B.C. teaching material pulled for review

VANCOUVER — A package of education materials used in B.C. secondary schools has been removed for review after a First Nations woman learned her 14-year-old daughter had been asked to define the word “squaw,” an offensive term for a First Nations woman.

A woman took to social media to express her outrage over the weekend about exercises of “violent colonialism” that her daughter was being asked to complete at Templeton Secondary School in Vancouver.

The material centres around the book Susanna Moodie: Roughing it in the Bush, which was originally published in 1852 and has language that a teaching guide developed in 2016 describes as racist and discriminatory.

The word squaw shows up in the original publication 39 times, and an exercise asks students to match the term with its “appropriate language” definition, which in this case is “an Aboriginal woman.”

Second Story Press, which publishes the teaching material, says it has removed the material for review and sincerely regrets any pain it has caused.

RCMP says charges to be laid over fentanyl shipments

VANCOUVER — The RCMP has launched at least 20 investigations involving dozens of vendors shipping fentanyl from China as Canada grapples with a record number of illicit opioid deaths, the force’s director of serious organized crime says.

“Most intercepts are done here in Canada,” Sgt. Yves Goupil said, adding arrests have been made and charges will be laid.

Goupil said the Mounties, along with the CBSA and Canada Post, have worked together to identify the best way to flag parcels arriving from China at three international mail-sorting centres — Montreal, Mississauga, Ont., and Vancouver, which gets most of the mail going to destinations across the country.

Fentanyl is prescribed as a painkiller but is also sold illicitly and often pressed into pills. Two milligrams of fentanyl, the equivalent of about four grains of salt, can kill someone who may not even know it’s been mixed with drugs like heroin and cocaine.