Two Leader residents killed in tragic accident
Cypress County Alta. –
On Oct. 15, 2023, at approximately 7:25 p.m., Redcli RCMP were dispatched to a two vehicle collision on Highway 41, between Highway 545 and Township 190, in Cypress County. Investigation revealed that an SUV swerved to avoid a moose, at which time it struck a cattle hauler head on. e SUV caught re as a result of the collision.
e driver of the cattle hauler was not injured. Unfortunately, the
38-year-old male driver and 14-year-old female passenger of the SUV, both residents of Leader, Sask., were pronounced deceased at the scene. Condolences to the family and friends of both deceased. No further updates are anticipated.
A COMMUNICATION PROBLEM
Let’s first assume that West leads a heart in response to East’s overcall, and that East covers dummy’s queen with the king, which South ducks. As a result of this communications-breaking play by declarer, he makes the contract.
If East continues the suit, South finesses the ten and leads a club. No matter when or how the defenders take their A-K of clubs, East’s hearts wind up withering on the vine, and South eventually scores three club tricks to make the contract.
Note that if declarer slips by winning the opening heart lead, he goes down. Whenever he leads a club, West wins with the king and returns a heart to East’s jack, and East leads a third heart to establish his suit. East still has the club ace as an entry, and South goes down two.
Entries pose a problem in the play of many deals. In the case of declarer, an abundance of winners in either his own hand or dummy is worthless if there is no way to reach them.
The defenders might likewise be faced with this difficulty. Either defender might have tricks that cannot be taken because there is no entry card in the hand that holds the good tricks. The defenders can sometimes solve this problem if they use their resources expeditiously. Here is such a case.
Note also, though, that East can defeat the contract if he plays the seven of hearts on the opening lead! By allowing declarer to win the first trick with the queen, he maintains a heart contact with West that prevents South from scoring more than seven tricks.
Thus, if declarer plays a club at trick two, West takes his king and returns a heart to East’s K-J, driving out South’s ace on this trick or the next one. The race for the establishment of tricks is then won by the defense, and South winds up taking second money.
©2023 King Features Syndicate Inc.
Q:I saw a commercial with Julianna Margulies in a new series. Did “The Good Wife” end? What is her new show? — J.K.
A:“The Good Wife” was a smash hit series for CBS, but it’s been long gone, having ended its run in 2016 after seven seasons. It spawned a successful spin-off series called “The Good Fight,” starring Christine Baranski, and has another spin-off in the works called “Elsbeth.” It will star Carrie Preston as “the astute but unconventional attorney” who fans will recall from the same role she played on “The Good Fight.”
As for Margulies, she is one of television’s most acclaimed and employable actresses, having turned a one-episode guest role on NBC’s “ER” into an Emmy award-winning one that lasted six seasons. In recent years, she’s accepted parts that have allowed her to stretch her already impressive range. She played an abrasive fashion magazine editor in the AMC series “Dietland,” followed by a doctor racing against time to stop an Ebola virus outbreak in “The Hot Zone.”
Most recently, she returned as Reese Witherspoon’s ex-girlfriend and co-anchor in the Apple TV+ drama series “The Morning Show.” Margulies once said that the character is a cross between Diane Sawyer and Rachel Maddow. As for any other upcoming projects, it surely won’t be long before Margulies is asked to headline a new series, but for now, she seems content making a big impact in smaller roles.
***
OUTREACH SERVICES
Q:How is Priscilla Presley been doing since the unexpected death of her daughter, Lisa Marie? — G.G.
A:Priscilla
and Lisa Marie Presley attended the Golden Globe Awards together this past January to support Austin Butler in his nominated role (he won!) in the feature film “Elvis.” Just two days later, Lisa Marie was rushed to the hospital with a bowel obstruction that would claim her life. Her mother, Priscilla, issued a statement shortly thereafter and asked for privacy for her “profound loss.”
Now, almost a year later, Priscilla herself will be the subject of a film directed by Sofia Coppola, daughter of Francis Ford Coppola (“The Godfather”) and
Morning Show”
Oscar winner for her screenplay of the 2003 film “Lost in Translation.”
“Priscilla,” which will premiere in theaters on Nov. 3, stars Cailee Spaeny (“Mare of Easttown”) as the titular character. Coppola says that she really connected with the young Priscilla who was thrust into stardom seemingly overnight and how impressed she was when Priscilla later left her marriage with Elvis.
As for how Priscilla is doing, she’ll likely speak more about it in upcoming interviews for her biographical film, which she helped co-write.
***
Q:
My mother’s favorite talk show is “The Talk,” but she is worried it won’t be back with new episodes because of the strikes. Is there anything definitive I can tell her about it? — L.L.
