WOOD, Allister Sherman

Alberta’s lone NDP member of Parliament is calling it quits.

Linda Duncan has announced on social media that she will not run in next year’s general election.

“It is time to pass the torch to another,” Duncan wrote Tuesday.

The three-term representative for Edmonton Strathcona says she will stay in the job until the writ for next fall’s election is dropped.

“Rest assured that over this coming year I will continue working hard inside and outside the House of Commons with my NDP colleagues to hold the government accountable,” she wrote.

Duncan was first elected in 2008 and has worked in a variety of critic portfolios, currently in international development and environment.

She narrowly defeated Conservative incumbent Rahim Jaffer in the 2008 election, but was reelected by healthy margins in 2011 and 2015.

Along with politics, her life has been dedicated to the law and the environment.

She founded the Environmental Law Centre in Edmonton in the early 1980s and has worked as an international environmental law consultant.

At the Prince County Hospital on Sunday, August 26th, of Allister Sherman Wood of Mt. Tryon, age 90 years. Beloved husband of Annie (nee Matheson) Wood. Dear father of Allison (Jane) Wood, Paul (Theresa) Wood and Pauline (Jim) Carragher. Grandfather of Connor, Michael (Cherry), and Christopher (Julie) Wood, Matthew, Morgan, Kristen, and Taylor Carragher, Rachel, Jayden, Jaxon,and Kaelan Wood, and great grandfather of Isabella, Nali and Zayden. Resting at the Dawson Funeral Home, Crapaud, with visitation on Wednesday, August 29th, 5- 8 p.m. Funeral service from the Dawson Funeral Home on Thursday at 11 a.m. If so desired memorial donations may be made to South Shore United Church Building Fund, P.E.I. Cancer Society, or Charity of Choice.

The regal presence Aretha Franklin exuded in life was captured at her viewing on Tuesday, with the late Queen of Soul in a gold-plated casket dressed completely in red, including highheeled pumps, proving, as one person put it, that she was a “diva to the end.”

As Franklin’s powerful vocals from classic gospel performances were piped through the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit,