Winnipeg Blue Bombers lead the CFL with 25.8. TOUGH CROWD: The Alouettes haven’t won at B.C. Place since Aug. 20, 2015. Still, the Montreal Alouettes have been decent on the road this season, going 3-3.

quarterback Danny O’Brien throws the ball during a game against the Ottawa Redblacks in Ottawa on Sept. 21. The Lions host the Montreal Alouettes today.

-30- years

Photographer Brent Braaten is leaving The Citizen after 30 years and “-30-” is the traditional symbol used at the end of a story. Here are a few of Brent’s favourites from over the years.

Tegan

and Sara reflect on growing up gay in Calgary

Jancee DUNN Special To The Washington Post

“If you enjoyed high school,” the writer Jenny Lawson once wrote, “you were probably a psychopath or a cheerleader. Or possibly both.”

All others should find plenty of solace in High School, a coming-of-age memoir from Canadian musicians, twin sisters and LGBTQ icons Tegan and Sara Quin. A sort of anti-yearbook, it’s not likely to make anyone nostalgic for their teen years.

Written by the sisters in alternating chapters, the book is divided into three sections – Grade 10, Grade 11 and Grade 12 – and details their teenage years and discovery of rave and grunge in the mid-90s. Their upbringing in the suburbs of northeast Calgary, was fairly drab. Born in 1980 to childhood sweethearts who split when the sisters were in Grade 1, the girls lived mostly with their mom, Sonia, a plucky activist and mental health worker who worked long shifts. This meant, as Tegan puts it, that “Sara and I were free to kick the,” well, you know, “out of each other without a referee.”

In 1990, Sonia and the girls move in with Bruce, a handsome, Camaro-driving hockey-playing construction manager who becomes a kind of stepfather and emerges as a caring, endearingly complicated hero.

The Quins are skilled writers with an eye for detail. Here’s Sara describing the scene as Bruce ferries them to school in his pickup truck: “The silver wrappers from the Wendy’s burgers he ate daily were balled up near the pedals on the floor. The dashboard and seats were dusted with grit from the construction sites he managed, and the whole car smelled of onions and his musky cologne.”

Both women deftly capture the messy complexities of being twins. As acrimonious as their relationship could be, there was also an inexorable need.

“We fought, mercilessly, for time alone,” Tegan writes, “but I still felt a primal fear of being apart from her.” They discover acid (they very matter-offactly did a ton of drugs). They hit the mall. They brawl over whose turn it is to use the computer as the dial-up modem sputters to life, one of many amusing ‘90s-era details.

And both begin to realize, even if they can’t yet put it into words, that they are attracted to girls.

Tegan attempts to date a guy named Spencer. (“Why doesn’t this feel right?” she keeps asking herself.)

Meanwhile, Sara writes secret letters to her crushes. (“It was still a shock to feel desire for girls, addictive thoughts that stole hours of my time at school and in bed before I fell asleep.”)

When she finally kisses her friend Naomi, she feels so much inner turmoil that she runs to the bathroom to throw up, terrified of revealing her sexuality in a place, and era, that isn’t particularly queer-friendly.

Music becomes their salvation. Sara discovers Smashing Pumpkins and howls along to the lyrics, imagining that a crowd, replete with her junior high bullies, is watching her. In Grade 10, the sisters unearth a guitar that Bruce has stashed under the stairs. They steal off to teach themselves to play (Tegan studying music videos of Courtney Love and mimicking how she holds her hands).

“Slowly, I was able to start holding power chords that didn’t sound half bad,” she writes.

Eventually, Sara starts singing along, and writes their very first song, Tegan Didn’t Go to School Today. Their fate is sealed when their mom buys them an electric guitar on their 16th birthday.

In Grade 12, they enter a contest called Garage Warz. The prize is gigs and studio time.

“If we don’t win tonight, our mom is going to make us go to college,” Tegan announces to the judges. They win. Their fans know what followed: a million albums sold, a Grammy nomination, their emergence as outspoken advocates for LGBTQ rights. By the book’s end, the reader is nearly as eager to leave high school as they are. This is not a knock. They write so viscerally about the mundaneness and despair and occasional highs, of being a teen that it revived, for me, some long-buried memories I had hoped to leave behind forever.

High School has the immediacy and intimacy of a diary, but it also suffers from the stream-of-consciousness verbosity of the form.

The most powerful moment in High School comes as they confront their sexuality. Sara writes movingly of realizing that she is gay. In a flood of tears after her first girlfriend leaves her, she stands at her bedroom window and looks at the moon. I’m gay, she thinks for the first time.

“From that night forward, I carried the words in my mouth,” she writes, “tempted to tell everyone and no one.”

HANDOUT IMAGE BY MCD

Canadian pop singers Sara Quin and Tegan Quin reflect on coming out and hitting it big in High School.

The Dutch House a fascinating peek inside a storied mansion

Allegra GOODMAN Special To The Washington Post

At a June wedding in a Gatsbyesque mansion, a few of us lingered on the terrace to enjoy the view across the lawn to the forest and the lake. Slowly we began to walk back toward the house with its white pillars and double-height windows, its stone urns, and formal gardens.

“Incredible,” I said to the elegant woman walking with me. She smiled and answered, neither boastfully, nor wistfully, but with a touch of surprise at her own words. “I grew up in a house like this.”

That sense of surprise is a rich subject for Ann Patchett in her eighth novel, The Dutch House. We remember our childhood homes because they were ours. What is it like to grow up in a home enchanting not only to us, but to everybody else?

Maeve and Danny Conroy grow up in the storied Dutch House, a 1922 mansion in the Philadelphia suburbs that was commissioned by the VanHoebeek family who made a fortune in cigarettes and filled their American home with European treasures, ornate mirrors, wood paneling, fanciful windows, and blue Delft mantels “said to have been pried out of a castle in Utrecht and sold to the VanHoebeeks to pay a prince’s gambling debts.”