Short Term Counselling
A:By the time you read this, the syndicated multi-host show “The Talk” will be back with new episodes. Season 14 took off on Oct. 9 with the same five hosts and a new executive producer, Rob Crabbe, who served the same role on the fun-filled “The Late Late Show with James Corden.”
Send me your questions at NewCelebrityExtra@gmail.com, or write me at KFWS, 628 Virginia Drive, Orlando, FL 32803.
© 2023 King Features Synd., Inc.
OUTREACH SERVICES
ARIES (March 21 to April 19) Some flashes of Aries ire might erupt as you confront an unusually bewildering situation. But you should be able to keep your temper under control as you work through it.
TAURUS (April 20 to May 20) That marriage twixt the arts and practicality that Taureans excel at once again highlights your enjoyment for much of the week. However, you need to watch any sudden urge to splurge.
GEMINI (May 21 to June 20) Even with all the pluses apparently outweighing the minuses, you still might want to defer an important decision just to make sure you have all the facts that you need.
CANCER (June 21 to July 22) One or two problems might threaten to derail smoothly running situations at work or at home. But a few wellplaced words should help get things back on track quickly.
LEO (July 23 to August 22) This could be a good time for all you Leos and Leonas in the spotlight to open up your generous Lion’s hearts and share the glory with those who helped you accomplish so much along the way.
VIRGO (August 23 to September 22) Before investing time or money (or both) into a questionable matter, you might want to get advice from someone with expertise who knows these situations better than you do.
LIBRA (September 23 to October 22) Be careful how you handle a workplace matter that seems out of place in the schedule you’ve prepared. Before you act in one way or another, find out who set it up and why.
SCORPIO (October 23 to November 21) Your entertainment aspect is strong this week. Besides providing a wonderful break from everyday obligations, sharing fun times with others brings you closer to those you care for.
SAGITTARIUS (November 22 to December 21) Having a weekend fun fest? Your friend or relative who’s down in the emotional dumps could perk up if you find a way to include them in your plans.
CAPRICORN (December 22 to January 19) If you’re in one of those “Goat knows best” periods, you might want to ease up and try listening to what others have to say. You could learn something.
AQUARIUS (January 20 to February 18) That new challenge is getting closer, and you should be out there now showing facts and figures that can help persuade potential allies to rally to your support. Good luck!
PISCES (February 19 to March 20) Getting a head start on holiday plans could help free up some time later to spend on other projects. Meanwhile, a colleague has some ideas that you might find worth discussing.
BORN THIS WEEK: You are always there for others, but sometimes you need to be reminded that you need to be there for yourself as well.
© 2023 King Features Synd., Inc.
• Fresh H2O Trucks
• Pipeline Testing
• Fresh H2O Hot/Cold
• Meth Sales & Rentals
• KCL Sales
• Hot Shot Services
• Rod Rigs
• Flush Bys
• Hot Oilers
• Pressure Trucks
• Chemical Trucks
• Steamers-Boilers
• Frac Heaters
• Produced H2O & Oil Hauling
Right side of history: Two protest leaders from 2019 truck convoys react to “No More Pipelines Act” ruling
BY BRIAN ZINCHUK
Twice last week, SaskEnergy set new daily natural gas usage records, and we can thank Alberta for most of our supply
BY BRIAN ZINCHUK brian.zinchuk@pipelineonline.ca
Not only was Saskatchewan setting electrical consumption records during the cold snap of last week of December, we also set two consecutive natural gas consumption records, too.
WEYBURN, ESTEVAN – Long before the “truckers convoy” protested COVID-19 pandemic measures in Ottawa, a series of convoys in and from Saskatchewan and Alberta paved the way, as it were. And those protests over four years ago have finally seen success, in the form of a Supreme Court of Canada ruling on Oct. 13 that found one of their major issues unconstitutional.
According to SaskEnergy in a Dec. 31 release, “Extreme cold weather across Saskatchewan this week resulted in record-breaking natural gas demand in the province. On December 28 and 29, natural gas consumption surpassed the previous daily record of 1.57 petajoules (PJ) which was set in February 2021.
two of the lead organizers, in a group that numbered around two dozen.
plant, very similar to Chinook, is under construction at Moose Jaw.
All of this added natural gas-fired power generation has, in turn, driven higher usage of natural gas during times of high electrical consumption.
While there are some activists that protest their respective causes on a frequent basis, both oil patch workers and farmers rarely, if ever, are the type of people to join a protest.
The Crown noted that increased demand from SaskEnergy’s industrial customers, including natural gas use for power production, was the main driver of this week’s record-setting consumption.
