‘War on fun’ in global spotlight, and other updates
Time to update some recent columns: • When members of a Chemainus strata voted to ban children from playing in the street, they didn’t expect their decision to make the local news, never mind the international media.
Yet here was the headline in Britain’s Guardian on Thursday: “Canadian neighbourhood declares ‘war on fun’ with ban on outdoor play.”
Likewise, the BBC weighed in with “No hopscotch, no hockey: Canada neighbourhood bans outside fun.”
There can’t be much indoor fun in the homes of those who voted for the ban, either. They might have made their decision in the name of safety, but they’re being cast as the villain of the piece.
As for the dozen of so children at the heart of the story, they continue to play on the street at Artisan Gardens. “We’re still letting them draw chalk and ride their bikes and play,” says parent Christa Howard.
The strata council was to meet this week, but there has been no word of a change of course. Meanwhile, Howard says some of the neighbourhood’s non-kid residents have erected signs saying: “We support the children.” • Alas, the mysterious metal contraption that CRD Parks hauled out of the bushes by the Galloping Goose trail last week was not, as our inner romantic/hillbilly wanted it to be, a moonshine still.
Sharp-eyed reader Rick Ward recognized the object pictured in Sunday’s TC as a “prover” used to verify the accuracy of gas pumps and other devices with fuel meters. This one had been stolen from Columbia Fuels’ Jacklin Road property, not far from where it was discovered near Glen Lake.
So much for the notion that the sharp-smelling liquid in the tank was backwoods whisky. Said CRD Parks’ Mike Macintyre: “Knowing now what this thing is, I’m grateful some of my more curious and adventurous staff did not sample the fluids within.” • Construction of oil-spill response bases on Vancouver Island is going ahead after all.
When Kinder Morgan backburnered its Trans Mountain pipeline expansion plans in April, work on six new bases, four of them on the Island, was suspended. The bases were a condition of the National Energy Board’s approval of the project. When it was put on hold, so were the new facilities.
Now that the federal government has taken over the Trans Mountain project, the bases are back on. They’re still a requirement, no matter who owns the pipeline.
Regulators say the bases — on the Saanich Peninsula, at Becher Bay, Nanaimo, Port AlberniUcluelet and two on the Lower Mainland — must be up and running several months before the taps on the twinned pipeline open. Plans for the Peninsula base include office and warehouse facilities on Victoria International Airport land, with a skimming vessel, landing craft and workboats moored at Sidney’s Van Isle Marina. (Mini-barges, used to transport oil from skimming vessels to larger barges, have been parked there for a year or two.)
“The first priority is finalizing and signing the leases for all the base locations starting in Nanaimo and Port Alberni,” says Michael Lowry of the Western Canada Marine Response Corp., the industry-funded body that will run the facilities. A 26-foot work boat, the first of 40 vessels that will double
the size of the organization’s fleet, was launched last month.
• The C.A.R.E. Team, comprising doctors, nurses and others from local hospitals, have just wrapped up an intense week performing surgeries on impoverished people in Guatemala.
This is the fourth year the volunteers have used their own vacation time and paid their own expenses to do so. As of Friday the team had done 81 operations. “Our patients ranged in age from 13 to 79 and many were from remote communities with very limited access to basic health care and no access to elective surgery,” Victoria anesthesiologist Brent Caton reports.
Among the procedures: Gynecologic surgeons Kellie Whitehill and Joelle Dennie cared for a patient who required a total hysterectomy for a huge uterine fibroid. General surgeon Darren Biberdorf repaired an intestinal defect that, in Canada, would have been fixed in the first few weeks of life. “The 19-year-old fellow had lived all of his life with a small part of intestine exposed and protruding from his abdomen,” Caton said.
Good for them.