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Prince George Citizen November 3, 2022

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MP speaks about his abusive childhood

Passport office sought

ARTHUR WILLIAMS

Is it time for Prince George to have its own passport office? That’s a no-brainer for Skeena-Bulkley Valley MP Taylor Bacharach. The backlog of applications this past summer resulted in blocks-long lineups at the Vancouver office. That was enough to convince Bachrach the time is now for people in the northern half of the province to have full access to passport services. The government opened passport offices this year, in Trois Rivieres, Que., Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., Charlottetown, P.E.I. and Red Deer, Alta. Bachrach is hopeful the federal government will extend that courtesy to northern B.C. “I think opening an office in Prince George would cut down the travel time for people who need to urgently get their passport completed, and I’ve written to the minister and asked her to consider that strongly,” Bachrach said. Kelowna is the closest B.C. city to offer passport services. The province’s other passport offices are in Vancouver, Richmond, Surrey and Victoria. People who require urgent or express pick-up service must go to the Vancouver office at the Sinclair Centre 100-757 West Hastings St.

TED CLARKE Citizen staff

remember thinking that he even stood on his toes to help her deliver the punishment. She held his arm in place as she placed his tiny hand onto the burner. I could hear the sound of his flesh burning. Oddly, I do not remember him crying or screaming, maybe because our screams drowned out his. She did not even blink as she flung him to the side and looked directly at my brother and me.” The incident was just one of many, Doherty said. “Just a couple of weeks earlier, I had been on the receiving end of a can of soup that was thrown at me.”

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brother Kevin.” Doherty did not identify the abuser, only referring to her as “she.” The burner had been on for some time and was purple-hot. “It was a bad day. Why? I do not know. Was the canned food stacked properly? Were the dishes done? Was the garbage out? It did not matter. Whatever played in her head, we were going to have to pay for it. We had been here before. We knew what was coming,” Doherty told his fellow MPs. “As we stood there, tears slowly ran down our cheeks. We were all terrified. She yanked his little arm. It was barely able to reach the top of the stove. I

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Prince George-Cariboo MP Todd Doherty spoke for the first time publicly about the child abuse he endured during an Oct. 20 debate in the House of Commons.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: This story contains disturbing content. As a child, Cariboo-Prince George MP Todd Doherty had to stand and watch as his brother’s hand was pressed to the hot burner of a stove. In a debate on mental health in the House of Commons on Oct. 20, Doherty spoke publicly for the first time about the abuse he and his brothers faced growing up. “While I have never shared this publicly, I live every day with the emotional and physical scars of the abuse that my brothers and I dealt with back home. My hope is always that if a person finds themselves experiencing some or all of what my brothers have, that they will see that they can overcome. They are not broken, and they are not weak,” Doherty said. “I can still remember the smell of burning flesh and the sight of my brother’s skin hanging off of his hand. We were lined up to watch. We did not know if we were all getting this, or if it was just my

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