The Dutch House is the stuff of fairy tales, and Patchett’s plot sounds like a fairy tale as well. A mother who runs away from home, an orphaned sister and brother displaced by a grasping stepmother – bare summary sounds like melodrama, and this plot would devolve into cliche in the hands of a softer more sentimental novelist. Fortunately, Patchett is made of sterner stuff.

Eight years younger than his sister Maeve, Danny Conroy tells the story of his family in and outside the Dutch House. We see the mansion and its inhabitants through Danny’s young eyes, and then we revisit place and people as Danny grows. Like a gradually opening aperture, Danny’s narrow view of rooms and servants broadens to comprehend abandonment by Elna Conroy, and the arrival of a brisk stepmother, Andrea, and her little girls Norma and Bright.

We watch Danny realize that his life is strange, his house extraordinary, that the rooms and people of his childhood are more complex than he imagined. His family’s faithful servants Sandy and Jocelyn are sisters. To his shame, he had “never wondered who they were related to or who they went home to.”

Most important, we see Maeve through Danny’s eyes, as he grows from dependence to mature appreciation of his brilliant older sister. Danny narrates this story, but Maeve is its heroine – Danny’s protector, teacher, confidante and closest friend. We watch in horror and fascination as Andrea supplants the absent Elna, and Norma moves into Maeve’s room with its curtained window seat – a perfect detail straight from another orphan tale, Jane Eyre. We feel for brother and sister as they return, like Hansel and Gretel, after their father’s death to gaze at the Dutch House and try to make sense of their past.

Above all, we come to understand the bond between brother and sister. This is the central relationship of the novel – more durable for these two than any other friendship or romantic attachment. Patchett dramatizes this sibling bond as beautiful, necessary and dangerous.

With the loss of mother, father and childhood home, Maeve and Danny become a family of two. Maeve serves in loco parentis, but she also becomes a kind of historian for Danny, because she remembers so much more. Pragmatic, clear-eyed, and unsentimental, Maeve is nevertheless possessed by the Dutch House. She drives Danny there whenever he is home from school, and they sit together in her parked car to view the mansion and to talk about what they have lost. The ritual is painful and at the same time thrilling because it is theirs alone. Danny does grow up and marry, but this is the true romance of his life, this love triangle – brother, sister, gorgeous house. This is the novel’s beating heart – a strange enchantment in which Maeve waits for her brother to come home and watch the house with her. Here again, the situation sounds both bleak and fanciful, but Patchett writes with restraint, never indulging in overwrought language. In perhaps the most dramatic scene in the book, Maeve and Danny sit in their parked car and watch as their stepmother emerges from the Dutch House to retrieve her newspaper. Danny observes: “She hadn’t stopped for a scarf. She hadn’t expected the early morning dark to be so clear or the moon so full, and she stood there, taking it in.” Simple language, primarily one-syllable words to convey a moment of almost unbearable suspense, as the orphans watch and speculate on the woman who “threw us out.”

The outcome is uncertain, lives hang in the balance, and we cannot stop reading. Subtle mystery, psychological page-turner, Patchett’s latest is a thriller.

HANDOUT PHOTO BY HARPER

The cover of Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House.

The secret weapon of dogs? Love

Karin BRULLIARD

The Washington Post Research on dogs has exploded in recent decades. Universities have opened canine cognition labs, and scientists have probed dogs’ intelligence, behavior, biology and skills.

Clive Wynne, a psychologist and founder of the Canine Science Collaboratory at Arizona State University, has a new book that walks readers through the growing body of dog science. In it, he argues that what makes dogs remarkable is not their smarts, but their capacity to form affectionate relationships with other species – in short, to love. Wynne spoke recently about his book, Dog Is Love: Why and How Your Dog Loves You. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Many dog owners will think, “Of course my dog loves me.” Why study this?

It’s at least worth thinking about that what on the surface appears to be something in our dogs that people are happy to call love might – might – not have deserved that name. It could have been that our dogs were in some sense just faking it to get better treats. Ultimately, this is, to me, about trying to understand the secret of dogs’ success and what makes dogs unique. Scientists in the first decade of the 21st century were mainly concerned with the idea that dogs have special forms of intelligence and social cognition that were unique in the animal kingdom. From the point of view of those of us that are in the science of studying dogs, the idea that it’s affection and not intelligence that’s the secret ingredient that makes dogs successful is quite a radical idea. What is love? Don’t we need a definition?

I avoid using the L-word in my scientific writing. We talk about exceptional gregariousness. We talk about hypersociability. When we’re doing science, we have to find terms that can be operationalized, or things that can be measured. We can measure whether a dog chooses to go for a bowl of food or its owner when it’s separated from both food and its owner for many hours. We can measure how hormonal levels go up in both dogs and their owners when they look into each other’s eyes. At the end of the day, an overarching, multidimensional phenomenon like love has to be broken down into small, measurable pieces. But I think if one were to just do science on the small, measurable pieces and resist the attempt to synthesize all those observations into a picture, that would be a disservice.

You and I have had conversations in the past where I got the impression you would be on the more skeptical end of the dogs-love-us spectrum.

I’m a reluctant convert. I was somebody who was resistant to the idea that what appeared to be affection radiating from our dogs could really be that. But ultimately, a combination of getting this dog into my life – who’s lying down next to me now, Xephos –and the overwhelming evidence of the studies that my students and I did, and the studies that so many other people have done, it really all adds up to an irresistible picture. I know that sometimes Xephos just wants dinner. But I’m pretty convinced that that’s not the whole picture. She really does feel a bond, a connection toward me that’s as real as any other connection that any other individual in my life might feel toward me. Anthropomorphism is frowned upon in science. How can you examine dogs’ ability to love without veering into anthropomorphic territory?

