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PORT HARDY – A young woman is lucky to be alive, say police, after the car she was driving went over the cliff at Thomas Point.
The girl, her boyfriend and another female were at the point during the early morning hours of Jan. 8.
The vehicle became stuck and the two young adults got out to push while the younger girl got behind the wheel, said Phil Lue, spokesperson for Vancouver Island North Regional Police Services.
“Something went wrong and the vehicle went over the cliff, falling about four metres and lodging in the rocks,” said Lue. “The driver then exited the vehicle, then fell the rest of the way into the water, about seven or eight metres.”
Lue said the girl’s boyfriend jumped into the water to rescue her and managed to pull her out onto a nearby beach.
Emergency services were called and the girl, suffering from hypothermia, head injury and cuts and bruises, was taken to Port Hardy hospital. She was later transferred to Victoria and is expected to make a full recovery.
“Doctors said she is very lucky,” said Lue. And he concurs. “She is lucky the vehicle didn’t continue falling into the water. And she is extremely lucky in where she fell. There are very large jagged rocks in the area.”
Lue said alcohol may have been a factor in the incident.
via bclocalnews.com
Demands to change regulations around halibut fishing are growing.
Local fishing charter companies have taken up the call, sending out an email to North Island businesses Jan. 14 through the Port Hardy Chamber of Commerce.
“There is a chance that our sport fishing for halibut may shut down late July, early August this summer,” said the email from Mike Kelly of Tides and Tales and Wade Dayley of Limit Out Charters. “This is due to that fact that 436 people own 88 per cent of the halibut that is allowed to be caught each year, us sports fishermen are only entitled to 12 per cent of what is a Canadian-owned product. The government did this in the mid 90’s and promised us that we would never have a closure ... halibut is closed right now and has been for months.
“You can see the impact these kind of closures will have on Port Hardy and the tourists that flood to town during the summer to fish and the businesses that rely on this flow of people,” continued the email. “A potential loss of tens of thousands of dollars not coming into Port Hardy”.
The BC Wildlife Federation has also joined the B.C. Sportfishing Coalition to fight for this years’ halibut fishing season.
“The current Minister has refused to correct the unfair, inadequate, and, we suggest, illegal quota system ... This unbalanced allocation will, for the third year, result in closure of the public fishery while commercial harvesters continue to fish,” said a press release from the BCWF.
“Halibut is not the only species to which DFO intends to unduly restrict public access. We are witnessing similar situations developing for prawns, crabs and salmon,” said the BCWF.
All groups involved are calling on the public to send letters and emails to their member of parliament and Fisheries Minister Gail Shea.
For more information on the halibut fishery and how to respond, consult www.sfibc.com or contact Mike Kelly at info@tidesandtales.com or Wade Dayley at info@bearcovecottages.com
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Fears of lost taxes arise as non-aboriginals move to reserves
A treed area at the south end of Burrard Bridge will be under discussion for development between the Squamish First Nation and the City of Vancouver. The 11-acre tract is the Squamish band's traditional land.
Photograph by: Jason Payne, PNG, Vancouver Sun
Municipal leaders fear long-awaited reforms could see thousands of non-aboriginals living on First Nations reserves in the next 20 years yet not paying regional taxes.
The warning was highlighted in a draft discussion paper by the Lower Mainland Treaty Advisory Committee, which looked at the potential fallout from the federal First Nations Commercial and Industrial Development Act and the First Nations Certainty of Land Titles Act.
LMTAC, which represents local municipalities on aboriginal issues, said the move would “seem to be mutually beneficial for both First Nations and the neighbouring local government” as it would cut the red tape on commercial, industrial and residential market development on reserve lands.
But it noted some civic leaders worry that development will result in neighbouring municipalities subsidizing regional services because the region can’t collect property tax and utility fees from non-aboriginals who move into the developments.
First Nations have their own independent taxation and property assessment bylaws. Like the federal and provincial government local government taxation levies don’t apply to them, meaning they aren’t required to pay local, regional, TransLink, and school taxes.
