Trudy Klassen challenges some popular ideas, page 9 Diane Nakamura explains how depression hits people with brain injuries, page 13
Prince George Thursday May 14, 2020
Cats goalie trying to stay sharp Page 17
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City featured in opioid doc Arthur Williams Citizen staff
Prince George is featured in an episode of a new documentary series about the opioid crisis.
Citizen staff photo
Bernice Trick outside of her RiverBend Manor home in Prince George.
Retired Citizen writer weathering pandemic Ted Clarke Citizen staff
As a reporter whose career at the Prince George Citizen spanned 31 years, Bernice Trick learned early on how to craft stories that were informative and trustworthy, written in a style that made people want to read them.
Retirement hasn’t taken away her thirst for knowledge and Trick stays tuned to what’s happening in the world - especially now, while the story of the century is being written. She knows future historians will look back at this time and the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and how it has touched everyone on the planet. She’s convinced it’s not all doom and gloom. “I think this is the darkest hour in modern society,” said Trick. “Even World War 2, it was over there. Everybody in the whole world is in the same boat and
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that doesn’t happen very often. Society is never going to quite be the same again and I think a lot of good things are going to come out of it. I’m hoping this will make it easier for people. We’re being kinder to each other.” Trick knows the vast, sparsely-populated Northern Health region, an area the size of France, has gotten through the two-month pandemic relatively unscathed. That hasn’t been the case in the bigger cities like Vancouver, Calgary, Montreal and Hamilton, where the virus has hit seniors homes hard, killing dozens of people. “We’re lucky here, we don’t have anybody in here who has it,” said Trick, standing in front of her ground-floor condominium where she lives at RiverBend Manor seniors residence. “In fact, Northern Health is pretty lucky and I think it’s got to do partly with our location. I’d say we’ve done really well in Canada compared to other nations and I’m proud of our people, not only our people in government but our doctors, nurses, first responders, bus and truck drivers. We can be really proud of them and thankful for them.” RiverBend Manor is an independent-living facility built by BC Housing for people aged 55 and older. Despite the pandemic, which has put some seniors homes in the city on lockdown, RiverBend residents are permitted to leave the building on their own. Non-essential visitors are not allowed and that prohibited list includes hairstylists/barbers and personal cleaning service staff.
“The powers-that-be should be very careful when they ease restrictions because we just can’t go through another wave of this, it would just ruin the economy, and we’d have another round of deaths,” said Trick. “I just hope they’re careful.” Trick keeps up with daily events happening in the city on the Citizen’s website and looks forward to reading the weekly Citizen print edition on Thursdays. “You can get the obituaries there and that’s one of the most important things in the paper,” she laughed. The former school teacher from Snowden, Sask., got into the newspaper business when she started a weekly publication, The Little Dipper, shortly after moving to Mackenzie with her husband John in 1966. Trick taught school for six years and was hired at the Citizen in 1980, where she covered several beats - city hall, postsecondary education and health – but perhaps she is best remembered for telling the stories of the unsung heroes and their local events as the community beat writer until her retirement in 2011. Lately, Trick has been putting her writing skills to work producing children’s stories with a holiday theme that she hopes will find their way into school classrooms. ““I’ve written a Canada Day story about beavers,” Trick said. “When I was a teacher I could not find suitable stories that I wanted to read in class for certain holidays or celebrations and I thought, one day I’m going to write a story book just for teachers.”
Good People is on CBC’s free steaming service, CBC Gem. The five-part series takes a look at the issues of homelessness, the spread of garbage in the environment, issues facing veterans, gun violence and the opioid crisis. Series creator Mark Sakamoto said he wanted to take a look at some of biggest problems facing communities in North America, and the creative ways some communities are tackling them. “They’re not insurmountable problems, that’s the thing,” Sakamoto said. “We really set out to look at what some communities are doing.” Sakamoto said he chose to come to Prince George to shoot parts of the episode on the opioid crisis because he wanted to illustrate that this problem isn’t just found in places like Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. “We wanted to show that this crisis really doesn’t’ discriminate between bigger cities and smaller cities and towns,” he said. Good People debuted on CBC Gem a day after the B.C. Coroners Services announced its latest statistics on illicit drug overdose deaths. Between Jan. 1 and the end of March, seven people in Prince George died of drug overdoses. In 2019, a total of 25 people in the city died of drug overdoses and 49 in 2018. Based on statistics from 2018 to the end of March this year, the city has the ninth-highest rate in the province of drug overdose deaths per capita. The city’s rate of deaths is the equivalent of 35.8 deaths per 100,000 people, compared to the B.C. average of 20.4 deaths per 100,000 people. So far this year, Northern Health has the highest rate of drug overdose deaths per capita, at 29.3 per 100,000 residents. After leaving Prince George, Sakamoto’s crew went to Burlington, Vermont. “Burlington looked eerily similar to Prince George a decade ago. Vermont was the worst state in the U.S. for opioid issues,” Sakamoto said. “Then they did something really interesting... They thought about it as a health pandemic.” Instead of treating the opioid crisis as a criminal problem, they treated it as a purely medical issue. They established a command and control system that responded to increases in overdoses like an outbreak during a pandemic. “That changed the whole ballgame in Vermont,” Sakamoto said. The state went from one of the worst rates of opioid overdoses in the United States to one of the best, he said.