I’m on record as one of the vehemently anti-anthropomorphic animal behavior scientists. Anthropomorphism means ascribing human qualities to animals. And certainly love is something we know first through human experience. But I think that different species can have different forms of love. Dogs fall in love much more easily than people do, and they also seem to be able to move on much more easily than people can. A lot of people have anxiety about the idea of adopting an adult dog. Wouldn’t the dog be pining for its original human family? But what evidence we have indicates that dogs can form new loving relationships much more easily and don’t seem to have the same level of trauma from being taken away from preexisting loving relationships. I’m not saying human and dog love are identical. I’m just saying there’s enough similarity between how dogs form strong emotional bonds and how people

form strong emotional bonds that it’s fair enough to use the love word. So dogs’ intelligence – cognitive skills that make them uniquely able to understand us – is not their secret?

I thought it was a fair enough idea when I started studying dogs: maybe dogs had developed special forms of cognition by living with people for 15,000 years. The aha moment came when we got an invitation from Wolf Park in Indiana. Wolf Park has been handrearing wolves since 1974. When we’re testing wolves, we’re testing the wild ancestor of dogs, and it’s a crucial way to see what makes dogs unique, because we’re seeing what differences are there. We got around to having the wolves there tested in this very simple task where you point at something on the ground and see if the animal goes where you point. This was supposed to be something that was unique to dogs, and sure enough, the wolves were excellent at it. That was totally the aha moment – it couldn’t be how dogs were unique. Subsequently, we and other people have tested goats and dolphins, and even bats. Bats raised by people follow human pointing gestures, and bats raised by other bats do not. What matters is your early experience in life. That’s what determines whether an animal will be sensitive to what people are doing.

You write about studies that show dogs behaving as though they love us. Can you describe one you find particularly compelling?

The one I like best is one of our own, which we usually call the rescue experiment. There had been a prior experiment where scientists had volunteer dog owners pretend to have heart attacks, and the dogs didn’t do anything to help. I thought this was quite convincing: it seemed to suggest that dogs didn’t really love people. Later, I thought, “Well, how are you supposed to know what to do under those circumstances?” So I looked into these experiments that certainly indicate that dogs express concern when a human seems to be crying. Then I read this book about pets in the Second World War that mentioned repeated stories of dogs trying to dig their owners out from under the rubble of bombed homes. And I thought, “Maybe we can make an experiment where we in some way bomb people’s homes and see if their dog will dig them out!” Ultimately, it’s a box that we ask people to crawl inside and then cry out in distress. And we see whether the dog will open the box for them.

If you set it up how I described it, about one-third of dogs rescue their owners. But pretty much all dogs look very, very upset, and what appears to be happening is that all the dogs are disturbed, but only about one-third can figure out what needs to be done. So we did a follow-up experiment where before we put the person in the box, we put food in the box and

we train the dogs to open the box to get the food out. Going forward, when we put the owner in the box and ask the owner to cry out in distress, we know that the dogs know how to open the box. Under those conditions, pretty much every dog opened the box. That, to me, is a compelling demonstration that dogs really do care if they can understand. If they can figure out what to do, they will. You also write about how biological research backs up the idea that dogs can love. If it’s there, it’s got to be in their biology. Their biology has to underwrite their behavior. A Japanese research group analyzed dogs’ and people’s urine for levels of this hormone oxytocin, which gets called the love hormone because it spikes when two people are in loving contact with each other. They had people and dogs come into the lab and look at each other lovingly. Sure enough, the oxytocin levels went up on both sides of the relationship. If you show dogs in MRI scanners objects that remind them of either food or the presence of their owners, you can see how their brains light up. And the reward centres of the brain light up more strongly to signals that say “your owner is nearby” than to signals that say “you’re going to get a piece of sausage.”

That’s really strong evidence inside the brain that the presence of a beloved human is rewarding to a dog in itself. The more biological side that I’ve been involved in is digging right down to the genetic code. In part of the genome of the dog that shows evidence of recent changes, the equivalent part of the human genome is responsible for this syndrome called WilliamsBeuren. The most peculiar symptom is what they call exaggerated gregariousness. People who have this syndrome have no notion of stranger, they treat everybody as a friend, they’re extremely outgoing. When I read this, I thought: they’re much like our dogs! So some people got together and did these very simple behavioral tests for what you could call gregariousness or sociability on dogs and on wolves. And we got DNA samples from those dogs and wolves, and we identified three genes that show the mutation in those genes (is) responsible for a big difference between dogs and wolves in their gregariousness. Dogs are much more outgoing, and this correlates in three genes that independently have been shown to be responsible for the gregariousness aspect of Williams syndrome. So deep into the deepest level of biology, into the genetic code that underlies everything that dogs become, you can find it all the way through.

(Note: Wynne writes in his book of his relief that advocates for children with Williams syndrome weren’t offended by this finding. “If they had tails, they would wag them,” one told a reporter.)

Let’s say I find myself in possession of a wolf pup. Legal and ethical considerations aside, if I cuddle it and

feed it and train it, will it love me?

You can form a strong emotional bond that’s reciprocated with a wolf. Tameness is a conjunction of the right DNA and early life experiences. The early life experience that dogs need to become tame involve really very little exposure to humans. Meanwhile, if you want to have a tame wolf or a tame lion or a tame tiger, even a tame squirrel, all those things are perfectly possible, but they take much more hard work. Because that’s another way that dogs changed during the process of domestication. They became much easier to tame.

Before we humans get all smug about our lovableness, you should probably explain that dogs don’t reserve their affection for people.

It’s not the case that dogs have special genes or special capacities to form relationship with humans. Dogs just have special capacities to form relationships with anything. Whatever they meet early on in life, they will then accept members of that species as potential friends later on. In Australia, there are these beautiful little penguins that live on offshore islands. In one particular case, the island is not really far enough offshore, and at certain times, at low tide, foxes can get out and they have repeatedly decimated the penguin colony. So a nearby farmer who had dogs guarding his free-range chickens suggested putting dogs out on the islands to guard the penguins. The dogs were put with penguins when they were puppies, so now the dogs form warm,

strong emotional bonds with penguins and follow the penguins around and keep the foxes away. It’s a beautiful success story about how dogs’ very open program to forming strong, loving relationships can be put to use protecting endangered wildlife.

