The Prince George
Citizen
FRIDAY, JULY 28, 1989 60 CENTS
Low tonight: 10 High Saturday: 20
Ann Landers.............10
Bridge..................24
Business...............8-9
City, B.C..............2,3
Classified...........21-31
Comics..................14
Crossword...............23
Editorial................4
Entertainment 14,16
Family..................10
Horoscope...............24
International ...........7
Lifestyles..............10
Movies...............14,15
National.................5
Sports............17-20,32
Television .............23
I
ncluded
nside
TITEE
Blood goal exceeded 3 Gays and marriage 10 Expos challenged 13
TELEPHONE: 562-2441
Simon Fraser Days fun begins Saturday
by ARNOLD OLSON Staff reporter
Simon Fraser Days are upon us.
It’s when we honor the explorer whose name is attached to the river that flows past us and who helped open New Caledonia for expansion.
Although the trapping industry that he developed for the Northwest Fur Trading Company — later to become the Hudson’s Bay Company — is no longer the principal industry, it is by no means dead, providing significant income for many people.
This sixth annual celebration is a 10-day event which opens Saturday with a mixture of new and favorite events.
Gord Griffiths, president of the Simon Fraser Days organization, said the calendar and other previously-planned events made this year’s celebration extend over the 10-day period, rather than six days as it did last year.
He said the close of Simon Fraser Days is arrang-
ed to coincide with the B.C. Day long weekend and that the calendar will allow for a shorter celebration next year.
Opening the events on a Saturday, instead of a Thursday, is seen as a benefit for families.
“With the stores open late on Thursdays, and families wanting to get their children off to bed early, we thought we’d change.
“Saturday afternoon is better for the families, because they can take in all the events,” Griffiths said.
As well as the calendar configuration, “People had things going and it just worked out to the 10 days.”
Because of the opening ceremonies being on a Saturday, he expects more people to show up than they did for the Thursday evening celebrations.
At least 1,000 will probably attend the annual mud-bowl volleyball tournament he said. The RCMP and Prince George firemen to enter again this year.
Anyone who remembers last year’s Simon Fraser will think he’s been in a time warp, because this year the character is being played a younger man.
Dave Matthews is close to the 33 years Simon Fraser was when he stopped at the two rivers’ confluence where Prince George now sits.
Matthews will probably look more like Fraser did when he came through — dressed in frontier buckskins rather than the more formal wear we see in history book portraits.
Griffiths adds aqother bit of color to the new person behind the Fraser characterization: Matthews has actually travelled by canoe along Fraser’s route.
He said those who attend the opening ceremonies have a chance to try their luck in special lotteries. Prizes include a helicopter ride around the city and tickets on Air B.C. for a flight to Vancouver.
For the earth-bound, there will be the thrilling spectacle of the Black Sheep Skydivers falling toward the park.
One of tne more novel events is new: the inaugural Great Northern Duck Race, when 5,000 wooden ducks will float down the Fraser River on opening day. Made with great care in Prince George, any fu-
gitive ducks that get past the barricades will be exported by wind and wave to Japan.
These are a new breed of duck — neither puddle duck nor diver. They’re floating-racing-river ducks and the first five will win varying degrees of honor and wealth for their owners.
The Kinwanis club’s Fun Run, the nine-ball pool tournament and the Prince George Airport open house are also new.
When organizers say that Simon Fraser Days offers something for everyone, they’re not kidding.
A race for tots still in diapers is planned and the more senior members of our community have a few events events planned for them.
Teenagers can get real dirty in the mudbowl volleyball tournament and entire families can take part in canoe races.
Whether Fraser ever saw the Carribean is open to question, but this year’s raft race on Aug. 6 has adopted those islands as its theme.
'Principal' investors get cash
EDMONTON (CP) — Investors with money in two failed Principal Group companies will be partially compensated and Connie Oster-man, the minister in charge at the time, will be dropped from cabinet, Alberta Premier Don Getty announced this morning.
Investors will receive a total of 75 per cent of the money they had tied up in First Investors Corp. and Associated Investors of Canada, including the money they already received, the premier told the legislature.
Getty said he was removing Osterman from cabinet, effective
Evacuees returning to homes
WINNIPEG (CP) — Northerners displaced by menacing forest fires and acrid smoke are slowly being allowed back home, but thousands are still waiting for good news from the sky.
The control of some fires means more than 1,500 people are to return to their homes in northern Manitoba and Ontario today. On Thursday, more than 4,000 evacuees from those provinces and Saskatchewan were allowed to go back to their remote northern communities.
But about 19,000 people are still stuck in makeshift accommodations, mostly in Manitoba, as a result of the worst forest fire season in memory. Although the last few days brought cooler temperatures and scattered rains, firefighting officials said a good downpour is the only thing that will really help the situation.
Meanwhile, a forest fire that started in the James Bay area of Quebec more than three weeks ago flared up again near a hydro site. About 150 tourists were evacuated on Tuesday, and plans to move some 260 residents were on hold Thursday.
There have been no injuries in the fires.
today, because investigator Bill Code’s report found she failed to enforce regulations while she was minister of consumer and corporate affairs.