“We’re now faced with the potential of significant growth of non-aboriginal populations that take it into a whole new dimension where the time has come that these issues and problems are flagged and addressed by the province,” said Belcarra Mayor and LMTAC chairman Ralph Drew.
Drew said many first nations have servicing agreements with local governments for the provision of utilities and other services. But those have been done on what he called “good neighbour” agreements. Local governments need more structured rules, he said.
“We are talking about the potential over the next 20 years of significant market housing developments that are targeted at non-aboriginal communities,” he said.
The Squamish First Nation is already planning to develop residential units on undeveloped reserve lands, particularly in West Vancouver and Vancouver that could add as many as 25,000 non-aboriginal residents over the next 20 years.
Metro Vancouver residents now pay a portion of their property taxes — $39 on an average $600,000 home — for things like parks and air quality. The regional district also levies through the municipalities a fee for water, sewer and solid waste.
“At the core of the discussion here is a question of fairness,” Drew said. “That fairness is that we feel that all non-aboriginal property owners in Metro Vancouver should contribute to the regional district taxes, TransLink taxes and school taxes.”
White Rock Coun. Mary-Wade Anderson, a member of LMTAC, hailed the Tsawwassen First Nation, which has signed a treaty and is now a member of the Metro Vancouver Regional District, as “a good example of the treaty process.”
The band collects regional taxes from its 400 non-aboriginal residents for Metro and TransLink and its 480 members will no longer be tax exempt after 10 years. Under the treaty, Tsawwassen has self-government jurisdiction and an expanded land base. It has a water serving agreement with Metro Vancouver and receives other regional services such as strategic planning, 911 and air quality. Delta also provides municipal services such as dike maintenance, library services and parks and recreation through a service agreement.
“Tsawwassen’s different because we have a treaty framework,” Chief Kim Baird said, adding “there’s very little inter-governmental relations between [Tsawwassen] and the municipalities. “Most First Nations negotiate service agreements with municipalities and pay through the nose for those services.
“It won’t impact us because we made a decision to integrate into the [regional district]. It was to accommodate our need as a community to have services, understanding it would make for a better region if we cooperate within the system as long as First Nations [issues] are recognized.”
Chief Gibby Jacob of the Squamish Nation said non-aboriginal residents on his nation’s lands also already pay tax levies to the band, which remits money to local governments. He said things like school taxes are paid for by the federal Department of Indian and Northern Affairs to the province.
He dismissed the concerns of the LMTAC report, saying first nations already have working relationships with local governments. “They [LMTAC] are just throwing out a red herring. We’ve had thousands of people living on our reserves for years and there haven’t been problems,” he said.
He predicted the Squamish will, within two to five years, have a working agreement with the province over how full property taxation will be handled.
Aboriginal Affairs Minister Barry Penner said he hasn’t read the LMTAC report yet but is aware of the committee’s concerns. But, he added, there is nothing now stopping First Nations from developing their reserves.
“I am not dismissing the concerns of the LMTAC. Just as local government wants to get dollars, I know first nations want to get services and therein lies the essence of a potential bargain that the two sides have something to negotiate about.”
Penner said the federal legislation will allow, for the first time ever, for a host of provincial regulations to apply on aboriginal land. That’s important in protecting the rights of both residents and citizens at large, he said.
“From the B.C. government’s perspective, what this amendment has done is given us more authority than we would have had without it,” he said, referring to the Builders Lien Act, Civil Forfeiture Act, Commercial Tenancy Act, Dike Maintenance Act, the Environmental Management Act and the Homeowner Protection Act. Previously those provincial statutes or rules did not apply to residential developments on first nation reserve land.
© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun
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FIRST ONE IN THE WORLD
Massive closed-containment tank is in the water
Dan Maclennan, Courier-Islander
Published: Thursday, January 13, 2011In the world of closed containment aquaculture, it appears size matters. Never was that more true in the Campbell River area than in the past few weeks as a massive floating solid-wall tank was built on the waterfront by the Agrimarine Industries/Middle Bay Sustainable Aquaculture Institute (MBSAI) partnership.