The final section of your book is a sort of call to action. What do you think we owe to dogs in return for their love?

Dogs gave up their free-ranging, roaming, hunting lives in order to hitch their wagon to ours, and I think that implies duties toward them. You know your dog needs feeding. Most recognize that dogs need exercise. The thing that upsets me is that people don’t give enough thought to the fact that a large part of what makes it so wonderful to live with a dog is your dog’s social nature. You come home and there’s at least somebody who’s happy to see you. So I think the cruelest thing that we routinely do to our dogs is leaving them home for eight, 10, 12 hours a day. If your life is such that your dog is going to have to be left alone for more than four hours routinely, then you should reconsider whether you have a life that a dog can comfortably fit into. But the thing about dogs is they make friends so easily. You can have a neighbor or a friend come, or you pay a dog-walking service. That’s part of my whole point here. Your tame wolf will probably not be interested in having a stranger come and take them out. But your dog will.

CITIZEN FILE PHOTO

Lexi Seida along with therapy dog in training Jorge were helping bring awearness to Victims and Survivors of Crime Week, in May of this year in Prince George.

Aboriginal tourism right on target

Taylor Baptiste draws the bow back and, bam, shoots the arrow straight into the heart of the bear cub.

Don’t fret, this isn’t a real, live bear cub, but a plastic bruinshaped target.

It’s been set out with a similarly fake badger for our archery session on the sage flats of Canada’s only desert in the southern tip of British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley surrounding the town of Osoyoos.

Baptiste, a member of the Osoyoos Indian Band and a champion archer, is leading a group of travel writers on a cultural tour to promote the band’s burgeoning Aboriginal tourism.

There’s so much more to Indigenous tourism than elaborately costumed dancers at a powwow or an elder tending a fire in a teepee.

There’s Native storytelling, hiking traditional lands, swimming in Canada’s warmest lake (Osoyoos Lake) and, yes, modern conveniences such as staying at a luxury Indigenous-inspired resort, eating gourmet Aboriginal cuisine, drinking vintages made by North America’s only Indigenous winemaker and playing at golf courses on Indian land.

All this is set in the eye-candy of the South Okanagan, where tourists have been flocking for decades for warm weather, lakes, mountain scenery, food and wine.

Before we get to all that, it should be noted Baptiste is a champion archer who won a bronze medal at the North American Indigenous Games and a silver medal a the Indigenous Canada Games.

She’s also the aforementioned tour guide, a member of the Osoyoos Indian Band Youth Council and the Indigenous education adviser at Southern Okanagan Secondary School.

And to brag a bit, I won the media archery competition, sticking an arrow in the target, although not as close to the bullseye as Baptiste.

As a prize, I received a $100 gift certificate to spend at the gift shop of the Nk’Mip Desert Cultural Centre.

My wife spent it for me, choosing a huge wood salad bowl with Native motif, some desert-scented candles and Aboriginal art tea towels.

The centre is also where the tour started with interpreter Dyawen

Top, champion archer Taylor Baptiste of the Osoyoos Indian Band practices on the sage flats in Canada’s only desert at the southern tip of British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley. Right, Dyawen Louis of the Lower Similkameen Indian Band is an interpreter at the Nk’Mip Desert Cultural Centre in Osoyoos. Above, Justin Hall of Nk’Mip Cellars in Osoyoos is North America’s first Indigenous winemaker. Below, chef Murray McDonald creates the Indigenous-inspired dishes at The Bear, The Fish, The Root and The Berry, the new restaurant at Spirit Ridge Resort in Osoyoos, including this bison rib-eye steak paired with Nk’Mip 2016 Merriym Red Meritage.

Louis drumming and singing the Syilx (Okanagan) national anthem and creation story.

The centre is also where you can check out rattlesnakes (in an aquarium), replica teepee and pit house and start a hike through the desert.

Baptiste continued the tour to Okanagan Falls where salmon has been traditionally fished for a millennia and the shore of Osoyoos Lake for lunch prepared by chef Murray McDonald.

McDonald, formerly the chef at the famous Fogo Island Inn in Newfoundland, is now at the helm of The Bear, The Fish, the Root and The Berry, named after the

four Syilx food chiefs.

The Indigenous-inspired restaurant is in Spirit Ridge Resort, the hotel that’s part of the Unbound Collection by Hyatt on Osoyoos Indian Band land.

It’s where for dinner we’ll devour bison rib-eye steak paired with 2016 Merriym Red Meritage from neighbouring Nk’Mip Cellars.

Nk’Mip is North America’s first Aboriginal-owned winery and Justin Hall is the first Aboriginal winemaker on the continent.

“Quite the accomplishment for a kid who grew up on the rez,” said Hall with a laugh in reference to him growing up on Osoyoos

Indian Band reserve land.

“I was 24 and needed a job and knew nothing of wine, but I pestered Randy Picton (now head winemaker at Nk’Mip) to give me one. He finally did and I started as a cellar hand and along the way the band sent me to Lincoln University (in New Zealand) to become a winemaker.”

McDonald himself has Indigenous heritage – Labrador Innu

(Inuit) on his mother’s side and Metis on his dad’s.

“The best way to learn about a culture is through food,” said McDonald in a distinctive Newfoundland accent.

“Indigenous cuisine is the original farm-to-table, the original Paleo diet, the original hunt-fishand-gather and it’s full of superfoods.”

Check out Fall.OIB.ca

Steve MACNAULL

Kelowna Daily Courier

STEVE MACNAULL PHOTOS

Six ways to spruce up the laundry room

Jura KONCIUS The Washington Post

Your laundry area, whether it’s a tiny closet or a corner of the basement, can actually be a happy place.

In a recent project, Jessica Centella and Kiera Kushlan designed a laundry space as part of a total basement renovation. Their client, who loves pink, wanted something fun with storage and a sink suitable for bathing dogs. The designers decided a patterned tile would add some spice to the tight space.

“Our lives are so busy, but we still have to do our mundane household tasks,” says interior designer Glenna Stone. “People have started to realize that even some of the areas that are more utilitarian in a home can actually have some beauty to them.”

Here are some ways to refresh, energize and bring joy to the place where you wash your socks.

Tile the floors

“Tile is the best pick for a high-moisture environment like a laundry room,” Centella says, “especially a laundry room in a basement where flooding is a more likely scenario. Porcelain in particular is extremely water-durable.”

Patterned floor tile is definitely having a moment. Stone likes porcelain and ceramic tile for floors because they offer a lot of colour and pattern options.

Cement tile is another option, she says, but beware, because cement might have to be re-sealed frequently in high-traffic areas.

Designer Stuart Nordin says you can never go wrong with classic white subway tile, even if it’s just for a backsplash: “It elevates the overall look of a room and adds another layer of dimension and interest.”

Designer Josh Hildreth says old concrete floors in basement laundry rooms can be made less dungeon-like by stenciling them, if you’re DIY-inclined. If not, just giving them a coat of fresh paint can be life-changing. Hildreth recalls painting the basement laundry room floor of one of his first places after college in red, and taking the red paint up the wall about 60 cm.

Have fun with the walls

Designer Sheila Bridges is a big fan of using wallpaper for impact. “One of my favorite things to do in a small laundry room is to install a bright and cheery wipeable wallpaper,” she says. “No reason to make doing laundry a chore, even if your laundry room is in a basement.”

Hildreth sometimes takes a hint from old British manor houses when designing laundry spaces. “Give it a Downton Abbey look,” he says. Such details would include adding traditional beadboard or wainscotting to dress up and protect walls. And look for big wicker baskets, he says, as opposed to using plastic laundry bins.

Accessorize with storage

Take a good look at the baskets and bins around your washer and dryer. Bridges likes baskets for detergent and laundry made of various materials including seagrass, recycled plastic and water hyacinth. She’s also fond of using indoor/outdoor rugs that are washable or wipeable and won’t get damaged if they get wet.

“Go for anything that makes laundry less of a chore,” says Meg Wittman, a professional organizer. Wittman says some of her go-to laundry products are clear plastic bins, rolling laundry hampers and a bamboo double hamper. Supplies look better in large jars and clear acrylic canisters.

Centella loves using trays to help corral supplies. “Even a bunch of ugly soap bottles can look more contained and pretty on a nice tray,” she says.

She often uses a flip-down wall hook which folds down to provide a spot to dry delicates or hang clothes and can be folded up when not in use.

Upgrade your appliances

Some of the latest machines are targeted toward millennials looking for efficient internet-connected products and condominium dwellers looking for space-saving solutions. According to Joshua Stumacher, Samsung product marketing director, Samsung’s 6300 Smart Front Load Washer has WiFi connectivity that tells you when a cycle is complete and it has faster speeds so you can do a full load in 30 minutes. To go with some of the warmer wood tones showing up in laundry room design, Samsung recently added a champagne finish option to some of its models.

Most space-strapped consumers still prefer the larger-capacity 27-inch-wide models vs. 24-inch models, says Brendan Bosch, Whirlpool’s marketing director for laundry appliances. So, Whirlpool designed a shallower “closet-depth” 27-inch washer and dryer to fit into more compact places. Some have a “load and go” feature that allows you to put 40 loads worth of detergent in a

Top, Jessica Centella and Kiera Kushlan designed a cool laundry space as part of a total basement renovation, using encaustic porcelain tiles and a farmhouse-style cast-iron sink. Middle left, Josh Hildreth designed a charming space that accommodates laundry, flower arranging and coats. Middle right, Samsung has models that come with WiFi connectivity and in a new champagne finish that goes well with wood cabinets. Above left, for space-constrained customers, Whirlpool has a variety of stackable 24-inch-wide models. Above centre, designer Kevin Dumais created a laundry room and mudroom as a second entrance to this home. Above right, designer Glenna Stone put in pale green cabinets, brass accents and a patterned cement floor in this laundry room.

machine, alleviating the need to store big containers of detergent.

Create a folding area

If you have a side-by-side washer and dryer, consider putting a counter on top. If you’re doing a lot of renovating, you might use the same counter material as you have in your kitchen. For those with stacking units and no extra counter space, Nordin says to try a wall-mounted collapsible table.

“Put a painting or photo on the bottom so it masquerades as a framed piece of art when not in use as a folding station,” she says. Make an effort to make your folding area attractive. “Even in an old, dark basement,

there are things you can do without spending a lot of money,” Hildreth says.

For a nice folding surface, he suggests finding an old farm table at a yard sale or flea market, or painting an old dining table. It’s nice to also upgrade the lighting (especially in a basement). A new fixture, Hildreth adds, such as retro-looking flushmount lights, would make the area brighter and cheerier.

Make it multitask

When square footage is at a premium, laundry rooms can be multipurpose, combined with an entryway, utility room, home office, gift-wrapping station or pet-care area.

Build in room for bulk supply storage or places for household basics such as light bulbs or tools.

Consider how you can use the space most efficiently.

Interior designer Kevin Dumais gave clients in an apartment a combination laundry/mudroom/plant-care area using practical, stylish finishes such as a floor of black honed marble, a solid surface countertop created from recycled paper and a nonpetroleum resin; and anodized aluminum backsplash and drawer fronts. The materials are industrial and sturdy and, combined with the white oak cabinets, give the space a modern, clean-lined look.

“These rooms are like workhorses, and take a lot of wear and tear,” Dumais says.

It is with great sadness that the friends of Drago Lagarusic announce his passing. Drago was born on October 20th, 1932 and left this earth on Sept 19th, 2019. Drago was born in Sarajevo and moved to Canada in 1965 to make a better life for himself. He took great pride in his time that he worked in Cassiar and always had fond memories of living there. Eventually he came to retire in Prince George. While Drago never married or had children, he had a large group of Yugoslavians who were proud to call him a friend. He was always willing to help out in any way he could. He was a kind and giving man and he will be missed dearly by all of us who loved him.

PICKUP,Cyndie

June6,1953-August15,2019

Itiswithgreatsadnessthatweannouncethepassing ofourbeautifulwife,sister,aunt,andfriend,Cyndie Pickup(neeBrassard).

Cyndie,passedawaypeacefullyatthePrinceGeorge HospiceHouse,surroundedbyherhusband,Steve; family;andfriends.AnyonewhoknewCyndiewould attesttoherincrediblespirit,kindheart,mouthwateringcooking,andbeautifulgarden.Wemissher dearly. WewillcometogethertocelebrateCyndie,on October6thfrom2:00pmto4:00pmatSalmon ValleyCampground.AllwhoknewandlovedCyndie, arewelcometoattend.

Joan Mavis Yurkowski (Nee Corless) August 1, 1928September 25, 2019

Joan is the last of the Corless pioneer family. Predeceased by mother and father, three brothers, and two sisters. Left to mourn are her husband Stan, son Jim (Margaret) and son Russell (Anne), four grandchildren (Rebecca, Laura, Emily and Samuel), three greatgrandchildren (Haedyn, Ava and Vivienne), nieces, nephews and special friends Patricia, Christine and Ken. Joan was born in Prince George and lived here all of her life. She remembers an enjoyable childhood with many occasions spent at Summit Lake. Joan married Stan in August of 1958 and spent her life raising her two children and working at various jobs. The highlight of Joan’s work life was being the owner/operator of Nature’s Vita Centre, Health Food Store on 4th Avenue from 1982 to 1999. Joan spent her retirement years enjoying travel, activities at the Prince George Senior Centre, learning how to play piano, painting and spending time with family and friends. She especially enjoyed her birthday bonfires. Joan will be remembered for her fabulous cooking, love of candy, sense of humour, lifelong friendships, and her determined nature. No funeral service or life celebration as per her request. May she Rest in Peace

In Loving Memory of Robert Stallknecht April 19, 1948 to Sept 15, 2019.

Survived by daughter Tamara (Stephen) Toporowski, son’s Colin & Shane Stallknecht, grand kids Tyler, Justin and Joshua Toporowski. A Celebration of Life will be held at Willow River Hall on Saturday Oct 12 at 11am.

It is with broken hearts that the family announce the untimely passing of Francis Herbert Mitchell on September 1, 2019 in the Vancouver General Hospital. Francis will be dearly missed by his children: Herb, Mitch, Darlene and Roger, his grandchildren Tashia, Raymond and Shane, and his great grandchildren Tyler, Jaide and Lana. But, most of all, Francis will be missed by his wife and friend of almost 58 years, Shirley.

A Celebration of life will be held at the Native Friendship Center in Prince George Saturday, October 5 at 12:00 noon until 4:00pm with a pot luck lunch to follow.

Charles Eliel Butler November 15, 1917 -September 12, 2019

Charlie was born in Greenspond Newfoundland and served in the British Merchant Marine during WWII. After the war he moved to British Columbia where he stayed the rest of his life. Charlie passed away after a brief health complication. He was predeceased by his wife Frances, his mother Alice ,his father Caleb and sister Jeannie. He now goes to be with them after nearly 102 years. Many thanks to the kind and caring staff at the UNBC Hospital and Parkside Care Home.

A celebration of life will be held at a later date , care of Assman’s Funeral Chapel.

Rest in Peace Charlie you will be missed.

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MONEY IN BRIEF

Currencies

OTTAWA (CP) — These are indicative wholesale rates for foreign currency provided by the Bank of Canada on Friday. Quotations in Canadian funds.

Oil industry execs weigh in on climate strike

Dan HEALING The Canadian Press

BANFF, Alta. — Oil and gas industry insiders say demands by organizers of Friday’s Global Climate Strike to transition swiftly away from fossil fuels to 100 per cent renewable energy are naive and unrealistic.

But the leaders reached on the sidelines of the Global Business Forum in Banff on Friday say they support the right of participants to draw attention to the issue and applaud their emotional commitment.

“The strikes in some ways raise the emotional urgency of the whole process,” said Hal Kvisle, chairman of ARC Resources Ltd. and former CEO of pipeline builder TransCanada Corp., now called TC Energy Corp.

“The strikes themselves are not offering any answers. The strikes are not addressing the question of how we reduce carbon demand.”

He said he doesn’t mind students missing school to take part in the protests but he would not support his employees missing scheduled work for that reason.

The markets today

TORONTO (CP) — North American stock markets

sustained losses to end a poor week as uncertainty over the trade war resurfaced with American government threats to investments in the U.S. and China.

The movement followed reports that the U.S. administration is discussing limiting U.S. portfolio investments in China and delisting Chinese companies from U.S. stock exchanges. Limiting investments just doesn’t sound good, says Les Stelmach, portfolio manager at Franklin Bissett Investment Management.

“It’s just further drum-beating on kind of this trade war thing which the market obviously doesn’t like,” he said in an interview.

The escalation in the trade war comes after the two sides made some conciliatory moves ahead of next week’s resumption of negotiations that gave observers hope for a deal.

“It just seems like posturing but it’s just this game of one-upsmanship that makes everybody nervous.”

The S&P/TSX composite index closed down 96.13 points at 16,694.27. It marked the first weekly decrease in five weeks and follows the setting of record highs several times last week.

The Canadian dollar traded for an average of 75.48 cents US compared with an average of 75.41 cents US on Thursday. In New York, the Dow Jones industrial average was down 70.87 points at 26,820.25.