TARNES ELECTRIC HIRING
IMMEDIATELY
Journeyperson/Apprentice Electrician
“A new daily record of 1.62 PJ was set on December 28 and broken again on December 29 with total system delivery of 1.64 PJ. Delivery numbers for December 30 and 31 are not yet finalized, but are also expected to exceed 1.6 PJ.”
The natural gas records coincided with record power consumption. On Dec. 29, SaskPower set another record in power consumption for Saskatchewan. At 5:27 p.m. on Dec. 29, 2021, Saskatchewan homes and businesses reached 3,868 megawatts (MW) in power use, according to the Crown corporation. The previous record of 3,792 MW was reached four years ago to the day, on Dec. 29, 2017.
Around Christmas time of 2018, a spontaneous truck convoy protest took place in Estevan. In less than three days, a protest was organized with a 14 kilometre long convoy of trucks rolling through town. Their drivers were protesting federal energy policies including the carbon tax, pipelines, Bill C-69 (the Impact Assessment Act, a.k.a “No More Pipelines Bill”, and Bill C-48, the oil tanker ban. That led to similar, quickly organized protests throughout western Canada. Local truck convoy protests occurred in almost every significant oilfield community from Virden, Manitoba, to Grande Prairie, Alberta.
Saskatchewan’s power production has increasingly shifted from coal to natural gas as a fuel source. In December, Boundary Dam Unit 4, a coal-fired generating unit, was retired, reducing the Boundary Dam Power Station to 672 megawatts capacity. On the natural gas side, Saskatchewan has seen the construction of several new natural gas-fired power plants. They include the baseload North Battleford Power Station (289 megawatts), Yellowhead Power Station peaking plant (also at North Battleford, 135 megawatts), the baseload Chinook Power Station at Swift Current (353 megawatts) and peaking plant Spy Hill Power Station (89 megawatts). Another 353 megawatt baseload
A few weeks later, now in February, 2019, a convoy to Ottawa took place, with similar motivations. It picked up several participants from southeast Saskatchewan, including Dale Mainil of Weyburn and Jason LeBlanc of Estevan, both of which contributed a truck to the protest through their businesses. Those trucks ended up parked right at the gates of Parliament. LeBlanc gave a speech standing in a snowbank in front of Parliament, as they were forced off the sidewalks by security personnel.
And from that, several of those participants determined it was time to organize their own convoy, this time to Regina to protest the carbon tax and those other energy policies. Mainil and LeBlanc were
24 HR DISPATCH: 306-460-8684 OFFICE: 306-463-1454 EMAIL: doomen@gtgt.ca 1101 - 9th Ave. West, Kindersley, Sask.
After weeks of preparation, a convoy of 860 trucks, both oilfield and agricultural, rolled into Regina on April 4, 2019, parking at Evraz Place. And there they were greeted by Premier Scott Moe in a rally which focused on those very energy issues – carbon tax, pipelines, Bill C-69 and C-48.
SaskEnergy said it measures daily natural gas consumption for the 24-hour period from 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. A PJ is a unit of measurement equivalent to one million gigajoules (GJ) of natural gas. An average Saskatchewan home consumes about 100 GJ of natural gas each year.
Supreme Court ruling
On Oct. 13, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that most of Bill C-69, now in law as the Impact Assessment Act, was unconstitutional.
Pipeline Online asked to of those convoy organizers, Dale Mainil and Jason LeBlanc, what they thought of the ruling.
“SaskEnergy’s natural gas system design can accommodate additional capacity to manage increased consumption even on peak days,” SaskEnergy president and CEO Ken From said in a release. “Throughout the year, SaskEnergy employees inspect, maintain and enhance the system to support safe and reliable natural gas delivery in all weather conditions. In addition, employees monitor the system 24 hours a day to ensure sufficient system capacity to meet customer demand across the province.”
This province is now largely dependent on neighbouring Alberta to fulfill roughly two-thirds of our natural gas needs.
Mainil, one of the owners of oilfield construction firm Jerry Mainil Ltd., said on Oct. 17, “It’s progress. You know the courts are so political. I was surprised, but happily. And it’s a start, but we got a huge hurdle still ahead of us to right the ship to make our industry what it is.”
When natural gas prices took a tumble roughly 14 years ago, Saskatchewan’s domestic gas production fell off a cliff. Targeted gas drilling went essentially extinct, with next to no gas-specific wells being drilled in this province for most of the past decade. Our domestic gas production is now largely based on associated gas production that comes with oil production. As a result, Saskatchewan went from being a net gas exporter for the period of 1988 to 2009 to a net importer that year.