"It feels wonderful," laughed Robert Walker, vice president for Agrimarine Industries, at the Middle Bay site Wednesday. "It has been a very long time and it's exciting to see it. This is the first one in the world and we're very much looking forward to getting fish in it."
After years of design, government approval, funding efforts and redesign, sections of the gargantuan fibreglass tank were assembled on site in the last two weeks. The 3,000-cubic-metre tank has a 24-metre inside diameter and a depth of almost nine metres. At press time yesterday, the plan called for the tank to be towed into place and filled with seawater by the afternoon.
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Eric Joseph, top centre, is dwarfed by the new closed-containment tank built at Middle Bay north of Campbell River as he works on one of the massive tank's overflow ports. The Middle Bay Sustainable Aquaculture Institute and partners Agrimarine Industries hope to have 50,000 young chinook salmon swimming in the tank within two weeks. Quadra Island can be seen in the distance.
Photo: Dan MacLennan
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Font:"We hope to have fish in the water within the next two weeks," Walker said. "There are no other hard-walled tanks of this capacity. We've designed it to address many of the problems that currently exist with the net-cage industry. We hope to have a working system very shortly and be able to demonstrate that we have a solution here."
The challenge facing closed-containment proponents is getting operating costs into the same range as those of open-net ocean fish farms. The aquaculture industry has long argued closed containment is too costly, but Walker is out to prove that contention wrong.
The first phase of the Middle Bay Sustainable Aquaculture project will see 50,000 young 45-gram chinook added to the tank and raised to the four kilo range over an 18-month period. Walker is hoping the next three phases will follow quickly.
"We'll order the second tank almost immediately," he said. "By the end of May, perhaps, we'll have the second tank in the water and hopefully tanks three and four by the end of the summer." Tank two will be same size as tank one, but tanks three and four will be even larger. Each will be 30-metres in diameter with a 5,500-cubic-metre capacity.
MBSAI is a not-for-profit organization formed for the purpose of researching and developing the use of commercial-scale solid wall containment systems for aquaculture.
Funding has come from the Coast Sustainability Trust, the US-based Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the federal government's Sustainable Development Technology Canada.
The total cost of the project is in the millions of dollars, but Walker didn't want to attach a specific figure Wednesday.
© Courier-Islander (Campbell River) 2011
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Public forums will focus on aboriginal education
Years after the Vancouver school district considered then rejected starting an aboriginal secondary school, it's contemplating another program with an aboriginal focus--possibly a mini school.
Consultation starts later this month with two public forums--one at Point Grey secondary Jan. 24 at 6:30 p.m., and another at Templeton secondary Jan. 25 at 6:30. Jo-Ann Archibald, associate dean for indigenous education in the Faculty of Education at UBC, will facilitate the meetings.
Board chair Patti Bacchus said it's time to reconsider a program with an aboriginal focus without preconceptions of what it would look like. "We know that the mistakes of the past have been people thinking they know what would work for aboriginal students," she said.
A January 1996 school board report entitled, A Feasibility Study for a First Nations Secondary School for the Vancouver School System, concluded establishing a secondary school was not feasible at the time. Finding an academically balanced student body of aboriginal students who'd be interested in or who would choose such a school was considered unlikely. The report noted the aboriginal secondary student population was academically and socio-economically diverse, geographically scattered and too small to recruit the 300 to 350 full-time equivalent aboriginal students necessary. "At that time they were considering a standalone school, even building a new school, that would be an aboriginal school. For various reasons it didn't move forward but we felt it might be worth revisiting the concept of maybe even a school within a school like we do with our mini-school program," Bacchus said.
Mark Aquash, director of the Native Indian Education Program and assistant professor in the education department at UBC, supports the idea. "Providing more choices for aboriginal students, parents and the community can provide greater opportunity for student success," he wrote in an email to the Courier.
Aquash maintains community involvement increases self-determination and allows the Vancouver aboriginal community to participate in the education of youth who are currently not connected to the aboriginal community, which can motivate and create positive outcomes for individual students and their family. "The student begins to make those connections between being an academically successful student as a representative of their family and helping to lift their community from the many negative social challenges that both urban aboriginals and First Nations face every day."
Those who plan to attend a forum can RSVP to mlouie@vsb.bc.ca for planning purposes, but it's not required.
Twitter: @Naoibh
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A food handler at the WalMart delicatessen in Duncan, north of Victoria, may have infected customers with hepatitis A. (CBC)
Hundreds of southern Vancouver Island shoppers may have been exposed to hepatitis A after buying meat or cheese from a WalMart delicatessen in Duncan.
A WalMart employee was infected while working in the store's delicatessen in late December and early January, company spokeswoman Karen Campbell confirmed.
"This is our first incident after almost 17 years of operation in Canada," Campbell said.
She said the department has been disinfected, the inventory removed and the employee placed on medical leave.
Hepatitis A is a viral infection of the liver that can leave patients feeling ill and chronically tired for several weeks. It also usually causes jaundice and can cause permanent liver damage.
The disease is highly contagious and most commonly spreads hand-to-mouth through contact with anything that an infected person has touched.
Health officials are recommending hepatitis A vaccinations for anyone who consumed ready-to-eat food — including sliced meat and cheese — from the deli between Dec. 30 and Jan. 4, or who ate meat or cheese sliced at the deli counter from Jan. 5 to Jan. 10.
"Over all, it's still a fairly low risk that people who are exposed will develop hepatitis," said Dr. Dee Hoyano, of the Vancouver Island Health Authority. "However, we do it's a high enough risk that we would recommend that people who have been exposed to the foods are getting vaccinated."
Free clinics are being held in Duncan and 50 kilometres south in Victoria through Monday.
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Tony Merchant, whose law group has been working on the lawsuit since July, filed the suit in Federal Court and in the province and plans to file similar suits in other provinces.
Photograph by: Don Healy, Leader-Post files
REGINA — About 45,000 Canadians are to receive Indian status as defined by the Indian Act.
And now, a Saskatchewan law firm has launched a class-action lawsuit because it believes those individuals are eligible to recover more than $2.7 billion in taxes and other amounts owed to First Nations people who, since 1985, have been wrongly denied Indian status.
Last month, Bill C-3 Gender Equity in Indian Registration Act received royal assent and the federal government can now move forward.
The bringing into force of Bill C-3 will ensure that eligible grandchildren of women who lost status as a result of marrying non-Indian men will become entitled to Indian status.
Tony Merchant, whose law group has been working on the lawsuit since July, filed the suit in Federal Court and in the province and plans to file similar suits in other provinces.
He believes that the $2.7-billion figure is fairly accurate based on a number of factors.
"First, we took the people, with whom we spoke, the taxes that they paid that they shouldn't have paid and we averaged the taxes," said Merchant. "I spoke with someone (Tuesday) and in my mind, they should not have paid $65,000 over time that they should not have paid so we averaged the issue of taxes and in addition, people are entitled to . . . certain medical expenses paid that non-First Nations don't get and added that in and added in our estimate for higher education."
He then added the $5 treaty annuity payment every First Nation receives annually from the federal government.
Merchant explained that the tax amounts are based over 26 years and includes income tax, provincial sales tax and fuel tax. According to the Indian Act, a person entitled to be registered as a status Indian is exempt from paying income tax on income earned on reserve. A person with Indian status, currently, does not pay taxes for purchases made on reserve, which include tobacco and fuel.
"We're confident that this is at least $2.7 billion," said Merchant. "In class actions you can have an aggregated claim and you aggregate based on the advice of experts."
"In 1983, (Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau's) government brought in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms," said Merchant. "The sections that affected this, came in 1985, so the government looked and knew they were discriminating against women. If an Indian man married an non-Indian woman, their children still continued to be full-status Indians, but if an Indian woman married a non-Indian man, she lost her status and her children lost their status."