The S&P 500 index was down 15.83 points at 2,961.79, while the Nasdaq composite was down 91.03 points at 7,939.63.

Activists who want to stop new pipelines aren’t considering the negative impact on Indigenous communities who are counting on oil and gas development to improve their lives, said Harrie Vredenburg, an executive board member for Project Reconciliation, an Indigenous consortium considering making a bid to buy the Trans Mountain pipeline from the federal government.

“Another issue (other than climate change) Canada needs to address is its relationship with its Indigenous people

that has gone awry over the last 150 years that needs to be corrected,” said Vredenburg, who is also a professor at the University of Calgary’s Haskayne School of Business, in an interview at the business forum.

“And a way to do that is majority ownership of the Trans Mountain pipeline with the highest possible environmental standards.”

Young people taking part in the climate change strike are being manipulated and misled by radical environmentalists, said Earl Hickok, chairman and founder of Advantage Energy Services Ltd.

“Generally, emotionally, they want to make a change and I think that’s a positive thing,” he said. “Now, do I believe they are right and we should strike and stop the world and stop our economy and stop our way of life? No, I don’t. But I think their intentions are good.”

Gary Mar, CEO of the Petroleum

Services Association of Canada and a former Alberta Progressive Conservative environment minister, said some of his three grown children have taken part in environmental protests before and he supports their right to do so.

He said if one of his children wanted to skip school to attend the strike Friday he would “be OK with that.”

However, he said it’s unrealistic for the climate change strikers to demand the immediate end of oil and gas production.

“We’re not opposed to the environment,” Mar said of the energy industry.

“In fact, I would argue the environmental characteristics of the energy we develop in Canada are part of the brand of Canadian energy, that we are responsible about it, that we do support governments in their efforts to make this a cleaner environment and, someday, we will transition to different forms of energy. But that’s not going to happen in the next five or 10 or 15 years.”

Add value to province’s forestry products, Horgan says

The Canadian Press

VANCOUVER — A downturn in British Columbia’s lumber industry is a chance to refocus on getting more money out of provincial forests, Premier John Horgan said Friday.

He told hundreds of delegates at the annual convention of the Union of B.C. Municipalities that the forest industry has focused for too long on sending raw logs offshore without adding value.

Dozens of forest companies have closed or curtailed operations in B.C. over what Horgan said is dwindling supply and an operating model that moves timber to market without tending to a renewable resource.

He said the province has dwindling fibre because of fires, pine beetle infestations and an operations model that gets timber cut and to market as fast as possible. Instead, the focus needs to be on the renewable resource over the long

term, Horgan said.

“That means focusing on getting more money out of our forests, not more wood out of our forests.”

Earlier on Friday, convention delegates approved a motion asking the province to reconsider its decision to transfer $25 million in funding from an economic development program for rural communities to a support program for forest workers.

The government announced a $69 million aid program last week for communities and workers hurt by the industry downturn.

Horgan said the funding diversion is not a cut and is intended to help people and communities in difficulty.

“We are feeling pain in the communities, we need to band together and that’s why we curtailed the rural development fund so we can focus direction on people who are in distress,” he said.

The B.C. government’s website says

the Rural Dividend Program has been suspended for the year, not cancelled. The fund supports small and Indigenous communities in diversifying their economies.

Horgan told the crowd the money would be reinstated as the province monitors the forestry aid program.

The premier said he met recently with five CEOs of the major forest companies in B.C. and they had a candid discussion.

“It’s hard for me to listen to companies say they’re in distress when they’re making multimillion-dollar investments in the United States and Europe and around the world.”

He said he wants the forest industry to be successful.

“It’s not about reducing their ability, it’s about opening opportunities for markets and that’s why I’m so excited about cross-laminated timber,” he said, referring to wood product that can be used for construction of highrise buildings.

The return of the circuit preacher

Julie ZAUZMER The Washington Post

The Rev. Jess Felici looked out from her pulpit at her tiny flock.

“Our closing hymn comes from our green books, Number 492,” she said. The pianist struck up the opening notes. And the pastor walked right down the aisle and out the church door, leaving her congregants still singing without her.

She turned on her car. Drove down the gravel road until she reached the paved one. Took the hairpin turns down into the valley and back up the next mountain.

Forty-one minutes later, she walked through the doors of her next church, where the service was well underway.

Still wearing her white robes, she waited while a congregant finished reading from the book of Psalms, then took over the pulpit.

“I invite you to stand as you are able for a reading of the Gospel,” she picked up seamlessly.

Two churches down and one more to go on this Sunday for Felici.

Jess, 36, and her husband, the Rev. Jason Felici, 33, serve together as the pastors of five churches in one of the most isolated pockets of America. Their weekly acrobatics of military-precision timing and longdistance driving are what it takes to make Sunday church services happen in a place where churchgoers are aging, pews are getting emptier and church budgets are getting smaller.

That makes Appalachia much like the rest of the country when it comes to mainline Protestant churches.

Mainline denominations – the historically indomitable Protestant institutions that were the backbone of early American respectability, including Methodist, Presbyterian and Lutheran churches – are now on a precipitous decline.

From 2007 to 2014, according to Pew Research, the number of mainline Protestants in the United States dropped by about 5 million people, leaving just 14 per cent of Americans – about 36 million – identifying with any mainline denomination.

One in every five American adults were raised in a mainline church. But less than half of them continue to affiliate as adults.

That has left churches, especially in rural areas, facing the tough question of how to keep serving the members who remain. Some churches simply close. Others merge. And in an increasing number of places, rural and even urban, pastors are bringing back an old-fashioned concept: the circuit preacher.

“The circuit rider in a lot of ways was lost,” Jason Felici said. “This is, in some way, the model of the future.”

The Hartford Institute for Religion Research found in a survey of more than 4,000 churches that in 2010, 71 per cent of churches had a full-time paid pastor. Five years later, 62 per cent did.

The Felicis, who started dating while both were in seminary to become pastors in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (the ELCA, a liberal-leaning mainline denomination not to be confused with conservative evangelical Christians), have spent their careers facing these trends. When they graduated seven years ago, the Felicis took up their call as the pastors not of one local Lutheran church, but five. In these seven years, they have come to know individual deer by sight. They have become accustomed to a 100-year-old parishioner coating cotton balls in peppermint oil to get the smell out when the skunk gets under a church building. Their daughter, Emma, was born here, and they will welcome another child soon.

They have learned the signs of a church emptying out. There are the economic pressures – jobs lost in Pendleton and Pocahontas counties that have forced families to move to Virginia or Washington; shrinking farm profits that have pushed people out of full-time farming.

This isolated corner of Appalachia is simply a hard place to live. The drive from the nearest city, Harrisonburg, Virginia, is at least an hour – all the way up and down the steep mountain that separates this area from the outside world. Under decades-old law meant to preserve this area for scientific research, there’s no cellphone service or radio in most of the two counties, which are in the National Radio Quiet Zone. In certain parts, even at-home wireless Internet or microwave ovens are banned to protect the research zone.

And then there are the religious trends –Americans are growing ever more secular, with well over 20 per cent now identifying with no religion at all. Conservative evangelical churches have shrunk, too, but not as rapidly as the mainline denominations, such as the Felicis’ Lutheran church, that hold more-liberal positions on issues such as same-gender relationships and the role of women.

“It’s secularization. I don’t know how else to say it. The product that we had is not working for a lot of people,” said Lewis Parks, a professor retired from Wesley Theological Seminary, a United Methodist training institute in the District of Columbia. Parks traveled to small churches throughout the country, researching a book.

“What’s happening now,” he said, “it’s the cutting edge of a lot of mainline denominations – how to cope with the loss of members... What’s our model?”

In the United Methodist Church, decisions can come from the top down, with denominational leaders deciding to shutter a church or have churches start sharing a pastor.

“Many laity feel their traditions and cultures are lost when two local churches merge into one,” said Bishop Kenneth Carter Jr., the president of the United Methodist Council of Bishops. Rather than mergers, therefore, bishops are turning more often to a circuit-preacher model.

“The UMC has a history of circuits,” Carter said. “The practice of a pastor serving more than one church dates back more than two hundred years.”

In other denominations, the decisions are left to local churches. That is the case in the ELCA, the denomination of all five of the Felicis’ churches: any church or collection of churches, of any size, can hire a pastor as long as the members can raise at least the set base salary.

Every Sunday, one of the Felicis starts the day at 7:15 a.m. with a 100-km drive to the farthest of their churches, New Hope in Minnehaha Springs, West Virginia. After the service, that pastor drives all the way back to Franklin, where the Felicis live, to preach at the 11 a.m. service at the church next door to their parsonage. Meanwhile,

the other pastor makes a mad dash through three church services, which means leaving early and arriving back late to get it all done. Each pastor writes one sermon each week and delivers it two or three times.

“We have a significant number of people in their 90s and older who drive themselves. If they had to drive more than a mile and a half to get to their church, we wouldn’t see them anymore,” Jess said on one of the rare weekdays that she and Jason are at home together, instead of driving the long distances across their 120 km-wide parish to visit sick or homebound members.

“Out here, the church is the last social organization left,” said Jason, who grew up in the more populous West Virginia city of Wheeling. “The local post office is closed. The local social hall is closed. The local general store is closed.”

“When you age out of the volunteer firefighters or EMT, the church is the one place you have contact with people socially,” said Jess, who grew up in the Harrisburg area.

The two pastors reflected at the parsonage, where they live on a ridge overlooking endless trees, where they know the one spruce where a young bald eagle lives. “It’s a beautiful thing,” Jason said.

Through clergy networks on social media, Jason and Jess hear from pastors across the country who are new to circuit preaching. Their fellow circuit riders seek advice about how to maintain relationships with parishioners despite the long distances and about how to offer robust ministries when manpower is limited.

Jason and Jess tell these pastors how, come Sunday, they drive from church to church to church, holding the same service five times for a couple dozen people in each simple white-walled sanctuary.

When Jason drives the longest leg of the circuit, an hour and 15 minutes to Minnehaha Springs, sometimes he doesn’t pass another car.

“As the raw numbers in our counties decline, it’s not about the numbers,” he said on a recent Sunday. “It’s about faithfulness. It’s about the mission. It’s about what we are called to be doing in this place.”

Jess drove, this Sunday, in the other direction, toward their very smallest church, Mount Hope.

“The thought of closing this church is just so grief-laden,” she said as she drove up the hill, past the chicken barn she visits every year when the baby chicks hatch. “We all think about what it would be like if there weren’t enough people to have a congregation here. We put it off. Because it’s just painful to think about.”

She pictured this church on its best night, when it fills to the brim on Christmas Eve. The young people who have moved away to Morgantown and Washington are home. The families too busy and exhausted to attend church more than once a year are there.

“Everybody’s spirits are glowing and the candles are lit and it’s dark outside,” she said. “I’m not sure I have the words for it.” She was almost at the church, the first one of the day. She thought of that sacred night, and the sacred spaces she and Jason create every Sunday.

She pulled up in front of the graveyard, where the faithful generations who sustained this church for more than two centuries are resting.

She looked up at the simple building where their descendants carry on into an uncertain future. She turned off the car and opened the door.

WASHINGTON POST PHOTOS

Above, the Rev. Jess Felici speaks with parishioners at New Hope Lutheran Church in Upper Ract, West Virginia, before the first of three services she’ll officiate. Right, the Rev. Jason Felici prays with Olivia Caplinger, his daughter Emma Felici and Holden Puchany during a short time during the service where kids come to the front for a talk and prayer at Faith Lutheran Church in Franklin, West Virginia. The Felicis travel to five different services each Sunday that are part of the Mountain Lutheran Parish.