Asked if the judgement is too late, Mainil said, “I’m an optimist. Nothing’s ever too late. It’s just going to take a long time to stop the train and turn it around. And, you know, we’ve got the best industry in the world, in our oil and gas, in the safest and the most environmentally friendly. Yet, when you have politicians down east that don’t recognize that, whether it be in Estevan and a carbon capture of CO2 or, or how we do things environmentally friendly in our industry here in Western Canada, oil and gas. That is, it’s frustrating.”
CONTINUED NEXT PAGE
carthurs@gtgt.ca
He added, “There’s no renewable
that is going to replace oil and gas tomorrow. So we need this industry, regardless of what the politicians say. We need this industry, and we have the best in the world. So, I believe we’re definitely it’s an uphill battle as your business and my business know, but we have choices do we have?”
Jason LeBlanc, an Estevan-area farmer and retired auctioneer who is currently reeve of the RM of Estevan, took a lot of personal flack as a result of the protests. He was personally (and wrongfully) maligned as having “anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic sentiment” by none other than the NDP Leader of Opposition Ryan Meili, speaking in the Legislature under parliamentary privilege, which protected him from slander litigation. Meili’s verbal assault on LeBlanc, a man very well known in the agriculture industry, led to the number of participants taking part in the convoy doubling in the space of two days. By the time the convoy rolled into Regina, more half the trucks were from the agriculture sector.
Speaking to Pipeline Online on Oct. 17, LeBlanc said of those federal energy policies, “Well, the whole thing was a farce from the start, when you’ve got an activist in charge of Canada’s largest checkbook, which is Steven Guilbeault. He should have never gotten that far, but that you got activism, you got a federal government that was bound to kill it all in the name of climate change. And they didn’t care who they stepped on all the way. And we did some push backs. We got behind our premier. We supported them on the fight back and it’s paying off. People are slowly waking up to it. Now they’re very quickly starting to see the damage has been done.”
As for Meili’s comments, LeBlanc noted it’s a common left-wing theme to attack the person they disagree with, as opposed to their points of contention. “The left wing seems to
COLEVILLE, SK
know you’re right. So they changed the narrative a little bit. They started calling you a racist and a bigot and a yellow vester and all that because they can’t argue the facts, they just want to change the narrative a little bit. We can all see that now. He quit. He was so upset over it.”
LeBlanc thinks similar tactics are being used against Premier Scott Moe. LeBlanc said, “He’s got his hands full all the time. There’s somebody coming at him from different angles all the time. But if you look at it, it’s the same group of people that try to discredit him and take him down, from a different angle, all the time. And now they’ve lost this, the majority of their concentration now is on pronouns. They just jump from one thing to another, never leave him alone. And he’s done a very good job but so we’re happy with the decision because it was the right decision.”
LeBlanc thinks one of the reasons behind the ruling against the Impact Assessment Act was the Supreme Court is realizing there are winds of change afoot in the discourse of the nation. He said, “One of my reasons is that the Trudeau government’s polls are falling. Any judge who is to go down with them, or they’re starting to look after themselves a little bit, too, and realize, hey, we can’t just slide this stuff in. There has to be reality check now.”
Right side of history
Asked if he felt they were on the right side of history, Mainil said, “Well, I hope so. This whole thing, what I call a climate cult, is starting to wear thin when it affects people’s pocketbooks, which it is, today. People are realizing that, yes, sure, we want to have a good environment, good climate policies. But we’ve gone too far. It’s like anything, whether it’s climate or whether it’s oil, or that’s agriculture, the pendulum always swings too far. And it’s got to come back.”
LeBlanc said of history, “I think we were. I think we were trying. We went into the pit of fire, because that was right after the Greta Thornburg thing and all that. The schools were against us, the teachers were against us. Pretty much anybody that wasn’t in the oilpatch was against us. Now, those are the same people that are coming back and saying, ‘Hey, yeah, you guys were right all along.’”
Mainil added, “We’re all for a cleaner and healthier planet. But we do a pretty good job right now. And we’ve improved, in my 40 years in the industry, hugely. And we’re gonna keep continuing to improve. But that doesn’t mean you should kill an industry, which this federal government has tried to do, and have been pretty successful.
“Back to the court, your original question, that’s a step in the right direction. And I’m pleasantly surprised.”
He didn’t expect such a ruling from the Supreme Court because, as Mainil said, “They’re more of a left-leaning court.”
He pointed out Alberta and Saskatchewan had challenged the carbon tax in court and lost. “This is the first win. So maybe that train is slowing down, and we’ve got to turn it around. And like I said, I’m an optimist.”