“I have to acknowledge that an independent investigator has found that the minister was in breach of her public duties,” he said.
About 67,000 investors from across the country had $467 million invested in the two companies when the province cancelled their licences on June 30, 1987. Those with money in First Investors have recovered 60 cents on the dollar so far from liquidation of assets and those with money in Associated Investors have received 57 cents on the dollar.
Getty said they will receive a further 15 cents and 18 cents on the dollar, respectively, from the province, bringing investors’ total recovery to 75 per cent.
People who had about $90 million invested in Principal Group demand notes will not be compensated. Many promissory-note holders are Hutterite colonies from Saskatchewan and Alberta.
The compensation package is expected to cost the province $65 million to $85 million, which amounts to about half of what investors are still owed.
Getty said the compensation acknowledges the province was partially to blame for investors’ losses but he noted Code also said in his report that the collapse of the Alberta and British Columbia real estate market in the early 1980s played a major role.
“This is not an admission of fault in a legal sense but the Code report has found the government had a moral responsibility,” Getty said.
Code, who released his 619-page report July 18 after an investigation lasting almost two years, blamed provincial securities regulators as well as Osterman in part for the collapse.
He said Osterman was "neglectful, misguided or even reckless” but was not dishonest. He said regulators wilfully refused to stop the two companies from selling investment contracts even though they knew it was on the skids.
NIGHTMARE OF 1987 RECALLED
Tornado hits Edmonton
EDMONTON (CP) - A tornado hit Edmonton with the swiftness of a bandit Thursday, causing minor damage and sending a tremor of dread through residents who remember the killer twister that struck two years ago — almost to the day.
Thursday’s tornado was bom of a savage storm that lasted less than an hour, stealing in at the end of a muggy day with blinding lightning, hail, heavy rainfall and fierce winds.
Two people received minor injuries when the twister touched down on a construction warehouse in the city’s west end, not far from the West Edmonton Mall, slicing off
the roof and tearing bricks from nearby buildings.
One of the injured men was pinned to his desk when the tornado twisted the roof off the building. “I looked up and the doors blew off and the roof came down,” said Ken Yuschyshyn.
“When I realized what was happening, I didn’t even have time to get out of my chair. I was pinned.” Co-worker Art Huisman dug through the rubble to free his friend. The two were taken to hospital and later released.
On July 31, 1987, tornadoes swept through an industrial park and a mobile home park in the city’s east side, cutting a swath of destruction
and leaving 27 dead.
It was the memory of that devastation that sent residents of the Evergreen mobile home park fleeing from their homes Thursday as the skies threatened repeated destruction.
Wendy Chrisp, whose baby Tyler was paralysed in the 1987 twister, said she fled with her husband Murray and Tyler, as soon as she was warned of the approaching storm.
“We just got up and left,” said a shaken Chrisp, who waited out the brief storm in the basement of a friend’s home. “I was shaking all the way there. My stomach was
Citizen
features
Suzuki's
column
We’re killing our environment and we’re stealing our children’s future.
That’s the frightening message from Dr. David Suzuki, Canada’s premier environmentalist, as he launches a series of columns to be published in The Citizen on S«.;.ur-days.
About 300 of Suzuki’s articles have been published, along with 13 books. He’s even produced records about science for children.
Suzuki’s weekly column is called Reflections and appears on the editorial page.
City manager
appointment
expected
City council is expected to choose a replacement for departing city manager Chester Jeffery at a meeting behind closed doors Monday, The Citizen has learned.
Officially, no one is talking about the meeting, but Mayor John Backhouse has called a press conference for Tuesday morning when he’s expected to name the successful candidate for city hall’s top job.
Backhouse was in Victoria this morning meeting with civil servants from the provincial highways and municipal affairs ministries and couldn’t be reached for comment.
Last month a council search committee whittled down a list of about 25 candidates, developed by a Vancouver consultant, to four people who have each been interviewed by council.
While the finalists included senior staff from within city hall, an administrator from outside the city has been recommended, sources say.
Jeffery, who holds the city’s most senior position carrying a salary of over $76,000, is stepping down in September after 32 years on the job.
In January council budgeted $34,000 to find a replacement for him. This “is perhaps the most important decision the city makes, hopefully for the next three decades,” Jim Stevens, the city’s personnel director, said earlier this year.
Prince George model Tania James, 18, leaves in September for Japan where she has a two month modelling contract. After being chosen .last year as a semi-finalist in a Vancouver “face of the year” model search, James decided she would graduate from school before putting her efforts into modelling. She graduated in June and has been modelling locally for about four months. Her father Don said “in most cases it takes time before someone selects you. . .this was her first interview.” Citizen photo by Brock Gable
Off to Japan
HERMAN®
"Freedom."
Suzuki, whose CBC program The Nature of Things brought science and its impact on society into our living rooms, has a list of credentials that covers four single-spaced pa-ges. Probably his suzuki most poignant visual statement about the state of the environment was the 1985 series A Planet for the Taking — eight one-hour TV programs. Currently a five-part CBC Radio series, It’s a Matter of Survival, is being broadcast Sunday mornings.
058307002005