In 1985, the federal government introduced Bill C-31, which gave women — who lost their status by marrying a non-status person — back their Indian status and that of their children.
"(The federal government) didn't give back the same things that applied to men," said Merchant.
The grandchildren of Indian men who married a non-status woman were entitled to be registered as status Indians, but grandchildren of Indian women who married a non-status man were not entitled to be registered as status Indians.
The claim also states that sex discrimination continues to exist even with the Bill C-3 amendment.
The statement of claim contains information that has not yet been proven in court.
© Copyright (c) The Regina Leader-Post
WHEN War Lake First Nation Chief Betsy Kennedy was a slip of a girl in The Pas, a First Nation man would watch over her wherever she went.
It was a troubled time.
Helen Betty Osborne had been murdered a year earlier. Racial tension was high, there were fist fights every weekend in the streets and aboriginal girls were vulnerable to white men.
First Nations men became the first line of defence in a hostile society.
"I was protected all the time," Kennedy said with a sad smile outside a federal hearing on violence against aboriginal women. "That doesn't happen anymore."
Today, many First Nations men are in jail or damaged by their experiences behind bars.
The House of Commons Standing Committee on the Status of Women stopped in Winnipeg for hearings Thursday as part of seven-city tour over 10 days this month. The committee will report to the Harper government this spring on ways to reduce the violence, St. Boniface Conservative MP Shelly Glover said.
Kennedy was among 11 witnesses listed to make five-minute presentations. She appeared with fellow First Nation Chief Francine Meeches from Swan Lake to deliver a brief from the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, the province's largest political organization for First Nations.
A joint RCMP and the Winnipeg Police Service task force is examining 84 unsolved cases of Manitoba aboriginal women who've vanished or been killed in the last 20 years. Kennedy left the hearings with a sense of unease. She doesn't feel aboriginal women are getting any added protection from the current federal crackdown on crime.
Some aboriginal women said handing out stiffer sentences to men convicted of family violence charges only escalates the cycle of abuse.
"It's aboriginal men who are put in jail. And they come out worse," Winnipegger Karen Chevillard said. She was among a group of 25 women wearing bright yellow T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan 'Decolonize yourself. Break the racist pattern.'
"They want to build more jails and if they build more jails, it will be genocide for our families," Chevillard said.
Solange Garson talked about the impact when aboriginal men are vastly over-represented in prison populations. "Jails are a breeding ground for gangs and criminal activity."
PORT HARDY — Rob Lind saw a need in Port Hardy and he has found just the right place to set it up.
Lind saw the necessity for a multicultural, community-driven, family-oriented, drop-in place. Now he is looking for customers and input on how to shape the new program.
Lind, the executive director of Bears Place, has secured a lease on the Robert Scott Elementary gym. He and his program director, Debbie Hominiuk, are operating on a shoestring budget. They have a slate of activities planned for January, but also want to hear from public on planning activities going forward.
The weekly schedule for January includes open gym (volleyball, floor hockey, etc.), drama/drumming, teen dances, adult dances, three levels of cardio-fitness workouts, and family days with games for all ages. Cost is $2 per drop-in event.
The organizers hope to have two teen dances and two adult dances each month.
A badminton league is planned for three days a week: Tuesdays and Thursdays from 7 - 9 p.m. and Sundays from 5 to 7 p.m. Fees for league activities are available from the organizers.
Lind stresses that the new centre is not a babysitting service. Parents are expected to supervise their youngsters and are responsible for their behaviour.
The non-profit group is looking for support from the community to help defray expenses.
“We are taking money out of our pockets now to make this happen,” said Lind. He is visiting Port Hardy businesses and charity organizations to help continue operations beyond January.
Lind said he brings more than 20 years of experience setting up programs like Bears Place and those he talks to agree there is a need for alternative activities that stress wholesome family fun in Port Hardy.
Those who have questions, suggestions, or want to register for any of the activities may call Lind at 250-949-0343 or drop in during any of the scheduled activities.
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